Hammer Mill Days

Who knows what happened to your wallet, Mitch. I'm not your valet, for chrissake. And tubey - get your freaking plant food out of my shoe closet. I don't care if it's full of topsoil. That just means I've been pacing the north forty. Just lay off! I'm sorry you had to hear that (or read the transcript of it, rather). Yes, tempers are running a little thin around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill these days. Some see it as a variation on seasonal affective disorder - you know, it starts getting warm, we can't afford air conditioning, and this clammy mill gets kind of toasty. But it goes deeper than that, I'm afraid. An erosion of trust, you might say. It's the kind of thing that tends to happen with Big Green between interstellar tours. In fact, that's what keeps driving us into space. I think that's what, anyway. Still, there are other things eating away at us. Like those nefarious bloggers, always trying to make more of a monkey out of me than I...

Obama's Middle East address was full of familiar themes. There's been a lot of dust kicked up about the suggestion that any lasting peace in Israel/Palestine should be based on the pre-June 1967 borders with mutually agreeable land swaps. That was a bit like Gingrich saying he didn't believe in gutting Medicare and turning it into a lame, unworkable voucher program. Nothing draws criticism like brief moments of relative sanity. But I digress. What wasn't surprising about the speech? The hard swipes at our perennial punching bags, Syria and Iran. The heavily caveated criticism of Bahrain and Yemen. The non-existence of Saudi Arabia. These are all too attractive not to make it into the final draft. But in my mind, there were probably three items worth referencing: "Drawing from what we've learned around the world, we think it's important to focus on trade, not just aid; and investment, not just assistance. " This was the magic of the marketplace passage ...