Top Ten Things To Do In A Blackout

A list:: of things to do

• 10. Have a barbecue on the ghetto porch, AKA the fire escape. Try not to fry your upstairs neighbor's petunias.


• 9. Open a hydrant. Run through the spray until the cops come


• 8. Eat the ice cream in the back of the freezer. It's going to melt anyway.


• 7. Ditto on the beer. It's getting warm.


• 6. Go outside and start a roller skate circle in the intersection. Traffic's not moving anyway.


• 5. Buy candles. Lots. Stage a scene from "Interview with a Vampire" over dinner.


• 4. Or get glowsticks. Hold a mini-rave on the corner, providing your boombox has batteries.


• 3. Replace your sonic electric toothbrush with the old-fashioned hand-crank kind.


• 2. Fold and tape sheets of lined notebook paper into fans. Stand out on the street selling them for a dollar.


• 1. Call your Congressperson and ask her/him to fund sustainable energy research – after the electricity comes back on, that is.
  

By Farai Chideya,

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The Democrats' laboratory: The host organism dies



IN JUNE 2002, the liberal American Prospect magazine was hailing California as a "laboratory" for Democratic policies. With "its Democratic governor, U.S. senators, state legislature and congressional delegation," author Harold Meyerson gushed, "California is the only one of the nation's 10 largest states that is uniformly under Democratic control." In the Golden State, Meyerson said, "the next New Deal is in tryouts." (Can't you just feel the tension building?)

Just a few years before that, the impresario of this adventure in Democratic governance, Gov. Gray Davis, was being touted as presidential material – which wasn't nearly as insulting a thing to say to a politician back then as it is now. Analyst Charles Cook said Davis was "a major player in the Democratic Party," with qualities that would "serve him well should Davis try to test his national ambitions." Davis' fellow Democratic governor, Gary Locke of Washington, called Davis "truly the rising star among governors across America, and among Democrats he's so highly respected as one of the new breed of moderate, centrist Democrats." The only Davis adjective he left out was "money-grubbing."




Ann Coulter

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