Hammer Mill Days

You did what to the whom? When was that again? Christ on a bike - I thought you agreed to stop running these freaking rogue operations out of the basement. What's that? You ran it out of the attic ? That's not the point! Ah, hello. Just caught me in the midst of yet another dressing down of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who, apparently, has some kind of crackpot entrepreneurial streak wired into him. (I need to talk to his inventor, the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, about this.) Every time I turn around ... and I mean every time, like, if I were to turn around right now it would happen ... he's got some new racket going. It's like living with an audio-animatronic P.T. Barnum. Only with slightly less calliope music. What's the latest? Well, Marvin has been taking advance orders on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , a collection of Norwegian carpenter songs ... I mean, songs from a now-lost rock opera about the trials and tribulati...

The thing that keeps popping into my mind as more details of the president's budget emerge is the notion of how small-bore our political leaders are about everything. We face enormous problems - climate changes, massive unemployment, deindustrialization, economic inequality, rampant militarism, an out-of-control justice and penal system, rampant gun violence, and so on - and yet our politicians behave like the wizened, stingy little men they are and fail again and again to recognize the scale of what's confronting us. Obama is no exception, his desire to reach a "Grand Bargain" with the Republicans so overriding that he appears to have forgotten who stood out in the sun, rain, whatever, for hours and voted for him last November. Honestly, it's hard to imagine that a Democratic president, serving in the wake of two decades of steady decline for the poor and working class, would opt for a plan that would cut the meager supplemental retirement checks of elderly peo...