What development projects deliver short-term relief to people and long-term economic structural change for sustained growth and should therefore be part of the upcoming economic stimulus package? The answer: projects determined and managed by the local communities they are intended to benefit.  

As the disaster of the Bush administration draws to an end, Dubya has begun offering the first attempts to whitewash the sordid darkness marking the past eight years.  In recent interviews, he's even attempted to offer himself as a kind of martyr, portraying himself as a sympathetic figure who took the high moral ground, sticking to his principals in spite of dreadfully low approval ratings.  We must not be sucked into that kind of historical revisionism.  The debacle of Dubya's administration-its callousness, its breath-taking greed, its insatiable hunger for power, its trampling of the Constitution-must never be whitewashed, never watered down.  No, this administration in all its dark folly must stand fully exposed as an example to future generations of how government can be perverted by a few individuals if voters don't maintain proper vigilance, if voters don't make the effort to know what the government is doing, if voters don't hold our representatives responsible for what they do in our name.

OPINION

 As heard on Cumberland's WCBC Radio, AM 1270, these are the columns of the Good Ship Dick, an American privateer newly self-commissioned to the forces of truth once more sailing the ocean blue under a banner of the same hue, and stripes of red, stars of white. Currently enjoying well-deserved R&R in a sun-splashed, rum-soaked Caribbean port of call, Captain awaits return to duty about two weeks after the inauguration, when Fox & Fiends blames it all on Obama. Which is total garbage, for as we all know...

"Mele Kalik-Obama is America's way, to say Merry Christmas to the world..."

Recorded 12-14-08

  While I can't take credit for transformation awaited lo these many years, I will celebrate as one who long championed it.

Not Barack Obama‘s election, but an American revolution of a different sort, bombillas borealis.

From little wire trees aglow, to icicle strands ablaze, an explosion of color decorates Mountain Maryland this Christmas season, the forces of white-light conformity in full retreat.

I do a good bit of driving through the southwestern provinces of Allegany County, and can testify to megawatts of holiday spirit from McCoole all the way up Georges Creek to the Mountain City. And while a ride through just about any part of Frederick County, and large swaths of Washington, would reveal houses bathed in nearly naught but suburban white, rainbow colors light the night in what natives like to call true Western Maryland.

Thus is Christmas uniquely American amongst these ancient Appalachian folds, a celebration not only of the Savior‘s birth, but the independence of spirit that birthed a nation.

And I'm not talking lights of red, white and blue, though the former and latter appear, together with yellow and orange. White lights in any proper display are confined to creche alone, purely for illumination.

Because we see white lights all the time, every waking hour of every day. At their most hideous, they are flourescent, rank upon row, cold light above a place no one wants to be. White lights. Up and down the street, blinding through the windshield, in the mirror and in your face.

White light is too much with us as it is, why give our days any more?

Bombillas borealis sings of that singular time of year, that one day, when the world is truly different. And the season leading up to it, sweetened with anticipation, smoothed with goodwill. Not a bad time of year to be alive.

It is a harbor in storm-tossed seas, this Christmas season, and a year like no other it will introduce.

If you thought 2008 was a ride, buckle up for 0-9.

If I had a year-end confession to make, of sin-prognosticate, it is that I misread gas-price speculation as engine of end times. They were a symptom, to be sure, of greed run amok till it runs us off the cliff, but the root cause of downfall, the height of offense to all us working schmucks, occurred on a far grander scale, an off-Broadway orgy of excess. Last Christmas, the top five investment houses that taxpayers just bailed out, gave themselves a collective $30 billion in bonuses.

Nine months later, Washington handed them $700 billion, while Detroit, and a million-plus blue-collar jobs, gets sent packing for want of 15.

It's enough to make a working man wonder what the Republican Party is all about.

As if we don't already know, as if we didn't already vote accordingly.

Bombillias borealis at the dawn of Barack Obama; light of many colors, declaration of independence, beacon to the nation, dream unto the generations.

Mele Kalik-Obama is America's way, to say Merry Christmas to the world...

What is going on with the economy?  It's very likely that John McCain lost the election
because of the sudden downturn of the economy, but was he really to blame?  Does
President-elect Obama have the answers?