The game of “Chicken” continues up on Capitol HIll. …Or, perhaps, it’s a game of “Dare”.

Thehill.com reports that

House Republicans approved a stopgap spending bill that delays ObamaCare in an early-morning Sunday vote that increases the chances of a government shutdown.

The high-stakes GOP move intensifies a game of chicken with Senate Democrats with just 48 hours to go before the lights could go out on the federal government.

The White House threatened to veto the measure, while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) proclaimed it dead in the upper chamber.

…Republicans characterized the bill as a safety net in the event Congress can’t reach a deal. Democrats countered with charges that the proposal is evidence that the GOP’s CR strategy is designed to shutter the government.

The CR package was designed to cater to conservative Republicans, who have insisted that any spending package must scale back ObamaCare. Those conservatives had revolted earlier in the month when Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) tried to move a funding bill without that direct link.

The resistance forced GOP leaders to approve a CR last week that would have defunded the healthcare law – language that was stripped by Senate Democrats Friday, putting the ball back in Boehner’s court.

At a closely watched meeting of the GOP conference Saturday afternoon in the Capitol basement, Boehner outlined his hard-line strategy, leading to cheers from a conference that’s often been wary of his conservative credentials.

“This is exactly what we hoped for so we’re all getting behind leadership,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a Tea Party favorite. “We’re excited [and] we’re united.”

The bill now moves back to the Senate, where Reid is expected to scrap the two healthcare amendments with a single vote on Monday, when the Senate returns, and return the “clean” CR, yet again, to Boehner and House Republicans.

“To be absolutely clear, the Senate will reject both the one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of the medical device tax,” Reid said in a statement. “After weeks of futile political games from Republicans, we are still at square one: Republicans must decide whether to pass the Senate’s clean CR, or force a Republican government shutdown.”

That move could potentially come just hours before the Tuesday shutdown.

“ObamaCare is based on limitless government, bureaucratic arrogance, and a disregard of the will of the people,” said Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.).

If you listen to the Democrats, a “Government Shutdown” is equal to a sighting of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Their over-the-top reaction to the possibility of aGovernment Shutdown that would delay their grandiose socialist scheme, Obamacare, from be implemented, and taking away our freedom, reminds me of the following scene from the classic movie “Ghostbusters”.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
Mayor: All right, all right! I get the point!

However, in reality…

During Ronald Reagan’s presidency from 1981 to 1989, shutdowns were a fairly regular occurrence and the government faced a funding shortfall on eight occasions. However, none of those lasted more than three days and many of them occurred over a weekend. Because stocks don’t trade over the weekend and the shutdowns were brief, investors had little reaction back then.

When shutdowns are prolonged and federal employees are out of work for weeks, the effect on the market is usually more negative. Under the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, when the government was shut down for 10 days or more, the average decline for the stock market was more than 3 percent during closures.

But in the last major pair of shutdowns, from November 1995 to January 1996, the stock market actually rose.

President Bill Clinton and the Republican House leader Newt Gingrich failed to agree on a plan to reduce the nation’s budget deficit as well as cuts to Medicare premiums. As a result, the government shut twice in three months. First, it closed for five days between Nov. 13, 1995 and Nov. 19, 1995. Then a second shutdown lasted 21 days, from Dec. 15, 1995 to Jan. 6, 1996.

The S&P 500 rose 4 percent between Nov. 13 and Jan. 6, suggesting that investors were focused elsewhere. The stock market had just started its five-year, technology-fueled bull run, during which the S&P 500 more than doubled.

Even if the government shuts again, investors should take a long view because Europe and the U.S. are more stable than two years ago, says Dan Veru, chief investment officer of Palisade Capital Management.

“If things get really tricky, maybe there will be a three to five percent pullback,” in stocks, Veru says.

On October 27, 1964, the Great Communicator, Ronald Wilson Reagan, spoke the following words, in his classic speech, “A Time for Choosing”:

…Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they’ve been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, “The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.” Another voice says, “The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.” Or, “Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.” Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as “our moral teacher and our leader,” and he says he is “hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.” He must “be freed,” so that he “can do for us” what he knows “is best.” And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.”

Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as “the masses.” This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, “the full power of centralized government”—this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.

Back in the day, when I was in school, and we pledged allegiance to the Flag, and not the president,, we were taught How Marxism, in both its forms, socialism and communism, took away the individual rights of the people, and made them a single, faceless entity, subservient to the will of the all-powerful Central Government.

That, boys and girls, is exactly what Obamacare is designed to do.

And, that is why Obama and his Progressive Minions, on both sides of the aisle, are so anxious to see it implemented.

Obamacare was not passed for YOUR benefit, Pookie. They did it for THEIR’s.