Rep. Steve King (R-western Iowa) Is a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Rep. Steve King (Republican Congressman of western Iowa, and they can have him) posed as a dubious hero by helping Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) remove barricades from a WWII memorial so that 89-year-old and 90-something year-old WWII veterans in wheelchairs and on walkers could visit the memorial after an honor flight to D.C.

Steve King purposefully helped bring the government shut-down to a government office near you, including the Women, Infant, and Children Feeding Program (WIC) near you, which provides only wholesome, pre-approved foods to poor families and pregnant women like milk, cheese, formula, healthy cereals, and farmers' market vegetables and fruits, and peanut butter to prevent birth defects in developing embryos and to help brain development and promote health in very young children.

Update!! WIC checks obtained in the past are still valid in grocery stores, so no WIC checks obtained prior to October 1st, 2013 should be denied in any grocery store or at any farmers' market. New WIC checks will be available through October 31, 2013 because funds were found to fund the WIC program through the end of October. So please collect your WIC checks at the Johnson County WIC office on Gilbert Court Street in Iowa City!

Head Start classrooms, which have never accepted more than a third of the poor children eligible for federally funded preschool, will be affected, and previously were affected by the sequester act, which no one thought Congress would be foolish enough to allow to go into effect. It did go into effect and is in effect today.

Social Security checks for the elderly and disabled will still be issued, but many "nonessential" federal services, including those to the poor, will be shut down. Elderly people, you see, are very likely to vote, whereas poor people are less likely to. In fact, if Republicans like Iowa's own Secretary of State Matt Schultz had his way, no poor people would be allowed to vote. He throws up every barrier he can in the way of poor people voting since they are likely to vote Democratic. Other states are doing the same thing, and Attorney General Eric Holder, long asleep at the switch as war criminals and Wall Street criminals have taken U.S. taxpayers to the cleaners, has woken up long enough to take some of those states to court over suppressing voting rights.

Now the Republicans in Congress are trying to negotiate with the Democratic majority in the Senate and Pres. Obama to reopen one government agency of their choosing at a time, but the Democrats aren't playing that game. By the Democrats' logic, no extremist wing of the Republican Party (the Tea Party) should be given the power to control which government agencies are allowed to re-open and which will not be allowed to re-open.

All this nonsense of terrorism and hostage-taking is over the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which the Republicans have unsuccessfully tried to repeal over 40 times. Giving in to their extremist tactics in any way, shape, or form would only encourage them, so Democrats and some sensible Republicans have drawn a red line in the sand to discourage any more two-year-old tantrums.

No more "my way or the highway." My God, what must the rest of the world think when the greatest superpower in the world engages in behavior that destroys its own economy?