A done deal...For now

October 16, 2013 (WABC) -- "We fought the good fight. We just didn't win."

So sayeth House Speaker John Boehner. The good fight? I've been trying to find the good in any of this  the government shutdown, the young kids I saw standing at Grant's Tomb on Riverside Dr. unable to get in because the monument was shuttered, the 800,000 furloughed workers not getting paid, the topsy turvey stock market hurting peeps' retirement accounts, the junior-high-school behavior of elected officials, the Congress-held-hostage-by-a-few-dozen Tea Partiers bent on defeating anything with the name Obama on it, all of it.

But I can't.

So now the Senate will approve its showdown-ending deal, and the House, which doesn't have enough votes to block it, will go along, and the nation will not default on its debt and run out of cash and throw the markets into chaos.

What is gnawing at me is that by all indications the Tea Partiers wanted exactly that. Chaos. Hey, I'm all for shaking things up it's how I was raised, it's how I spent my college years, it's part of who I am. But chaos for chaos sack, hurting people just to hurt people, attacking a President because they wanted him to fail since the beginning  these are the things that many Democrats and Republicans alike find shocking, and appalling.

So why isn't anyone doing anything? That's the big question that seems unanswerable.

And under the current deal that's being voted on tonight by the Senate and the House, the deadline for defaulting on the country's debt will now be pushed back to February 7, so we'll be going through all this again.

Charming.

And make no mistake, had we defaulted, we would have run out of cash by Nov. 1, when a $58 billion Social Security, Medicare and military pay bill is due. That would have been catastrophic.

Jim Dolan is following developments for us, at 11.

Also at 11, we're in New Jersey where Cory Booker and Steve Lonegan are squaring off in the $12 million special election to replace the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg. The darling of the Democratic Party versus the darling of the Tea Party. Phil Lipof and Carolina Leid are with the candidates tonight.

And we're following closely any developments in the search for Avonte Oquendo, the 14-year-old autistic boy missing since a week ago Friday in Queens.

We'll also have any breaking news of the night, plus Meteorologist Lee Goldberg's AccuWeather forecast, and Rob Powers with the night's sports. I hope you can join Sade Baderinwa and me, tonight at 11.

BILL RITTER

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