Its 6am and dark outside but one thing is clear, it is not snowing and soon I will be driving to work.

Let me apologize in advance for the curmudgeonly take on today… I really was hoping for the world to be taking a snow day.

All area public schools are closed which will in all likelihood make work today all the more painful. As I drive around town today I now have to dodge frolicking children who gleefully hurl snow balls at one another across traffic, hitting my car and possibly causing an accident. Meanwhile, children in China are trudging through blizzards in order to pull further ahead of the U.S. school system in math and science. Or something curmudgeonly like that.

Here is what the Pilot has to stay about the weather.

This article includes all the right buzz words that together spell out snow day: Ice, Freezing rain, accumulation, and 1 to 3 inches. In the snow-a-phobic region of Hampton Roads this should have guaranteed me a region wide shut-down. Why gods of Hampton Roads did you not let me wake up to hear, “Emergency personnel only.”

In other news I have found a secret list with the name of the gods of Hampton Roads and have decided to go ahead and leak it to the public.

The list is in order of import-

Hollywood- Power to melt hearts and laugh better than anyone on earth.

Pete Decker- Power to seem to wield insane amounts of local power while most people have very little idea what he actually does.

Whoever runs the A.R.E.- Think baby Drew Barrymore in Stephen King’s Firestarter.

The Baboons at the Norfolk Zoo- They have red butts.

The Ferry Operator- He is the region’s historian. He has seen everything that has occurred since the beginning of time in the region known as Tidewater. At Cruzer’s he is also known as Tonka Tim.

Tim from Naro Expanded Video- His powers are limitless.

There you have it folks. My apologies if your pick did not make it into the Hampton Road’s pantheon. I had no say in who was deified as protectors of the region folks, I’m just reporting on it. From this point forward please direct all requests for assistance and mercy in this group’s direction. I hear they meet once a week at Ten Top in Ghent.

House of Representatives expected to pass tax deal today in the name of the virtue known as Compromise

The House will likely pass the tax package today, which includes extending all Bush era tax cuts, an expansion of the estate tax, and an extension of unemployment benefits. On one hand I am glad to see a Congress that managed to find a way to sit in the same room with one another, but this compromise strikes me as objectively bad for our country. Which got me to thinking… What good is compromise when it leads to bad governance?

Let me make it clear where I stand on this particular measure: The extension of tax breaks for the wealthy and the estate tax giveaway are an absolute abomination. The Congress members that pushed for them should be ashamed of themselves. Democrats accepting the deal should be ashamed of themselves, as well for giving up an opportunity to force Republicans to defend these atrocities in the light of day. That being said, I am not particularly interested in the tax debate, but rather the more meta debate concerning compromise as a method of legislating, and its efficacy.

One can certainly produce a litany of examples when compromise produced sound legislation for the American people, but can this Congress be expected to do the same? Our legislative process of the last decade has been increasingly marred by intense polarization and a loss of the traditionally collegial environment of mutual respect and public interest. Now Obama is reaching out in the waning moments of this lame duck session to the Republicans, but at a considerable cost to his domestic priorities. My question is this: can the divide become so great between the two parties that compromise becomes a detriment to the public good?

Rather than beating around the bush allow me to jump to my conclusion. Yes. Why? People believe (probably mistakenly) that there is such a thing as the fact of the matter. If a fact of the matter exists then at least one side, and possibly both sides in a policy debate, are incorrect. The thinking is that compromise comes in, bridges the gap, and presto-magico some happy middle emerges. The problem is there is no such thing as the happy middle, only the middle. The middle is the home of stagnation and status quo. No change has ever come from the middle. Moves towards greater justice, equity, and freedoms have always been a result of some outlier to the political spectrum. The most we can hope for from compromise is a continuation of life as usual and that is beyond question what this tax deal represents.

The politicians have made no secret of this fact either. Many on both sides are crying about how this is one of the hardest votes they’ve ever had to take because it forces them to give in on items they are so passionate about. The end result is that our nation will continue to limp along waiting for the next time we are forced to address these issues. Two years from now we will reopen the absurd debate over tax breaks for the richest people in human history and undoubtedly we will revisit the crazy estate tax giveaway as well. More importantly, as our nation’s deficit continues to soar under the pressure from tax giveaways to the wealthy, we will struggle to balance our books and cut from our quality of life. This is not a compromise but a deferment, or stay of execution.

Compromise in our current political system is the result of two belief structures being crammed into one another and no single fact of the matter. For that reason history will always force us to revisit the issues at hand. If you believe there is a right and a wrong then compromise will always taste stale. The current extreme partisanship only exacerbates the matter as the political divide makes compromise on any particular matter near impossible. This ‘tax deal’ is not a give and take on a specific measure, but rather a hostage exchange on a litany of issues. This one “tax deal” pertains to multiple, individually important matters, and this compromise is not the middle ground but a series of extreme policy trades.

Republicans got to give huge breaks to the wealthy without answering for its economic feasibility, and Democrats got to extend unemployment benefits without coming up with a funding source. The only ‘compromise’ here is that we let both parties act as if legislation occurs in a vacuum without consequences; each party agreeing to turn a blind eye to the irresponsibility of the other’s actions.

I am glad that benefits for the unemployed are to be extended and I am glad that our middle class will still have the Bush era tax cuts that are so crucial in this time of recovery, but it’s the trade that gets me. I’ve read and listened to some of my more progressive friends defend this move as a necessary concession that prevents our most at risk citizens from suffering further and I cannot help but marvel at the short sightedness of the argument. Our broken system of taxation and distribution does not dissipate with this compromise. On the contrary, this will only exacerbate the problem in the long term. The next time we revisit this issue we will likely have greater income inequality in America, we will likely have more debt to factor into the equation, and we will definitely have less Democrats in the House and Senate. There will be cut backs, America, and the longer we choose to put them off the greater the consequences will be. The choice is yours, but please dispel from your mind the notion that compromise in its current form does anything more than put off for tomorrow what ought to be addressed today.

Here is an incredibly interesting interactive map that shows you how divided our city is along race lines.

Check it out and please share what it makes you think about.