Republicans shut down their brains first

And so here we are, a despicable and demented but highly influential Republican minority (within their own pathological party, even!) having shut down the federal government. I'd have to say the down side outweighs the positive, by a substantial margin: 1. EPA has had to furlough pesticide regulators, a possible matter of life and death. 2. Department of Energy had to furlough renewable energy regulators. 3. Department of Transportation had to furlough inspectors who work on automobile recalls, another possible life-and-death issue. 4. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has furloughed inspectors who oversee atomic power plants, who, among other things, helped prevent a potentially catastrophic accident at Ohio's Davis Bessie reactor in 2003. 5. National Parks are closed from coast to coast. 6. Further damage to the already beleaguered Head Start program. One positive development is that the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management has had to temporarily stop issuing permits allowing new oil drilling operations on federal lands. But that hardly seems consolation enough for the damage that's being done to the US economy, or for the hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of a paycheck for the indefinite future. All this to try to harm Barack Obama's lame duck presidency. And to further shred the remaining safety net. The ultimate irony is the Affordable Care Act is being implemented on schedule. It won't even be significantly affected, near as I can determine. I frankly hope that hundreds of thousands of Tea Party idiots are being harmed by this shutdown; they certainly deserve it. But the rest of the country, arguably at least, doesn't. There may exist a decent Republican somewhere; as a group they really are the Scum of the Earth. May the GOP pay heavily at the polls in elections to come!