"Only" 12 Republican Senators Voted To Shut Down The Government Last Night

Last week, on my travel blog, in covering the devastating earthquake in India and Nepal, I looked over the insurance industry's ratings of American states' relative risks for natural disasters. The Top 10 were Louisiana, Florida, Texas, New York (they counted terrorist attacks as a factor), Mississippi, Oklahoma (tornado alley, but they didn't count domestic terrorist attacks), Alabama, California, Missouri and Ohio (which, believe it or not, suffered "more than 30 earthquakes between 2002 and 2007").

Driven primarily by teabagging nihilists inside their own congressional caucuses, the House and Senate Republican leaderships decided to play chicken with the Democrats on disaster aid. The threat has been that they would shut down the government if the Democrats didn't agree to offset the costs of emergency disaster relief from the recent hurricane and earthquake with devastating cutbacks to clean energy projects that Republican Party funders at Big Oil-- i.e., the Koch Brothers and their fascist allies-- are demanding. Polls have been clear that the public is getting short tempered with the Republican game playing.

Even proto-Republican Ben Nelson (D-NE) resisted the temptation for making an ass out of himself by voting with the GOP when the funding bill came up in the Senate. And so did most Republicans. Only 12 of the worst right-wing extremists were on the losing side Monday night. And many right-wing zombies who are usually all too eager to shut down the government or increase unemployment or in some other way cause pain to the citizenry in the hope that it reflects badly on President Obama, either voted with the Democrats or, like Richard Burr (R-NC), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), John Cornyn (R-TX) and even Jim DeMint (R-SC) hid in the cloak room during the vote. All those senators are in states prone to natural disasters and all knew the independent voters in their states were watching closely. That didn't stop crackpots Marco Rubio (R-FL), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), or Pat Toomey (R-PA), all from states that also suffer more natural disasters than the average. They were among Monday night's Dirty Dozen. And Dean Heller (R-NV), the guy who voted to end Medicare more than any other more of Congress... what does he have to lose that he hasn't already lost?