I need blog material, Dear Readers. There’s only so much I can write about health care reform or fishnets before everyone’s eyes glaze over, including my own. So I’m asking readers to submit questions and I’ll devote next week to answering them. Questions can be on any topic of your choosing. Yes, even those questions. In fact, especially those questions. The more provocative, the better. I’ll also put out the word on Facebook and Twitter.

This could be really interesting or really awkward. Either way, it’s a win for you, the reader.

I wrangled myself an invite to the buzz-heavy streaming music service Spotify and have been playing around with the free version for the past hour. It’s fairly intuitive to use: type in an artist, song, or album and Spotify will produce a list of matching results available for streaming. And with 15 million tracks available in its catalog, Spotify doesn’t lack for selection (although a few big artists like the Beatles are missing). It’s a great way to listen to complete tracks and albums without actually purchasing them. And it offers all kinds of possibilities for creating playlists for parties.

But Spotify seems to work best if you know what you’re looking for or you want to explore the playlists of friends. It doesn’t offer a simple way to browse and discover new music. And perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I’m still a little reluctant to stream all my music from the cloud. Streaming is fine for video, but sometimes I want to listen to Gorillaz on a lonely stretch of road that is completely off the data grid. I’ll probably continue to use Spotify to sample music that interests, but I’ll continue to purchase tracks through Amazon and iTunes.

Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo gives a good summary of the debt deal’s positives and negatives from a progressive perspective. After reading a few summaries like this, I’m beginning to think that the deal, while indeed terrible, could have been worse. The initial cuts are relatively small and won’t take effect until FY 2013, which gives the economy a little breathing room. Medicaid, which seemed particularly vulnerable not so long ago, is shielded from automatic cuts (although Congress could still enact future cuts to the program). That’s not much to cheer about, but with one-half of Congress in thrall to ignorant worshippers of Ayn Rand’s ghost, minimizing the pain is probably the best outcome we can expect.

The most frustrating thing about this whole fiasco is that nothing has been done to address the fundamental drivers of our debt problems–entitlement program costs that vastly exceed revenues. And with Republicans demonstrably unable to offer rational proposals on either front, Obama’s only leverage may be the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at end of 2012. If he loses the election, it may actually be easier for him to let them expire. He may see it as his last opportunity to set the country on responsible fiscal footing and if the Republicans don’t like it, they can try to round up the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to undo it.

The Times Topics blog has a list of words that its readers look up most frequently in the Times‘ on-line dictionary. It contains true obscurities like “panegyric” and “crepuscular”, but it contains a few that should be gimmes for the paper’s typical liberal elite reader. I mean, “ubiquitous”? Really? And isn’t “brinkmanship” fairly self-explanatory? Perhaps an explanation lies in the fact that the Times is available to anyone with an Internet connection and so its readers have a broad range of vocabulary skills. And that’s not intended to sound like English major snobbery. If reading the Times teaches people incredibly useful words like “feckless” and “schadenfreude”, that can only be a good thing. 

I have two tasks to accomplish tonight:

• Finish a book club selection so that I don’t have to cram it all in tomorrow night; and
• Spend all of the gift certificates I accumulated on my birthday before the national economy crashes and the only valid currencies are gold ingots and bars of silver. 

If I accomplish these tasks in the next couple hours, i may post again.