Owning Responsibility

Via HuffPo (I know - sorry, but even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while):

As a result of the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC), a handful of moneyed interests have managed to circumvent the democratic process and engineer a government shutdown that nobody else wanted. The forces driving the current shutdown are just the latest indication of a disturbing trend in American politics: Elected officials increasingly feel accountable to a vanishingly small percentage of the population with the financial means to threaten their political existence instead of the voters they're elected to represent.

As summarized by a recent New York Times article, we've learned that the shutdown was planned months in advance by a very small but incredibly wealthy network of outside interest groups. Roughly three dozen well funded political organizations signed off on the "Blueprint to Defunding Obamacare," which outlined the strategy of using a government shutdown as leverage against the healthcare law, back in February -- nearly eight months before the shutdown went into effect. A Supreme Court hostile to any efforts to curtail the corrosive influence of money in politics has given these groups free reign to enforce this strategic vision, will of the people be damned.

And meanwhile, this is Antonin Scalia: