"And they don't care."

[babylonsister]

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/2/24/124715/126

Zealots or Nihilists?

by BooMan
Sun Feb 24th, 2013 at 12:47:15 PM EST


This is why I can never decide if they are more accurately described as nihilists (who don't believe in anything, including science, evidence, or well-reasoned argument) or zealots (for whom ruining the federal government is the point).

On Thursday, the National Parks Service announced that furloughs would curtail services at such popular destinations as Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. And on Friday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood released a list of airfields that could close due to Federal Aviation Administration furloughs.

Conservatives were unimpressed. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan “fired more than 10,000 air traffic controllers. There could have been massive disruption. But there wasn’t,” said Chris Edwards, a budget expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Okay, then. Never mind that it took ten years to restore full staffing for our air traffic control system, as long as there was no "massive" disruption, then no biggie, right?

Chicken farmers in Delaware and Maryland are lobbying against cuts to food safety inspectors; the American Hospital Association is pushing to ease cuts to medical research; and defense industry executives have been prowling the halls of the Capitol for months.

But there’s no grand stop-the-sequester movement. And unless the public starts complaining, the AEI’s {John} Makin said Democrats’ best hope for persuading Republicans to reconsider the sequester may be a new recession. The sequester is forecast to slice 0.6 percentage points from economic growth this year, and destroy 750,000 jobs.

I like the word "destroy" in this context. Why sugarcoat it? The Republicans' refusal to compromise at all, even a tiny bit, is going to destroy 750,000 jobs and possibly cause a recession. And they don't care.

[Cleita]

1. Considering many of the national parks including those you listed, hire a lot of contractors

to run things, how does that affect them? Since I have worked for those private companies in the past, and they make their money from fees they get from visitors, I don't see them being affected nor the parks not being able to function. Sure security will go way down because if it does affect the Rangers, Fire and Police personnel, then those places will really not be very safe.

[babylonsister]

2. I dug this up for you...

http://swampland.time.com/2013/02/23/sequestration-memo-details-potential-cuts-to-national-parks/

[Cleita]

3. All that happens anyway. It would be worse but our neo-con overlords don't care.

The lumber companies will move in and take the last of those Sequoias. No more trampling on the roots problem. See? There will still be visitors, lots of them and everyone will sit back and say, we got through it. It wasn't so bad. Like some jerk told me once, when we were trying to help salmon up stream because some jerk-off lumber company had destroyed the ladder they climb in their stream, "who cares about a bunch of fish anyway?" So as you see no one cares about those things. If things don't come to a complete halt when there is money to be made, no one will care.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

4. Zealots...

they believe in small government (whatever the heck that is) and free markets. I like how they dismiss the mess that air travel was during and after that fiasco...On a flight from Rome to NYC we were rerouted to Iceland and sat on a runway there for hours. That was late Sept. 1981.