China has said the US government shutdown has exposed "the ugly side of partisan politics" in Washington and expressed concern about its effect on the world economy.

An editorial on the state-run Xinhua news service, considered a channel for Beijing's official views, said on Wednesday: "The United States, the world's sole superpower, has engaged in irresponsible spending for years."

"With no political unity to redress its policy mistake, a dysfunctional Washington is now overspending the confidence in its leadership," the editorial said.

The US shutdown went into its second day on Wednesday with no end in sight to the funding battle in Congress that triggered it. Major stock markets and the dollar fell.

Xinhua's commentary said the shutdown might lead to the US failing to meet its debt obligations, referring to a similar conflict in 2011 over raising the government's debt ceiling. While default was ultimately averted, the crisis resulted in Standard & Poors downgrading the rating of US sovereign debt.

"In the view of the latest political failure, a replay of the 2011 summer drama seems likely, which is certainly a concern for US foreign creditors," it said.

China is the largest single holder of US government debt, a side effect of its managed exchange rate policy, which requires it to purchase massive amounts of dollars from Chinese trading companies to hold back the yuan from appreciating. 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/10/eu-officials-raise-concerns-over-us-shutdown-2013102133848529547.html

By 2012, results in the House of Representatives were so skewed that the Republicans comfortably maintained their majority despite the fact that Democrat candidates received more than 1 million more votes. Take Pennsylvania, where Democrats won nearly 51 per cent of the vote, but Republicans won 13 seats to five. Or Michigan, where the Democrat vote was nearly 53 per cent while Republicans took almost twice as many seats. North Carolina: 51-49 to the Democrats but nine Republican seats to four. And on it goes. That sort of result landed in at least 10 states - only one of which was rigged to favour the Democrats. To get a sense of the scale of it, consider that in the seven states redrawn by Republicans, near parity voting (16.7 million votes to 16.4 million) delivered 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats.
That's a clear perversion of democracy, and it's no accident. The Republican State Leadership Committee made it explicit. It ran a $30 million project called Redmap, aimed at winning key seats at the state level which would give it the power to draw electoral boundaries. What's more, it planned to do this in a census year so it could draw with precision - 2010 was exactly such a year.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/republicans-stuck-in-reality-they-created-20131003-2uxak.html#ixzz2ghCVTW9x

In Australia, a massive gerrymander in the 1970s helped our National Jo stay in power while holding only 27 per cent of the votes... But these days, the media is more manipulative: The ordinary folks are fed crap. Instead of reading the stern Socialist Workers, they read the Daily Telegraph that gives them entertainment and illusions in which are planted slanted ideas about everything... especially glorifying the right hand side of politics that will eventually rob them blind...

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde says failure to raise the US debt ceiling would be a far worse threat to the global economy than the current shutdown.

The shutdown is due to a budget standoff between President Barack Obama and Congress.

But a worse problem looms: the US will run out of money if there is no agreement to raise the borrowing limit.

Ms Lagarde's comments were echoed by the US Treasury.

It says a debt default could lead to a financial crisis as bad as 2008 or worse.

Mr Obama emphasised that gloomy message in a separate speech on Thursday.

"As reckless as a government shutdown is, as many people as are being hurt by a government shutdown, an economic shutdown that results from default would be dramatically worse," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24384759