It looks like that we're going to have a debt ceiling agreement soon. But what a bad deal. And the road that we took to make this deal is full of ashes and dead bodies. 

I'm horrified that our country was taken hostage  in order to make political points. That's what just happened. 

Paul Krugman writes,

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

On Friday night, my babysitter didn't leave when we got home. Instead, she stayed in my kitchen and vented for an hour. She and her boyfriend can't get married, because, four years after getting his college degree, he still can't find a job. He's caddying at the local golf course. She's a classroom aide and never expected that she would have to support a family. They are selling their gold at Sell Your Gold parties. Perhaps they are clinging too long to a traditional suburban family arrangement that no longer exists. 

Where can he find a job, she begged. I told her that he should get a nursing degree. 

The economy is in the pooper and this deal isn't going to help the unemployed 2o-somethings. 

But that bothers me less than the ruthless and cynical politics that happened this week. More Krugman,