I’ve been wondering when it might sink into the DC consciousness that at some point the federal government shutdown will start affecting grants-in-aid to states and localities, and the essential low-income services they finance. Here’s MSNBC’s Adam Serwer:

Federal food aid for low-income Americans could dwindle if the government shutdown drags into the next month-leaving the states in charge of deciding to cut off benefits altogether or to dig into local coffers to feed the needy.

The USDA has said it will fund the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)-which helps feed about 45 million Americans a year, most of whom are children or elderly-through the end of October….

If the shutdown lasts into November, Americans reliant on SNAP could find themselves without aid, depending on the fiscal health of the state or the priorities of state leadership. A spokesperson for the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration told MSNBC that “If the shutdown continues beyond October, the State of Indiana will assess its resources and consider its options for continuing to provide SNAP benefits.” Similarly, a spokesperson for Mississippi’s Department of Human Services said they would look to the USDA for guidance.

Some states are already cutting back on assistance for the poor. Arizona has stopped paying Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits entirely for the duration of the shutdown. Children are being turned away from Head Start programs closed because of the shutdown. The USDA has said it can fund the Women, Infants and Children food aid program through October, but as with SNAP states could be on their own if the shutdown drags into November.

So it’s not just a matter of what happens to “non-essential” federal employees. And at least employees can be voted “back pay.” It’s kind of hard to vote “back food.”

Unfortunately, cuts in federal food aid are likely to be considered a feature rather than a bug of the shutdown to many of the House Republicans driving this crazy train.

Watching this show roll on, I’m really beginning to feel like the “girl with the mousy hair” in Bowie’s “Is There Life On Mars?”

So long as House Republicans maintain the initiative in the current fiscal fight, we’re all living in Robert Costa’s world. His latest missive from Boehnerland (entitled “The Emerging Offer”) suggests that the Speaker and such helpmeets as Paul Ryan are already far advanced in working on the end-game about which we were earlier led to believe conservatives had no clue. And guess what? It looks like a slimmed down version of the debt increase package Boenher tossed out last week as a way to keep restive conservatives on board—you know, the one I called “the devil’s Christmas tree” and alternatively “an evil child’s wish list to Santa.” Check it out as Costa cruises slowly through the possibilities:

[T]he final volley of the fiscal impasse, at least for House Republicans, is already being brokered. And according to my top sources — both members and senior aides — it won’t end with a clean CR, or with a sprawling, 2011-style budget agreement. It’ll end with an offer — a relatively modest mid-October offer that concurrently connects a debt-limit extension, government funding, and a small, but strategically designed menu of conservative demands….

What I’m hearing: There will be a “mechanism” for revenue-neutral tax reform, ushered by Ryan and Michigan’s Dave Camp, that will encourage deeper congressional talks in the coming year. There will be entitlement-reform proposals, most likely chained CPI and means testing Medicare; there will also be some health-care provisions, such as a repeal of the medical-device tax, which has bipartisan support in both chambers. Boehner, sources say, is expected to go as far as he can with his offer. Anything too small will earn conservative ire; anything too big will turn off Democrats….

House leaders are also looking at how to include some energy demands, such as the Keystone pipeline, but tax reform and entitlements are looking to be the core of the offer, and the medical-device tax is seen as the rare health-care demand that’s viable as part of a deal.

You get the feeling Costa’s informants are really proud of themselves for being so very modest in their demands, albeit with some worry that it won’t be enough for the Tea Folk, some of whom would just as soon see a debt default anyway.

Nowhere in the piece, of course, is there any recognition that the president and Harry Reid might mean what they say in stating over and over again that they will not negotiate over a debt limit increase. And this whole strategy also moots the question of a deal over the CR, which would be rolled into the debt limit increase, which means “non-essential” federal employees can plan on cooling their heels for another two weeks.

Days ago, when things began to bubble up about Boehner’s decision to move toward a larger fiscal package, many House Republicans, even his close friends, thought he was maybe trying for a “grand bargain” — a broad deal that’d include some revenue and tax reform, among other policy fixes. But after Boehner brought that kind of deal up at the White House earlier this week, and Democratic leaders dismissed it, he appears to have retreated slightly — looking to go big, but not grand.

Mighty nice of him, eh?

House Democrats better start getting that discharge petition for a clean CR and a clean debt limit increase warmed up. Boehner and company seem to be living on a different planet than the rest of us.

In another fine item at Wonkblog today, Ezra Klein interviews University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker, who’s done considerable research on the Tea Party, and particularly its attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities. Parker has focused additionally on differentiating Tea Party conservatives from regular old-fashioned non-radicalized conservatives. And when Ezra objects to Parker’s characterization of Tea Folk as relatively more “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-Obama,” he replies:

What I do in these surveys and models is I account for desire for limited government. I account for ideology. I account for all these other things where people could say they’re just more conservative. There’s just this empirical connection between support for the tea party and antagonistic views toward quote-unquote marginalized groups, or, if you prefer, toward quote-unquote not real Americans…..

But however you feel about Parker’s general take on the Tea Folk, what’s most immediately gripping is his data on their attitudes about Obama and the danger he represents, as presented in a new book he wrote with Matt Barreto entitled Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America:

We also ask if people think Obama is destroying the country. We asked this question of all self-identified conservatives. If you look at all conservatives, 35 percent believe that. If you look at tea party conservatives and non-tea party conservatives, only six percent of non-tea party conservatives believe that vs. 71 percent of tea party conservatives.

71% think Obama is “destroying the country.” Wow. So is it any great surprise that these same people, and the House members who identify with them, are willing to go to dangerous lengths to mess up Obama’s signature policy achievement and force a significant change in the federal government’s direction? Who cares about the risk of destroying the economy if the destruction of the country itself is the current trajectory?

Fighting dystopia with dystopia!

Maybe it’s the shutdown news tedium, or the first travel-free weekend in a while, but I’ve got a really bad case of Friday Fever today. Can’t wait to get moving on doing little or nothing. But it makes me feel sorry for Weekend Workers, too, particularly those with second and third jobs—and also for the involuntarily idle.

Here are some midday snacks from the hamper:

* New York Times’ Adam Liptak has good summary of legal theories Obama could use to unilaterally boost debt limit.

* National Review urges conservatives to go small in fiscal negotiations, maybe evening offering Democrats a reprieve from sequestration.

* Emerging portrait of woman killed by Capitol Police after high-speed chase down Pennsylvania Avenue shows someone with history of mental illness. But as Josh Marshall notes, fear of car bomb may have dictated policy tactics.

* Josh Green argues Republicans have completely detached themselves from business interests in shutdown crisis.

* House Democrats plotting discharge petition strategy for “clean CR.” Hard to do, and would require at least 18 GOPers, but not impossible.

And in non-political news:

* A-Rod sues MLB for suspension, alleging “witch hunt.”

Can’t have Space Music without Bowie, so here’s David performing “Moonage Daydream” during the Ziggy Stardust tour with Mick Ronson on guitar. Make me know you really care/Make me jump into the air.

Back in a bit.

After days and days of MSM analysts blaming the government shutdown on “partisan gerrymandering” by Republicans that insulated their House members from public opinion, somebody had to point out the rampant confusion about what partisanship in redistricting involves, and TNR’s Nate Cohn was up to the task:

[T]he fact that gerrymandering boosted the total number of House Republicans does not mean that gerrymandering made the GOP more likely to support extreme positions or shutdown the government. In fact, partisan gerrymandering usually reduces the number of extremely red districts. Why? Because the point of partisan gerrymandering isn’t to try and maximize the number of safe districts. The goal is to maximize the number of districts that are merely safe enough by packing as many of your opponents’ voters as you can into a small number of extremely partisan districts while safely distributing the rest throughout your own districts. In this way, gerrymandering may actually increase the number of moderate Republicans.

While Nate’s basically right, there are, in fact, different kinds of “partisanship gerrymandering,” some done for the benefit of incumbents and some for the party as a whole. The bigger problem with blaming polarization on gerrymandering is that the evidence is at best mixed that Republicans in safer seats are more conservative than those in relatively competitive seats. In fact, competitive-seat Republicans sometimes have a very practical incentive to go wingnutty: it’s good for volunteer recruitment and small-donor fundraising.

In any event, polarization of the population, which reduces the number of “median voters” on which the ancient “median voter” theory of centripetal pressure on the parties is based, may be as big or bigger a factor as anything mechanical—or fixable—like gerrymandering in creating the kind of atmosphere we have in Washington today.

There may be deeper dynamics of the current fiscal fight that are eluding me or that only Politico-style digging in the dirt can expose. But Jonathan Chait sure seems to succinctly capture the basic obstacles to any sort of bipartisan resolution right now:

[T]he bigger problem here is that conservatives are not acknowledging the Democrats’ belief [that they can’t negotiate over the debt limit]. It’s not a pose. They genuinely think, regardless of the merits of the ransom demand, they can’t give in, both for the national long-term interest and on moral principle. Conservatives are acting like the problem here is that they asked for a bit too much to begin with, and want to start haggling down the price. The price isn’t the issue. If the conservative goal is to create the illusion of winning something for the debt ceiling, then they’ll come back next time to win more, and Democrats can’t allow that.

This gap in comprehension is reflected even more in John Boehner’s otherwise baffling simultaneous assertions that he won’t allow a debt default but intends to rally Republicans around a tough negotiating stance on the debt limit. The only way this makes any sense is if negotiations are a given, and the Speaker’s simply saying there are limits to how far he’ll go to win maximum concessions. In other words, he won’t demand an unreasonable price for increasing the debt limit. But if any price is unreasonable, where do Republicans go then? To a fantasy world where two plus two equals five?

It’s unusual that a sitting governor’s comments are so inappropriate that they fluster an interviewer, but clearly, PA Gov. Tom Corbett is himself unusual.

I’m beginning to understand why this guy’s looking so toasty for re-election. What a jerk.

As a follow-on to the discussion of the disproportionate number of people needing health insurance living in states governed by Obamacare- and Medicaid-hating Republicans, National Journal’s Ron Brownstein offers a district-by-district analysis of the uninsured for the whole country.

He finds, unsurprisingly, that an awful lot of the uninsured are represented by Republicans in the House, and comments:

In the confrontation that precipitated this week’s government shutdown, the near-universal refrain of Republican House members has been that they will “do whatever we can, as much as we can, to protect the people of our districts from the harmful effects of this law,” as Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma put it. Regardless of what other provisions they consider harmful, that posture unavoidably means House Republicans are seeking to “protect” a surprisingly large number of their constituents from the right to obtain health insurance with federal assistance.

Recently released census data show that, on average, the share of residents without insurance is almost as high in districts represented by House Republicans as in those represented by Democrats. Slightly more Republicans (107) than Democrats (99) represent districts where the uninsured percentage is above the national average. Even about half of the 80 conservative members whose letter hatched the strategy of funding government only if Obama agreed to defund the 2010 Affordable Care Act represent districts where the uninsured share exceeds the national average.

I’m not the least bit surprised by these numbers. First of all, some of the uninsured are the “young invincibles” who don’t necessarily want health insurance even if they ought to have it. But second of all, Republicans in the South and West famously represent a lot of districts where African-Americans and Latinos are a significant minority, even if they have been removed from such districts by redistricting to the extent necessary to make them red.

I’m going to be blunt about this: your average very conservative southern Republican House member doesn’t much think of black folk as “constituents.” And they are elected not to tend to black folks but to keep them from “looting” the resources of the GOP Member’s real constituents, via Obamacare or other socialistic means. So this idea of Members looking at their districts and weighing constituents’ interests with furrowed brows before taking a position misses the whole race- and class-based nature of politics in these areas.

Brownstein understands this, of course, so he puts a lot of emphasis on the argument that Obamacare-hating Members are ignoring to their potential peril the interests of “hospitals, doctors, and other providers who now are delivering significant levels of uncompensated care.” These are the same interests, of course, that were supposed to convince southern Republican governors and legislatures to enact the Medicaid expansion that would have directly placed many billions of dollars in federal money into their health care economies. Didn’t happen, did it?

Conservative politics isn’t just about short-term economic self-interest, though that remains a big part of it. Much of it’s about denying nearby enemies access to the political power they might use to redress both public and private injustices. So that’s why Republican House members from districts with poor and black folks—or next door to heavily poor and black areas—are very likely to be more savagely opposed to Obamacare than anyone else. They aren’t really representing those people. They’re keeping them down.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been asking some troubled and troubling questions in the wake of a New York Times analysis of Obamacare showing that the new program could actually increase the disadvantages facing African-Americans because they are so heavily overrepresented among the eight million people who are “impoverished, uninsured, and ineligible for help” thanks to the refusal of states to expand Medicaid.

Coates wonders if Obamacare is another casualty of the collision of high-minded liberal universalism with the realities of race and class in America:

The conventional liberal approach says, “Obamacare didn’t get all we wanted but it got a lot of it. We took what we could.” But what if that logic really does exacerbate the wealth gap? Is it moral to support a program that fails to help those who need it the most? The response might be that — like Social Security — eventually all states will adopt the expansion. But this does not address the damage done in the meantime, nor does it address the possibility in increasing if not the wealth gap then the overall gap in life outcomes.

There is a more radical possibility — Obamacare is ultimately immoral, not because it didn’t get “everything” but because it didn’t get to those who needed it most. The stated impulse of class-first liberalism is that those who need it most — measured by wealth and income — will get the most help. In the case of Obamacare, this may eventually happen, but great damage will be done in the meantime.

Coates later regretted the use of the term “immoral” with respect to Obamacare, but he’s raising a point we need to think about regularly with respect to progressive ends and means—say, when we devote all of our passion to protecting Social Security and Medicare instead of food stamps and Medicaid, which are more important to more people who are in most need of assistance. Yes, “universal” benefits create more politically powerful coalitions than those which concentrate help on the truly needy, but when they actually discriminate against poor people or people of color, it’s hard to justify them as progressive.

In the case of Obamacare, of course, the exclusion of the eight million discussed in the New York Times article was not part of the law’s architecture; it took a Supreme Court decision to create the anomaly of large swaths of the population being too poor to qualify for help. But any program building on Medicaid as it exists has to take into account the extraordinary race-inflected hostility of Republicans, especially in the South, towards people “on welfare,” and figure they’ll do all the damage they possibly can to its effective implementation. This should not be an afterthought.

So Republicans made an attack on Obamacare the central justification for a government-wide shutdown on the very day open enrollment for the new exchanges proved what an incredible demand there was for the program. And now they are drifting steadily away from a focus on Obamacare into some sort of debt-limit-related “grand bargain” just as trouble with the enrollment process is getting really serious. Here’s Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas this morning:

Republicans who decided to shut down the government this week rather than relentlessly message against the Affordable Care Act’s glitches did the law a great favor. The site’s flaws are real — and if there was more focus on them, they’d be quite embarrassing.

Of course, the problem for Republicans is that the proximate cause of the problems directly undercuts their agenda. The fact that the site is buckling under the traffic is not a reason to defund or delay the law. Indeed, it’s perverse to use the overwhelming demand as a reason to take the law away from the people who so clearly need it. And even if it takes a few more days or even weeks until the site is working as well as it should be, the open enrollment period still has another five months and 27 days (or so) to run. These are fixable, not fatal, problems.

But the Obama administration did itself — and the millions of people who wanted to explore signing up — a terrible disservice by building a web site that, four days into launch, is still unusable for most Americans. They knew that the only way to quiet the law’s critics was to implement it effectively. And building a working e-commerce web site is not an impossible task, even with the added challenges of getting various government data services to talk to each other. Instead, the Obama administration gave critics arguing that the law isn’t ready for primetime more ammunition for their case.

There are signs the site is improving. The early word from insurers is that basically no one was able to sign up during the first two days, though successful applications began to “trickle” in on day three. HHS says that added capacity has cut wait times by a third, though wait times aren’t the only problem, as I found when I got through the queue only to have the site crash on me five or six screens in. The Obama administration need to get the marketplace working, and fast.

Yeah, no question about that. But at the same time, public hostility to the idea of shutting down the government over Obamacare, already sky high, may be hardening, and it’s also not clear the congressional GOP can keep switching demands and switching hostages without losing its already very low credibility. Wonkblog is right: had Republicans signed onto a short-term CR and just sniped from the sidelines about Obamacare’s difficult enrollment rollout, they’d be in much better shape.

It’s the 56th anniversary of the launching of Sputnik, so unavoidably we’re going to have us another day of music about outer space. Fortunately, there’s a lot of material to work with. Here’s Montrose with Space Station #5, live in Santa Cruz.

WaPo is confirming that the unidentified woman at the center of today’s bizarre and scary incident at the Capitol was indeed killed by police gunfire. No news about motive just yet.

Here are some final stories of the day:

* Blue Girl notes Ted Cruz’s crusading father is still peddling the “death panels” meme.

* Politico’s Alex Isenstadt details the general election invulnerability of the House GOP members pushing a hard line on the CR and debt limit.

* Denny Hastert says the “Hastert Rule” never really existed.

* At Ten Miles Square, Keith Humphreys worries that Holder’s prison sentencing reform initiative will wind up disproportionately punishing minority folk because they are more likely to be involved with gangs.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer reports on a theologian’s argument that Catholic colleges should stay away from reliance on MOOC, on moral grounds.

And in non-political news:

* MLB playoffs get fully underway tonight as Pirates face Cardinals and my Braves play what Atlantans used to call “the hated Dodgers” back in their NL West rivalry days.

That’s it for now. We’ll close with Johnny Winters’ performance of what is probably Elmore James’ best-known song, “Dust My Broom.”

Selah.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli really, really didn’t need a federal government shutdown. He was already trailing Terry McAuliffe in every recent poll. He already had a questionable ticket and a divided party dogging him. So with up to 170,000 federal employees in the state being prevented from going to work by the very faction of the GOP with which Cooch is heavily identified, and real economic side-effects for the Commonwealth well within sight, it’s not looking good for the fieriest Obamacare-hater of them all.

Like several GOP House members from VA, Cooch has opposed the shutdown. He has also (with the same best-defense-is-a-good-offense tactic he used earlier in claiming critics of Virginia’s atavistic sodomy laws were coddling child abusers) tried to suggest T-Mac might shut down Virginia’s government in an effort to force a Medicaid expansion.

But his main argument is that the fight in Washington has nothing to do with him (which is, of course, undercut a bit by his long involvement in the kill-Obamacare effort):

Danny Diaz, a senior campaign adviser, said voters would be able to make a distinction between Washington lawmakers and the statewide candidates for governor.

“I think these are voters who are going to understand, O.K., this is the federal government, and these are guys running for state office, and I’ve heard from them and I’m going to weigh that,” he said.

Hmmm. Cooch ought to talk Jeb Bush before relying on that assumption. Jebbie famously lost his first bid for governor of Florida (and hence the opportunity to run for president as the Bush Dynastic Candidate in 2000) in 1994 in no small part because Lawton Chiles succeeded in tying him to Medicare cuts being proposed by Republicans in Congress.

In any event, Republicans who have spent the last five years trying to tie Democratic candidates to Barack Obama are in a poor position to urge voters to make fine distinctions between members of the same party. The silver lining for Cooch is that he may have an excuse for losing instead of admitting he hasn’t worn well on Virginia voters.

The ever-insightful John Judis of TNR has a sweeping analysis of the origins and significance of our particular moment of political history that you don’t have to agree with entirely to find illuminating. He views today’s conservative revolt against government as parallel to and in some respects derived from the antebellum nullification movement and the coalition that fought the New Deal. His prognosis for where we are headed if radical conservatism isn’t curbed is not cheerful:

The largest effect is likely to be continued dysfunction in Washington, which if it continues over a decade or so, will threaten economic growth and America’s standing in the world, undermine social programs like the Affordable Care Act, and probably encourage more radical movements on the right and the left. Think of Italy, Greece, or Weimar Germany. Or think about what the United States would have been like if World War II had not occurred, and if Europe, the United States, and Japan had failed to pull themselves out of the Great Depression.

But in discussing possible ways to reverse this trajectory, Judis says something worth pondering:

Politically, the Republican far right has to be marginalized. That can happen either through ordinary conservative Republicans like Tennessee Senator Bob Corker or California Congressman Devin Nunes bolting the party or by the conservatives and moderates reclaiming control of the party and forcing the far right to create its own party along the lines of the old Dixiecrats or George Wallace’s American Independent Party. In the former case, you would have the emergence of an FDR-strength Democratic majority; in the latter, an Eisenhower era collaboration between the parties.

In other words, the current chaos and tension within the GOP could lead to an actual split with one side or the other controlling the elephant’s tired old carcass.

How likely is that? Not so likely, I suspect. For all the back-biting and RINO-hunting and “they’re crazy” whispering that has long afflicted the GOP, it’s important to understand that a lot of the divisions involve strategy and tactics rather than actual policy goals or fundamental ideology. All the “moderates” bad-mouthing Ted Cruz this last week did, after all, vote against Obamacare and for the Ryan Budget. Nearly all of them favor abortion bans and oppose tax cuts even if they are necessary to achieve any sort of bipartisan fiscal deal. And on the other side of the barricades, for all the endless accusations on the right of Republican Establishment gutlessness and betrayal, the hard-core conservatives did in the end loyally back the last two GOP presidential candidates (though they did so after forcing them well out of their own ideological comfort zones).

So I wouldn’t count on a big split in the Republican ranks any time soon, much less a real divorce.