I agree about Panetta. At first I wondered, but then it became clear. He's a political operative, and he's going to the "CIA" to clean house. He doesn't need to know anything about intelligence for the task at hand. What he needs are organizational skills, which he has, and the authorization from his boss, Obama, to do what needs to be done.

I'm still optimistic about Obama's skill as a visionary, politician, and leader. He has to know that McConnell and Boehner are sleaze buckets, and that ingratiating himself to them is a losing proposition. I think he is setting them up.

I welcome the "middle-class" tax cut personally, because my income is dropping, and I need the money. I also know that the tax cut will not revive the economy, any more than Bush's tax cuts did. I spent both promptly, the first time needlessly, the second time for a root canal.

What is needed to revive the economy is employment. If a person has a job, he or she can pay taxes, to say nothing of rent, food, transportation, and health care. Tax cuts do not generate employment. Capital formation does. The creation of businesses that provide goods and services generates demand for other goods and services by proving income.

In lieu of generating capital formation, Obama can create government jobs - construction, to repair our collapsing infrastructure; environmental cleanup; an expanded regulatory and justice system to deal with the criminality of the last several decades; a teacher corps to reinvigorate our education system; a health care system for the whole country, similar to the V.A. care I get. It works. It all can work. All that is required are the vision, the will, and the leadership. I think we have it.

I like the Panetta appointment for similar reasons. It's pretty obvious he's going in there as a political operative. He likely will do a lot of housecleaning, which requires no intelligence skills. He also will need organizational skills, which he has through his campaign work, and as White House Chief of Staff.

It's worth mentioning that Diane Feinstein wouldn't even be a senator if it had not been for Dan White. When he assassinated the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, Feinstein became mayor, which catapulted her to the Senate. She's been a crappy senator, and it's about time someone real challenges her.

Jay Rockefeller, of course, is a Rockefeller. Some day someone will write a history of the connections between the Rockefeller family and the Bush criminal regime. A good place to start would be Jay Rockefeller's connection by marriage to former Illinois senator Charles Percy, and Percy's connection to, of all people, Donald Rumsfeld. There was a time when Rockefeller would have been the ideal "Democratic" candidate for president, but for some strange reason he never ran.

In an ideal world we would be reinstalling street car tracks, railroad tracks, and monorail lines. In the actual world, the public depends on the roads and vehicles it already has to get from one place to another. From home to work, por ejemplo.

If the roads and bridges are in a state of disrepair, then they are dangerous to the human lives that depend on them today, not next week, next year, next decade, or next century. Plans or agreement are not exactly in place (shovel ready) for monorails, train tracks, or street car tracks, so the spending on such imagined projects is not, hmm, payroll ready, and won't be for some time to come.

It almost doesn't matter. We don't have the kind of system anymore that can competently respond to problems, even if those problems are species-threatening. There has been a progression to where we are now that started centuries ago, with some blips from time-to-time, like the discovery of fire, then copper and bronze, and most recently the Industrial Revolution, now over two centuries old.

We aren't equipped, socially, economically, or technologically for a retrofit. Just the fact that people like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can even be candidates for public office speaks volumes about our level of civilization. The fact that Fox News even exists is a testimonial to our futility. And, to remind us of the obvious, the fact that George W. Bush has been President of the United States for eight years, to say nothing of being even a candidate, is sufficient evidence that we are in big trouble.

There will be mountains of B.S. slung in the coming days about how to "save" our system. We would do well to be shovel ready.