The Tea Party's Prize

With the louder than normal bluster by both real and wannabe Tea Party Republicans over the past few days, and the flurry of major Republican op-eds on Wednesday, we figured something else was really behind all the political rustling in the bushes.

Sure enough, yesterday afternoon, CNN's Dana Bash flushed out a report about the deal now floating around Capitol Hill, to potentially solve at least the debt ceiling fight. Not too long after that initial report, multiple other sources began confirming that multiple key Republicans in Congress now appear ready to send President Obama a clean debt ceiling bill, even as they may still keep the rest of the government closed.

Since tea party Republican Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana whined a week ago today that House Republicans just HAD to get something out of this fight, even if they didn't know what it was, the question hasn't really been IF Republicans would claim a prize before they dealt with the reality of the debt ceiling. It's mostly been a question of when.

Still, like Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly pointed out, the Tea Party extremists have fully expected to get a prize of some kind out of this whole affair. After looking at both the economic and political costs of the Tea Party shutdown so far, it appears their prize isn't coming from either President Obama or Democrats in Congress.

Their prize appears to have come from Wall Street, at the expense of all Americans.

Indeed, thanks to the Tea Party extremists' shutdown, not only did this week include the largest weekly drop in U.S. economic confidence since the Great Recession began in 2008. The global economy has also begun to slow down, a fact that neither Wall Street investors or American debt holders let go unnoticed. What really shook the markets though was Fidelity Investments dumping nearly all their short-term U.S. government bonds on Wednesday.

Traditional Wall Street business interests also sent their hounds after Congress over the past few days, and one of the biggest outside political organizations, Koch Industries, made a rare move yesterday of distancing themselves from the Republican Party's ridiculous actions. Two other major conservative political groups, Heritage Action and Freedomworks also told Republicans to quit the hunt on Wednesday.

With the Republican Party's traditional business and political allies abandoning them, the poll numbers that came out this week could hardly be considered surprising. Congress is now at a five percent approval rating, literally lower than dog poop. This political snipe hunt has been especially bad for the Republican Party, with their favorability ratings at an all-time low for any political party - even lower than when the Republicans in Congress impeached President Clinton.

We'd like to think the kind of selfish, short-sighted, wholly irresponsible behavior displayed during this shutdown fight by Tea Party Republicans will carry over into brutal losses for the GOP in the 2014 elections. However, like Paul Waldman of The American Prospect, we're not entirely sure it will.

What we are fairly sure of is that whenever this deal becomes finalized over the next few hours or days, President Obama's signature health care insurance reform will still be standing, and neither he nor Congressional Democrats will have had hardly anything taken from them.

Meanwhile, our nation's economy - that was poised to become very bullish again - will have effectively been hunted down and shot by Tea Party Republicans.

Congratulations, nutjobs. Enjoy your reward.

Demanding To Know

While the extremist nutbags in the Republican Party continue to hold the nation hostage, the rest of the world seems to have gotten tired of their pointless jumping up and down, and seems to have moved on without them.

President Obama has announced he's officially nominating Janet Yellen to be the next head of the Fed later today, a job few would wish on even their worst enemy right now. Major League Baseball's post-season continues, too, with a particular Atlanta Braves fan catching some notoriety with his topical way to complain about the way his team's season ended. The push for immigration reform also continued on Tuesday, with a massive protest on Capitol Hill that saw several members of Congress get arrested. An embarrassing and infuriating ruling in a Nebraska Supreme Court case also hit the media yesterday, that we may dig into deeper, later this week.

It's not that Americans have stopped caring about either the Republican-caused government shutdown or the looming debt ceiling crisis. It's just that most sane Americans realize until Speaker Boehner decides act like a real leader, not much is going to change.

Sure, we could act like the Nebraska Supreme Court or even that cheeky Braves fan, and demand something outrageous - like to know why the price of gasoline is nearly 30¢ per gallon higher near our Lincoln, Nebraska offices than it is an hour away in Omaha. Of course, our demanding that information wouldn't be any more effective than the current Tea Party demands that President Obama kill the ACA, his signature legislation - and frankly, we don't need idiots like that to give us the good news about those gas prices anyway.

While earlier this year, gasoline in Eastern Nebraska was more expensive than almost anywhere else in the nation, the price of fuel both in Nebraska and nationwide is falling right now, for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that the price of oil continues to fall, down to $103 per barrel on Monday. That price drop, in part, is being caused by the Republican government shutdown, which is temporarily slowing the demand for petroleum products.

Oil refiners have also had a relatively problem free year, and with Tropical Storm Karen fizzling out recently, oil production in the Gulf has also continued without weather-related issues. The Wall Street Journal says the U.S. is also on track to become the world's largest oil and natural gas producer this year. Oil market experts have even said that as long as market conditions remain stable, prices for a gallon of gas could easily drop below $3 in many areas of the country.

It's that last caveat that's still sticking in our brains, however - that as long as market conditions remain stable, low gas prices will remain.

If Republicans in Congress don't hurry up, stop the hostage taking, and do the jobs we've all sent them to Washington to do - namely, pay the nation's bills - that could destabilize most markets in a major way, including the oil and gas markets. As we said earlier, however, demanding those fools do their job isn't very effective, and it's not like any of us can see into the future, and determine when those tea partiers will grow up and act responsibly.

Maybe we'll go gas up the car and drive across some of their lawns, and see if that motivates them instead.

Something To Really Fear

As our staff members have continued to read the horror stories about the debt ceiling and the disasters of the ongoing shutdown, we keep finding ourselves repeatedly & unpleasantly surprised. Several topics kept resurfacing in our discussions, including how such a sizable number of Republicans in Congress remain so clueless about the negative effects their obstruction is causing.

When mixed with the season, the term 'nightmare' also kept coming back up in our discussions, along with inevitable comparison to monsters in the closet, and even the old purple-horned snorkelwhacker from the comic strip 'Bloom County.'

For all the whip counting and posturing going on in DC right now, what's really driving the entire process on Capitol Hill isn't anything complex, though. It's simply the outsized fear by Republican Congressmembers of being attacked by the tea party wing of the GOP - specifically, about getting a primary challenge from a privately funded extremist tea party candidate.

Think of it as your local cowardly Republican Congressmember's personal anxiety closet.

What any brave adult knows is that the key to defeating any nightmare is to stand up and face it, as both President Obama and Congressional Democrats are calling for their Republican counterparts in Congress to do right now.

Frankly, after looking at the polls Monday, or at the drop in the Dow & S&P since the shutdown began, you might think Congressional Republicans have far more to fear from their constituents than they do from the deep pockets of wealthy right-wingers like the Koch family, or Art Pope in North Carolina. Indeed, some Tea Party Republican congressmembers are already catching political backlash from their constituents at home for being too extreme.

The problem for the GOP really boils down to something far more simple than what most pundits have made it out to be.

If a Republican member of Congress ends up cowering under the covers every time a Tea Party bogieman with a wad of cash jumps up and down, then the question isn't whether or not they're going to get chased out someday by the Tea Party monsters. It's only a matter of when that will happen.

Further, it's not like those Tea Partiers are truly their own masters. If you don't think that Sen. Ted Cruz will change his tune when his financial masters yank his money chain, then you haven't noticed the silence coming from politicians like Sen. Marco Rubio over the past few months.

If Republican pragmatists truly want to stop their nightmares, they need to stand up both for the people who they nominally represent - their constituents - as well as for themselves.

Like we said, the key to defeating any nightmare is to look it square in the face and stand up to it.