@ThePlumLineGS I'd take that deal. But only if I got to carve the Gadsden snake logo into Ted Cruz's forehead.
— billmon (@billmon1) October 15, 2013
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According to the Washington Post Shutdownpocalypse liveblog, it looks like the Heritage Foundation has decided to call in its markers and show the rest of us exactly how many Repub Reps it owns, body and whatever-passes-for-a-soul. The Post is also talking about threats of a national downgrade by the credit rating agencies and the possibility that Social Security checks might not go out, so they’re not fans.
Meanwhile, Alex Pareene’s evisceration of the latest “centrist nation” #brandyammer is hilarious:
Esquire, a magazine about fancy clothes and ordering drinks like an asshole, has teamed up with NBC News to poll a bunch of soft-liberal white voters. They discovered that those voters exist, they’re white, and they’re a bit liberal. This proves that the country is not divided. You can’t argue with all these charts and graphs! Even when the charts and graphs don’t prove anything, let alone what the words introducing them claim…
But let’s look at this “Center” more closely in terms of actual policy, to see whether this “Center” looks like the imagined “Center” of a Sunday show panel guest. This “Center” has dumb beliefs about “government spending” and a “balanced budget” because those issues are generally explained poorly and constantly lied about, but it is well to the left of the Washington consensus on specific economic issues. This “political center,” which is, again, primarily (but not entirely) a soft-Democratic white plurality, supports raising the minimum wage, hiking taxes on millionaires (59 percent support!) and taxing carbon emissions (yes, a carbon tax polled well in a survey of “the Center”), and financial regulation. We’re definitely still a center-right nation as long as you only pay attention to vague beliefs about the importance of balancing the budget and ignore the strong national desire to soak the rich…