Events

Some astute readers may have gathered that spending time in a different neighborhood plus complaining about the government shutdown affecting mortgages implies something is changing at Inner Drive Technology Worldwide HQ. For now, I'll just say that a happy side-effect of all this disruption is an unusually clean and orderly house. More details as the situation develops.

Day 5. Today, though, Congress did something right: With the partial shutdown entering its fifth day, the GOP-run House passed a bill Saturday that would make sure the furloughed workers get paid for not working. The White House backs the bill and the Senate was expected to OK it, too, but the timing was unclear. The 407-0 vote in the House was uniquely bipartisan, even as lawmakers continued their partisan rhetoric. The White House has said President Obama will sign the bill. Of course, "back pay"...

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones puts the shutdown in 10 sentences: 3. Democrats in the Senate have been begging the House to negotiate over the budget for the past six months, but Republicans have refused. 4. That's because Republicans wanted to wait until they had either a government shutdown or a debt ceiling breach as leverage, something they've been very clear about all along. He sums up: "This whole dispute is about the Republican Party fighting to make sure the working poor don't have access to...

They want to make it even harder for millions of impoverished Americans to get health care: The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides. “The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion —...

It's day three of the stupidest political event of the past 20 years. Here are some reactions. The Atlantic's Jon Judis likens it to Weimar Germany: I wouldn’t expect the current crisis, which was precipitated by the descendants of Calhoun, to result in a civil war. The civil war, as Marx once wrote, was a revolutionary clash that pitted one mode of production against another. Nothing so momentous is at stake today. It also pitted one region against another, and it was fought with rifles and men on...

Just a reminder: John Boehner can end the government shutdown any time he wants to. No, really: All Boehner has to do is bring a “clean” continuing resolution to the House floor -- that is, a bill to fund the government without any strings attached -- and give it a vote. Most, if not all, Democrats would vote for it, and enough Republicans are publicly now on board to pass it. The Huffington Post has been keeping a running tally of which Republicans have said they support doing this. Privately, more GOP...

Sullivan has a scathing piece about the Republicans shutting down the government again. And closer to home, apparently Chicago has phantom El trains that drive themselves right into other trains. But yesterday's Atlantic Cities piece on bike-share etiquette is much more enjoyable to think about than either of those: The central ethos is built into the name. "The whole point of it is it’s bike share, it’s not bike rental," says Kim Reynolds, the office and administrative manager in Washington for Alta...

Baseball in Chicago ended yesterday as both the Cubs and the other team lost to whomever they were playing. The Cubs ended the season 66-96; the South Siders, 63-99. Here's the miserable Cubs season in a single graph: So I was shocked to find gambling in this establishment Dale Sveum got fired: Sveum's dismissal comes 13 days after team president Theo Epstein declined to give Sveum, 49, a vote of confidence despite saying there were "no alarm bells to ring" regarding the manager. Epstein said Sveum's...

I was going to post about the Cubs, who just ended the 2013 season a few hours ago, but then I saw James Fallows' clear and concise takedown of the pernicious notion that the impending shutdown of the U.S. Government is anything other than a Republican Party failure: In short, we have a faction making historically unprecedented demands -- give us everything, or we stop the government and potentially renege on the national debt. And it is doing so less than a year after its party lost the presidency...

New York magazine's Ann Friedman explains why she did: New York is increasingly a city for people who are already on top, not for those looking to establish themselves. I've always been partial to the friendly guy who doesn’t know how hot he really is (Chicago) or the surprisingly intelligent, sexy stoner (Los Angeles) as opposed to the dude who thinks he’s top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one. In an excerpt from Goodbye to All That adapted for BuzzFeed, Ruth Curry describes the heady...