Hammer Mill Days

Gosh, but it's great to be back home! My favorite five words in the alphabet. Wait... did I say something? Did someone just say something...? Whoa, sorry, friends. I'm a little woozy after that hard landing the other day. Did I mention our landing was hard? Well, if I didn't (and I do believe I did), let me tell you... it was HARD . We more or less followed the re-entry instructions Urich found tucked under the navigation console (it was buried in coffee grounds and cigarette butts, but still readable). His angle of descent was a bit too steep, perhaps, and the second-hand Soyuz capsule heated to the traditional 450 degrees Kelvin. That was the first piece of difficulty. The second? No water landings with Russian spacecraft. We were forced to find open ground somewhere within walking distance of our long-term squat at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why walking distance? No cab fare. And it's not like we've got the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln out there trawling for us...

Obama came rolling into office bipartisan guns a-blazin'. He met with congressional Republicans. He met with conservative columnists. He courted, compromised, and curried favor, but never seriously called them out on their incessant whining about insufficient (in their view) tax relief contained within the president's stimulus plan. Birth control provisions were dropped, tax cuts added. In the end, the stimulus package was far more modest on infrastructure related items than most economists think is demanded by a crisis of this magnitude. (100,000 jobs cut this week alone - good grief!) And yet, when it came to a vote in the House, not one Republican supported it. My first reaction to this news was, well... okay, then can we have the original package back - the one Democrats could have passed two weeks ago? What the hell - the G.O.P. acts like a dog that can't eat all his food, so he pisses on it. So much for bipartisan good will. Personally, I think this notion of bipartis...