can't we all agree on the future?

The blog name is based on Team Silverback, the motorcycle endurance road racing team, and my sprint number. Slow-fisted Ernie Hemingway would have wetted his severe woolen shorts trying to keep up, and could not have understood that Jessica Paris, in her pink leathers, would have smoked him worse than she smoked me at Daytona in October.

The best thing that could happen for what we call western civilization would be for that Palin thing to be the Republican nominee in 2012.

Can we all not just shut up and hope?

if I could get someone else to pay for the wine, I would be glad to taste the food that they also paid for. It would probably take about 6 glasses to make me tell them the stories about the little hotel in Deauville. Knowing me, I would probably get drunk and Ruth would drive me home.

Does that make me bad?

Do they have to let them work?

How many of those new jobs will be filled with the same predatory lenders who surfed the subprime lending stupidity wave all the way to the beach? Shouldn't we at least wait to fill them until next Feburary, when it will no longer be Amateur Hour in Washington?

Dick Cheney famously announced back in January, 2001, that the adults were back in charge of the White House. Instead, we got 8 years of The Amateur Hour, with results that would have been comical if the lives and the future they wasted did not belong to our children.

If you want to sit at the grown-ups' table when economics is the topic of conversation, you need to be able to and make a practice of reading and understanding Paul Krugman, at the very least when he is not speaking in the shorthand of mathematics.

After 28 years, stupidity is no longer sold as a virtue.

you have ever said under any name that might come back to fuck me if I hire you.

What, exactly, is wrong with this question if you are applying to work for the President of the United States?

Obama did not run as a liberal, nor as a progressive, nor as a socialist that only lives in the wet dreams of the left behind right.

What Barak Obama promised me was to be smarter and less compromised than Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who thought they were required to run as not-quite-racist Republican substitutes in order to get elected.

Except for possibly that other Senator from Illinois, and maybe that 5-star general from Kansas, we have never had a President who came from nothing but smarts.

Have faith, people.

Damned internet search engines. Facts can interfere with an effort to rewrite history.

Hope all those children of autoworkers enjoy the kind of Christmas that unemployment benefits and food stamps will buy. At least the Republicans haven't killed those.

It's like hands reaching up from the grave and dragging all the rest of us down with them. Ho, ho, ho.

Fix the title.

The only reason that there will not be blanket pardons round about January 16 is that Bush and his co-conspirators don't think they need them.

For more than the past quarter-century, I have lived in the Arkansas Ozarks. I have always said I moved here for the geography, not for the conversation. Talk these days comes at a keystroke across the globe; I see the sun rise over Memphis every clear morning, and watch the march of the solstice from my dining room table.

To this day, the best places to sit and watch the transit of the sun in Arkansas are the WPA and CCS projects that were built back in the run-up to the Second Great War,that saved our economy in the day. Economic efficiency counted for nothing compared to keeping that great body of young men away from the potential class conflagrations in the cities, and out in the woods where they had nothing to do but to swing hand tools and send the money they had nowhere to spend back to their families in the dying cities. Any modern Chicano would understand.

Building highways is fine, but it will only benefit the owners of the massive machine tools that will do the job. Let's spend money letting high-school drop-out swing hand tools to build the White Rock Mountain overlooks for the next generation. Might ever make some of the rest of you value the woods.

Rick Warren does the invocation.

After all is done, Gene Robinson does the benediction.

Muslims and Buddhists can wait until the next inauguration.

Will someone please explain how you make a gazillion tons of aluminum alloy, with the doors open, float in the Hudson?

Does anyone ever finish an article? If so, why?

Tied? Vas deferens? Snipped?

If you can't manage to abstain from either sex or nicotine, there's always anal, although I have a former law partner whose personality strongly suggests that buggery is not an infallible contraceptive.

I live in the Arkansas Ozarks, where weather still has way more impact on our lives than the attitudes of people who live in concrete/asphalt beehives.

Can someone try to persuade me I should pay attention more often than weekly?