Zephyr Dear

In an overview of Judaism and Christianity, Kenan Malik contrasts their understandings of evil and sin:

The story of Adam and Eve, and of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, was, of course, originally a Jewish fable. But Jews read that story differently to Christians. In Judaism, Adam and Eve’s transgression creates a sin against their own souls, but it does not condemn humanity as a whole, and nor does it fundamentally transform either human nature or human beings’ relationship to God. In the Christian tradition, God created humanity to be immortal. In eating the apple, Adam and Eve brought mortality upon themselves. Jews have always seen humans as mortal beings.

In the Garden, Adam and Eve were as children. Having eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they had to take responsibility for themselves, their decisions and their behaviour. This is seen not as a ’fall’ but as a ‘gift’ – the gift of free will. As the Hertz Chumash, the classic Hebrew-English edition of the Pentateuch and Haftorahs, observes, ‘Instead of the Fall of man (in the sense of humanity as a whole), Judaism preaches the Rise of man: and instead of Original Sin, it stresses Original Virtue, the beneficent hereditary influence of righteous ancestors upon their descendants’.

The story of Adam and Eve was initially, then, a fable about the attainment of free will and the embrace of moral responsibility. It became a tale about the corruption of free will and the constraints on moral responsibility. It was in this transformation in the meaning of the Adam and Eve’s transgression that Christianity has perhaps secured its greatest influence.  The true legacy of the doctrine of Original Sin is not as an explanation of evil, but rather as a description of human nature, a description that came to dominate Western ethical thinking as Christianity became the crucible in which that thinking took place.

Will Hines explains how improv comedy can become an ascetic, almost religious pursuit:

The most popular improv advice sounds like spiritual challenges. “Follow the fear” — without even considering if that’s actually practical advice for an improvised comedy scene, you want to believe that. You’ve been hungry to have someone tell you to follow the fear. You find a way to make that advice true. You may come to improv because you like comedy, but if you stay, it’s because all this advice challenges you in a way that you’ve been hungry for. You want this to be a more interesting world, and you want to be a braver person, and then in a dingy improv classroom someone is saying it to you. It’s why you don’t mind not being paid, because you are learning. You’re growing as a person, so it seems just that you pay for it. Your shows are not a place where you give your services, but are a place where you are being taught by an audience how to be spiritually and philosophically more bold.

We believe that these improv classes are going to burn away the parts of our personality that we don’t like and leave in its place a braver, more bold person. There is no one more ready to flagellate than a newly excited improv student. “Call me out on my bullshit,” they say. “I like this teacher because they didn’t let me get away with shit.” It’s almost sado-masochistic, their desire to be corrected and fixed. But it’s because they sense a spiritual perfection. The wording of improv lessons baited them into it, and now they want it.

As we learn more about what went wrong with the design and launch of Healthcare.gov, a few broad principles have emerged about how to fix the procurement system so this kind of debacle -- which isn't the only non-functional Web site the government's bought, just the highest profile -- doesn't happen again.

One of them is the willingness to entertain innovative proposals from companies that might not have years of federal contracting experience. As we mentioned last week, CGI Federal landed the Healthcare.gov contract as a task order, having been certified four years previously to compete with a select group of other big firms for anything the Department of Health and Human Services might need. That keeps out newer firms that might have a more novel approach to the problem, as well as those that just don't feel like dealing with jumping through all those government hoops.

Another is the openness of the software development process: While the front end of the Web site was developed open source, CGI Federal's backend was entirely secret, which meant that coders couldn't crawl around and help spot bugs. As Bloomberg Businessweek outlined, posting the code on Github would have brought a community of people out to fix problems before they got so deeply embedded that there was no way to extract them. It's standard in Silicon Valley, and even for lots of major governments around the world as well. The Obama administration even used it for an earlier version of HealthCare.gov.

A third, however, goes to the very heart of how companies build large software systems: The federal government's been doing it backwards for decades.

To understand why, you need a little history. Government contracting culture and rules originate with the Department of Defense, which knows what it wants ahead of time, and can draw exact specifications that companies compete to fulfill. A tank is a tank is a tank, pretty much, plus or minus a few bells and whistles.

The software development version of that is what's known as the "waterfall" model, where bidders describe what they're going to do, and then proceed to design and construct it -- with testing all the way at the end. A big problem with Healthcare.gov was that the team didn't have time to run many tests before the Oct. 1 cutoff date, which meant nobody knew quite what would happen when it went live.

Larry Fitzpatrick, who used to run IT systems for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and now serves as president of a Bethesda-based tech contracting firm, says that makes no sense.

"That style of development is something that the government continues to latch onto, because it seems to be easy to understand, easier to procure for. But it generates a tremendous amount of risk," he says. "What often happens when you have these big requirements up front, is the people who are specifying the product are afraid of not getting all their ideas in, so they overscope the project. And then the development team is on the hook for delivering everything, not just the essential elements."

The better way to do things is a school of software development called Agile -- it's been around since the 1950s, was basically codified in the early 2000s, now has a whole non-profit devoted to it, and is the dominant form of software design in teams. Rather than moving from one static stage to the next, it emphasizes constant iteration and testing, with prototypes building on prototypes so the endpoint is something that works. The only problem, from a government perspective, is that you need to be comfortable with not knowing exactly that they will look like.

"If you're going to take the time to write a 1,000 page specification, you're going to miss the point," Fitzpatrick says. "They should have fairly quickly, within a quarter, been able to put together a skeleton for what the system had to do, what systems had to talk to each other, and get it up and running. This is really the only way to build systems of this complexity."

It's not as if nobody in the government knows how to do this. Fitzpatrick says his firm, Computech, used it to put together the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's national broadband map, and that the Customs and Immigration Service has used agile principles for some of its projects as well. They tend to fly under the radar because they're less expensive projects -- but they're also less expensive because they don't require massive numbers of people to put together. [UPDATE: As Suzy Khimm notes, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has done a lot of this as well, in part because it has a robust in-house tech shop]

"I mean that's an alarm bell," Fitzpatrick says. "If you have a software development project that costs more than $40 to 50 million, you really have to ask why."

So how does agile become the standard mode of software development for all federal IT contracting? It's more a cultural shift than anything else, said a bunch of federal tech people at a panel on the topic last year. Project managers need to get used to the idea of working intensely with a development team rather than asking for a specific thing and then walking away -- as Office of Management and Budget policy analyst Tim McCrosson put it, "if we can get out of that mindset that we're buying a product and get into the mindset of we're buying a process."

Mike Wehner, writing for TUAW:

The massive information engine Wolfram Alpha just added a whopping 649 pokémon to its database. For fans of the games, that fact is pretty cool all on its own, but if you happen to own an iPhone or an iPad with Siri, it’s even more awesome. You see, thanks to Siri’s ability to search Wolfram Alpha for information, your iDevice is now as close to a real-life Pokédex as you’ll probably ever have.

See also: Announcement from Wolfram Alpha.

I somehow lucked into working with a group of intensely talented people to make a video game called SCALE that lets you make any object any size. It’s sort of like Portal meets Mario 64 meets the gibbering madness of BEING ABLE TO MAKE ANYTHING ANY SIZE. The Kickstarter went up today where you can pre-order it! I work as the writer and sometimes do a little concept art. I drew the big illustration above of our main character, Penny, stomping through the skewed remains of the universe. Demo screen cap gifs are there to prove to you that this game is BANANAS *drops sunglasses to stare at you with real eyes. Real eyes have bananas on them.*

I absolutely despise J-types. They reach conclusions prematurely, ignore the perspectives of others, and demand unreasonable schedules. They are ridiculously inflexible, and disdain P-types as lazy, indecisive dilettantes, because we prefer to ensure that all evidence and the possibility of unforeseen twists are taken into account. My whole life, I’ve been surrounded by J-types, and I want nothing to do with any of them. All of my immediate family are J-types, and I can’t stand them, at all.

Cruz says conservatives should hold Republican officeholders "accountable" for shutting down his government shutdown.

Watching Heart perform Stairway to Heaven for the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones) and Barack and Michele Obama.

Read More →

In an interview with the NYT's James Risen, Edward Snowden explains what was really going on back in his CIA days, when he was allegedly reprimanded for accessing systems he wasn't supposed to see. It turns out Snowden had found a security vulnerability in their sensitive systems, which he reported through channels, got blown off for, and then kept pushing. In the end, the manager who had tried to cover up the vulnerability took revenge on Snowden by putting a black mark on his record.

Mr. Snowden said that in 2008 and 2009, he was working in Geneva as a telecommunications information systems officer, handling everything from information technology and computer networks to maintenance of the heating and air-conditioning systems. He began pushing for a promotion, but got into what he termed a “petty e-mail spat” in which he questioned a senior manager’s judgment.

Several months later, Mr. Snowden said, he was writing his annual self-evaluation when he discovered flaws in the software of the C.I.A.’s personnel Web applications that would make them vulnerable to hacking. He warned his supervisor, he said, but his boss advised him to drop the matter and not rock the boat. After a technical team also brushed him off, he said, his boss finally agreed to allow him to test the system to prove that it was flawed.

He did so by adding some code and text “in a nonmalicious manner” to his evaluation document that showed that the vulnerability existed, he said. His immediate supervisor signed off on it and sent it through the system, but a more senior manager — the man Mr. Snowden had challenged earlier — was furious and filed a critical comment in Mr. Snowden’s personnel file, he said.

Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia [James Risen/NYT]

(via Techdirt)

Andrew Gumbel explains:

Prisoners going into solitary [confinement] sometimes imagine they can take advantage of their isolation to read, or study, or develop an interest in painting, but, invariably, they grow listless and unfocused within just a few days — unable to concentrate for even short periods of time. In a 2003 paper, Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz noted: “There is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which nonvoluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days [...] failed to result in negative psychological effects.”

The evidence of these studies clearly contradicts the official line that isolating prisoners is a necessary measure to reduce prison violence.

Violent incidents at California prisons have actually increased by almost 20 percent since Pelican Bay opened and long-term isolation became institutionalized statewide. When a national commission spearheaded by a retired federal appeals judge and a former US attorney general looked into the matter in 2006, they concluded that responsibility for prison violence lay primarily with the prison authorities, not the prisoners themselves. A system that either packs prisoners into overcrowded cells or isolates them, then fails to provide an adequate daily structure of work, exercise, reading and socializing, is a system ready to explode.

Previous Dish on solitary confinement here, here, and here.

You may be in the running for dipsh#t of the year if you manage to break something that maybe a hundred million years worth of dinosaurs didn't screw up.

Friday afternoon, I spoke with someone in the insurance industry who's overseeing his company's integration with the federal insurance marketplaces in a number of states. "I've never seen a project go this poorly," he said. "But then, I've never been part of one this grand in scope."

He confirmed, as others have, that his insurer is seeing a lot of bad data come in from the exchanges. Payments are getting rejected. Enrollee information is coming in wrong. Membership is proving tough to validate.

"What our company, and I'm assuming others, are doing is throwing people at it," he said. "We're overcoming the tech flaws with manual reviews and manual rigor and manual processes. That's fine right now, but when you start looking at the scale of what the Obama administration wants to do, that's just not going to scale up."

What that means, oddly, is that if the federal health-care exchanges Web site traffic problems were solved Friday afternoon, it might be a disaster for the law as insurers would be flooded with applications that they couldn't trust. The question is whether the data problems can be fixed as quickly as the traffic problems are abating.

The good news, he said, is "the quality of data coming from the exchanges is getting better." Which isn't to say the problems are anywhere near solved. There's still plenty of duplicate data and corrupted data coming in. But they've definitely seen an improvement over the last few days.

He thought the mood had swung a bit far toward gloom. "There's a lot of negative talk now, and people feeling down," he said. "Things will stabilize at some point in time as they always do." I asked whether he thought it likely that the law or significant provisions within it would need to be delayed. "I think that's overly pessimistic," he replied.

An issue on both sides, he said, is that though there are very good people working at the Department of Health and Human Services and very good people working in the insurance industry those people don't tend to go into the IT departments. Really good technologists don't want to work on the kind of computer systems and software development cultures that dominate in places like HHS or the insurance industry.

"Kids coming out of MIT don't want to work on mainframe technology," he said. "They go into start-up firms. They want to be entrepreneurial. So there's a big gap in terms of technology talent."

It's worth saying that if you've talked to one insurer you've talked to one insurer. Industry consultant Bob Laszewski, who has a more global view, e-mails that the insurance carriers he's talking to "are reporting no improvement in enrollments and no improvement in [data issues]."

The leader of Tea Party Unity has the game change to turn back the gay tide. A class action suit against homosexuality. Just all homosexuality. Like the AGs did with the tobacco companies.

“I initially thought that there is some sort of logic behind the process: you commit a violent crime; you receive a sentence that correlates with this crime; you go to prison for X number of years; you go in front of the parole board; and you are released once you have proven that you’re rehabilitated. While I knew that your sentence also depends on the quality of the defense—on money, in other words—I thought that once you are eligible for parole, you have a reasonable chance of being released. This is not the case. The parole hearing process is completely arbitrary. This is why I decided to dissect this process: people’s release from prison is not dependent on the work they’ve done on themselves. It’s not a decision that is being made by qualified individuals, psychiatrists, or psychologists. It’s based on a twenty-minute interview by commissioners who have never met the prisoner before. All my subjects were denied parole for several years, because their release was “incompatible with the public safety.” All of them had folders brimming with vocational and educational certificates and support letters—to no avail. It is unclear what they could or should have done to get out when they were first eligible for parole.”

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The Rumpus Interview with Sabine Heinlein, author of Among Murderers: Life After Prison

(via therumpus)

Yesterday I wrote about Oregon's big success signing people up for Obamacare: The state had, in the course of 17 days, signed up 56,000 people for the health law's Medicaid expansion. In one fell swoop, the state had cut its uninsured rate by 10 percent.

That is, however, only part of the story from Oregon. When it comes to private insurance, spokeswoman Amy Fauver said that it has not yet had any sign-ups.

"While we wish we were in a different place with our technology, we're implementing the contingencies we need to make sure no Oregonians get left behind," she said.

Cover Oregon decided Sept. 30, the day before the marketplace went live, that the software it uses to determine who qualifies for financial aid was coming up with too many errors to go live. It decided instead that it would process applications manually. Those applications have begun filtering in and determinations will likely go out later this month.

"They'll start hearing from us in the next week or two what about what their next step is," Fauver said. "We have staff trained to do that determination."

However, Fauver said that no Oregon health plan has received an enrollment through the marketplace. She declined to comment on the number of applications submitted to the marketplace, saying her department is "still working through the data to to arrive at a number we can stand by." It's possible that some of the applications could be incomplete, or represent multiple people. Cover Oregon doesn't know because they're still pending manual processing.

Oregon initially projected that 7,000 people would sign up for private coverage this month. Fauver wouldn't say whether that number still seems reasonable, with 12 days left to go in the month.

"It's too soon to say," she said. "We're working with our developers around the clock to get this fixed. We're not where we want to be, but we think we'll be able to get there soon."

How could so many people sign up for the Medicaid expansion, and not a single person enroll in private insurance? It mostly has to do with how simple the Medicaid sign-up was: The state sent out notices to about 260,000 people who already receive public benefits and were below 138 percent of the federal poverty line, the cut-off for the Medicaid expansion.

To enroll, they simply had to call a phone number or return a form to the state.

"It simplified the process and that made a huge dent," Fauver said. "We're extremely thrilled about that, and expect the number to go up in coming weeks."

Daniel McCarthy examines the self-delusion of the Republican base:

[A]nyone who is psychologically satisfied by actions that in fact cost taxpayers additional money, and that are counterproductive in the public arena, really an opponent of big government? A feeling of courageous satisfaction here is perverse: it subverts the principle it’s supposed to support.

Imagine what the Tea Party would accomplish if this incident became paradigmatic: government would grow, anti-government sentiment would be discredited, and the people responsible for both would continue to applaud themselves as the only true champions of limited-government principle.

The self-defeating emotionalism of Ted Cruz’s admirers won’t allow them to think through this problem. Instead they present themselves with a false dilemma between Cruz’s counterproductive incompetence and RINO liberalism. That there could be a more intelligent strategy for limited government than merely doing what feels good never occurs to them—it’s too painful to contemplate.

Larison chimes in:

Because small-government conservatism is a harder sell than many of the alternatives, it is especially important for its advocates to make good judgments about what is possible and to make sound decisions that prove that they are capable of running a government of reduced and limited powers. Neither of these has been on display in the last few weeks, everyone can see it, and it would be senseless for anyone to offer up spin to the contrary.

Jayne Rand, of Swindon, England, was sentenced this week to an 18 month jail sentence after shoplifting $200,000 worth of handbags. No kleptomaniac, Rand was such an expert thief that the judge, Rhys Rowlands, felt compelled to remark upon her professionalism:

"How you got away with it for so long without being caught was deeply remarkable. You showed professionalism and that is why you went undetected for so long. You travelled the country with the sole purpose of theft and you made a successful albeit dishonest business of selling stolen handbags. The values are quite outside of what the court comes across even from professional shoplifting gangs."

Ted Balaker says: "It's the drug war's little cousin: Laws create a black market in cigarettes, so smugglers step in to make money. What they're doing isn't inherently dangerous, but the black market makes it more violent than it otherwise would be. That gives ATF a public safety justification to arrest smugglers and add them to the ranks of incarceration nation. And the agency says the problem is the penalties for cigarette smuggling aren't tough enough! When both sides smuggle cigarettes and make money doing it, it gets harder to tell the 'good' guys from the 'bad' guys."

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, (and Explosives!) has been fighting cigarette smuggling by smuggling cigarettes. Agents buy smokes in low-tax states like Virginia and sell them in high-tax states like New York. The sting operations are supposed to help build cases against smugglers, but ATF is cashing in too.

By law ATF may keep booty to cover “operational expenses.” As if the line between law breakers and law enforcers wasn’t blurry enough already, a recent inspector general report highlights a “serious lack of oversight” at the agency. Seems that confidential informants have been allowed to pocket, not expenses, but profits amounting to millions of dollars. ATF agents have “misused” $162 million in sting operation profits and “lost track” of $420 million cigarettes.

But hey, don’t federal agents have better things to do! Well, ATF’s own most-wanted list features men suspected of crimes like murder, so yeah, agents could focus more time busting violent criminals. Then again, cigarette smuggling is so much more lucrative!

The country’s biggest business groups are making noises about taking on tea party candidates in primary races. But reclaiming a more reliably pro-business Republican Party -- one that stops railing against “corporate welfare” and threatening to default on the nation's debt obligations --isn’t going to be easy.

For one, the trade groups are talking about only a handful of races so far: four primaries, only two of which would involve taking on Republican incumbents. The group of House Republicans who led the charge to shut down the government numbered in the dozens. And on Wednesday night, 18 Republican senators and 144 GOP House members opposed the bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.

Even if many of those "no" votes were symbolic, that’s a large number of GOP lawmakers who felt enough political pressure to reject the deal, suggesting how deeply tea party politics with an anti-corporate bent have seeped into the GOP's mainstream.

In this vein, the most telling moment this week was when a compromise surfaced that would have eliminated the medical device tax. The idea should have been a no-brainer for a traditional pro-business Republican to support. Instead, it was pilloried by Michael Needham, chief executive of Heritage Action for America, who said that killing the tax would amount to “corporate cronyism.” The deal quickly died.

Views like these threaten to unravel the decades-long alliance between business and the GOP and have clearly alarmed groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trade organizations are only in the early planning stages of wresting back control, so they may decide to get involved in more races eventually. But this is also extremely new territory for them; they’re used to participating in general elections, not primaries.

There are also limits to how far these groups can go if they want Republicans to keep control of the House. They can try to weed out a few ultra-conservative lawmakers who have been causing trouble for House Speaker John Boehner and send a message to activist groups like Heritage Action and Club for Growth. But they can’t go so far in targeting certain Republicans that they risk losing seats to Democrats.

And just deciding which Republicans to take on won’t be obvious. Among the most recalcitrant House Republicans were some who have have received top marks from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho, for instance, was among the hard-core conservatives who terrified business executives with their threats to not raise the debt ceiling. But Labrador is hardly “anti-business” by the Chamber’s own standards. Last year he received the group’s “Spirit of Enterprise Award” for “his support of pro-jobs, pro-growth policies.”

Adding to the confusion is that the business community is hardly monolithic. Trade groups may want to take on some of the tea party candidates, but they’re up against other figures in the business world, including a handful of financiers who have pumped money into the Club for Growth. And chief executives who are thoroughly confused by what’s happened in Washington the last month may have their own ideas about what to do, including the start-and-stop Fix the Debt effort.

Why don’t these business trade groups abandon the Republican Party altogether, as some have asked? Besides shared policy goals like lower taxes, there’s a long personal history between Boehner and the leaders of the biggest trade groups. Since the 1990s, Boehner has been carefully nurturing the party’s relationship with these organizations --and it shows. Nearly every Republican lobbyist I interviewed in the last week couldn’t say enough nice things about Boehner, that he was loyal, decent and wouldn’t let them down. These lobbyists never doubted he would raise the debt ceiling. And they were right.

In a way, these groups have invested too much in Boehner and the GOP to back down now. They helped the Republicans win back the House in 2010, linking arms with the same tea party politicians who are causing them problems now. The idea then was that having Republicans control the House was the best way to win on the narrow policy battles -- Will this tax go up? Will those regulations get approved? -- that are the bread and butter of lobbyists. But with Congress no longer passing major legislation, all that’s left is intra-party squabbling. And business groups have no choice now but to wade into the fight.

Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog.

In the last two weeks, Oregon has cut the ranks of its uninsured by 10 percent through Obamacare.

They're not the only state seeing huge gains. California has signed up 600,000 low-income Golden Staters for the law's expanded Medicaid, and over 100,000 are in some stage of applying for insurance on the marketplaces. In Washington state, over 40,000 people have signed up for Obamacare. In New York, the numbers are even larger. Kentucky's online marketplace has been a model of glitch-free performance, with more than 10,000 signing up on the first day alone.

It's increasingly possible that Obamacare, at least in its early years, will be a success in blue states (and red states run by Democrats, like Kentucky) even as it flails in red states.

Alice Rivlin likes to say that if the law "really were a federal power grab it wouldn’t be so complicated." Instead, it relies heavily on states. And some states are doing a much better job than others -- and the federal government's failures are further pulling the laggards down.

"Unlike Medicare before it," write Sheila Burke and Elaine Kamarck in a new report for the Brookings Institute, "the ACA has built into it a number of key decisions that were left up to states. Among the most important was the decision whether or not to create an insurance exchange. Another decision, whether to expand Medicaid coverage (or not) was not built into the law but came as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision on it."

The law's drafters never really saw those as actual decisions. They expected most every state to want to build its own exchange. And, prior to the Supreme Court decision, they believe it impossible for any state to reject the Medicaid expansion.

That's not how it played out, of course. Today, most states with Democratic governors both expanded Medicaid and built their own exchanges while most states with Republican governors rejected the Medicaid expansion and left exchange construction to the federal government.

It's been clear for months that the Medicaid rejections would be a serious problem for the law. In those states, people who make less than the poverty line get nothing under Obamacare, but people who make between 100 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line gets subsidies for private insurance. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about six million of the people expected to get health insurance through Obamacare fall through this massive crack.

But more surprising is the fact that the federal exchanges are a mess while the state exchanges are, by and large, working well. Since the states that expanded Medicaid are, for the most part, the same ones that built their own exchanges, that's further widening the divide.

The state-by-state nature of the exchanges creates a potential problem even after the technical problems are fixed: Since each state exchange is its own risk pool, the states where sign-up is difficult and delayed may end up with with fewer healthy people and more sick people then the states where sign-up worked from the beginning. That would mean, in year two, higher premiums for insurance in the exchanges, and more difficulties for the law. The problems will be particularly bad in states that aren't attempting to advertise or otherwise sign young and healthy people up for their exchanges.

The result could be that many blue states see cover both a successful Medicaid expansion and successful exchanges while many red states both reject the Medicaid expansion and see their exchange fail.

To that point: "The Houston Chronicle reported that the elected Republican insurance commissioner for the state of Georgia, Ralph Hudgens, told an audience of the Republican faithful that he and the Republican governor were doing 'everything in our power to be an obstructionist.'"

It's much too early to say anything conclusive, or even very predictive, about Obamacare. As Burke and Kamarck note, a lot of what we're seeing right now are "short-term problems" that will likely be fixed within the first year. But short-term problems can become long-term problems in states where the leadership wants to see Obamacare fail rather than be fixed.

The result may be that Obamacare doesn't do anything as simple as succeed or fail. Instead, it vastly improves the health-care systems of the states that wanted to use it to improve their health-care system while collapsing in the states where the leadership did what they could to undermine the law.

Over time, that could lead to a country with two health-care systems: One, a near-universal system based around Obamacare and centered in blue states; the other, a policy mess based around the rejection of Obamacare in the red states.

Wonkbook's Number of the Day: 500,000. That's how many enrollments the Department of Health and Human Services projected for insurance exchanges this month. It seems unlikely we'll come anywhere near that, due to serial technological problems.

Wonkbook's Graph of the Day: The Wall Street Journal had the coolest debt-ceiling chart.

Wonkbook's Top 5 Stories: 1) hasta la vista, shutdown; 2) "train wreck" watch; 3) taper talk tapers off; 4) is immigration reform back?; and 5) Snowden speaks.

1) Top story: The shutdown was only a symptom

President, Congress leave one crisis behind but face long road to budget deal. "President Obama and congressional leaders sought Thursday to move beyond the cycle of crisis that has paralyzed Washington for three years, initiating talks over the broad issues at the heart of their fight: the size of government and the level of federal taxation. Neither Republicans nor Democrats held out much hope that the talks would produce an ambitious deal to spur economic growth or tame the $16.7 trillion national debt. But senior Republicans — whose party suffered in opinion polls after forcing the second-longest government shutdown in U.S. history — said they are unlikely to use that lever to challenge Obama again." Lori Montgomery and Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post.

...And here's what the conferees will be aiming for. "To improve the prospects for some success, the negotiators largely agreed at a closed-door breakfast on Thursday that a deal involving significant new tax revenues and large-scale changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, whose growth in an aging population is driving long-term projections of growing debt, is not going to happen. Instead, they agreed, the talks will aim at a more modest, confidence-building measure to replace the sequestration cuts in 2014. Negotiators could aim higher, for a deal saving at least $1 trillion over the next nine years to substitute completely for the arbitrary sequestration cuts. But neither side was hopeful of that." Jonathan Weisman and Jackie Calmes in The New York Times.

Transcript: President Obama’s Oct. 17 remarks on the budget deal. The Washington Post.

The shutdown probably won’t matter in the 2014 election. It definitely won’t matter in 2016. "There's a tendency in non-election years for political pundits to project the consequences of big political events onto the next election, as if this is off-season and a bad week for the Republican Party is the equivalent of an MCL tear for a linebacker...I'll take the other side of this bet: The events of these last three weeks will have no effect on the 2016 elections. They probably won't even matter much in the 2014 midterm elections...First, basically nothing matters in elections. Once you account for partisanship, the economy, presidential approval and incumbency, there's very little vote left to swing. The main mistake the political class makes about elections is vastly overstating their volatility." Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

@resnikoff: Shutdown's over, but the effects for a lot of low-income people are going to linger. It's not like flicking a light switch on and off.

Business is getting tired with the Tea Party and throwing its weight behind establishment Republicans. "Rather than revisit their strategy of supporting Republicans after this week’s near-disaster, influential organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are standing behind Boehner. More important, Boehner’s friends in the business community are getting ready to take sides in a few Republican primary races against tea party candidates in Michigan, Idaho and Alabama who could cause the House speaker more trouble...It’s this decades-long relationship that helps explain why even as one wing of the Republican Party threatened to drive the economy off a cliff, the business community has largely stuck by its party — and its man, Boehner. These lobbyists say they are worried that Boehner has a shaky hold over his caucus." Jia Lynn Yang and Tom Hamburger in The Washington Post.

In a crisis, Republicans again turn to Mitch McConnell. "By Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) realized he had run out of luck. House Republicans had failed once again to pass critical legislation out of their chamber, so the Democrats who control the Senate had all the leverage...McConnell, perhaps the most accomplished congressional dealmaker of his time, scrambled to pick up the pieces. Thursday, he settled on an extended football metaphor to describe his predicament: He was a backup quarterback thrust into the game after the starter got knocked out with a concussion, and he was backed up against his own end zone with little protection." Paul Kane in The Washington Post.

Interview: Sen. Mitch McConnell. Robert Costa in National Review Online.

How McConnell sees it. "[I]f House Republicans had been able to unify and pass bills like Speaker Boehner's "Plan B" during the fiscal cliff negotiations of late last year, or a last-ditch plan in the recent negotiations earlier this week that would have achieved more of Republican goals, McConnell would have had better leverage to force Senate Democrats to negotiate a deal more to Republicans' liking. But Boehner has been unable to pass those alternate plans because a significant contingent of his caucus views them as not conservative enough. That leaves Boehner needing Democratic votes to pass any ultimate plan, and McConnell, who has only a minority of the Senate, with little leverage." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post.

Background: Who is National Review's Robert Costa, and why does he matter? Joe Coscarelli in New York Magazine.

Was the debt standoff American politics at its best, or worst? "Look, there's no question this episode has been damaging, both for individual Americans who have been temporarily unemployed, and for America's standing around the world. But as ugly as it has been, this is a moment where the center held. The grown-ups of the Republican Party, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, said, "Enough!" It's hard to know for sure just now, but I suspect the whole episode has been damaging enough that they'll come into the next standoff, in January and February, with a different understanding of the costs and risks of extreme tactics." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post.

@conor64: Compare cost of Iraq War to cost of government shutdown. Both dumb, unforced errors. Establishment mistake far more costly, irresponsible.

Republicans don’t love Barack Obama. But do they fear him? "Will even lawmakers who loathe the president and his policies decide they are better off entering the 2014 election with a record of some actual accomplishment, rather than leaving voters with sour taste from the shutdown and near-default? Will mainstream conservatives decide they fear the president and center-right business interests more than they do the far-right extreme of the conservative coalition? If the answer is yes, the nation could get a more sensible approach to deficit reduction, a better tax code and a more reasonable immigration policy out of all this. If the answer is no, it will be a long 13 months between now and the 2014 election, with many more forced crises and little actual lawmaking." Neil Irwin in The Washington Post.

Republicans reassess after shutdown debacle. "That the government shutdown was a political disaster for the party that engineered it is widely acknowledged, except by the most ardent tea partyers. And that near-unanimity presents an opportunity for the establishment to strike back — and maybe regain some control from the insurgent wing. “You roll them,” advised former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “I do think we need stronger leadership, and there’s got to be some pushback on these guys who think they came here with all the solutions.”" Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post.

...Some of them are coming to the realization that Heritage may be part of the problem. "“Heritage used to be the conservative organization helping Republicans,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, himself a longtime conservative leader in Washington, said Thursday in an interview on MSNBC. “There’s a real question on the minds of many Republicans now — and I’m not just thinking for myself, for a lot of people — is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything anymore? I hope not.”" Eric Lipton in The New York Times.

@morningmoneyben: Pretty sure Ted Cruz cannot force another shutdown much as he might like to.

Conservative Republicans aren’t done fighting the new health-care law. "Fresh off an unsuccessful attempt to block the president’s sweeping Affordable Care Act, several conservative Republicans announced Thursday that they have decided on their next political target: the Affordable Care Act. The temporary resolution of the budget battle is likely to intensify, rather than lessen, public scrutiny of the health-care law, commonly known as Obamacare. Chronic problems with the online enrollment system — which have diminished but not disappeared since its Oct. 1 launch — were largely overshadowed by the 16-day fiscal standoff in Washington...House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders announced Thursday that they will hold a hearing Oct. 24 to scrutinize the law’s implementation. They also sent Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius a letter, asking her to reconsider the administration’s decision not to participate." Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post.

No, we didn’t get rid of the debt ceiling forever. "The way it works is that the president gets the power to raise the debt ceiling and then Congress gets an opportunity to take a vote of "disapproval." If that vote passes Congress, then the president can veto the disapproval rule. If Congress can muster the two-thirds majority to overturn the veto, then the president's debt-ceiling increase is rejected. If we made the McConnell mechanism permanent — something the Obama administration favors — it would basically disarm the debt ceiling forever. But last night's deal didn't make the McConnell mechanism permanent. It's only valid until Feb. 7, 2014." Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

The government shutdown wasn’t that bad for the politicians. It was terrible for this guy. "He is a line cook at the American Indian Smithsonian Museum on the National Mall. Anderson is not a government employee. He's a contract worker - the government hires his company to make the food for visitors to the museum. When the shutdown closed the museum, Anderson lost his job. He'll now presumably be able to go back to work, but unlike federal workers, he won't get back pay...Anderson is a divorced father of two who usually brings home about $350 a week after taxes and child support. His 16-year-old son lives with him in Washington but commutes by bus and train to high school in Maryland every day. Anderson has no savings - his wages don't leave much cushion for savings - and struggled through the shutdown to pay his rent, put food on the table and pay for his son to travel back and forth to school." Jim Tankersley in The Washington Post.

@pdacosta: U.S. shutdown reshuffling: JP Morgan - "We now project growth of 2.0% in Q4 (down from 2.5%) and 2.5% in Q1 (up from 2.25%)."

DEMINT: We won't back down over Obamacare. "Now that the government shutdown has ended and the president has preserved ObamaCare for the time being, it's worth explaining why my organization, the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives chose this moment to fight—and why we will continue to fight. The reason is simple: to protect the American people from the harmful effects of this law." Jim DeMint in The Wall Street Journal.

ROSENTHAL: The insufficient craziness theory. "Every time Republicans suffer a rejection of the most right-wing items on their agenda, a significant number decide they haven’t been sufficiently crazy. That was the conclusion that many Republicans drew from the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. And now that Republicans in Congress have been forced to surrender in their fight with President Obama over the budget, health care and the nation’s credit, some are drawing the same conclusion." Andrew Rosenthal in The New York Times.

DOUTHAT: Was it all Boehner's fault? "This was the methodless madness of the last few weeks: Not the fact that individual House members had rational reasons not to want a deal, not the fact that the Republican caucus encompasses conflicting interests that make dealmaking difficult but the fact that against that backdrop, enough of the stakeholders involved either actually believed that they could achieve the impossible or felt compelled to pretend that they believed it, which in turn led to a House majority acting against its collective political self-interest in pursuit of an unattainable goal." Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

BARONE: Partisanship. Get used to it. "Voters with vivid memories of the 1930s and '40s were disposed to give large majorities to presidents whose policies seemed to produce peace and prosperity—57% for Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, 61% for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and for Richard Nixon in 1972, 59% for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Such large majorities gave at least the appearance of consensus. Since 1984, fewer and fewer voters remain who knew that earlier era, making consensus more elusive." Michael Barone in The Wall Street Journal.

KRUGMAN: The damage done. "[I]t’s important to recognize that the economic damage from obstruction and extortion didn’t start when the G.O.P. shut down the government. On the contrary, it has been an ongoing process, dating back to the Republican takeover of the House in 2010. And the damage is large: Unemployment in America would be far lower than it is if the House majority hadn’t done so much to undermine recovery." Paul Krugman in The New York Times.

BERNSTEIN: The shutdown shuts down. "The shutdown maybe shaved half a point off economic growth this quarter, so maybe we post a 2 percent growth rate instead of 2.5 percent. And probably some spending that didn’t happen this quarter bleeds into next quarter, so we’ll make some of that loss up later. If we ever get an October jobs report — and weirdly, we might not; the government was closed during the survey week; maybe the Bureau of Labor Statistics can ask respondents in November about their payrolls and job market status in October, but that would create a notable inconsistency — it will surely show a weaker labor market than in prior or coming months." Jared Bernstein in The New York Times.

RALSTON: How Harry Reid won. "If you want an object lesson in why you should never underestimate Harry Reid, his shutdown shutout was a marvel...Frustrated from past presidential capitulations, realizing early on this fight could be won and deaf to the other side’s echo chamber, Reid correctly calculated that all he had to do, no matter what the Republicans tried, was Just Say No." Jon Ralston on his blog.

Music recommendations interlude: The Eagles, "Take It to the Limit."

Top opinion

KLEIN: Higher taxes shouldn’t be the Democratic Party’s top priority. "Democrats should admit the obvious. For the time being, they’ve lost on taxes. And you know what? That’s okay. At least, it could be, if they were willing to admit it and smartly negotiate the terms of their surrender...The worst mistake Democrats could make would be to become the mirror image of Republicans on the tax issue. Republicans are cannibalizing everything they care about -- defense, deficit reduction, their chances of retaking the Senate -- to keep taxes low. The Republican obsession with taxes is an opportunity for Democrats to exploit, not an example for them to mimic...Democrats should use their leverage to get something they actually want. Immigration reform and infrastructure investment are obvious places to start. They mean vastly more to the economy and to people’s lives than slightly higher taxes on rich people." Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

BLANCHARD, JAUMOTTE, AND LOUNGANI: How to make labor markets work again. "It is a difficult task to design labour-market institutions so they enhance micro and macro flexibility while protecting workers. Our view is that to have micro flexibility, workers should be protected more through unemployment insurance rather than high employment protection. Dual employment protection should be avoided. Macro flexibility depends critically on the collective bargaining structure. A combination of national and firm-level bargaining seems like an attractive solution to the needs for both flexibility and coordination." Olivier Blanchard, Florence Jaumotte, and Prakash Loungani in VoxEU.

DOVERSPIKE: The false promise of universal pre-K. "Oklahomans are proud of their pre-kindergarten program. Universal, voluntary and administered at no direct cost to families, it enrolls 74 percent of Oklahoma’s four-year-olds...The state of education in Oklahoma overall is basically abysmal. Various groups with various methodologies have ranked Oklahoma near the bottom for math and science, K-12 achievement, reading, and standardized testing. And for big-government types who think it matters, Oklahoma also ranks 49th in state expenditures per student and continues to cut per-student costs. There seems to be a disconnect here." Jennifer Doverspike in The Federalist.

DOLAN: Immigration and the welcoming church. "More than 150 Catholic immigration programs across the nation assist immigrants in becoming Americans. Helping the newcomer to our land feel at home is part of our mission, as Christ reminds us in Matthew 25 that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."...Our nation has been enriched by the remarkable diversity of our citizenry and our ability to weave distinct traditions into one American fabric. With help from the church and other institutions, our country has done a remarkable job of transforming immigrants from other shores into Americans, helping them become full members of our culture and communities." Timothy Dolan in The Wall Street Journal.

Wonkbook is watching this story very closely interlude: House stenographer: Holy Spirit moved me.

2) 'Train wreck' watch

Insurers are getting the wrong data. "Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle even the trickle of enrollees who have gotten through so far, in a sign that technological problems extend further than the website traffic and software issues already identified. Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations, say executives at more than a dozen health plans. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Nebraska said it had to hire temporary workers to contact new customers directly to resolve inaccuracies in submissions. Medical Mutual of Ohio said one customer had successfully signed up for three of its plans. The flaws could do lasting damage to the law if customers are deterred from signing up or mistakenly believe they have obtained coverage." Christopher Weaver and Louise Radnofsky in The Wall Street Journal.

Troubled Obamacare website wasn't tested until a week before launch. "Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct. 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project. The individual, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the troubled Obamacare website project as suffering from top-level management disarray, changing systems requirements and recurring delays. The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor." Richard Pollock in The Washington Examiner.

All eyes on Obamacare. "The end of Washington's budget showdown is likely to shift attention back to President Barack Obama's health law and its rocky rollout, news of which was sometimes submerged in the past 16 days of struggle...Observers on all sides say the shutdown and debt-ceiling fight acted as a distraction from the implementation difficulties of Mr. Obama's signature domestic initiative. "All Republicans did was give him great cover for the complete screw-up on the opening of the exchanges," said Gail Wilensky, a Medicare director in the administration of George H.W. Bush and a board member of insurer UnitedHealth Group." Louise Radnofsky and Christopher Weaver in The Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration projected 500,000 Obamacare sign-ups this month. Can that still happen? "Health and Human Services predicted 500,000 people would enroll in health coverage this month, according to internal memos obtained by the Associated Press. The memo, written in September, was based on Congressional Budget Office data projecting first year sign ups...We don't know, at this point, how many people have signed up for health insurance through HealthCare.gov. Because the site has been very difficult to use, the assumption is not many. One outside estimate pegs the number around 36,000. That's for 34 states that tend to have the highest uninsured rates. That's not so great." Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post.

Obamacare just cut Oregon’s uninsured rate by 10 percent. "Though the Oregon's health insurance exchange is not yet up and running, the number of uninsured is already dropping thanks to new fast-track enrollment for the Oregon Health Plan. The low-income, Medicaid-funded program has already signed up 56,000 new people, cutting the state's number of uninsured by 10 percent, according to Oregon Health Authority officials." Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post.

Watch: Your Obamacare questions, answered. Casey Capachi in The Washington Post.

The GOP’s income verification ‘concession’ is meaningless. "[T]he deal basically requires two submitted reports in the course of the next year. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is due to submit the first report by Jan. 1, which must detail "the procedures employed by American Health Benefit Exchanges to verify eligibility for credits and cost-sharing reductions described in subsection." Six months later, the HHS inspector general is required to submit a report "regarding the effectiveness of the procedures and safeguards provided under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for preventing the submission of inaccurate or fraudulent information by applicants."" Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post.

Animal rights interlude: This is what humane slaughter looks like. Is it good enough?

3) Taper your taper talk

There's basically no way the Fed will taper at the end of the month. "Just a few months ago, the Fed seemed to be on track to start pulling the program back by September in response to an improving economy. Now, it isn't clear when the first move will occur...Fed officials have said the decision depends on how the economic data evolve, but the data won't be very illuminating into November because the partial government shutdown closed the agencies that collect them." Jon Hilsenrath in The Wall Street Journal.

Sign up: Is Congress killing the economy? Join us for the next Wonkblog Debate! The Washington Post.

It's catch-up time for economic statisticians. "The short answer is that the first new figures will be available early next week, but the bigger picture is one of delays stretching into December. What is more, the catch-up process could also help slow any decision by the Federal Reserve to ease back on its stimulus efforts. The most eagerly awaited number, the update from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on unemployment and job creation in September, will come out Tuesday, Oct. 22, two and a half weeks after it was originally supposed to be released. And the October jobs report, originally set for a Nov. 1 release, will be delayed until Friday, Nov. 8. The Consumer Price Index for September will slip from an original release date of Oct. 16 to an Oct. 30 announcement. And the first estimate for economic growth in the third quarter, prepared by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, is vulnerable to a delay from the original release date, Oct. 30." Nelson D. Schwartz in The New York Times.

Short-term Treasury yields drop after default averted. "The one-month Treasury bill yielded 0.015% at the end of Thursday. It was down from a multiyear high of 0.505% set in Wednesday's trading, before news of a possible deal in Congress sent yields tumbling, according to Tradeweb. Bond yields rise when prices fall. On Thursday, the bill due Oct. 24 yielded 0.018%, down from a multiyear peak of 0.722% Wednesday." Min Zeng in The Wall Street Journal.

New effort to reform US mortgage banks. "A third bill will be introduced to the US Congress to tackle the last major remnant of the financial crisis: reform of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, is the latest lawmaker to put forward a plan to overhaul Fannie and Freddie. The final version will probably reflect a combination of at least two of the proposals." Gina Chon in The Financial Times.

Wes Anderson at last interlude: The trailer for his new movie is out. Watch!

4) So you think you can pass immigration reform?

Democrats renew push for immigration bill. "President Obama and his Democratic allies are using momentum from reopening government to renew their attempts to persuade House Republicans to support a comprehensive immigration reform bill by the end of the year. With Democrats convinced that they have the GOP on the defensive, the president cited the passage of an immigration bill, along with securing a long-term budget and a farm bill, as top priorities over the next three months. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also place immigration atop the Democratic agenda for the remainder of the year. But it’s not clear that GOP lawmakers, who took the brunt of public blame for the 16-day shutdown, will be forced to the negotiating table." David Nakamura in The Washington Post.

Can Obama seize the moment and make Washington work? "It’s rare when a president is given an opportunity to reboot in the middle of a term, but that’s what the end of the government shutdown has provided President Obama. The question now is: What will he do with it?...Against a divided foe, with unity among his Democratic forces, Obama might now have an opportunity to lead in ways he hasn’t been able to for most of this year and much of his first term. His success or failure is likely to depend on his ability to exploit those divisions in his and the country’s interests." Dan Balz in The Washington Post.

Wonkbook can help you with practical things too interlude: Like microwave conversion tables. Managed to make that sound wonky somehow.

5) Snowden speaks

New Snowden interview. "Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them. Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said...In a wide-ranging interview over several days in the last week, Mr. Snowden offered detailed responses to accusations that have been leveled against him by American officials and other critics, provided new insights into why he became disillusioned with the N.S.A. and decided to disclose the documents, and talked about the international debate over surveillance that resulted from the revelations. The interview took place through encrypted online communications." James Risen in The New York Times.

Europe moves to shield data from U.S. surveillance. "Lawmakers here have introduced a measure in the European Parliament that could require American companies like Google and Yahoo to seek clearance from European officials before complying with United States warrants seeking private data...[A] European Union official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the vote could be further delayed if the United States intervened or if there was heavy lobbying by tech industry groups that oppose the bill." James Kanter in The New York Times.

Reading material interlude: The best sentences Wonkblog read today.

Wonkblog Roundup

The U.S. isn’t about to lose its top spot in science — despite Congress’ best efforts. Brad Plumer.

Here’s Walmart’s new strategy for being your everything. Lydia DePillis.

Mitch McConnell delivers some real talk to House Republicans. Neil Irwin.

Obamacare just cut Oregon’s uninsured rate by 10 percent. Sarah Kliff.

The Obama administration projected 500,000 Obamacare sign-ups this month. Can that still happen? Sarah Kliff.

Higher taxes shouldn’t be the Democratic Party’s top priority. Ezra Klein.

Your Obamacare questions, answered. Casey Capachi.

No, we didn’t get rid of the debt ceiling forever. Ezra Klein.

Republicans don’t love Barack Obama. But do they fear him? Neil Irwin.

The shutdown probably won’t matter in the 2014 election. It definitely won’t matter in 2016. Ezra Klein.

Was the debt standoff American politics at its best, or worst? Neil Irwin.

The GOP’s income verification ‘concession’ is meaningless. Sarah Kliff.

The government shutdown wasn’t that bad for the politicians. It was terrible for this guy. Jim Tankersley.

Et Cetera

Obama to nominate Jeh Johnson, former Pentagon official, as next DHS secretary. Scott Wilson and Greg Miller in The Washington Post.

Oil companies sued for waste of natural gas. Clifford Krauss in The New York Times.

Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me.

Wonkbook is produced with help from Michelle Williams.

Immediately after the government reopened, President Obama began the work of trying to resuscitate his second-term agenda. "We should finish the job of fixing our broken immigration system," he said on Thursday. But Republicans don't see it that way:

Representative Ra l R. Labrador of Idaho told a Heritage Foundation forum on Wednesday that “it would be crazy” for House Republicans now to negotiate with the president on immigration, because “he’s trying to destroy the Republican Party.”

As Greg Sargent notes, Labrador is an important voice in the Republican Party on immigration, so his reflexive rejection matters. But his reasoning astounds.

There's a tension in the Republican Party's portrayal of Obama in which he's thought, on one hand, to be a naif who's in way over his head and, on the other, a grand chessmaster executing an intricate strategy to annihilate his political opposition.

The answer, of course, is that Obama is neither. He's a center-left technocrat who wants to get immigration done. And getting immigration done, most everyone agrees, would be good for the Republican Party. It's possibly necessary for its very survival. What's standing in the way isn't Obama's determination to destroy the GOP. It's the GOP's determination to destroy itself.

In 2012, 71 percent of Hispanic voters, and 73 percent of Asian voters, marked their ballot for Obama. Those aren't survivable numbers for the Republican Party. And immediately after the election, Republicans mobilized to try to do something about them. It's often forgotten now, but a lot of the pressure to pass immigration reform was coming not from Democratic politicians but from key Republican voices like Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan and Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer.

That was enough to get an immigration bill through the Senate with a big, bipartisan vote. But then Speaker Boehner declined to bring the bill up in the House, even though most observers believed it would pass. And House Republicans have been incapable of coming up with a bill of their own, even though, as Byron York notes, some of them are still trying.

The unifying excuses for the GOP's failure to move on immigration reform is that it's all the Democrats' fault. York quotes an unnamed Republican lawmaker saying, "Everyone has seen the bad faith exhibited by Obama and Reid during this fiscal fight and I can't imagine anyone making the case that a final [immigration] product would reflect conservative principles in any fashion." That's similar, of course, to Labrador's contention that Republicans should abandon immigration because Obama is trying to destroy the Republican Party.

The irony is that if you talk to White House officials, their belief has long been that immigration reform might be possible precisely because it would help the Republican Party politically and because the Senate was able to craft a bill that conservatives like Marco Rubio found ideologically congenial. They've even tried to keep Obama distant from the process so the Senate Republicans who participated would get much of the credit. If the price of immigration reform is a more competitive Republican Party in 2016, it's a price the White House is happy to pay.

But that's the irony of the GOP right now: They're so scared that Obama is trying to destroy them that they're destroying themselves.

McConnell says no new shutdown in January 2014 or maybe ever. "One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there's no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days."

One of the interesting things about this is that this is clearly not the lesson taking by House Tea Partiers who see this as a mere three month time out before the next shutdown and debt default crisis. And I strongly suspect that Democrats will be asking opposing candidates starting now to pledge never to shutdown the government or threaten debt default again.

Steinglass points them out:

It may be more useful to compare the tea-party movement to a different sort of party that tends to crop up in parliamentary systems: far-right populist parties based on backward-looking ideologies of national identity. In France, the Netherlands and Austria, such parties consistently win substantial portions of the vote. Like the tea-party movement, they tend to be fiercely protective of existing social-welfare programmes that benefit the elderly and the ethnic majority, and bitterly opposed to social-welfare programmes that benefit ethnic minorities or immigrants.

And like the tea-party movement, they can win by losing: their partisans may treat legislative defeats as a badge of honour, and in any case, when government is stymied, the economy weakens, and people get angry, populist parties that avoid responsibility and stay out of government draw more support. But in parliamentary systems, fringe populist parties are rarely included in governing coalitions, in large part because their tendency to value expressive identity-based politics over concrete legislative goals makes them extremely difficult for other parties to work with. The weakness of two-party systems such as America’s is that purists who treat politics as a type of self-affirming performance art have to be included in one party or the other, and indeed are likely to regard themselves as being that party’s true soul.

I think of the xenophobic extremism of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, in Britain. There are right-wing factions among the Tories, but they tend to be contained within the elitist structure of the Commons and the power of the central party in selecting candidates for parliament. The BBC – however contentiously liberal – has also created a single national conversation that can help integrate extremists. None of this exists to the same degree here – and with a divided government, the unaccountable can indeed inflict the unimaginable. And they nearly did.