Hammer Mill Days

I spy with my little eye.... a breakfast nook. Yes, that's it. I spy with my little eye... a seven-foot-tall solid iron anvil. Found that one too, eh? Hmmm... I'm going to have to make this harder. Hello again, visitor(s). Yeah, just killing a little time on a holiday weekend. All the carolers have gone home, back to their cabins somewhere in the Adirondacks to stoke their hearth fires and peel their stocking-heel tangerines. Celebratory drinks all around! The place is as dead as a hammer head... and we've got a lot of those lying about the old abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Or, as some call it, the hammer mill of the imagination.) I'm looking out upon empty cobblestone streets in the old canal-side district of Little Falls, NY, watching the snowflakes drift lazily earthward, each one laden with icy cloud-stuff, little bits of frozen heaven dropped by the formidable gods of the great north. Sometimes it feels like we're in the middle of nowhere. (I think I know why ...

You've heard (way too many times) the facile comparison between legislating and making sausage. It's the kind of analogy that obscures the spectacular level of dysfunction now most impressively on display in the U.S. Senate. This institution has always been a problem with respect to the popular will, but under the current circumstances, the "world's greatest deliberative body" has become not the cooling saucer of democracy but a dousing bucket of cold water. There is, of course, no question that the Senate is an extremely undemocratic institution, according the same number of votes and, therefore, the same political power to every state, whether it is home to 36 million (California) or 500,000 (Wyoming). Even if the chamber's arcane rules allowed for voting on a majority-rule basis, it would be intrinsically unfair to larger population centers - i.e. the kinds of communities that most rely on social programs administered by the federal government. But it's...