Open Thread

>so we can give others an excuse to get away to a destination and sped time with close family and friends.

Personally I think a ‘destination wedding’ is the height of selfishness and arrogance. You celebrate a wedding with friends and need to have their comfort in mind as well, it’s not your personal fief. Why would I want to go to some weird, expensive, difficult-to-reach, out of the way place?

where have all the fun OT people gone!?

*rob*

I throw eggs, rocks, poop, etc at all the politicians as they become election-focused and dont give an F about governing. that house vote on the 9-11 1st responder aid pkg was super clear cut case of it. shame on the democrats for pulling that stunt and shame on Weiner for not dishing the outburst on his democrat peers.

Op-ed from the Times on Sunday, from Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget:

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
By DAVID STOCKMAN

If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

complete op-ed column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html