Labor Day. The last plastic souvenir sports bottle of lemonade on the dying coals of summer. The beginning of the end of the bright light and harbinger of the darkness. Swimming pools close. Ice cream trucks tie up their bells and convoy back into hibernation, And Dad suffers his last second degree hissing bubble burn from the BBQ grill for at least nine months. The dividing line between baseball’s endgame and football’s chrysalis from two- a- day drills into hardcore Bowl envy. The solstice is dead. Long live the autumnal equinox.

Labor Day. As a kid, I was too busy recoiling from the looming specter of the end of my freedom to pay much attention to the meaning or even the name of the holiday. One 24 hour period carved into the almanac to honor the American worker. Seems a bit of an archaic sentiment these days. A gesture almost as empty as the candy counter at a Cineplex after a Labor Day weekend Harry Potter festival, especially what with lean and mean being all the rage. And trust me, there is a lot of rage out there.

Labor Day. Now might be the perfect time to trot out that old chestnut that if it weren’t for the blue collars there wouldn’t be any white collars much less $4500 Brioni grey pinstripe merino wool suit collars. Without labor and the labor movement, we might still be nomads, camping on a frontier, boiling river water to wash down our nightly meal of beans and mush and roots and moss. Getting way too friendly with the livestock. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Labor Day Admittedly, not the sexiest holiday: There’s no fireworks to watch or ugly birds to cook or chocolate covered bunnies to steal marshmallows from. Just one Monday off for all those ordinary guys and gals trying to make ends meet; raising 2.3 kids, juggling a mortgage while trying to cover the monthly cable bill with at least one premium channel thrown in. The lifeblood of America’s body politic has always been its workforce, the people. (claimants before Judge Judy disincluded) I’m talking about real folks who don’t think “work ethic” is a dirty word. Or a dirty two words. Or whatever.

Labor Day. A calendaric conundrum. A day we celebrate what it is we do for a living by taking the day off from work. Paying tribute not to fancy movie stars or stodgy founding fathers or rich and bloated athletes, but us. The real American heroes. You and me. Okay, mostly you. But allow a guy who memorized his social security number at the age of twelve, wish you a happy Labor Day. Go out and buy a new notebook and a couple of pens. And a ruler. Nobody buys rulers anymore.

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It was a mite disconcerting that President Obama came up with Justice David Souter’s replacement in about a quarter of the time that it took for him to choose the family dog. Of course that dog is destined to become an integral part of the First Family. And a choice they will have to live with for ten or twelve years.. A Supreme Court Justice simply affects the country and the world for the rest of our natural born lives.

Although dogs and Associate Supreme Court Justices do share many commands. A judge must SIT on the bench. They STAY there for a lifetime. Tend to LIE DOWN at the first sight of a third rail issue. SPEAK only when questioning precedents. Clarence Thomas took a year and a half to HOUSE TRAIN. Antonin Scalia is a HEEL. Rumor has it John Paul Stevens’ law clerks regularly follow him around with a ROLLED UP NEWSPAPER. And generally all nine will BEG anytime they can FETCH a consensus.

Though they lack the votes to derail the nomination, Republicans will not ROLL OVER and PLAY DEAD. Their antagonism was evident even during the decision process. Qualms were expressed about the President’s use of the word “empathy” describing his search. It was interpreted as code for a radical left wing activist judge. Empathy, to these guys, is a pejorative. Well, there’s your problem right there. No wonder the GOP approval rating is lower than steel tipped fingernails on a schoolhouse blackboard.

A tape was discovered of Sotomayor riffing off a Sandra O’Connor quote, rhapsodizing about the hope that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” and a chorus of Conservatives jumped so far down her throat only the soles of their shoes can be glimpsed wriggling at the ceiling in choreographed mock fury.

Thus they charge Sonia Sotomayor with racism. For suggesting white men are not the ultimate end- all be- all in this country. Admittedly, this accusation has not been leveled by any real elected Republicans; just the usual peanut gallery rejects of Coulter, Limbaugh, Gingrich and Tancredo. That’s right. Tom Tancredo accusing a Latina of being racist. You can’t make stuff up like this. All the gas emitting from these blowhards is just another example of the Hummer calling the minivan annoying. What’s next? Bernie Madoff publicly complaining that the auto bailout math is suspect?

Their determination to escalate a confirmation fight has multiple motivations. 1. It’s necessary for the party to appear halfway relevant. 2. Combat provides an excellent opportunity to energize the base and raise money. 3. And most importantly; they can use the practice. Obstinacy, like a muscle, must be exercised.

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These aren’t your normal ordinary everyday forms of torture we’re talking about either: like 12th in line at a understaffed Starbucks or shuffling through life a Golden State Warriors fan or being forced to watch NBC’s prime time lineup against your will, I’m referring to real, state sponsored, “talk or we do something crazy” Jack Bauer on steroids kind of stuff.

The big difference being, Keifer Sutherland’s rascally television torturer gets most of his best results simply by raising his voice. “Are you going to talk?” “Never.” Compelling him to move in real close and yell in the dastardly scoundrel’s face:  “ARE YOU GOING TO TALK NOW?” “Okay. Okay. I’ll talk. Just lower your voice. The kids are trying to sleep.”

Now we got Nancy Pelosi and the CIA exchanging torture lying charges. Don’t you hate it when lovers’ spats go public? The Republicans are gleefully sliding into the House Speaker cleats up because she has little of the President’s Teflon coating. To many Americans she’s that great aunt who smiles too much at Thanksgiving and always uses your full name when scolding you for poor quality table manners. “William, only cows chew with their mouths open.”

Even Dick Cheney has gotten into the act with a recent talk show offensive defending his administration’s torture policies. And as far as everybody in the nation who sees his face being mightily offended, he’s been successful. This is not a partisan thing. A National Journal poll of Republican insiders shows 57% of them think he’s hurting the party. So pretty much everybody agrees, Dick Cheney speaking on torture is redundant.

He called the enhanced interrogation techniques used at Gitmo regrettable but necessary. And you got to love that phrase: “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Sounds like instructions on how to turn on the fluorescents at a job interview. He’s not being tortured, he’s being solicited to provide easy answers to exceptionally difficult questions. In bad lighting. And those car battery cables attached to his nipples are “nervous system awareness amplifiers.”

What I don’t get is how anybody can defend waterboarding a single prisoner 183 times. Operationally, wouldn’t you think the effectiveness would start to wear off after about 60 or 70? What genius kept pushing, “I know we’ve gotten nothing the first couple hundred times here, but I got a hunch, this next time- we’re gold.” Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 183 times, shame on me. As my daddy always said: 183rd time’s the charm.

The best way Dick Cheney can help this country is to creep back to that undisclosed location of his, and maybe take Joe Biden with him. Still haven’t figured out why Cheney is so obsessed with selling the positive merits of torture. Though there is that old axiom about one man’s torture being another man’s S&M turn- on, so maybe that explains more about the Cheney Doctrine than we really need to know. TMI. You want torture? Dick Cheney in fishnets. Try to pry that image out of your mind.

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So let us belatedly jump into this whole 100 day retrospective dealie thing, which recently became a heavy duty benchmark of real importance, because, hey: TRIPLE DIGITS. The media has dutifully kept us informed upon the significance of this monumental occasion and have not used their indoor voice while doing so. But this space will address the first one hundred and TEN days of the Obama administration, hence OUR look back will be 10% more accurate. 10% more comprehensive. 10% better. By being 10% later.

Exactly how has the fourth Democratic administration since 1968 fared in its first 110 days? Unh. Well. You know. About what you’d expect, I guess. Depends on whom you talk to. Not a lot of agreement. General consensus is: “too early to tell.” Or as my knock- off discounted Magic 8 Ball said when consulted: “Still not cleahr. Outlok cloudy. Try again alter.”

Some experts proclaim the 44th President has done brilliantly under adverse circumstances. Others blame him for everything gone wrong with the planet in the last 3 months including the unusually high, late spring upper Midwest humidity. Unfortunately, that vaunted Bipartisan Outreach Program was about as successful as barbed wire crib rails. As they say in Variety and exceptionally frantic frog restaurants: “no legs.”

Neither is Barack getting what you would call your major assistance from either side of the aisle. “We want to work with the President.” Mmm- hmm. The same way a starving coyote wants to work with a nest of baby ducks. One discouraging word circulating the Beltway accuses the Chief Executive of being arrogant, but you know what, at least he’s smart. Because we tried arrogant and stupid and that didn’t work.

From a comedic stand-point, I’m severely disappointed. The foremost scandal thus far has been couple of Cabinet appointments that didn’t want to pay their taxes. Which most of us can relate to. Problem is, Bush was a satirical motherlode and even Clinton hit the ground running as a corpulent womanizer. But Obama is smoother than liquid black velvet affording little purchase to hook a barb onto. Besides, you can’t mock hope. Too much like kicking a small furry whimpering thing with big eyes. Got to wait for hope to scab over a bit.

Not to mention the economy being more fragile than a spun glass step- ladder, so pretty much everyone not named Rush Limbaugh is rooting for him to succeed. But with pirates and pandemics and Pakistan all set on High Menace, the job ahead looks tougher than untying a centipede’s shoe laces while wearing oven mitts. Which is bad for the nation, the world, the planet and the solar system, but good fodder for us political comics. Of course, at this point, we members of the CCJU (Comics, Clowns & Jesters Union,) just might be wiling to take one for the team.

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I’m worn out by people so busy proving they’re planet friendly, they end up spraining their own arms patting themselves on the backs for barely remembering to throw an empty beer bottle at a blue bin. And missing. For flaunting their extreme green commitment with a personalized embroidered hemp shopping bag swinging provocatively to the front door of the Park and Rob from the back hatch of an SUV.

I’m sick of the politicians. All of them. The supposedly sympathetic ones, staging their sanctimoniously phony photo- ops in front of CGI forest glens, while their staff is under strict orders to do everything in their power to stall environmental reform to the point of arguing about punctuation. And the unsympathetic ones simply wear me out, expressing their smirking faux concern over the larger problem of cow flatulence.

I’m way weary of the corporations weaseling their way into our wallets with nonsense as transparent as the curtains at Grey Gardens. “Earth Day, brought to you by Dow Chemical. Without whom this event would neither be possible, nor necessary. Co- sponsored by Mobil- Exxon. Spanning the globe to find new ways to teach fish to breathe oil.”

And you know who just drains me? Those big hotels shoving their laminated cardboard placards into our faces from the top of the bathroom sink with the sole design of instilling guilt. “We here at Acme Rest want to see the burrowing barn owl smile. So don’t make us wash your sheets. Oh sure, you can have new towels if you want. You’ll kill Bambi’s mom. Its up to you.” Hey, I just want new towels from the previous guy. Is that going to be a problem?

The naysayers? These people are exhausting. You’d think that since Obama had rescued the fair damsel Science from 8 long years of Executive dungeon darkness, that people would at least say nice things about her hair. You’d be wrong. “We don’t know what’s causing the greenhouse effect. You’re costing jobs.” As opposed to costing lives. Then the idiots keep lighting matches to see how high the pool of gasoline has risen. Hey! Your shoes are wet. What else you need to know?

Al Gore puts me to sleep and Prius drivers make me want to plotz. Not the Prius. The drivers. The EPA? I get drowsy just thinking about them. With their impenetrable lack of bark and bite and teeth and the same goes for the media who can’t even get worked up for one freaking day a year and yeah, that also means me. As I said, I hate Earth Day. But you know what? It sure as hell beats the alternative.

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And now Mister Smarty Pants Commander- in- Chief is talking about how any significant improvement is going to take time. “Don’t expect too much too soon.” Oh yeah, great. Change, but small change. Nickels and pennies and dimes. Maybe one of his advisors should remind him that his constituents are not an incremental people. Rather, we have the attention span of hickory ash in a wind tunnel. In the land of “too much is not enough,” tomorrow is too far into the future by at least two days.

This “baby steps” approach is definitely not what people had in mind last November. Pretty sure folks were thinking more along the lines of something wonderful right away. Snap some fingers. Wave some wands. Tall buildings being leapt in a single bound. The righteous smiting of foes. Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew, cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two? The President can. The President can, ‘cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good. And why did we think that? ‘Cause Obama done told me.

We should be waking up right now swimming in sunshine and rainbows and Mylar balloons. Instead; storm clouds all around, and its raining bailouts and bank failures and bedbugs. I’m not kidding. Bedbugs have made a comeback. In the USA. That’s a straight shot of third world right there my friends. I think I would have remembered hearing anything in his stump speeches about bedbugs. What’s next: cholera? Yellow fever? River blindness? Angelina Jolie adopting domestically?

How long are we supposed to wait before the President kisses boo- boo and makes everything all better? Another month? Five weeks? Five weeks and two days? I know. I know. I know. It took longer than sixty days to get us into this mess, it’ll probably take sixty more to get us out of it. But after his first sixty days, FDR had ended Prohibition, vanquished the Depression and was two thirds of the way into world peace, until that spoilsport Fuhrer came along.

Maybe the problem is geographic. After all the District of Columbia was built on a swamp. Kind of hard to hit the ground running when your landing ramp has the consistency of She Crab Soup. Not to mention all the potholes, rolls of red tape and barbed wire the opposition thoughtfully installed as welcoming gifts. Knowing this, I still don’t care. I just want better.. No, scratch that. I want best. And I want best right now. And as an American I’m perfectly within my rights to keep complaining, wee, wee, wee, all the way home. So I will.

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Go ahead. Guess who’s to blame? No, not the subprime mortgage brokers or Bernie Madoff and his ilk or those reverse Robin Hood hedgefund speculators throwing trillions of dollars worth of derivatives around like paper towels at a chili cheese dog eating competition. Nope. The dastardly bums that created the world wide financial crisis is… us. That’s right. You and me. And I hope we’re happy.

For making former Silicon Valley start up CFOs toil as Indian casino valets. For driving down the price of 2 year old Porsche Boxters to the level of a 96 Taurus with a blown head gasket. For forcing casseroles and meatloaf onto the menus of 3 star Michelin chefs. It’s all our fault. And how are we doing it? By not buying enough stuff. Damn us anyway. How dare we?

Who cares whether we’re employed or not? Don’t we realize we are the pistons that drive the free market engine? It’s our God- given patriotic duty to go out there and buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. We don’t do easy. We do compulsory.

Remember how good it felt to buy that brand new DVD we had no intention of ever watching? Aren’t you just itching to tear the shrink- wrap off of something with your teeth right now? Anybody can conspicuously consume when things are going well and money geysers from the ground like it did between the Bushes. It takes a true retail soldier to run up credit card bills when banks are raising interest rates so high, it would not be too far off the mark for them to utilize a dorsal fin as a logo.

I wouldn’t get this squishy if I wasn’t seeing pubescent girls get punched in the gut with our selfish frugality. Girl Scout Cookie sales have sunk to levels not seen since Jimmy Carter was scolding us while wearing cardigans. The Girl Scouts! Okay, that’s it. I don’t know which of you commie pinko yellow rat cretinous toads managed to hypnotize the rest of us into believing we’re so broke we can’t afford a couple of measly packages of Thin Mints, but you’ve gone too far. You fiend. How soon before we take out our parsimonious wrath on the innocent producers of Sham- Wow and Snuggie?

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you; open your wallets. Ask yourself, “what would Paris Hilton do?” It doesn’t matter what you buy. A Jonas Brothers lunch box. A $75 grass fed, hand massaged, Kobe beef porterhouse steak, bathed in boysenberry infused truffle butter. A 96 piece Limited Edition Pewter Napkin Ring Set in the shape of the characters from the Lord of the Rings. Ford. Besides, this isn’t about you and me people. This isn’t about America. This isn’t about Detroit. This is about the Girl Scouts.

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So, St. Barack made a big deal of reassuring the public that at least a modicum of accountability will exist on his watch by announcing a cap on executive salaries for the banks that want to be part of the government bailout. And the number of banks that are looking to be part of the government bailout is approximately… all of them. Times two.

In retrospect, it’s not difficult to figure out why all these trusted financial institutions went belly up. The people they got running those things have the same sense that god gave a beach pail full of green plastic Easter grass. Proved to be more self- centered than the backstage bathroom mirror at a Debutantes Ball in the Hamptons. Crazier than naked flagpole sitters in a blizzard.

They bought into their own Tom Wolfe “Masters of the Universe” BS. Mesmerized by the siren song of a little thing called unregulated greed, which ended up sucking them drier than a four- day dead possum on an interstate outside Tucson. Making them weep and keen and cry that it was up to us to bail them out or all hell was going to break loose, and we, like the large mouth suckers we are, snapped at the bait. Pulling muscles in our rear haunches rushing to give them palettes full of cash before our retirement accounts retired for good.

So what do they do with all our bailout money? Help out society and homeowners by fixing the sub- prime mess they created? What are you, nuts? They spent it on themselves. AIG arranged a little spa vacation at a Ritz- Carlton.. Citigroup tried to buy a $50 million corporate jet then put their name on a stadium. Wells Fargo planned a staff retreat in Vegas to “recognize team members by emphasizing their value to the company.” Recognize their value to the company? The company’s broke. You could recognize that value with a shovel, a six- foot hole and a pointy stick.

AND despite their worst year since Hoover, Wall Street passed around 18 billion dollars in bonuses. To the exact same idiots steering our grocery carts down the pet food aisle in the first place. Who will undoubtedly find loopholes the size of Saskatchewan in the President’s edicts, but, at this point, like the size of the Valentine, it’s the thought that counts. Even if only one guy gets his hands slapped, its ten more red knuckles than we’ve seen in 97 months.

What we’ve been experiencing is bank robbery in reverse. The perps didn’t even bother wearing masks. And triggered absolutely no silent alarms. The problem is, those security cameras in the lobby are pointing the wrong way. You should do what I do. Now, every time I make a deposit, I ask the teller for 2 pieces of identification. “Oh yeah, what’s your mother’s maiden name?”

**
Catch Durst in Tahoe Feb 10- 16. And Chicago Feb 19- 29. Okay. March 1st. Don’t get all persnickety.

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His fruity crusade began after being impeached by the Illinois Assembly on a vote of 114-1, leaving many to wonder: who the hell was the 1? His barber? No. Turns out it was his sister-in-law. After all, she’s got years of cranberries and stuffing to share with the guy. Then, in spite of delivering an impassioned yet loopy closing argument, the State Senate voted 59-0 to convict and booted Blago right off his gubernatorial perch into the long snaking lines of the newly unemployed.

Because of his inspirational theatrics, every former playbook for arrogant politicians accused of scandal and disgrace has to be thrown out the window.. So, if you ever find yourself caught dead to rights, here’s a revised list of the top 10 actions to take. The classics still apply. None of the following will work without being applied over a base of: deny, deny, deny. Remember this is about survival. Follow Master Blagojevich’s lead. Chances are he will make more from his book deal than he ever hoped to extort from his constituent victims.

10. Hold a press conference to read a poem. Stay away from the arty crowd like Verlaine, Rimbaud, or Sylvia Plath. Pick a heterosexual who didn’t commit suicide. Someone classy, like Kipling.
9. Remember who is the victim here. You are. Claim a vast left or right wing conspiracy. The more fantastic the presumed motivation, the better, such as: they had to get rid of you in order to raise taxes. Or they kicked you out because you knew too much.
8. Two words: The View.
7. During all media appearances, carry a Bible. If no one’s going to buy that, try Winston Churchill. A book by him. Not desiccated pieces of his mummified corpse.
6. Witch Hunt. Keep repeating the phrase: Witch Hunt. Which hunt? This hunt? That’s right. Witch Hunt. Occasionally throw in an “unconstitutional” as well, just to break it up.
5. Compare the effect on your family to a national disaster. Pearl Harbor. RFK’s assassination. The day CBS canceled Dallas.
4. Keep telling the press that you CAN’T WAIT to tell your side of the story. Then never ever ever get tricked into telling your side of the story.
3. Can never go wrong blaming lawyers. Fire one of your defense attorneys. “Though convinced of my innocence, he was terrified to offend the powers that be.”
2. Lump yourself in with other oppressed leaders like Ghandi. Nelson Mandela. Martin Luther King. Joseph Stalin. Hah. Last one was a test.
1. Finally, the number one reason you can’t quit is you don’t want to send the wrong message to your children. “This is not about me. This is about standing up for the kids. And the elderly.”

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