No sour grapes, no bitterness whatsoever on my part since I didn't have a dime in the worthless dollar of either party. Simply commenting on what seems to be a rising tide of excessively effusive deference to and gushing over our President-elect. At the risk of using again a rather hackneyed expression, it is indeed deja vu all over again. I saw exactly this same sort of uncritical praise after the election of Kennedy in 1960.

No matter who wins the vote for the next squatter-in-charge, how many people will be saying that a week from tomorrow?

I thought that this article from a forum friend was worth posting here, even though I don't necessarily agree with Doc Carney's conclusion.

Is it intellectually dishonest to use a pseudonym when posting on the internet? The owner of this forum has suggested that it is, at least in one particular instance. Is it just the use of a pen-name in an internet forum that is somehow intellectually dishonest, or are such names equally tainted when used elsewhere?

Once again, the matter of military service - or lack of it - is being inserted into the terminally dull struggle between John McCain and Barack Obama to become the next despoiler-in-chief of what remains of the republic.

No, not the girl of that name in the dreamy song by Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael. No, not that southern state of midnight trains, rainy nights, lovelorn men and betrayed women in countless C&W ballads. I mean the real Georgia that could drag us into another face-off with Russia.

Religious affiliation still remains strongest among Republicans. According to this recent Pew report, secularism among the American public has grown to 12% - a 50% increase since 1987.

When George Washington retired from office in 1797, one of his warnings to the new nation was the necessity of avoiding foreign entanglements. Our young nation need not be dragged into the swirling riptide of European politics that so often pitted various alliances of England, France, Spain, Holland, Austria, Prussia, Russia against other combinations of the powers.

I've seen a lot posted here about what's wrong and what can be done about it, but very little in the way of how to go about it. And I plead guilty to bring one of those who complains but does not propose any specific action(s) to help recover some small piece of our nearly-eroded liberties. But I realize now that I have in some small way been doing that for many years.

We have been in Iraq for more than five years. More than four thousand of our sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters have died for that cause. More than a trillion dollars of our national treasure - most of it borrowed - have been spent there that could have been better spent elsewhere or not spent at all.

And for what?

The nation must finally be over its near-pathological obsession with the various mediocre offspring of a shamelessly self-anointed and self-promoting "royal family."

My friends and fellow Americans, I am speaking to you this evening to announce my decision on how to deal with the security of our nation's borders, especially with respect to the border with Mexico.

If you think that we lost the Iraq "war", you are mistaken. That is because you are making the error of assuming that the Iraq "war" is seamless, a monolithic construct. The simple fact is that there are three wars or, if you want to be persnickety about it, three distinct, cleanly separable and easily identifiable phases to the "war".

In light of the latest scandal involving a public official – the high-dollar call-girl assignations of New York’s Governor Spitzer – and only the most recent of a long, dreary list of infractions by high-ranking political figures, perhaps it is time that we, the public at large who bear the responsibility for having put these officials into power, should look at how a no-nonsense Prussian king dealt with those who abused the trust placed in them.

For the most part war is the prime example of the illogical and perverse in human conduct. Very few wars are really called for and those that do have to happen can never be anything more than grim necessities, devoid of nobility and glory, devoid of all of the foolish facade of nonsense that jingoistic fools attach to it.