Even while shutdown, the government managed to add 1000 employees!

Terence Jeffrey reports in cnsnews.com,

(CNSNews.com) - Even though the federal government was in partial shutdown for most of January, it still managed to increase its employees by 1,000, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In December 2018, according to BLS, the federal government employed 2,799,000 workers. In January, it employed 2,800,000.

Read more here.

"Pull back here, counter-attack there."

In Town Hall, Kurt Schlichter writes,

...So we lost this round? So what? We’ve lost before, and we’ll lose again. This is for the long-haul folks. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. There’s no magic wand where one term of Vitamin D cures a century of progressive pathology.

Trump’s instincts have been right all along. We doubted he could win. He did. We doubted he would actually remake the courts. He has. We doubted he’d fight for the wall, but he did, and he paid a price. Who else would have withstood the heat this long? Who would have even picked the fight?

...Remember Alinsky Rule No. 7?

“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

Did any of you see any indication at all that the shutdown tactic was about to deliver us victory, that it was not becoming a drag? Me neither. Cut your losses. Pull back here, counter-attack there.

We’ve been attacking for two years, racking up conservative triumphs you’ve never experienced unless you were one of us who was of age during the Reagan years. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – what other GOP president would have held course and made them happen? Trump’s remaking the courts and rebuilding our military. He gutted Obamacare and Obama’s regulations. He’s pulling us out of useless wars, useless agreements with Iran, and useless climate change scams. He’s got clarity on Israel, on the garbage mainstream media, and America’s useless elite.

Remember that in the days before the shutdown truce, we had won a huge victory over the garbage mainstream media by exposing their lies about the Covington kids and the drum-banging Frigidaireborne ranger. Buzzfeed first had its lies about the president exposed and then had to make massive lay-offs. HuffPo Opinion died. Even the SWAT raid on Roger Stone turned out to have zilch to do with collusion, as usual.

Read more here.

All the shutdown deals Democrats have rejected

In The Daily Caller, Amber Athey lists all the end the shutdown deals Republicans have offered that Democrats have refused.

Who is voting to end the government shutdown?

Who is voting to end the shut down of the government? 189 Republicans and 6 Democrats.

Who is voting no to end the shutdown? 222 Democrats!

Read the vote here.

via The Kristina Cook Show.

Media Blackout on Pelosi trip

I have read that there were 7 Democrat members of Congress, 86 family members, and 93 military and Secret Service members that were planning to go to Afghanistan, Egypt and Brussels on the taxpayers dime with Speaker Pelosi before Trump canceled their use of military planes during the government shutdown. There seems to be a complete media blackout on reporting or verifying this information. Can anyone help verify?

Bah Humbug!

Dov Fischer writes at the American Spectator about the government shutdown,

...Nothing has changed, and nothing is going to change. The furloughed federal workers all will get their back-pay in the mail as soon as the Government reopens. Mueller will keep doing that thing he does. His funding reliably is there, if he likes, through January 21, 2024. The House Democrats will have no problem getting federal payments made to their dozens of investigators and lawyers as they ramp up the next two years of non-stop investigations into Trump’s taxes, Trump’s hotels, Trump’s golf swing, Trump’s hairspray. The Democrats still will have the money to fly to D.C. every Monday morning and to fly back home for weekends. The shutdown is all a big nothing. Or, in the spirit of the season: Bah humbug.

...So let the Government stay closed, even for a year, even for two. It does not matter. Let the House Democrats investigate for two years; they would be doing it anyway. If they dare vote for impeachment, it never will pass the Senate, and the voters will make them pay for wasting two years, blocking the Wall, and accomplishing nothing.

And if G-d forbid anything crosses that southern border that causes damage any time during the next two years — more opioid deaths, more human trafficking, more MS-13 animals, weapons used for terror, or terrorists themselves — the lack of that Wall will tumble down on them.

Read more here.

Working together

Hat tip Bookworm

"People will die!"

In honor of Senator Diane Feinstein who said people would die in a government shutdown, but voted for the shutdown anyway.

The shutdown party backs off

Stephen Dinan and S.A. Miller report at The Washington Times,

Senate Democrats relinquished on the government shutdown Monday, agreeing to vote to reopen the government but insisting they’ll keep fighting for illegal immigrant “Dreamers” over the next weeks, with another shutdown deadline looming Feb. 8.

“I’m glad we’ve gotten past that,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said just ahead of a vote.

The vote to end the filibuster was 81-18, clearing the way for passage of the stopgap spending bill.

The House was expected to pass the bill later Monday, which would end the shutdown after three days.

The breakthrough came after Mr. McConnell said he would allow the Senate to conduct a freewheeling immigration debate in February, unless they come to a deal before then on how to handle the Dreamers.

Democrats touted that procedural commitment as a major victory, predicting they’ll emerge victorious from that immigration debate.

“The Republican majority now has 17 days to prevent the Dreamers from being deported,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, who had led the Friday filibuster that created the shutdown, but said Monday he was flipping his vote and would now support reopening the government.

Republicans said they had always intended to have an immigration discussion, though Mr. McConnell’s promise of a full floor debate is perhaps more than the GOP had originally been willing to concede. Senators pushing the debate said it’s a signal that President Trump has lost negotiating powers, and the Senate may pass a bill he disagrees with.

He said the debate would commence with a neutral bill and an open amendment process that allows every side of the debate to help craft the legislation.

The process thrilled the bipartisan group of about 20 senators led by Sen. Susan Collins, who helped broker the end of the shutdown.

“The outcome is not preordained,” said Ms. Collins, Maine Republican.

Ahead of the vote, Mr. Schumer continued to blame Mr. Trump for the shutdown, in a strident speech that seemed to anger some of the deal-makers he’ll need going forward.

“Please stop,” Ms. Collins said quietly to colleagues on the floor as Mr. Schumer harangued Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell.

“If we learned anything during this process, it’s that a strategy to shut down the federal government over the issue of illegal immigration is something the American people did not understand,” Mr. McConnell said.

His deputy, Majority Whip John Cornyn, was more blunt on Democrats’ strategy: “I think people realize this is really a dumb move.”

“They’ve got no exit strategy,” he said just before the vote. “They have no plan. You really need to ask yourself how does this end, and they really can’t answer that question. They can’t get what they want. They’ve taken a hostage they can’t shoot.”

Democrats did manage to limit the pain from the shutdown, most of which came over a weekend when the effects were muted. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were furloughed Monday but will be back on the job soon.

Despite their leaders’ deal, many Democrats voted to keep the shutdown going anyway, saying they had wanted to see an immediate deal for the Dreamers.

Those holdouts were cheered by immigrant-rights advocates, who’d pressured Democrats to block government funding until Dreamers get legal status.

“It’s really important Democrats continue to show the backbone they’ve shown to date to ensure this high-stakes move results in bipartisan breakthroughs,” Frank Sharry, executive director at America’s Voice, a leading immigrant-rights group, said Monday morning, before the vote.

The three-day shutdown is far less than the last go-around, when the GOP led a 16-day shutdown over Obamacare. But it does complicate Democrats’ argument in recent years that the GOP was the party of shutdowns.

Read more here.

Ace of Spades responded,

Democrats Give Up on Shutdown; Vote for Cloture on CR Passes, Setting Up Vote to Re-Open Government
—Ace
The CR will keep the government open just for two and a half weeks, until February 8th.

McConnell offered them his personal commitment that they'd vote on a DACA bill in the meantime, but they say that Republicans already made that offer. And also note there's no guarantee that bill will pass, or what the bill will actually say.

Oh, in the meantime, Schumer has been claiming he offered a grand compromise to the president and the GOP, offering to support authorization for the wall.

That's a con. The wall was authorized in 2006; what is lacking is appropriations for money to actually build it. So Schumer has been claiming he's "compromising" by offering to authorized that which was authorized going on 12 years now. While continuing to not offer what is actually needed, money.

Dave Barry's review of 2013

Dave Barry is out with his review of 2013. Some excerpts:
September:

Just when it seems as if there is no good way out of the Syria mess, help miraculously arrives in the form of our generous old friends the Russians, who, despite being longtime allies of Syria, are willing to lend us a helping hand without any thought of benefiting themselves. Under their plan, Assad gets to remain in power but must give up his chemical weapons and go back to killing people in a more humane, less Hitlerish way. With the crisis averted, everybody in Washington heaves a sigh of relief, and that is the last we hear about the crisis in Syria.

October: The federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park — ALL of it — is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.

November: Public dissatisfaction with Obamacare continues to grow as many Americans discover that their current insurance plans are being canceled. A frustrated and — it goes without saying — surprised President Obama reveals to the nation that “insurance is complicated to buy” and clarifies that when he said “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” he was using “you” in the sense of “not necessarily you personally.” Observers note that the White House has stopped referring to the program as “Obamacare” and is now calling it by the more formal legal name “George W. Bush.”

December: In other retail news, Jeff Bezos reveals that Amazon is experimenting with a system that would deliver parcels weighing up to five pounds via drones; heavier packages would be delivered via surplus World War II howitzers. Some observers express concerns about this concept, but it gets a rare five-star rating from The Washington Post.