Sometimes I fear for my country...

...but then something comes along to remind me that there is always hope as long as our singers and storytellers still have a voice:

"Welcome back my friends / To the show that never ends.."

You might think that after a 10-month break I could do better for an opening line than a quote from Emerson, Lake & Palmer. But, "write what you know" and all that...

Anyhow, without further adieu I'm going to propose that we dive back into our usual topic, i.e. what's been amusing me lately. This week I'd have to go with: ranting tea-baggers who couldn't find a clue with a spotlight and a steamshovel. This bit in The Onion about a man "whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination" is so dead on the money that the laughter it generates comes out sounding distinctly queasy.

How to become permanently employed

Apparently the answer to my headline above is: become a pollster.

Or at least, that's the only reaction other than gales of laughter that I could come up with when I read the following headline this afternoon: "Poll: 2 out of 3 approve of Obama's job."

The article goes on to rather breathlessly note that President Obama's approval rating of 68 percent is "near the high end for new presidents, but short of President John F. Kennedy's 72 percent in 1961," though the numbers may be just a bit apples and oranges, since in 1961 the Gallup Poll waited an interminable three weeks (!) before asking the American people how the new guy was doing. None of that lollygagging in 2009, though. No, today our omnivorous mass media monster betrays no embarrassment whatsoever at trumpeting a poll measuring the job performance of someone who has been in office for THREE DAYS.

They used to call election years "silly season" -- these days, that seems to describe the American media machine 24/7/365.