Hammer Mill Days

Holy Moses. Where did all this snow come from? The sky? That's where it ordinarily comes from. There have been exceptions, sure, but ... how likely is that? Well, here we are. First days of the year and we're already snowed in. Mountains of the stuff piled up against the front door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Just as well that it's relatively congenial in here, that is if you don't mind being cooped up with crazy people. There's Matt, of course, though he mostly occupies himself with tending the wild creatures and feathered friends. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) does have some annoying habits, much as I've tried to program them out of him. (I'm not a scientist - I just play one on the internet.) The most troublesome companion we have in the Mill is anti-Lincoln, the antimatter doppelganger of the Great Emancipator, who was chrono-teleported into our midst some years back by Mitch Macaphee, using Trevor James Constable...

It's January 2015 (news flash!) and we're on the brink of true divided national government - Congress in the hands of one party, the Presidency controlled by the other, and a 5-4 split on the Supreme Court. If electoral politics may be considered by anyone to be a true measure of the nation's policy aspirations, it's hard to see how we have reached this outcome. We hear from our corporate media that the American people are tired of gridlock and dysfunction in Congress, and yet the electorate has rewarded the faction most responsible for these maladies with control of the Senate and an expanded majority in the House. Is there any expectation on the part of those who voted in the last election that Congress will function more smoothly and more effectively as a result? Perhaps it's simply that our Congressional elections are really 435 tiny local races rather than one big, national one; that each district decides on the basis of who's running and who's most l...