Shutdown Theater and the Politics of Inflicting the Maximum Misery

One of the miscellaneous uncompleted posts I wrote at some point. Might as well publish it now while the shutdown is still fresh in everyone's minds, even if we have more information now than we did at the time of initial writing.
 
President Obama--not the House, not even the Senate, but Obama and his administration--was apparently picking and choosing what gets closed and what stays open during the #Shutdown. So while we might blame the shutdown on the Republicans in the House (for starting it by refusing to compromise on Obamacare), or the Democrats in the Senate (for keeping it going by also refusing to compromise on much of anything), it's worth noting that Obama is the one who is deciding to make the shutdown as painful as possible. This at times is involving shutting down parks which are not even normally funded (or staffed) by the government, and perhaps doing the same to "government" services provided by third parties. And that is really the big difference between this shutdown, and the previous 17 which occurred under previous Administrations/Congresses since 1976.

I'm curious to see what, if any, impact this has on the popularity of the President, as well as both chambers of Congress [bad for both]. I ask this in the context of the president's approach--maximizing suffering for everyone during the shutdown--as a tactic for ending the shutdown.

My suspicion remains that everyone will simply continue to blame whichever party he favors less--that has been my observation so far, anyway. There are two ways to internalize this. The first is to argue that Obama wasn't picking and choosing, that his hands were tied. This was the official stance of the administration. The other is to argue that Obama was picking and choosing, and that it did in fact increase short-term suffering, but that he did so to force the Republicans' hand (which ultimately, predictably, happened). The line of reasoning is that this is a small short-term sacrifice in order to make a larger long-term gain: ostensibly, the reopening of the fraction of the government which was shut-down, but realistically a victory for bloated bureaucracy and government of gargantuan proportions.

Quick Link: Partisan Professors

A professor in Wisconsin has written and given an assignment which can't be completed during the shutdown. She claims that there's nothing partisan about this assignment (which is possible, since people will generally choose to blame whichever party they already disliked). SHe even sent a few emails about it, and made a special request concerning those emails:

She even pleads with her students at one point, asking them not to forward her e-mails to others outside the class. 

“If you want to discuss all of this, let me know and I can make an internal discussion board about it. But please don’t forward my emails to conservative blogs or list servs and I will make sure my emails explain things fully,” she wrote.

One wonders why she would need to make that request.

The e-mail I sent you all about the government shut down [sic] was not meant to be partisan, but it may have come across that way," she wrote. "It is true that I am dismayed that you cannot easily do the assignment. My opinion is that this shutdown is a bad idea.

So what did she write in this not partisan email?

“Some of the data gathering assignment will be impossible to complete until the Republican/tea party controlled House of Representatives agrees to fund the government,” University of Wisconsin La Crosse Assistant Geography Professor Rachel Slocum told students in an e-mail.

Oh yeah, nothing partisan in that, how could anybody mistake this for partisanship. Apparently, being partisan means picking a side between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Barack Obama. Of course, since Reid has basically acted as Obama's stooge during this whole thing, there's not really much of a side to pick. "Your pick: you can side with Chancellor Palpatine, or Count Duku!"

Shutdown Theater Presents: NIST

Imaginary Obama NIST spokesman: "We have no money to pay for NIST staffers to manually upload each web page on our website in realtime during the government shutdown, so we will have to suspend our website and services. Pay no attention to the server behind that curtain! The server which is displaying this 'site shutdown' message is a figment of your imagination, and does not exist. Blame it on Congress that we can't pay staffers to manually load pages to our website in realtime, and therefore have to close the whole website down...

"Also, since we do not yet have a guarantee of future money with which to have already paid for the various conferences which we have scheduled, we will have to cancel these future conferences. It's a shame that budget uncertainty for the next fiscal year prevents us from holding any conferences this week, but that's how it goes. Be sure to blame Congress for this.

"Please urge Congress to vote so that we can resume manually uploading each page to our website, and so that we can cancel those conferences which we previously scheduled and payed for."

Thank God for Local News Affiliates

They often don't report the news either, but they at least manage to be entertaining (in that "what were they thinking?" sort of way). First, there's this news story on what to do during a bear attack:



For what it's worth, here's what you should actually do during a bear attack (step 1: what kind of bear is it?). Then there's this colossal screw-up by a San Francisco news affiliate:



Fact checking? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?