When the rubber meets the road twixt Damascus and the Big Easy...

Poor Mike Pence. He's facing the hard reality that his party is that of "No Tax but Spend, Spend, Spend" -- that even his smarmy version of fiscal responsibility will be sacrificed on the altar of "Write Bad Checks to Shore Up Shrub's Fading Image". The description of his embarrassed aide's hasty denouement with a group of Pence's bluest (or should I say reddest?) and truest of believers in Pence's mission to reduce the federal government to something even the most federalistic of the Founders would have found too small in Dana Milbanks' Washington Post Washington Sketch column, Deep Pockets, Small Government and the Man in the Middle, is priceless.

Odd that Pence didn't really catch 'offset fever' full blow when his party's powerful were cutting taxes and writing rubber checks for the Iraq War but, when the emergency needs of Americans, particularly poor and disproportionately African-American ones were the subject, he and his best pals of the radical fiscal kind suddenly looked up to recognize that their legacy will be the biggest deficit ever. Not that he minds enriching the corporate crowd at the taxpayer's expense but he's in a big funk that he won't be able to do it by hurting 'the least of these his brothers' in the process.