Harold Meyerson

The three buildings arrayed around the central fountain at New York’s Lincoln Center are, north to south, Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the David H. Koch Theater. Avery Fisher was a radio and sound reproduction technologist who amassed a fortune from his hi-fi ventures in the mid-20th century, and donated a vast sum of money to the New York Philharmonic, which today performs in his eponymous auditorium. The Metropolitan Opera is the Metropolitan Opera. And David Koch is the same David Koch who is financing the destruction of the United States as we know it.

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Over the next couple of weeks, the fate of, well, some pretty big things — the Republican Party, the American system of government, the global economy — rests with about 20 people: Republican members of the House who have said they favor a straight-up continuing resolution that funds the government. No re-litigating Obamacare, no scaling back Social Security — just a “clean” resolution that would leave those other conservative causes to be fought about on their merits some other day.

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John Boehner apparently will let the debt ceiling rise, even if he has to rely on Democratic votes to do it. This is both good news and bad news.

It’s good news because we won’t have a global financial panic in two weeks time. Boehner apparently got Wall Street’s message loud and clear: If you make the United States government default on its debts, you take responsibility for a worldwide economic catastrophe.

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For the third time in less than 20 years, congressional Republicans are bringing the nation’s government to a halt in an attempt to reverse the outcome of national elections. The first instance was Republicans’ shutdown of the government in 1995-96 (which, actually, was two shutdowns in rapid succession). The second was their impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Today, we’re slogging through the third — yet another shutdown.

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Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says he is against creating “a special path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants. The path he refers to — which many of his Republican House colleagues also oppose — is the one laid out in the immigration reform bill the Senate passed this summer; it would enable the undocumented, after paying some fines and learning English, to get green cards in 10 years and apply for citizenship three years after that.

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The American press has widely reported on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s nickname: “Mutti,” which translates to “Mommy.” Less noted is her second nickname, which is also familial but decidedly less affectionate: “The Black Widow.” She has earned this second sobriquet because she kills her partners with whom she governmentally cohabits.

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