President Barack Obama told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he will discuss the future of his Affordable Care Act with Republican opponents in the House of Representatives only once Congress re-opens the United States government.

At the start of the second week of a widespread government shutdown, Pres. Obama warned House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) during his Tuesday afternoon address that the White House won't negotiate the fate of the president's hallmark "Obamacare" legislation.

One week earlier, a stalemate in Congress was unable to be resolved ahead of a Tuesday morning deadline required to pass a spending bill that would have kept the government fully functioning. Republican critics of Obamacare refused to authorize any budget plan without ensuring the congressionally approved health care act would be defunded.

Obama said Tuesday that he is happy to have a conversation or negotiation with Republican leadership in the house, but such a discussion "shouldn't require hanging the threats of government shutdown or economic chaos" over American people.

"Members of Congress, and the House Republicans in particular, don't get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their job," said Obama. That job, he added, requires those elected officials to pass a budget

"No American president would deal with a foreign leader like this. Most of you would not deal with coworkers or business associates in this fashion, and we shouldn't be dealing this way here in Washington," said the president.

The federal government is shut down, we're about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically "balanced" reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, the G.O.P. has become "an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

But there's one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they're also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect - the truly incompetent can't even recognize their own incompetence - reigns supreme.


To see what I'm talking about, consider the report in Sunday's Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects - the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others - plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.

This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama's signature domestic achievement. You'd have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. - as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn't seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.

Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn't tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.

New cargo planes on order for the U.S. Air Force are being delivered straight into storage in the Arizona desert because the military has no use for them, a Dayton Daily News investigation found.

A dozen nearly new C-27J Spartans from Ohio and elsewhere have already been taken out of service and shipped to the so-called boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Five more are expected to be built by April 2014, all of which are headed to the boneyard unless another use for them is found.

The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 C-27J aircraft since 2007, according to purchasing officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Sixteen had been delivered by the end of September.

The Air Force almost had to buy more of the planes against its will, the newspaper found. A solicitation issued from Wright-Patterson in May sought vendors to build more C-27Js, citing Congressional language requiring the military to spend money budgeted for the planes, despite Pentagon protests.

Congress put the brakes on the expenditure, which was the right thing to do according to government watchers such as Mike O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute. He said the planned additional purchase would have been "simply wasting precious taxpayer money."

The military initally wanted the C-27J because it had unique capabilities, such as the ability to take off and land on less developed runways, according to Ethan Rosenkranz, national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. But when sequestration hit, the military realized the planes weren't a necessity, but instead a luxury it couldn't afford, he said.

"When they start discarding these programs, it's wasteful," he said.

O'Hanlon said their near-resurrection was largely due to parochialism.

"It's too bad, and a waste," he said. "I'm not sure the program was ever a white elephant, and yet given budget cuts I'm not sure it should be saved now."

The World Bank is admitting that so-called economic growth in Africa, rooted in privatization and resource extraction by foreign companies, is not benefiting the vast majority of the continent's people.

This comes from an institution has been widely criticized for pushing these very policies of 'growth.'

Despite Africa's much-vaunted 'growth' over the past decade, deep poverty and inequality are "unacceptably high and the pace of reduction unacceptably slow," reads Africa's Pulse, an analysis released Monday by the World Bank. "Almost one out of every two Africans lives in extreme poverty today," and by the year 2030, a vast majority of the world's poor will be located in Africa, the report finds.

Francisco Ferreira, Acting Chief Economist for the World Bank Africa Region, states, "Africa grew faster in the last decade than most other regions," with a steadily climbing GDP noted in the report. Yet, this so-called growth is highly dependent on relatively few commodities sold for export, including oil, metals, and minerals. "Nearly three-quarters of countries rely on three commodities for 50 percent or more of export earnings," the report reads, with countries like Angola and Nigeria depending on oil for up to 97 percent of all exports.

The Social Security Administration has begun warning the public it cannot guarantee full benefit payments if the debt ceiling isn't increased.

When asked by the public, the agency is notifying beneficiaries that "Unlike a federal shutdown which has no impact on the payment of Social Security benefits, failure to raise the debt ceiling puts Social Security benefits at risk," according to a person familiar with the agency directive.

A Russian man who participated in an anti-Kremlin protest has been convicted of "calling for mass riots" and sent for forced psychiatric treatment.

Mikhail Kosenko was one of 28 people arrested after clashes broke out between demonstrators and police at a protest on May, 6, 2012, the eve of President Vladimir Putin's inauguration for a third term.

As debates in D.C. continue to rage over the debt ceiling, and the continuing resolution to fund the government...we are reminded of the words of one Democratic Senator when a similar argument was taking place back in 2006.

While the Harper government is preaching government austerity, it is spending almost $1.2 billion on a new Ottawa headquarters for a little-known military spy agency.

It's the most expensive Canadian government building ever constructed.

Under tight security, CBC obtained an exclusive tour of the top secret complex that most Canadians will otherwise never get to see, a development even National Defence apparently thinks is so grandiose that the department dubbed the project "Camelot" in official documents.

When completed next year, the facility in suburban Ottawa will house the roughly 2,000 employees of the Communications Security Establishment Canada, a federal agency that spies mainly on foreigners by hacking into their computers, reading their email and intercepting their phone calls.

The stand-off between Russian and the Netherlands escalated Tuesday as Moscow angrily demanded a full account of how one its diplomats came to be arrested by the Dutch police over the weekend.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russia Today channel that the state of relations between the two countries will depend on how Netherlands chooses to handle the matter.

"We need to know what disciplinary measures would be taken in regard to these police officers," Lavrov said in an English-language interview. "When we get a reaction on this demand, then we will see how we will handle the relations further."

Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded Tuesday that the Netherlands apologize for arresting a Russian diplomat, further straining relations between the countries after Moscow decided to put some Greenpeace activists on trial. The tensions come during a year meant to celebrate the countries' historic ties.

The diplomat, Dmitry Borodin, was arrested by Dutch police in The Hague late Saturday, and he has accused the police of even pulling his one-year-old daughter's hair as they took him and both his children to the station. Borodin, whose title is minister-counselor, gave his version of events on his Twitter account. He said the arrest came even though he identified himself and said he had diplomatic immunity.