[Lamplighter]

Despite my " liberal tendencies "... I do try to read the occasional conservative news source.

I came across this article from Bloomberg News that I find interesting and believable.
But be warned, the article is about a report from a highly Democratic political strategist.

Bloomberg - The Ticker
Francis Wilkinson
Oct 4, 2013
Why Republicans Shut Down the Government

If you want to understand why the government is shut down
or why elected Republicans would even consider doing something as reckless
as using a debt default to extract policy concessions from the White House
-- without necessarily even knowing which policy concessions they want --
Stan Greenberg has a memo for you.

Democracy Corps issued a report this week on six focus groups conducted
with Republican subgroups -- two each with Tea Partiers, Evangelicals and moderate Republicans.
The results somehow manage to be unsurprising and shocking at the same time
-- largely due to the bracing effects of reading the real words of (almost) average Americans.
<snip>

http://www.democracycorps.com/attach...ticle/954/dcor rpp fg 1000313 final.pdf
This link (above) will download a pdf file of the "memo" entitled:

Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical,
Tea Party, and moderate Republicans

<snip>
The Republican moderates were staunch fiscal conservatives, but most readily embraced
new gender relations and minority empowerment, including gay rights.
The Tea Partiers and evangelicals spoke as if they were in the midst of War of the Worlds.
As the report characterizes the Tea-Party worldview:
"Obama's America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations and dependency."

The Bloomberg article continues...

It's a tough situation to rectify.
A lot of Americans were not ready for a mixed-race president.
They weren't ready for gay marriage.
They weren't ready for the wave of legal and illegal immigration
that redefined American demographics over the past two or three
decades, bringing in lots of nonwhites.
They weren't ready -- who was? -- for the brutal effects of globalization
on working- and middle-class Americans or the devastating fallout from the financial crisis.

Their representatives didn't stop Obamacare.
And their side didn't "take back America" in 2012 as Fox News
and conservative radio personalities led them to believe they would.
They feel the culture is running away from them (and they're mostly right).
They lack the power to control their own government.
But they still have just enough to shut it down.

I downloaded the pdf memo and I do recommend it those interested in straight and raw politics .
As the Forbes article says, it is both unsurprising and shocking.
These focus groups definitely are NOT always using politically correct language !