Fandom High School

"Hey," Josh said, drinking from his coffee. "Anyone else spend most of yesterday convinced you were God's gift to humanity?"

Donna called that "Wednesday" for Josh and would have been stunned to learn he had further layers of self-involvement.

"Anyway, here's your final. You guys have been a lot of fun--I'll be teaching a class next semester about how great it is to be President of the United States. You know you want to sign up."

With that, he passed out their exams.

[OOC: Up eaaaaaaaaaaaaaarly because multiple international flights tomorrow....]

"Hello, everyone," Josh said. "I hope you enjoyed your turkey, or in my case, eight solid days of fried things as well as gifts of socks and underwear because my mom really knows how to make Hannukah special. Today we're gonna talk about the Pope because I'm tired of talking about the Affordable Care Act. Now I'm not Catholic, but my last two bosses were, plus they had the Pontiff on speed dial because sometimes it's pretty freaking awesome to be the President of the United States. The new pope released a document recently that denounced poverty and inequality and called on the Church to focus less on money, which seems fairly standard. But then he also mentioned how trickle-down economics doesn't work and decried the tyranny of unfettered capitalism, and now all of the conservative pundits, who love Popes when they are going on about abortion and gay marriage, now start wondering if Pope Francis is a closet Marxist.

"Putting aside how Marxism is pretty explicit about rejecting religion, what do you think it is about this particular message--which is hardly groundbreaking stuff--that is getting the right wing so upset?"

"Right," Josh said, sipping from his coffee. "The very first numbers were released yesterday by the Department of Health and Human Services about how many new people have signed up for health care since the law was enacted a month ago. And drumroll please--" he banged on his desk for a bit, "--the number is not zero, but it's a lot closer to zero than it is to the half-million people they'd been hoping to announce. And while they were announcing the numbers, the website that had them on it crashed."

Josh rolled his eyes. "Somewhere in Heaven my old boss is screaming a lot about football metaphors and the White House tripping over their own feet. Democrats being Democrats--especially Democrats being up for election in 2014--are already starting to panic and are introducing various pieces of legislation that are basically the Covering Our Asses Acts of 2013. They are good and pissed that when Obama said 'if you like your plan, you can keep it' that was only mostly true. It's supposed to only apply to plans that didn't really cover anything anyway, but no one can check and realize that they're getting a better deal with this new law because the website is still terrible and it doesn't look like it'll be fixed before November 30th like the administration wanted."

He crossed his legs out in front of him. "Now some of this is because more states than they'd anticipated said screw it and didn't make their own websites, some of it's because the government is inherently terrible at making something that is nimble, and some of it is Republican Chicken Little-esque 'the sky is falling' rhetoric, but no one wants to hear excuses from a guy whose name is in the name of the thing, and the President's poll numbers are crashing. Now if you were in the White House, what would you be advising them to do? Other than hide under their desks until January?"

In honor of the day, Josh had dressed up: in a suit with a "CLOSED" sign around his neck.

He was the government. Get it? DO YOU?

"Today's Halloween and so I'm not even going to pretend you're thinking of anything other than half-priced candy tomorrow so today we'll have discussion of costumes." He handed out an informational graph as he walked around the class. "And just so you know, if I catch any of you dressing as sexy pizza, corn or bottles of sriracha tonight, I will personally fail you."

He leaned back against his desk. "So, what are you dressing up as today? Or are you too old and cool for Halloween? Discuss."

"Right, so the maturity level on Capitol Hill has now reached heights usually only reached by seven year olds yelling 'I know you are but what am I' on the playground," Josh said with a sigh. "I'm looking forward to the start of 'yo mama' jokes. 'Yo mama's so bloated she makes the defense spending bill look skinny...' I'm so sick of Congress I could vomit."

He ran his hand through his hair. "We now have a grand totally of seven days before we hit the debt ceiling and default on all of the nation's debts, so that seems like a really good thing to screw around with, right? The debt ceiling is the amount of money that Congress is authorized to spend: in the current case, $16.94 trillion dollars. Yeah, with a 't'. It’s designed so that Congress doesn’t recklessly spend more money than is responsible. I'll take a minute so you can laugh about how spending only 17 trillion dollars is responsible, and now we can move on. Raising the debt ceiling means two things: one is yes, that Congress can borrow more money next year. The second thing is more important: raising the debt ceiling also means that the US Treasury, our national piggy bank, can pay the bills Congress has already run up this year. Congress has already authorized more spending than the debt ceiling allows, so go Team Math. They're bascially arguing about whether to pay their own bills, which as anyone who lives in the real world, like, say, furloughed government employees, know--isn't generally something that you get a lot of leeway on. If we default on our debt: well, no one knows exactly what would happen but it tends to make economists on news shows hyperventilate, so I'm gonna assume it's really, really bad."

Josh gestured to the laptops in front of them. "Since no one else seems to be doing it right now, today you guys get to figure out how to balance the budget using this handy-dandy program." He pulled up Budget Hero on the nearest computer. "I just ask that no one here acts like a schmuck and just zeroes out the Defense Department or the Department of Education. That's not how the real world works, kids."

He puased thoughtfully, then added, "or Paul Ryan, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't care."

"Right," Josh said from his spot at his desk. "This week we're going to talk aimlessly without a good goddamn reason. We're going to call it 'Cruzing' in honor of Texas Senator Ted Cruz who talked for 21 straight hours on the floor of the Senate literally to listen to the sound of his own voice. He wasn't filibustering. He ended up voting for the procedure he was allegedly trying to delay. But we did get to hear him talk about Ashton Kutcher and read 'Green Eggs and Ham' so that was time completely wasted."

He ran his hands through his hair for what was clearly not the first time today. "Okay. Let me explain a little bit about what was going on. The Republicans hate the Affordable Health Care act, or as they call it, 'Obamacare' because everything with his name in it is clearly evil to their base. They hate it so much that they have voted 41 times in the House of Representatives to overturn it. They campaigned against it during the last presidential election. If you stand next to one and make eye contact for longer than ten seconds, they'll probably start ranting about it. Tough toenails, cupcakes, it passed, it was signed into law and it was upheld by the Supreme Court. Rational people would have moved the hell on, but this is the Republican Party and they stopped being rational back in the '90s."

He took a breath. "Right. So a good portion of the ACA rolls out next week with the new fiscal year in a non-election year because Democrats aren't idiots. They want the kinks to work out before next November when they're up in the midterms. The House, using the mature level we normally only find in kindergartners, passed a bill last week that would only refinance the entire government for the next fiscal year if we also defunded Obamacare. The Senate, being populated by grown ups, will never pass this version of the budget, which brings us to Cruz. He talked for 21 hours and 19 minutes in an effort to delay the vote on the Senate version of the budget bill, which includes the funding for the health care bill. Ironically, if you're into that sort of thing, even if they do shut down the goverment on Monday the health care stuff will roll out because it's not linked to the discretionary spending of the goverment--it's part of Medicare."

Josh glanced at the teal deer pushing their noses against the classroom window. He had been talking a while. Oops. "So Cruz talked for 21 hours, then voted in favor of the cloture--along with every other Senator--to bring the bill up for a final vote. So he affected nothing other than appeasing his own, clearly gargantuon ego, and comparing the members of his own party to Nazi-appeasing Brits for not joining him in a doomed and pointless exercise. So he made a lot of friends.

"Today, you're going to stand up and babble on as long as you can until a classmate interrupts you with a question or a recipe or whatever. The rules of the Senate fillabuster are pretty easy: you have to keep standing and you have to keep talking unless a colleague comes to help you out with a question. You can't sit down then, either, but you can get a glass of water. You also can't leave the room for any reason."

He sat down. "Okay then. Fillibuster away!"

Josh was back on his iPad today, this time with a cup of coffee. Would you like a cup of coffee too?

Well, you should have had one before you came to class. Duh.

"Hey, everyone," Josh said with a tiny smile. "It's been an interesting week in the news, huh? Yesterday was September 11, a date that is weighed down with tragedy for at least a few of the dimensions I'm familiar with. Fortunately it hasn't yet spawned Memorial Day-esque shopping holidays because the first time that happens, I'm not going to be able to control my reaction or the arrest that will inevitably follow."

He passed out the sheet of ten things to know for the week. "There's also been some progress made in Syria, though it's probaly to soon to get overly optimistic, the Tea Party is holding their breath like a three year old who doesn't want to eat brocolli because threatening another government shutdown is totally like governing EXCEPT NOT--"

And then Josh went off on a fifteen minute rant about the Republican party and the Tea Party wing of it in particular that, while factual, was also, frankly speaking, kind of mean. Josh had Issues with the Republicans.

"We'll skip past Zimmerman because my amount of give a damn on that story has long since dried up," he concluded, "and as a Mets fan, I mock the Yankees' pain, but let's not talk about Jeter either." He leaned back against his desk. "Right then. What have you read about this week in that newspaper or blog you've totally been following now because of course you do your homework that you want to discuss today?"