Rumblings...

There I was at work, minding my own business, when I felt a wobbling in my desk chair.  I immediately dropped all of the important things I was doing to assess.  Seconds later, I felt the same, barely-perceptible shaking in... what?  My chair?  The floor?  My ass?

Shortly thereafter, coworkers, with the help of Twitter, confirmed that, yes, after apparently sleeping through seismic activity in two different hemispheres in my youth, I had experienced my first earthquake.

A truly sad compromise?

Let's hear it for our heroic congresspeople who have averted an apocalyptic federal default!  ...Ignoring for the moment that it was a crisis of their and their colleague's own making.  But now that the deal has been all but approved, all that's left is for the talking heads to determine who won and lost in this whole debacle.

I've come across an old saw that "a really good compromise is the one that leaves both sides equally dissatisfied" in a few different and eclectic contexts recently -- the NFL lockout, A Dance with Dragons.  So potentially, both sides should be and, indeed, are "find[ing] fault with [the] bill."  However, not all of those opinions are easy to reconcile with each other or the standard partisan storylines.