The threat of the Democrats loosing the majority in the Senate (again) is not so much the loss of opportunities to push thru a Democratic agenda -- that wasn't happening even with a supermajority of 60 because Obama felt the urge to fellate John Boehner instead of moving ahead with righting the wrongs from the Bush era. It certainly isn't happening with "only" a 9 seat majority, because you can easily write off at least nine of those Dems as sufficiently treasonous to the principles of the Democratic Party platform that they'd rather retire than get things done (viz. Evan Bayh retiring to spend more time with the millions that await him in his future life as a lobbyist for the same companies to which he catered as a cash-and-carry politician).

No, the threat is that even with the thinnest majority the GOP will be able to push thru their neanderthal agenda -- they have the ironclad party discipline to kick ass when given the chance, and on the few occasions when that fails them they can always count of a Lieberman or a Ben Nelson to screw the pooch and vote with the waterboarders in Congress...

So, no the dismay is not over all the good that could have been done -- that was never going to happen while Harry Reid drove his busful of misfits and miscreants around the countryside like some drunk frat boy on a joy ride, while Obama just watched like a traffic cop on 'ludes -- it's over the harm that is about to be done.

Joe Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe The Plumber" is going all napalm on his mentor and former sugar-daddy, John McCain.

"I don't owe him shit," Wurzelbacher told the Detrow. "He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it."

Yes, Joe, because before all of your pseudo-fame and celebrity you were having the time of your life. How could anyone not want to be an unlicensed plumber in Ohio owing back taxes? That's like, teh shizzle. Damn that McCain for enabling you to zip around and charge a feee for your public endorsement of random politicians for a living.

Oh, but here's a thought: So, you've pissed on ol' Cranky McCain and you've just told Sarah Palin she is teh suck, too. Bully for you. But you may want to ease off a bit, brother, or you might find yourself back in Ohio with the "I Do Pipes" sandwich board begging for $15-an-hour HVAC jobs before you know it. Those tea baggers are a finicky bunch with itchy trigger fingers, and just like in Stalin's days of fake revolutions of the people, they tend to eat their own.

(Cool card from here)

Senator Chris Buttars (R - Ignoramus) from Utah has thought long and hard... well, okay, no, he probably pulled this one out of his ass, but all the same, he's suggesting that the solution to a budget crunch is to shorten high school by a year. Way to go, Chris: there really was nothing else you could think of chopping from the budget but a full year of education for our already woefully underprepared kids, huh? That's real special kind of stupid right there. Maybe you should go back to school, Chris...

Mother Nature is a bitch. After she repeatedly insisted on dumping all of OUR snow in DC, where they don't want it and don't know what to do with it, things are getting pretty desperate up here in Northern New England. Cross country skiing has largely dried up; most of the trails are now sorry excuses for half-frozen ruts with leftover slush and ice. So, what to do? Well, if life gives you lemons and all that... enter: lemonade.

A good friend recently lent me his 29'er Kona full suspension bike mounted with a pair of Nokian Gazza Extremed 294 studded tires. I took that toy on a couple of laps on a local trail that I know well, and I was completely sold. Now that I've returned that schweet ride with the sexy rubbers, I realized that I had to get myself a pair of studded tires for my Felt 29'er Solo singlespeed. With the Nokians sold out pretty much everywhere (or ludicrously overpriced -- like, >$100, which is what I'd expect to pay for studded tires for my Volvo, thankyouverymuch) I had opportunity to shop around and learn more. 

I could do my pseudo-scientific review of tires here, but I'll leave it to to the pros. Peter White Cycling has a great rundown of everything that moves and shakes in the snow tire market, and can deliver pretty much any tire you could possibly want or need for your winter fun. Biketiresdirecxt.com have quite a selection, too -- but most of the mainstream shops sell out of the kinky winter stuff early in the season and are now back-ordering until the start of the 2010/11 season. Basically it all boils down to this:

If you're on a 29'er, there are a limited number of dedicated MTB tires from which to chose, but since you can fit 700C tires from road and cross bikes as well, the market opens up wider. The question really becomes: what are you planning on doing? If you have a hankering to ride that lovely bit of singletrack that makes you smile in the summer, then you'll need something with real bite, like the Nokian Gazza's or the Schwalbe Ice Spiker tires. If you're commuting to work and you're mostly on paved stuff that can get dodgy with ice, then you want lower rolling resistance, and there's a whole slew of nifty tires avaialble to you.

Quality vs. price. Close to $200 for a set of winter tires can be a bit steep if you're just looking to screw around. There are other options out there -- Nashbar used to make a 29'er tire, but since a) the whole Nashbar/Performance universe is largely teh suck these days, and b) they seem to no longer sell that version, we'll ignore it. Innova is the cheap-o option, and may do fine if you just want to try this out. It really comes down to studliness. No, I'm not talking about your testosterone level, I'm talking about the quality of the studs in your tire. Carbide is the gold standard -- tough, hard metal that will stay sharp and pokey thru continued use. Anything else is really just for show and will wear down pretty fast, particularly if you run the tires on pavement. Do check out Mr. Ice Bike's very scientific review of stud quality.

Once you have your tires, go ride! To learn more about the fun that can be had in the distinctly off-season season, check out IceBike (hasn't been updated in forever; maybe he's stuck in the snow somewhere) and start fantasizing about some of the more epic fun you could have, like this, or this, or even just a quick trip to Burke, VT to ride the epic Kingdom Trails. And of you decide you really want one of these, then you're more of a kick-ass rider than I'll ever be, and you should be writing this entry...

So, after pissing away his mandate, momentum and almost a full year on his bi-partisan pipedream and his insistance on letting the wankers in his party call all the shots, Barack Obama now suddenly announces that he does have a plan for health insurance reform after all... well bully for him. Odd, though, that he feels the need to step forward with one, given how the Senate plan according to his own statements gave him nintetyfive percent of what he wanted anyway... oh, I forgot: his other cunning plan was to allow his party to lose Ted Kennedy's senate seat (and with it that supposedly necessary 60 seat majority) to a naked Republican whose primary selling point was a red pick-up truck. Smashing plan, that.

I'm sure this new twist will go over well with the players he's inviting to his little confab, particularly the GOP representatives, who must be wetting themselves with delight at the thought of stonewalling some more while pretending to negotiate this one. If they play their cards right, they should have no problem running down the clock until 2012 when they can run their own candidate on a platform based entirely on the fucked-uppedness of the Democrats.

Also. While I find Eric Cantor to be one of the most repugnant characters on the national stage (and the competition for that honor is quite steep), he sometimes delivers a zinger. Case in poiint, in response to Obama's spokesman lamely blaming "the process" for failing to deliver on health care reform, Cantor counters:

Quick question for the Administration: Who controls the process?

CHEAT SHEET: Government 101 in 10 seconds or less:
The White House: President Barack Obama (Democrat)
The U.S. House of Representatives: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat)
The U.S. Senate: Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat)

Touché. Obama and the Democrats own this ugly baby. They could have ignored the Republicans completely, they could have come out fighting with an agenda built on genuine progressive positions with which to bargain, but insisted -- foolishly, naively -- to bring the GOP into "the process." Much more detrimental, however, was the refusal of Obama and his wizard advisors to actually push for results that mattered, handing the whole thing over to supreme wankers like Nelson and Baucus whose motives and interests were as far removed from "delivering on health care reform" as you can get. So, spokesman Gibbs, if the process failed to deliver it was only because your boss allowed a process to be set up that was destined to fail.

Mcjoan over at DailyKos takes that one on, and closes with a very hopeful statement:

Decisive, bold, action now can and will break through the "process" Gibbs laments, and show America that Dems can govern.

Riiight. And boldly soaring out over the horizon is all it would take for pigs to show us all that they can fly.