The Commentariat -- Oct. 7, 2013

Justin Sink of the Hill: "President Obama dared Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Monday to prove there aren't enough votes in the House to pass a 'clean' bill to reopen the government. 'The House should hold that vote today,' Obama said during a visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Monday. 'If Republicans and Speaker Boehner are saying there are not enough votes, they should prove it.'" Thanks to James S. for the link:

Speaker Boehner has a credibility problem. From refusing to let the House vote on a bill that was his idea in the first place, to decrying health care subsidies for members of Congress and staff that he worked for months to preserve, to stating that the House doesn't have the votes to pass a clean C.R. at current spending levels, there is now a consistent pattern of Speaker Boehner saying things that fly in the face of the facts or stand at odds with his past actions. -- Adam Jentleson, spokesman for Harry Reid

     ... The above is from the New York Times, which is liveblogging developments. ...

... NEW. Ken Cirilli of Politico: "The Obama administration would be open to a bill that boosts the debt ceiling for a few weeks, a top White House official said on Monday... National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling said that how much to raise the debt ceiling is up to Congress and that the administration would prefer a longer term solution." ...

... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said the nation would default on its debt later this month if President Obama does not agree to GOP's demands to cut spending and change parts of the Affordable Care Act. Appearing on ABC's This Week on Sunday, Boehner agreed that the risks of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be 'catastrophic,' leading credit markets to freeze, the dollar to lose its value, and interest rates to skyrocket." For those of you who can stomach it, here's the full interview. Stephanopoulos, for once, did a fairly good job (within the limits of his capabilities -- he let Boehner get away with claiming several times that often in the past, "debt limits have been used to force big policy changes," an assertion that is untrue). It's quite a spectacle:

     ... The transcript of the interview is here. ...

     ... Greg Sargent: "A lot of folks have been willing to accept Boehner's demand for 'negotiations' at face value. But let's be clear on what he is really asking for here. Boehner is actually ruling out any negotiations in which Republicans don’t enjoy the leverage that the threat of a massive economic meltdown confers upon them. And he's also saying Republicans will make no concessions of their own in them." CW: This concept is very, very hard for the Village People, not to mention ordinary people, to understand. Boehner is counting on that; indeed, he may not understand it himself. After years of using this tactic, he may think extortion & negotiation are synonymous. ...

... Justin Sink of the Hill: "The White House on Sunday challenged  Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to prove his assertion in an ABC News interview that "there are not the votes in the House" to pass a "clean" continuing resolution. 'If he's right, why not prove it?" White House press secretary Jay Carney asked on Twitter."

... CW: Twitter? C'mon. President Obama must address the nation from the Oval Office about this Constitutional crisis. Treating Congressional sabotage like a political game played out on TV talk shows & Twitter trivializes the seriousness of the situation & demeans the President's efforts to preserve Constitutional norms. ...

... Bob Scheiffer practices journalism, & Ted Cruz's fellow Texas Senator, John Cornyn (R), can't respond with anything but his assigned talking points. Via Jack Beauchamp of Think Progress:

... Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: "[Saturday], 200 Members of the House Democratic Caucus, led by Congressmen Timothy H. Bishop and Patrick Murphy, sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner demanding a vote on behalf of the American people on the Senate-passed continuing resolution, which would reopen government and end the detrimental, five day long Republican Government Shutdown. The letter, which is signed by 195 voting Members and 5 non-voting delegates, makes clear that there is a bipartisan majority to pass this bill and reopen government now." ...

     ... Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "Combine those 195 Democrats with the 22 House Republicans who have signaled support for a clean resolution, and you get 217 members, which is a bare majority of the chamber's 432 members." ...

... AND/BUT. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the leading critic of the Ted Cruz Plan, told Chris Wallace of Fox "News" Sunday that "he would not join Democrats to bring up a clean continuing resolution on the House floor for a vote." Too bad. Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...

     ... CW: I didn't realize how bare the bare majority is. Remove Peter King & Co. & it isn't a majority at all. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think much of Boehner's belligerent interview was a coded cry for help from the Not-So-Crazies. He wants that discharge petition. ...

... AP: "Maryland's Rep. Steny Hoyer, [the House Minority Whip,] says he believes 140 to 160 of the 232 House Republicans 'think what's being done right now is irrational.' Hoyer tells MSNBC Monday these lawmakers are 'looking over their shoulders' at potential tea party challenges." ...

It is a concession, I acknowledge that. -- Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), speaking of the continuing resolution Democrats have agreed to pass

... Vicki Needham of the Hill: Shadow House Speaker "Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sunday said changes to President Obama's signature healthcare law should be tied to a debt ceiling increase." ...

... Tom Hamburger & Matea Gold of the Washington Post: "The growing unhappiness among longtime GOP check-writers and party elders underscores the deepening divisions over the ascendant tea party wing, which fueled this past week's shutdown and is demanding Democratic concessions in exchange for reopening the government and raising the nation's debt limit.... The frustration was evident this past week not just at [an American] Crossroads conference but also throughout the party's high-end donor class. While grass-roots activists cheer the unyielding positions of conservative House Republicans, some of the GOP’s top fundraisers are watching the situation with growing dismay.... It is too early to tell whether the discontent will seriously hamper fundraising for party committees and independent groups such as Crossroads. Some top GOP fundraisers said they think donors upset with the strategy will still write checks in the end." ...

... ** MAG & others recommend this excellent piece by Jonathan Chait, published Friday: "To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends." Read the whole thing; he has a lot more to say about the inherent flaw in our Constitutional form of government. ...

     ... Paul Campos, in Lawyers, Guns & Money, likes Chait's parenthetical observation, "Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance." ...

     ... CW: What Chait fails to mention is the third branch of government -- the courts. Would that we had a responsible, pragmatic Supreme Court instead of one that springs from & enables the radical fringe, the President, I believe, could declare a Constitutional crisis & open up the government for business again under a fiscally conservative resolution as well as raise the debt ceiling. ...

... OR, as James S. suggests, the FBI could just cuff the Congressional teabaggers. As the Greek government has done to its far-right party, the DOJ could charge the RTPs with being part of a criminal organization. And, please, could we see Ted Cruz doing the perp walk? (Not serious here, of course, but it's a lovely thought.) ...

... ** Paul Krugman: "Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they're also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect -- the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence -- reigns supreme.... Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy -- we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news -- was bound to infect political strategy, too." CW: this is an expansion of a Krugman blogpost I linked the other day. Today's column is well-worth a read even if you read the post. ...

... Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post provides a perfect example of the kind of "balanced" reporting. Krugman derides. ...

... AND an unnamed House Republican backs up Krugman's assertion that House leaders have no idea what they're doing. Byron York of the Washington Examiner reports: "What became clear after an hour of discussion was that the House Republican leadership's position at the moment is the result of happenstance, blundering, and a continuing inability to understand the priorities of both GOP and Democratic colleagues." ...

... E. J. Dionne: "We now know that the tea party is primarily about postures aimed at undercutting sensible governance and premised on the delusion that Obama's election victories were meaningless. Its leaders abandon these postures as soon as their adversaries stand strong and the poll-testers report their approach is failing. This will give pause to anyone ever again tempted to follow them into a cul-de-sac." CW: I think Dionne's report of the death of the Tea Party is premature, & I don't see how the Tea Party's destructive agenda is the breaking news Dionne suggests it is, but his column is worth a read, if only for his evisceration of Li'l Randy. ...

... Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker: "If Obama refuses to back down, this could be a moment that will define his legacy -- a fight for democracy as much as for Democrats." ...

... ** Apocalypse Soon. Yalman Onaran of Bloomberg, in a straight news report: "A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen. Failure by the world's largest borrower to pay its debt -- unprecedented in modern history -- will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse." ...

... This Apocalypse Brought to You Live! by Fox "News." Jonathan Bernstein in Salon: "What all these [disparate Republican] talking points had in common ... is that they were eagerly snarfed up by the folks at Fox News and other parts of the Republican-aligned press. The truth is that Republicans can pretty much say whatever they want, no matter what the bizarre logic and no matter what connection it has to what they were saying five minutes ago, and Fox News will totally accept it and blast it for hours or days. The result? Republicans have become incredibly lazy. After all, why bother constructing a coherent argument if you don't need one.... It's easy for Republican politicians to fall deep within an information feedback loop, not even realizing that what everyone within that loop is excited about is unpopular, or perhaps just irrelevant, to the other 80 percent or so of the nation. Or to put it another way: Benghazi!" Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...

... Brian Beutler of Salon highlights the incoherence of the GOP "strategy": "The GOP’s current position ... boils down to to the laughable idea that nothing's more important than reopening federal monuments, funding clinical trials, and spending money on veterans services for two weeks, until we breach the debt limit and they have to be shut down again." CW: Beutler seems gobsmacked that Republicans don't know what they're doing, but Bernstein (above) provides a pretty good explanation of why they're so "clueless," as Beutler writes. Also thanks to Jeanne B.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times weighs in on the Supreme Court's consequential new term, which begins today. ...

... Justice Antonin Scalia weighs in on everything. Don't have time to read it, but I'm sure the interview, by Jennifer Senior for New York magazine, is full of stuff to make you want to rend your garments or something. ...

     ... NEW. The HuffPost factchecks Scalia. ...

... Robert Barnes of the Washington Post begins & ends his magazine piece on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a discussion of her fondness for opera (and how a good production of a sad operatic story makes her cry). CW: Well, she's a girl; what do you expect? No mention of her "mean beef stroganoff" of course because, as Barnes points out, Ginsburg can't cook. We hear from Scalia here, too. Nice touch.

Dr. Feelgood Runs FDA Painkiller Safety Tests. Peter Whorisky of the Washington Post: "A scientific panel that shaped the federal government's policy for testing the safety and effectiveness of painkillers was funded by major pharmaceutical companies that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the chance to affect the thinking of the Food and Drug Administration. E-mails show that the companies paid as much as $25,000 to attend any given meeting of the panel, which had been set up by two academics to provide advice to the FDA on how to weigh the evidence from clinical trials.... FDA officials who regulate painkillers sat on the steering committee of the panel, which met in private, and co-wrote papers with employees of pharmaceutical companies." CW: Reminds me of self-certified opthamologist Dr. Randy.

Senatorial Race

CW: You thought Scott Brown was a disaster? Ha! Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: Cory "Booker's bumpy campaign [for New Jersey's open U.S. Senate seat] and shrinking lead in the polls are all the more unsettling to Democratic Party officials because [GOP nominee Steve] Lonegan is a political anomaly in the blue-hued state: a Tea Party conservative who describes himself as a 'radical,' opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, cheers the current shutdown of the federal government and has relied on polarizing right-wing figures like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry as campaign surrogates." Voters who are skeptical of Booker have every reason to be, IMHO, but no reason to vote for Lonegan. The election is next week.

News Ledes

AP: "Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-born researcher Thomas Suedhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries on how hormones, enzymes and other key substances are transported within cells."

AFP: "Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday insisted the capture of an alleged Al-Qaeda operative in Libya in a US raid was legal, after Tripoli demanded answers about the 'kidnap'. Abu Anas al-Libi, who was indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head, was captured on Saturday."

Danbury, Conn., News Times: " Voters turned out Saturday to accept a $49.25 million state appropriation to demolish Sandy Hook Elementary School and design and construct a new school on the Dickinson Drive site. The state money will also fund buying two parcels of adjacent land for a new entrance to the school. The vote was 4,504 yes to 558 no." Via New York.

The Commentariat -- Oct. 6, 2013

According to James Hohmann of Politico, the right's new litmus test is sabotage. Anyone who wants to "compromise" by passing a clean CR is a suspect squish, & the Tea Party plans to primary him/her. This really is extraordinary. ...

... AP: Appearing on ABC News's "This Week," "House Speaker John Boehner ... says he doesn't know when the government shutdown will end and says it's up to President Barack Obama to start negotiations. The Ohio Republican said Sunday that he will not allow his GOP-led House to vote on a bill reopening the government without serious talks about spending. He also says he will not go forward with a bill increasing the government's borrowing authority without a similar conservation." CW Translation: Woe is me. I'm the Speaker of the House and the only thing I can do is make a long series of unreasonable demands. Alternate CW Translation: Ask Ted Cruz. ...

     ... Thanks to Julie in Massachusetts. ...

... ** Nicholas Kristof on governing by blackmail. If the President did it, we would think he had gone mad. "... in that kind of situation, I would hope that we as journalists wouldn't describe the resulting furor as a 'political impasse' or 'partisan gridlock.' I hope that we wouldn't settle for quoting politicians on each side as blaming the other." ...

     ... Mark Sumner of Daily Kos: "And now, let's flip back to the front page of Kristof's own New York Times for continuing coverage of 'the budget standoff.' See? It's not an impasse, it's a standoff. Glad that got cleared up." ...

... Paul Krugman: "Ever since Reagan, the Beltway has treated Republicans as the natural party of government.... There was a general presumption of Republican competence.... I think the last two years have finally killed that presumption. It wasn't just that Romney lost -- his shock, the obvious degree to which his campaign was deluded, was an eye-opener. And now the antics of the Boehner bumblers. Suddenly the old Will Rogers line -- I'm not a member of any organized political party,I'm a Democrat -- has lost its sting; the upper hand is on the other foot. And that's going to color narratives and shape campaigns for a long time." ...

... Thom Shanker of the New York Times: "Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel made a surprise announcement on Saturday that he would recall next week almost all of the 400,000 civilian employees of the Defense Department who had been sent home when the government shut down. Mr. Hagel said the decision that 'most D.O.D. civilians' would now be exempted from furloughs came after Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers interpreted a budget law passed just before the shutdown to include a larger number of workers." ...

** Sheryl Gay Stolberg & Mike McIntire of the New York Times: "... interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 -- waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.... The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law....

... CW: It should never go unsaid that the groups who form the loyal opposition are people who will never directly benefit from it: (1) the funders are rich old white guys (Koch boys, Ed Meese), (2) the politicians are legislators (retired or active) who already get government-backed health insurance, & (3) the so-called grassroots are people on Medicare. They are nasty, selfish bastards, one & all. ...

... Jeff Simon of the Washington Post: "As the fifth day of the federal government shutdown began, members of the House came together in a moment of rare bipartisanship to pass a bill, by a vote of 407 to 0, approving back pay for furloughed government workers. President Obama has expressed his support for the measure. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid supports the measure, but said Saturday that if furloughed workers are guaranteed back pay, there's no reason to keep them out of work." ...

... AFP: "US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Saturday the political standoff paralysing Washington was 'reckless' and would weaken the United States' standing abroad if it did not end soon." ...

... Teabaggers Suddenly Love Federal Programs. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "After defending such actions by saying they were taking aim at a major new government program, House Republicans set about reassembling the government they had shut down, piece by piece. Programs that conservatives had tolerated at best were suddenly lavished with praise: nutrition assistance for women and children, federal medical research, national parks, the Smithsonian Institution, even the government of the District of Columbia, which was authorized to spend money to pick up Washington's trash, maintain its needle exchange program for intravenous drug users and even implement the health care law." ...

It takes serious chutzpah for Republicans to portray themselves as the defenders of N.I.H., parks and other critical services they gutted through sequestration and proposed cutting further for 2014. -- Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y."

Are we meant to believe that today they have come to Jesus, or is this just politics? -- Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)

Dave Weigel of Slate: "The intransigence of Democrats, from Obama on down to red-state senators, has surprised the GOP.... Democratic aides say that the red-staters are 'scared straight' by the House GOP. They're not getting the calls from home to defund Obamacare. Their home-state papers aren't dogging them, either. They're in no fear of losing an 'optics' battle to John Boehner and company."

Dealing with terrorists has taught us some things. You can't deal with 'em. This mess was created by the Republicans for one purpose, and they lost. People in my district are calling in for Obamacare -- affordable health care -- in large numbers.... You can't say, OK, you get half of Obamacare -- this isn't a Solomonic decision. So we sit here until they figure out they fuckin' lost. -- Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.)

... Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson gave Rep. Darrell Issa (RTP-Calif.) what-for when he petitioned to allow his suit against Attorney General Eric Holder to proceed despite the shutdown, which has furloughed DOJ litigators. Berman wrote in her denial of Issa's motion: "... while the vast majority of litigants who now must endure a delay in the progress of their matters do so due to circumstances beyond their control, that cannot be said of the House of Representatives, which has played a role in the shutdown that prompted the stay motion." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...

... "Mitch McConnell's Vanishing Act." Dana Milbank: Mitch McConnell's Tea Party rival for his Senate seat is keeping McConnell -- who has been the Republican to avert crises in the past -- from doing anything useful in the present debacle. ...

... Mary Reinhart of the Arizona Republic: "Policy experts say Arizona appears to be the only state in the nation so far to have withheld welfare checks because of the federal shutdown, a move key state lawmakers want Gov. Jan Brewer to reverse. The shutdown halted funding Tuesday for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which states use to provide cash assistance and other support for low-income children and parents. Arizona officials announced this week that 5,200 eligible families would not receive payments, which average $207 a month.... States are allowed to use contingency funding or move money around to fund the cash-assistance payments, and other states have done so. In a letter to state welfare directors this week, federal officials said states would be reimbursed once the budget impasse is resolved. Arizona is one of 11 states that use only federal funding for the welfare payments, and the state uses the majority of its TANF funds for its burgeoning child-welfare programs." ...

... CW: Loved this David Kirkpatrick, et al., New York Times story (also linked in today's Ledes) on the U.S. raids in Somalia & Lybia: "With President Obama locked in a standoff with Congressional Republicans and his leadership criticized for a policy reversal in Syria, the raids could fuel accusations among his critics that the administration was eager for a showy foreign policy victory." The story, which is a long one, is all about the raids except for this graf signalling the wingnuts to attack Obama for, um, competence.

Julie Pace of the AP: "Defending the shaky rollout of his health care law, President Barack Obama said frustrated Americans 'definitely shouldn't give up' on the problem-plagued program now at the heart of his dispute with Republicans over reopening the federal government. Obama said public interest far exceeded the government's expectations, causing technology glitches that thwarted millions of Americans when trying to use government-run health care websites. 'Folks are working around the clock and have been systematically reducing the wait times,' he said. The federal gateway website was taken down for repairs over the weekend, again hindering people from signing up for insurance." ...

... AP: "President Barack Obama conducted an interview Friday with AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace that covered a wide range of topics...." Here's a text of the interview.

** Mark Sherman of the AP: "The Supreme Court is beginning a new term with controversial topics that offer the court's conservative majority the chance to move aggressively to undo limits on campaign contributions, undermine claims of discrimination in housing and mortgage lending, and allow for more government-sanctioned prayer. Assuming the government shutdown doesn't get in their way, the justices also will deal with a case that goes to the heart of the partisan impasse in Washington: whether and when the president may use recess appointments to fill key positions without Senate confirmation." ...

... David Savage of the Los Angeles Times: Ditto.

** Sorry I missed this. It's important. Leonard Downie, former WashPo executive editor, in the Washington Post, "based on his report 'The Obama Administration and the Press,' forthcoming Thursday from the Committee to Protect Journalists": "Many reporters covering national security and government policy in Washington these days are taking precautions to keep their sources from becoming casualties in the Obama administration's war on leaks.... The Obama administration has drawn a dubious distinction between whistleblowing that reveals bureaucratic waste or fraud, and leaks to the news media about unexamined secret government policies and activities; it punishes the latter as espionage."

Local News

Photo of the Nebraska Supremes via Digby.Margery Beck of the AP: "In a split decision released Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected a 16-year-old ward of the state's request to waive parental consent to get an abortion, saying the girl had not shown she is sufficiently mature and well-informed enough to decide on her own whether to have an abortion. The girl, who is not named in the opinion, was living with foster parents this year when a juvenile court terminated the parental rights of her biological parents, who had physically abused and neglected her. In a closed hearing this summer, she told Douglas County District Judge Peter Bataillon she was 10 weeks pregnant and asked for a court order allowing an abortion. She said she would not be able to financially support a child and feared she might lose her foster placement if her foster parents, whom she described as having strong religious beliefs, learned of her pregnancy." CW: You have to read the whole story to get the impact of how horrible this ruling is. ...

     ... Digby: "She is competent to raise a child, however.... Just the image of a group of old white men (and one woman) in black robes, sitting up on a dais, making such a personal, intimate decision like this from on high chills my blood. It's medieval.... By the way, a majority of the Nebraska Supreme Court are Democrats. And according to the article, it appears that the lone Democratic woman on the court sided with the majority in this case."

Presidential Election 2016

CW: In case you Hillary fans are still wondering whether she will run in 2016, the answer is, "She's already running." Just take a look at this AP report by Ken Thomas about Clinton's campaign speech at Hamilton College. It's 2013, & I'm already sick of the 2016 campaign.

News Ledes

Al Jazeera: Japanese "Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday that Japan is open to receiving overseas help to contain widening disaster at the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima, where radioactive water leaks and other mishaps are now reported almost daily."

Guardian: "Italian divers have recovered 83 more bodies of migrants who died when a fishing boat with an estimated 500 people onboard sank within sight of the tiny island of Lampedusa."

Al Jazeera: "A day of demonstrations has left at least 51 dead and 268 injured across Egypt, according to the government's Health Ministry. The toll has risen steadily through Sunday and includes at least one dead in the province of Minya, 150 miles south of Cairo, where police are reported to have fired live rounds into a crowd protesting the military-backed government. Police have used tear gas to disperse protesters in Cairo, near Tahrir Square, and in Alexandria, Egypt's second largest city."

New York Times: "American commandos carried out raids on Saturday in two far-flung African countries in a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects. American troops assisted by F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents seized a suspected leader of Al Qaeda on the streets of Tripoli, Libya, while Navy SEALs raided the seaside villa of a militant leader in a predawn firefight on the coast of Somalia.... Abu Anas, the Libyan Qaeda leader, was considered a major prize, and officials said he was alive in United States custody." ...

     ... Update: "An accused operative for Al Qaeda, [Abu Anas al-Libi,] seized by United States commandos in Libya over the weekend is being interrogated while in military custody on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean Sea, officials said. He is expected eventually to be sent to New York for criminal prosecution." ...

     ... Update: "Libya's fragile interim government condemned the United States on Sunday for what it called the 'kidnapping of a Libyan citizen' from this capital city a day earlier, and Libyan lawmakers threatened to remove the prime minister if the government was involved.... The government denied an American assertion that it had played a role in the operation amid anger that the nation's sovereignty had been violated. But ... some Libyans angry at the raid expressed exasperation at their government's failures to bring any measure of security to its people."

... Here's the Washington Post story on the U.S. raid on a Somali al-Qaeda-linked leader. Wire story linked in yesterday's Ledes.

AP: "International inspectors began destroying Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons and the machinery used to create it, a United Nations official said Sunday, racing under a tight deadline aiming to eliminate President Bashar Assad's chemical weapons program within nine months."

AP: "President Barack Obama says U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran is still 'a year or more' away from producing a nuclear weapon, an assessment he acknowledged was at odds with Israel. 'Our estimate is probably more conservative than the estimates of Israeli intelligence services,' Obama said in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press."

The Commentariat -- Oct. 5, 2013

"In this week's address, President Obama said that Republicans in the House of Representatives chose to shut down the government over a health care law they don't like. He urged the Congress to pass a budget that funds our government, with no partisan strings attached. The President made clear he will work with anyone of either party on ways to grow this economy, create new jobs, and get our fiscal house in order for the long haul -- but not under the shadow of these threats to our economy." -- White House

Blackmail, extortion, hostage-taking and brinksmanship are the tools of terrorists, not legislators. -- Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution

We Have No Idea What We're Doing. Lori Montgomery, et al., of the Washington Post: "House Republicans on Friday continued to demand changes to President Obama's signature health-care law as a condition for funding government operations.... Privately, a number of GOP lawmakers are pushing for a shift ... to exploration of a broader deal to reduce the nation's debt.... But Boehner seemed anything but conciliatory when he and other senior Republican lawmakers appeared before reporters on Friday, angrily denouncing comments from an anonymous White House official who said the Democrats were 'winning' in the funding impasse. 'This isn't some damn game,' Boehner said loudly.... [See video clip in yesterday's Commentariat.] President Obama sought to correct the official's comment when he spoke to reporters Friday during a visit with Vice President Biden to Taylor Gourmet, a deli near the White House.... 'As long as they're off the job, nobody's winning, and that's the point,' Obama said in response to a question, referring to furloughed federal workers. 'We should get this over with as soon as possible.'"

... We Admit We Have No Idea What We're Doing. Jonathan Weisman & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "The overarching problem for [Boehner]..., say allies and opponents, is that he and his leadership team have no real idea how to resolve the fiscal showdown. They are only trying to survive another day, Republican strategists say, hoping to maintain unity as long as possible so that when the Republican position collapses, they can capitulate on two issues at once -- financing the government and raising the debt ceiling -- and head off any internal party backlash." ...

You really have to call Cruz, I'm not even joking about that. That's really what you have to do, because he's the one that set up the strategy, he's the one that got us into this mess, and so we've got to know what the next move is. -- Dave Nunes (R-Calif.), when asked what the House was doing

... Michael Bender of Bloomberg News: "U.S. Representative Dennis Ross, a Florida Republican, said he would support a broad spending deal that didn't include changes to the health-care law, becoming the first Tea Party-backed House lawmaker to publicly back off the fight that has shut down the government for five days. Ross, ranked among the House's most conservative members..., said he shifted his position because the shutdown hasn't resulted in changes to the Affordable Care Act, which started Oct. 1, the same day government funding ran out. The shutdown also could hurt the party, he said." CW: I guess the old folks in Lakeland & Plant City are letting Ross know how fearful they are that President Obama will personally confiscate their Social Security checks if the shutdown goes on. ...

... Greg Sargent: "Dems have hit on a way to use a 'discharge petition,' which forces a House vote if a majority of Representatives signs it, to try to force the issue. Previously, it was thought this could not work, because a discharge petition takes 30 legislative days to ripen, so if this were tried with the clean CR that passed the Senate, this couldn't bear fruit until some time in November. But now House Democrats say they have found a previously filed bill to use as a discharge petition -- one that would fund the government at sequester levels.... Dems say that if they get enough signatures, they'd be able to force a vote by October 14th." ...

     ... CW: Various political scientists (here & here, ferinstance), are saying that the plan won't work, largely because few Republicans will sign on to a Democratic discharge petition even if they favor the Democrats' position. However, these experts assume the House leadership would be weakened by the defection & would therefore oppose it. I'm not sure they're right. Boehner knows he is going to have to work with Pelosi on this somewhere down the line; this would be an ideal way for him to get the CR through with no visible blood on his hands. It would not surprise me if Boehner was in on the Democratic plan. He retains his creds with the Crazy Caucus & gets the clean CR he wants. Perfecto. ...

... Jonathan Chait: "... a negotiation is not a shakedown. Pretending the two are the same doesn't make it so." ...

... Molly Ball of the Atlantic: "Friday's campaign-style back-and-forth over who said what and who cares more about the suffering American people during the shutdown started with an anonymous senior administration official's declaration, quoted and paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal, that "'We are winning .... It doesn't really matter to us' how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result.'" [See also the top of the October 3 Commentariat.] ... For all the accusations of gloating hurled at the White House..., I heard something very different from senior administration officials Thursday: an awareness that Obama doesn't have to get elected again, and that that has freed him to take politically risky positions in the service of dragging the American political system out of chaotic and destabilizing patterns. As senior administration officials portrayed it, Obama has been working throughout the course of this year to rightsize the presidency." ...

... ** "The Triumph of the Ratfuckers." Charles Pierce ties the House teabaggers to Nixon plumber Donald Segretti. ...

... ** Colbert King of the Washington Post goes back further in history to locate the ideological foundations of the Tea Party saboteurs: "Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.... The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy's instigated Civil War. Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad -- all in the name of 'fiscal sanity.'" ...

... MEANWHILE, if you stick with Right Wing News, here's what you're learning. Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller: "Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown." The post is worth a read for the shear audacity of it. And don't think members of Congress -- Eric Cantor, Ted Cruz -- aren't fully exploiting this fabrication. ...

... AND, Speaking of Ted. Igor Bobic of TPM: "Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), or 'the joint speaker of the House' as Harry Reid calls him, argued Friday that Republicans have already offered Democrats a concession in their stand against reopening the government by demanding not a full repeal of Obamacare, but merely the defunding" ObamaCare.

** Gail Collins: "Over the past few years, Republicans have terrified their most fervent followers about Obamacare in order to disguise the fact that they no longer knew what to say about their old bête noir, entitlements.... Not so very long ago, worrying about entitlements was central to Republican identity. Then, they began to notice that the folks at their rallies looked like the audience for 'Matlock' reruns. The base was aging, and didn't want to change Social Security or Medicare.... It's not easy leading a political movement that believes the federal government is at the core of all our problems while depending heavily on the votes of citizens who get both their retirement money and health care from the federal government." ...

... Ezra Klein & Evan Soltas of the Washington Post: The ObamaCare site sucks, & not just because it can't handle a lot of traffic. ...

... Arit John of the Atlantic: "Web developers, or at least people who know that Unix and OS X share the same lineage, took to Reddit to ridicule the coding errors plaguing the newly-launched Obamacare exchange websites this week."

Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times: "The mother of Aaron Alexis, the military contractor who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last month, told his bosses one month before the shootings that he had a history of paranoid episodes and most likely needed therapy. But Mr. Alexis' managers at the Experts Inc., an information technology firm, decided to keep him on the job and did not require him to seek treatment, an internal company investigation has found."

News Ledes

Reuters: "A U.S. Navy SEAL team is believed to have killed a senior leader of the al Shabaab militant group in a raid on his seaside villa in Somalia on Saturday in response to a deadly attack on a Nairobi shopping mall last month, the New York Times reported. The unidentified target was believed to have been killed in a predawn firefight after the SEAL team landed in the Somali town of Barawe by sea...."

AFP: "Tunisia's political rivals agreed Saturday on a timetable for the unpopular Islamist-led ruling coalition to quit and be replaced by a government of independents, aiming to end a festering political crisis.... Saturday's deal, signed in the presence of politicians and media, was brokered to end a simmering two-month crisis sparked by the assassination in July of opposition MP Mohamed Brahmi."

Times Picayune: "New Orleans native, former Black Panther and member of the Angola Three Herman Wallace died Thursday night because of complications from liver cancer, friends and counsel confirmed Friday morning."