With the 81 - 18 vote in the U.S. Senate and 285 - 144 tally in the U.S. House, Congress averted a worldwide economic disaster this week by finally voting to end the 16-day, 'Tea-Party' manufactured shutdown and debt ceiling crises.

As CNN noted, shortly after President Barack Obama signed the measure into law, Congress has furnished only a "temporary bandage," which leaves the draconian "sequester" cuts in place, authorizes government spending at current levels through Jan. 15, 2014 and postpones the same threat of a default on the nation's financial obligations until Feb. 7, 2014.

Meanwhile, radical 'Tea Party' Republicans, like Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, insisted "this was worth having the fight," even as they were conceding absolute defeat.

Worth it? Well, not to actual fiscal conservatives, according to the numbers...

Brilliant.

[Hat-tip to @litbrit.]

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The long national shutdown is over --- for now --- and environmental services and protections are returning; PLUS: Australia erupts in 'freakishly early' bushfire season; AND: The 40th anniversary of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Air pollution definitively linked to cancer; Lloyd's of London warns on warming, mocks deniers; Minimata Mercury Convention signed by world governments; Why Supreme Court taking on greenhouse gases isn't as bad as it looks; US shale boom shows signs of permanent decline; Uneven enforcement at US nuclear plants; Wisconsin opens wolf hunting season; ND farmers sue over natural gas flares; BP Oil Spill Trial update; World's first climate refugee seeks asylum in NZ; Kauai moves to restrict GMOs; PLUS much, MUCH more!...

[This article now cross-published by The Progressive...]

This story just keeps getting more insane.

We recently told you --- at The BRAD BLOG and at Salon --- about Judge Richard Posner's remarkable disavowal of his own majority opinion in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals case that became the basis for the U.S. Supreme Court's 2008 approval of the Republican implementation of polling place Photo ID restriction laws.

Though it's the only court case of note that Republicans are able to cite in claiming the "constitutionality" of such laws, last week, during an interview with HuffPo Live, Posner recanted the opinion he wrote in the case. He claimed that he "did not have enough information...about the abuse of voter identification laws," to make a better decision in 2007's Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. If he had, he said, the Indiana case "would have been decided differently."

Of course, at the same time, he noted that the dissenting judge in the case seems to have had no trouble ruling correctly at all. Judge Terence T. Evans blasted at the beginning of his dissent in the case [PDF]: "Let’s not beat around the bush: The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic."

Evans "was right", Posner now admits, and his own decision was wrong. Apparently, Evans somehow did have the information needed to decide the same case correctly, even if Posner now claims that he, personally, did not for some reason.

Today, the New York Times finally decided to cover Posner's admission, and they add at least one more head-spinning element to all of this...

As everything falls apart on The Hill tonight, again, Sen. Ted Cruz' speech writer and senior communications adviser Amanda Carpenter just had the temerity to tweet this...

It's almost November and I have no idea what my health plan will be or what it will cost in January. This. Is. Awful.

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) October 15, 2013

She must be joking, right? Apparently, she isn't. Just completely and entirely tone deaf. Or just plain stupid. Congressional staffers are being forced to buy their health care on the Affordable Care Act exchanges because Republicans in the Senate added that requirement in an amendment during the fight over the ACA's passage in 2010, hoping that it would be a poison pill to kill the bill. The Democrats called their bluff and said, 'Okay, fine.' And now Carpenter is whining about the uncertainty it appears to be causing her.

That, while she and her boss are bringing down the U.S. government and potentially the global economy, in an attempt to keep some 50 million Americans from getting health care at all. Amazing.

UPDATE: With Fitch issuing a warning tonight that they may soon be forced to downgrade the U.S. government's AAA credit rating, thanks to the GOP's Cruz-inspired threats to default on the debt limit, maybe Carpenter will soon have the chutzpah to whine about the drop in value of her 401k plan.

As the idiotic Republican shutdown continues and debt ceiling collapse looms, GOP approval ratings plummet yet again in latest poll. The new survey from ABC/WaPo finds a stunning 74% of Americans disapprove of the way the GOP is handling budget negotiations, that's up 11 points from before the shutdown started.

But more important to remember, as all of this idiocy drags on --- and as Dems consider some form of "concessions" to allow the GOP the face-saving measures they need to get out of this mess --- are numbers like the following, underscoring just how idiotic and hypocritical all this nonsense actually is...

Please RT : 3 Presidents and only 1 has slowed the GROWTH in Federal Spending. cc: @ToConservatives @edshow pic.twitter.com/NCV6XRrLvh

— ClassicalProgressive (@ProgressEconomy) October 14, 2013

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Shutdown's 'non-essential' food safety workers discovered essential after all in widespread salmonella outbreak; International community moving forward on climate solutions; Natural Gas War on Coal closes dirty coal plants; "The New Normal" - a time frame for climate change; PLUS: Climate science deniers now denied access to the L.A. Times ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): VIDEO: What’s Funnier than a Climate Denier at a Science Fair?; Latest leak at Fukushima plant contaminates 6 workers; ND suffers first big oil spill; Drought the culprit behind CO pine-beetle epidemic; Big Oil sues over ethanol mandate; Enviros urge WGBH to dump Koch on board; Shell exec says oil companies could lead in carbon capture technology; Shutdown means a delay in Keystone XL pipeline review ... PLUS: Fusion "Breakthrough" at NIF? [Uh, Not Really] … and much, MUCH more! ...

Speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate last week, on the third day of the federal government shutdown, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) excoriated Republicans in the House of Representatives as "extremists" and "anarchists", while offering an impassioned case for why "government matters."

[See video and transcript below.]

"When I hear the latest tirades from some of the extremists in the House, I am struck by how vague these complaints are," she said. "The anarchy gang is quick to malign government, but when was the last time anyone called for regulators to go easier on companies that put lead in children’s toys, or for food inspectors to stop checking whether the meat in our grocery stores is crawling with deadly bacteria, or for the FDA to ignore whether morning sickness drugs will cause deformities in little babies?"

She went on to argue that the American system of governance, though far from infallible, can carry out the will of the people who are positioned to correct it and make it better. "Our democracy is an experiment, and it’s always evolving. We constantly redesign and re-imagine and improve on what we do together."

"You can do your best to make government look like it doesn’t work when you stop it from working. You can do your best to make government look paralyzed when you paralyze it. You can do your best to make government look incompetent through your incompetence, and ineffective through your ineffectiveness. But sooner or later, the government will reopen. Because this is a democracy, and this democracy has already rejected your views," she said, before concluding with a message of optimism.

"Today," Warren said, "a political minority in the House that condemns government and begs for this shutdown has had its day. But like all the reckless and extremist factions that have come before it, their day will pass, and our democracy will return to the important work that we have already determined to do together."

Here's a video of the key section of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's powerful 10/3/2013 remarks on the U.S. Senate floor, (a longer version can be viewed here) followed by a text transcript...

Just chanced across this note I wrote to myself on my iPhone in June of 2010...

As the government shutdown began, the corporate U.S. media played its usual unhelpful role by not taking sides in what was clearly a one-sided argument.

"In shutdown blame game, Democrats and Republicans united: It's the other side's fault," declared Washington Post's headline. "Shutdown: Obama and Republicans Trade Blame as Deadline is Crossed," TIME unhelpfully noted, sounding much like the pretend news outlet Fox "News", which declared similarly "Partial shutdown begins: Can Congress, White House compromise?"

Never mind that Democrats had already compromised by agreeing to "Sequestration" level budget cuts, the only question was how would the two sides "compromise" on the Affordable Care Act which had nothing to do with the budget resolution itself, but has long been a bete noir for Republicans.

Meanwhile, the non-U.S. news outlet, The Guardian in the UK, accurately reported that the U.S. government shutdown occurred because Democrats refused to give into the Tea Party's extortion-like demands. Specifically, they wrote, it occurred after "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance."

Was that so hard? Apparently so, for the U.S. corporate media anyway...

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) --- we're inclined to write "(R-Asshole)" --- makes a national disgrace of himself on the Republican Grandstanding Stage that has become the national WWII Memorial...

And speaking of assholes...

Here's the statement from Alabama's former Governor Don Siegelman (D), now a political prisoner being held in a federal correctional institution in Louisiana, that we obtained and published last week, as discussed in my conversation above on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture this week.

If you're looking for Tom DeLay and Karl Rove, they're still on the lam, fugitives from justice, as Siegelman serves out 6.5 years for something that was never considered a crime before in the history of this nation.

Oh, and I do love this graphic that Thom's folks used at the top of our segment...

Sign the petition asking President Obama for a pardon for Siegelman right here...

UPDATE 10/5/13: I was also on Hartmann's radio show the day before the TV show appearance seen above. We talk about largely the same things, though with a few additional details here and there, such as more info on Siegelman's 2002 "stolen" re-election. Thom's radio show is also video taped (and played live on Free Speech TV and elsewhere). The video segment of my radio appearance with him follows below...

Have we hit rock bottom yet? Sadly, I don't think so. Not yet.

The Republicans still have much more to burn down, it seems. Starting with themselves. But they're well on the way. And they have only themselves to blame.

The good news...Perhaps the only good news: It all made for a very lively BradCast today on L.A.'s KPFK/Pacifica Radio, as we stomped out the myths that Chuck Todd refuses to, and heard from tons of callers in the bargain.

Oh, and there was much more, but you'll have to listen to find out about it. Enjoy! I know I did!

Download MP3 or listen online below...

As the latest round(s) of GOP hostage taking play out in Congress, it's worth stepping back a moment to take note of what is at the heart of their ploy-slash-temper tantrum-slash-effort to undermine the very essence of American democracy.

It's also worth taking note of the fact that it's unlikely, ultimately, to work and, if we can take any lessons from what has happened here in California, is very likely to redound, big time, against the Republicans and their "contempt for the democratic process," as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described it Friday, now on display in the nation's capitol.

"This whole debate over Obamacare is just a small part of what this right wing agenda is all about," Sanders observed during an appearance on MSNBC, as he described the twin threats of a government shutdown and defaulting on our financial obligations in the debt ceiling fight a few weeks from now, as but a part of "a right wing extremist agenda funded by people like the Koch brothers…who put hundreds of millions of dollars into the 'Tea Party.'"

Sanders' observation is vital to a comprehensive understanding as to why the very survival of our representative form of democracy may hinge upon a refusal to cave into a tactic that the Senator describes as "blackmail". Indeed, the New York Times describes the latest GOP tactics as the equivalent of a "ransom note" filled with "extortionist demands". President Obama, who once made the mistake of negotiating with Republicans on such terms, now aptly described the GOP threats, in a speech to The Business Roundtable, as a form of extortion.

Sanders noted that it's as if the Republicans now say: "Elections don't matter! We can shut down the government at any time to get our way!"

And, he's right. That's the plan. But it's not likely to get them what they want. More encouragingly, it's very likely to backfire on them completely...

Picking up on The BRAD BLOG's exclusive statement from the imprisoned former Governor Don Siegelman (D-AL) in regard to the alleged $20 million money laundering conspiracy by the currently-acquitted Tom DeLay, former convict Jack Abramoff, fugitive from justice Karl Rove and others to take down Alabama's popular former Governor, I was joined by Siegelman's son Joseph on this week's KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast.

Not familiar with the outrageous prosecution and conviction of Siegelman? Or of what appears to be his blatantly stolen 2002 election (on a Diebold paper ballot electronic tabulator?) This is great episode to listen to, as it also includes a lot of background and a few clips from my interview with the former Governor just days before he was ordered back to federal prison last year.

But before you get outraged all over again, we started off the show with a rarely heard good news segment to help soften everything else a bit. Yes, there have been a number of things to be happy and/or encouraged by, of late...though admittedly it's been very hard to notice.

Plus: Details on this weekend's upcoming Los Angeles screening of the tremendous documentary Shadows of Liberty which I'll be hosting for KPFK (I'm also briefly in the film, discussing the Sibel Edmonds story --- if you're in or near L.A., please come on out Saturday and say hey!); More on CA's terrible SB 360 bill that will end all federal testing of e-voting systems in the state (and some worse stuff too); and, of course a visit from Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report.

Enjoy! This is a good one!

Download MP3 or listen online below...