Shutdown of Government Starts To Feel Like Sequester — a Surprise Success

The MSM: We’re all going to die! Washington will look like something out of Logan’s Run or I Am Legend if the budget impasse continues!

Reality: Over 80 percent of the government remains open during the federal “slimdown,” except for those areas controlled by the Barry-cade obsessed National Park Service, which is acting like an arm of the DNC, as George Will said to Chris Wallace yesterday.

In other words, “The government ‘shutdown’ is starting to feel a lot like the sequester — a lot of alarmist warnings that the sky is going to fall, followed by business pretty much as usual,” Ira Stoll of the New York Sun writes:

That’s not to minimize the genuine inconvenience or worse for those government employees who have been furloughed, or for cancer patients involved in clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, an institution that House Republicans voted to fund but that Senate Democrats are holding hostage.

For most of the rest of us, it turns out that the government can “shut down” and life goes on pretty much the same as it did before. Now there’s a valuable insight that it’s almost worth having the government shut down to discover.

As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York has reported, only about 17% of the government is actually shut down, as measured by expenditures. So it’s not a full shutdown as much as a slimdown or a partial shutdown.

Even so, the shut-down elements that are attracting much of the news attention turn out to be easily replaceable.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics failed to issue its employment report for the month of September. NPR managed to come up with five alternative measures, including the ADP payroll report, state data on unemployment claims, the PNC Financial Services Group’s Autumn Outlook Survey, and a report by an outplacement company about planned layoffs.

The New York Times had an article about how tourists in Boston were upset that Faneuil Hall, which is run by the National Park Service, was closed. The Times did not mention that a short walk away, other sites on the Freedom Trail of historic Revolution-era Boston, like the Old State House (run by the private Bostonian Society) and the Old South Meeting House (run by the private Old South Association) remained open.

No wonder the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist tweeted, “It may be time to discuss how many federal gov parks could be handed over to states that are more competent to run them. Or privatized.”

And the longer this drags on, the less the MSM can continue their sky is falling!!!!11!!!!! rhetoric, and the more non-political junkies tune it all out, as they go about their daily lives. Which may be why the White House could be blinking today, Ed Morrissey writes:

Did the White House just blink on the debt-ceiling fight? After weeks of insisting it won’t negotiate on either the budget or the debt ceiling, a top White House adviser said this morning that Barack Obama would sign a short-term lift in the latter to gain more time for a longer-term agreement:

President Obama would accept a short-term increase in the federal borrowing cap , rather than one lasting a year or more, a senior White House official said Monday. The statement was an acknowledgment by the administration that it may not be possible to reach a deal on a long-term increase in the debt ceiling before a critical Oct. 17 deadline.

Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, said members of Congress ultimately have the responsibility to decide how often they want to raise the debt ceiling, although he argued that an extended hike is preferable. …

But it takes two to negotiate. When will Barry come to the table to begin obfuscating his side of the debate?

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Related: At the Weekly Standard, Lucas Thompson proffers “8 Reasons the Shutdown Won’t Hurt Republicans.”

Hysterical media overreach, including far left Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program today questioning Ted Cruz’s patriotism, certainly plays in their favor.

Meanwhile a “Spite House” logo jumps the Barry-cades and escapes onto Twitter: