I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend. I just finished up some last-minute preparations before family arrives tomorrow. The lack of snow here in the Twin Cities is a little dispiriting, but it does make errand-running much easier.

I’ll be back next week with my usual year-end wrap-up. See you then.

When the Wall Street Journal editorial page starts bashing House Republicans for failing to extend the payroll tax cut, you know that the GOP is heading over a cliff. I’d really like someone to explain what Republicans were thinking when they decided to block a tax cut extension that the Senate passed with an overwhelming majority. Did they really believe they would score political points by opposing Obama on a tax cut? Has conservative ideology become so nihilistic as to cause its followers to take complete leave of their senses? Meanwhile, Obama is enjoying a modest but still noteworthy rebound in the polls. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Republicans have a secret compulsion to throw the election to the President. So far, their strategy seems to be working.

Health care advocates are frustrated with the Obama administration’s decision to let states define the essential health benefits that will be offered through the exchanges. The politics of this move are plain enough: the Affordable Care Act remains relatively unpopular and the administration doesn’t want to expose itself to charges that it’s “taking over” the health care system as an election year approaches. But it also undermines one of the ACA’s core goals: providing a uniform set of health benefits to all uninsured Americans. Instead, we’ll likely see the same disparities that currently exist across state Medicaid programs. Some states will require insurers to offer comprehensive benefits while others will be content with bare-bones packages that fail to address the needs of people with more significant health care needs.

This is bad policy and I’m deeply disappointed in Obama for choosing this path. It will only complicate matters for those of us working to implement the next law.

One of the benefits of working for the state for nearly a decade is that I’ve accumulated quite a bit of vacation time; enough to afford me a two-week holiday that begins now. I’m still trying to figure out what I’ll do with myself, but I have a few ideas:

• Create a Wikipedia entry titled “Fishnets”
• Make some quick cash by writing term papers for procrastinating high school students. 
• Find creative ways to exceed my 250GB monthly bandwidth cap. Fishnets may be involved. 
• Camp out in a busy skyway, instruct my nurse to hold a sprig of mistletoe over my head, and see what happens. 
• Play WoW for 24 hours straight while subsisting on nothing but Red Bull and Junior Mints. 
• Blog about how few of those goals I actually accomplished during my vacation.

Here’s a great article about how the fashion and pop culture of today is almost indistinguishable from the fashion and pop culture of twenty years ago. I’m not sure I completely agree. Television shows have become more densely plotted and thematically complex than anything that was on in 1991. But in other regards, the author makes a good point. The best way to date a movie/TV show from the past 20 years is to study the technology the characters are using, not their clothing or hairstyles. We don’t seem to have a distinctive trend that peaked and then disappeared, like bell bottoms or finned cars. Have we simply hit the aesthetic pause button? Or is our culture going to stagnate until our alien overlords arrive?