This isn’t America.

Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, updates to this account will be limited. #Shutdown

— First Lady- Archived (@FLOTUS44) October 1, 2013

Alternate headline: “Yes, you’re paying someone to run FLOTUS’s free Twitter account.” The reason they need to scale back, in theory, is that it’s technically illegal for furloughed federal workers to so much as check their e-mail while there’s a shutdown on. Presumably the First Lady’s press shop has been sent home, which means the country will have to make do for awhile without periodic reminders that water is important. In that case, though, why tweet at all that updates will be “limited” instead of just going silent? (The FLOTUS account usually tweets only sporadically, sometimes not even once a day.) Silly — you know why.

As for the state of negotiations, Boehner’s apparently ready to try Ted Cruz’s plan of passing small, targeted CRs that fund specific parts of the government piecemeal. The first beneficiaries under the GOP plan: D.C., the VA, and the National Park Service, which would deny Democrats any more easy “shutdown theater” opportunities like sealing off the WWII Memorial just to spite people. Democrats won’t go for it, predictably, but that refusal gives the GOP some room to argue that, contrary to what Obama said in the Rose Garden this afternoon, this is not a “Republican shutdown.”

Via Politico, here’s Democratic Rep. John Larson on the House floor last night, staring into the abyss of not being able to access government websites for a few days. (Some websites are, of course, inaccessible despite being fully funded.) If you think he was mad yesterday, imagine how mad he’ll be when he finds out FLOTUS’s intern won’t be farting out the daily “eat more vegetables” tweet.