Weekend Open Thread

Welcome to your weekend open thread. It looks like we are going to have a spring weekend this weekend. Did any of you experience snow yesterday? There was a light snow when I went to work yesterday but it was mostly just rain.

Speaking of winter – check out this awesome video of northern lights in Norway. It’s shot over a 6 month period and it’s gorgeous.

In The Land Of The Northern Lights from Ole Christian Salomonsen on Vimeo.

It makes me want to visit Norway. I’ve seen the northern lights before, when visiting my in-laws in Canada. It’s really a great thing to experience.

Ezra Klein explains the “Worst Idea in Washington.” It’s a law proposed by Pennsylvannia’s Pat Toomey to require balanced budgets, by setting required spending levels.

Bruce Bartlett takes a look at the Balanced Budget Amendment all 47 Republicans signed their names to and pronounces it “quite possibly the stupidest constitutional amendment I think I have ever seen. It looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin.”

I think “stupid” is the wrong word. “Dangerous” is more like it. And maybe “radical.” This isn’t just a Balanced Budget Amendment. It also includes a provision saying that tax increases would require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress — so, it includes a provision making it harder to balance the budget — and another saying that total spending couldn’t exceed 18 percent of GDP. No allowances are made for recessions, though allowances are made for wars. Not a single year of the Bush administration would qualify as constitutional under this amendment. Nor would a single year of the Reagan administration. The Clinton administration would’ve had exactly two years in which it wasn’t in violation.

Read that again: Every single Senate Republican has endorsed a constitutional amendment that would’ve made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional. That’s how far to the right the modern GOP has swung.

Republicans would make St. Reagan’s budget illegal. Just goes to show, today’s GOP would have kicked out Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush for being insufficiently conservative.