Hammer Mill Days

I say let's start rehearsing on Wednesdays. You can't? Why the hell not? That's your LUNCH day? Oh, right. Forgot about that. Just trying to pull together some Big Green rehearsals in advance of our anticipated interstellar tour to promote our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Of course, I'm running into the usual scheduling conflicts. I keep forgetting how people arrange their time. Anti-Lincoln (who sometimes shakes a tambourine backwards for us), for instance, has what can only be described as a singular meal schedule: Instead of the usual three meals a day, he eats breakfast all day Sunday, lunch all day Wednesday, and dinner all day Friday. Hey - I don't judge. If it works for him, that's great. This does get to be like being a traffic cop, though. And what usually ends up happening is that Matt and I get together and just run through some songs, or make up new ones, or record an episode of Ned Trek for our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN ....

Kind of tired, so these will be brief. Cruz Control. Here we go again, lurching from crisis to crisis, the federal government sputtering along on fumes once more, its lifeblood of funding drying up. We haven't had an actual federal budget plan approved in years, just a series of continuing resolutions and last-minute deals. And now, as the federal deficit has shrunk (thanks in part to the blind cuts imposed by sequestration) to nearly half its size one year ago, the party who rules Washington - the tea party-fueled G.O.P. - has decided to drive us over the cliff once again, only this time it's about ideological, not budgetary, complaints. We must kill Obamacare (and fulfill a long list of other reactionary desires), or the economy gets it. Ted Cruz is working the reps in the House, but really ... the reps should know better. How can you call yourself a conservative and support playing chicken with the debt ceiling? Good call. Iranian president Rouhani called our own pres...