Another clear and chilly early morning here on California’s north coast, and we step lightly into day three of a shifty-eyed shutdown of political sanity.

The New York Times on Day One: By Tuesday morning, the leadership failure of Speaker John Boehner was complete. In encouraging the impossible quest of House Republicans to dismantle health care reform, he pushed the country into a government shutdown that will now begin to take a grievous economic toll.
Most-likely the worst Speaker of the House in US history — easily one of the biggest anti-photogenic assholes around.

This entire episode more than revealed the shit-empty Republican side of the governance aisle and this instance draws a much darker picture of the real crisis coming up in a couple of weeks — the debt ceiling.

(Illustration found here).

Along with the 800,000 or so government employees effected in the shitdown, oops, sorry, shutdown, who won’t get paid in awhile, if at all, the debacle really hits US children, like the Head Start program, closed; or dying children turned away from the National Institute of Health’s Clinical Center, closed;. and nearly 9 million women and kids won’t get vouchers through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, shuttered.
And the cost — estimated at $300 million a day — whoa!
Via ABC News:

The figure translates to about $12.5 million an hour, or roughly $1.6 billion a week, while the government is closed.
The IHS analysis, shared with ABC News, accounts only for the lost wages and productivity from the nearly 800,000 furloughed federal workers.
The calculation assumes an average annual salary per employee of $110,000 — essentially classifying that lost income as lost U.S. economic output (GDP) in the interim.
…
Needless to say, the bigger concern right now is the shutdown’s impact on the tepid economic recovery.
IHS estimates a week-long shutdown would cut the 4th quarter economic growth rate by 0.2 percentage points, bringing its forecast of 2.2 percent growth down to just 2.0 percent.

Two-tenths of a percent and a shitload of misery.

Horror of this whole mess is apparently the Affordable Care Act has found a public appetite, but the Republican leadership is in an overwhelming (and slobbering) fright: House Speaker John Boehner’s approach has been driven by fear: fear of the most right-wing House members, fear of rabid talk-show hosts, fear of the Frankenstein monster of fanatical organizations the party has relied upon to gin up the faithful.
And even worse is the lying, and bullshit from the frothy tongues of way-way-right Republicans — like the chaos at the National World War II Memorial in DC the last couple of days, and the nasty, political crazy talk, bending reality:

“It’s the best civil disobedience we’ve seen in Washington for a long time,” Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) told part of the group inside the memorial.
“As the son of a World War II veteran, I just want to say, guys, forget about all this politics and all this junk,” he said.
“This is about you today, and this is about us saying thank you to you and your service.”

And what about your service, asshole?
From yesterday: Huizenga called Wednesday for Democrats to pass legislation to fund national parks and other services, but said to pass a full budget to restart all of government Democrats need to make “common sense reforms” on Obamacare.

This off a program already law, even upheld by the US Supreme Court, even upheld by last November’s election, and even in the witnessing of so many people wanting in, so much so, many of the ACA’s websites crashed on Tuesday because of the overload.
Republicans need to make some “common sense reforms” to their own selves — the words, though, ‘common sense‘ is not in the GOP vocabulary.
We be near-about fucked.