We’re now bearing down on crunch time in the debt-ceiling hostage-taking drama of 2023. Virtually all of the establishment press is playing to form and treating the situation as a more or less ordinary matter of legislative jockeying and negotiation. That’s a problem but not a surprise. We’ll discuss that in another post. But this morning I want to talk about something different, the story that most commentators aren’t grasping about where this situation is headed. It’s a set of assumptions that is leading most of D.C. — and, it would appear, most of Wall Street — to miss what’s coming.

We’re now at 628 642 new members on the last day of our annual drive. We made it to our goal of 500 and now passed the revised goal of 600. Huge thanks to everyone who has joined over the last 30 days. We don’t want to be greedy but we want to add as many more as we can on the final day.

The truth is, it’s not greedy. The 500 number was a plausible reach goal we thought put us in a position to have the ship not taking on water and moving in the right direction over the course of the year. Joe Ragazzo and I especially sighed a big sigh of relief when we saw that we’d probably hit that goal.

With the the wave of new media site closures and layoffs just over the last week there’s been a little mini-chorus in the media debate of, “well those TPM folks really had the secret sauce, knew how to make it work, yada yada.” Well, appreciate the congrats and f— yeah and thank you, media types. But it’s a serious slog every day, running out single after single, I assure you. So driving that number higher still makes a big difference for us. So thanks to everyone who’s joined and if you’re still thinking about it make today the day. Click here.