We all know about the government shutdown that happened a few weeks ago. Some might know that the reason was because congress was divided about Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Health Care Act. Which, despite it’s name is nothing of the sort. Most Republican leaders were against Obamacare because of the following reasons: it’s simply not ready, it will ruin the economy, it will ruin small businesses, and full time jobs will be a thing of the past. Democrat leaders, and Obama, were for it because they want government to mandate health care, and wants people to rely on the government instead of thinking and living for themselves. But like anything, it all comes down to money. The health care industry is a three trillion dollar business. No wonder Obama and his liberal friends want a government mandated, supplied health care system, for the money! President Obama and his administration has a huge spending problem. America is currently seventeen trillion dollars in debt, but Obama wants to waste more money that we don’t have on government mandated health insurance that will ruin the economy, oh and let’s not forget that it’s your tax dollars that’s paying for it. But put all the politics aside- Obamacare is just not ready. When it was passed and signed into law, Obama wanted it to be ready by October 2013. But it wasn’t. On October 30, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is in charge of getting Obamacare up and running, testified in front of congress and said “There has been miserably frustrating problems putting it into place.” Not only is the web site not ready, but nor is the government, buisnesses and lawyers that have to make sense of it. The Affordable Health Care Act is 11,588,500 words long. That’s 30 times longer than all the federal laws put together. The useless words and sanctions in the law make it impossible for businesses and governments to follow it. Not even Obama and his officials that wrote the law can make sense of it. Now what I think the biggest problem with Obamacare is that it’s going to ruin the economy. Right now employees who work full time (40+ hours a week) receive benefits, including heath insurance. But Obamacare, will cost buisnesses an incredible amount of more money. So because of this, buisnesses will have to cut back employees, or cut back their hours so they don’t have to offer them health insurance. This will drive the U.S. economy down the toilets. I’ll end with this: in life we have 3 basic rights, food, water, and shelter. Why should health insurance be included? There’s millions of people on this earth that die each day because they have no access to clean water, food, or basic health care. We should be more concerned about them, than having

OK, the government shutdown is old news. Just the mention of the words Congress, Tea Party or shutdown is enough to make anyone cringe. But now that the smoke has cleared and we all get a better look at what happened. It’s simple. The Tea Party and Republican leaders are to blame.

After a cute and failed attempt to defund Obamacare and keep those who struggle to make ends meet without any sort of health care, Republicans held the government hostage. Because things didn’t go exactly according to plan, the GOP pulled a common four-year-old child’s response and simply said “no” to any reasonable compromise Democratic leaders proposed. Without the willingness to negotiate from both parties, all non-essential part of the government shuttered. Republican leaders would like you to believe Obama, being the obvious tyrant he is (I’m surprised he hasn’t launched a full-out invasion like his Nazi German counterpart yet), is at fault for the shutdown. But if you look at the facts, you’ll see that’s not the case.

On average, government shutdowns happen much more often under Republican presidents than they do under Democratic presidents. If you look at America’s shutdown history, you’ll see that 10 of the 18 government shutdowns since 1976 have happened while Republicans were occupying the Oval Office. Eight of those were under Ronald Reagan. That’s twice as many as President Jimmy Carter saw while he was in office. According to a poll by the Washington Post, 53 percent of those polled saw Republicans as responsible for the shutdown, whereas only 29 percent blamed Obama (Democrats). As the shutdown progressed, the way Americans viewed Republicans grew steadily worse. By the time the shutdown ended their disapproval rating was rose to a dumbfounding 77 percent. Close to this of Republicans even disapproved of the way their own party handled the negotiations. More than half of their own party agreed they messed up.

I could go on about how many conservatives distanced themselves from the Tea Party, how most Americans blames the GOP/Tea Party, or how many radical conservatives falsify or manipulate facts and states to please their own views and spread false information, but we only run a certain amount of pages in each Ahlahasa issue and I promised other people room for their stories.

Just keep in mind: Though the shutdown is over, the battle in Washington is far from it.