It was only when the first cries over President Obama's compromise with the Republicans began to settle that calmer analysis over its impacts kicked in.

Thomas Schegel, one of my Well colleagues, grasped immediately the potentially grim scenario ahead. It's not so much a matter of numbers and percentages. It's about handing the Republicans yet another tool to hype their alarm cries over the Social Security "crisis". And ironically, it could make that crisis a reality.

Tom's given me permission to excerpt his thoughts on the issue. Added emphasis is mine.

But it's not.

I took a news hiatus during the long holiday weekend. So it was the Jezebel post on the tragic death of Lizzy Seeberg that told me nothing's changed in my home town.

The story in short: a young girl reported an assault by a Notre Dame football player. Her charges seemed to lead nowhere; despite her following to the letter every single step advised in the wake of a sexual assault, authorities inside and outside the school apparently let her down. She took her own life. In the wake of her death, the university clammed up; the football player plays on; the coach cracked wise.

Oh, how to boil down for you how - well, how normal this is for life in South Bend. How football rules all. How Notre Dame has called the shots there forever, and always will; how the Lizzy Seebergs of this world publicly or silently fall away in the name of money, of privilege, of patriarchy and theocracy. And how I wish I believed that this will change. It will not.

Let me share with you my own tangle with the Great God Football in South Bend.

Gotta deal with it every year. I'm sure you can tell my enthusiasm is seeping from every pore.

Illustration by RebeccaR195