Vacation Time

As Nobel Prize-winning Big Guy will tell you, and Nobel Prize winning Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will confirm, award-winning administrations need down time to keep their edge.

That's why the Obama Administration has a hard and fast rule we like to call the "20/20."  You put in 20 hours of work a week, you deserve 20 hours of vacation time to recharge.

But there seems to be some confusion about our policy.  A lot of people have been noting, for example, that today, BO stayed three hours in Louisiana to look at the oil spill, but then tomorrow will spend 5 hours on a golf course in Illinois.  It doesn't add up, they say.

Well, if they'd won a Nobel Prize, they would understand that 3 hours in Louisiana dealing with a mess that was really the fault of the Bush Administration for being elected ten years ago, counts as more than 10 hours in Obama time.  That, and we add an extra hour because he couldn't use me on the beach for opening remarks. And another hour because he got his hands dirty ... literally. Oil just doesn't wash off with soap and water, you know. It takes some time, and effort.

See, this if more Americans won Nobel Prizes, you'd all have a much better understanding of the way Big Guy works.  And that whole deficit thing would make a lot more sense, too.

Out of Thin Ayres

I should be clear that Bill Ayers and I go way back. Oh, not so far back as you can tie me into his domestic terrorism days. But back far enough that my keyboard was used fairly extensive by him in writing Big Guy's first book, "Screams of My Father."

What's that? Oh, right. Well, that was the title Bill wanted. I guess he was working through some issues. Okay, let's face it, the man was deranged. But now he's been rehabilitated, in large part because he's a doppelganger to the leader of the free world.

Back then, we kind of tolerated Bill, who now goes by William, and we didn't have much contact with him until recently. But now I have to say I'm a bit peeved. See, I was supposed to appear on Robert McChesney's radio show, "The Bobbie McChesney Marxist Minute", which airs on NPR stations around the country, and which is produced in McChesney's bomb shelter out in rural Illinois somewhere. But he bumped me for Ayres, who now has - really - a cartoon book about how to teach radical politics to students.

I mean, you can't make this kind of thing up. Well, unless you're Bill Ayres and you're writing a biography about an obscure Illinois politician with a largely undocumented life.

Operation Over-Lording

I can't believe that someone let the cat out of the bag and leaked the fact that Big Guy was going to be running against former President George W. Bush in 2010. We were hoping to keep it a surprise, like D-Day or the sexuality of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  Now everyone knows.

Axe and Toes say that running against W is genius, and that the American people won't bother to notice that the former President has been out of office for, oh, 18 months. Or that the only things you could really blame on him were his failure to clear all of the mesquite off the 20 acres toward the southern edge of his ranch in Texas, and that he turned the manuscript for his book into Random House 18 hours late.

I don't know how you blame10% unemployment, 12 trillion in new national debt, an increase in attempted terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, snickering about our failed foreign policies from our allies in Europe, and being a wholly owned subsidiary of China in less than a year in office, on President Bush. 

But if there's a guy who can pull it off, it's our guy.  But don't tell him I told you so.

Visiting the Rust Belt

Big Guy and I had a lot of fun visiting the University of Michigan over the weekend. It's always nice to get out of Washington, with all the negativity that surrounds us here.  Then again, it seems just about everywhere we go there is negativity. Frankly, Big Guy doesn't get it.  Like he reminds all of us when we get down about the polls and the protests and the legislative losses, "Hey, America knows what it was getting ... well, except for the socialism and the debt, but whose fault is that? It's not like Rush Limbaugh wasn't warning them."

But up in Ann Arbor Big Guy really gets recharged. Back in the day, when Big Guy was nothing more than your run of the mill street-wise community organizer, pulling down a few grand a month from his ACORN grant, we'd travel from Chicago up there to Ann Arbor for long weekends hanging out at the U of M Alinsky chapter house, hazing recruits and giving the occasional lecture over the din to "The Nationale," which was played over and over again to keep our spirits up. Good times, Good times.

But you know, this was a bittersweet return for us.  The kids just don't seem to get it. They want jobs, and a future, and Big Guy just isn't into all that right now. He was more concerned about killing the other night in front of our friends at the the White House Correspondents Dinner, and making Jay Leno look like a douche. And this is really the problem.  How can Big O really focus on influencing the next generation, when he has to focus on day to day stuff.

Like an oil spill. This thing is really becoming a headache. Oh, not because of the toll on the Gulf Coast economy or the environment or the people. But because of the term, "Oil Spill."  Last month, when Southern California got hit by that earthquake, BO and Axe and Toes got lucky. They just changed the name of the location where the earthquake took place from MexiCali Fault to Bush's Fault, and the problem just went away.  But this oil spill deal is a real challenge, because none of us can figure out a way to change the term from "Oil Spill" to something with Bush's name in it.

As Axe noted, we have a few million left from the stimulus package, so we're going to hire some unemployed Hollywood writers full-time over at Commerce, whose job is going to be to figure out clever ways to work Bush's name into all of our national emergencies. We figure that should get us past the 2010 election cycle, and by then the economy will be going so good, no one is going to care any more anyway.