Today, two hundred patients were turned away from the NIH, thirty of them children. Most of whom, because of the severity and difficulty of the disease they faced, had been sent to this research facility as a last resort.
Veterans applying for disability benefits could not be helped today.
In a week poor women and children will not be fed.
Food safety inspectors have been furloughed.
Officials of the court are working without pay.
This list goes on and on.
This is a partial shutdown of government. If President Obama had not had the best interests of the country in his heart he could have enacted a hard shutdown, which would mean no air traffic, no border control, ports closed, the country brought to a frightening halt.
This is the shame the Tea Party and a faction of just over 40 craven individuals in Congress have brought us to. Most Republicans, if allowed to vote for funding the government, would. Nobody in their right mind would risk the world economy or the safety of the American people, over a law that was enacted three years ago.
We close with a thought from Andrew Sullivan:
I want to begin with a simple quote, a letter from Abraham Lincoln, facing a very similar constellation of forces as president Obama does with today’s nullification party, and sounding remarkably like his 2008 successor from Illinois:
What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum.
via The Dish.
[…] thanks to my blogging buddy, Vickie Lester at Beguiling Hollywood, is a list of a few things that happened on the first day of the government […]