Happy Tuesday morning! Here’s some of the stuff we’re reading this AM…
Welcome to the shutdown…
- WaPo’s Brad Plumer runs down everything you need to know about how this actually works.
- Last night at 5:48, NRO’s Jonathan Strong posted, “Moderates Revolt Over CR.” At 7:56: “Moderate Threat Fizzles.”
- House Dems made a counter-offer yesterday, saying they’d accept sequester-level spending in a clean resolution, reports Mike Lillis for The Hill.
- Time’s Zeke Miller on how Heritage Action Fund pushed the GOP to the brink, and then over it.
- At Slate, Joshua Keating writes about this mess in the same way American media tend to report events abroad.
- In The Atlantic, James Fallows is on false equivalency watch. NYMag‘s Jonathan Chait jumps in to note that the GOP’s legislative strike dates back to earlier in the year.
- Meanwhile, the small group of hard-right lawmakers pushing this strategy think fighting a moderate expansion of health care coverage is doing God’s work, according to Ashley Parker writing in the NYT.
- Also in The Times: Henry Aaron notes that breaching the debt ceiling requires Obama to break one of two laws, and urges him to choose the right one for the country.
Not everything is shut down –> Ironically, the health insurance exchanges will open today. TNR‘s Jonathan Cohn ranks the likely glitches by importance.
Watching the watchers –> NSA stores metadata for millions of web users, reports James Ball in The Guardian.
Climate change? More like catastrophe — Also in The Guardian, George Monbiot says we’re facing the prospect of a “catastrophic climate breakdown.”
SLAPPed down by the court –> Court rules against billionaire donor Sheldon Adelson’s bogus defamation suit. Josh Israel with the story for Think Progress.
Hunger is not a game –> 15 percent of the nation’s elderly are food insecure, writes Trudy Lieberman in The Nation.
High cost of incarceration–> AP: NYC spends almost as much per prisoner as the cost of an Ivy League education.
Choking –> James West describes a train ride through China’s coal country “Airpocalypse” for MoJo.
Shown the door –> Venezuela expels US diplos, accusing them of “sabotage,” writes Elliott Hannon in Slate.
Old nuns –> Anna Corwin investigates why nuns tend to outlive the rest of us in Yes! Magazine.
What took them so long? –> Scientists think they’ve figured out how to make a real lightsaber.
