Why is it I think the Republicans will give up on the "permanent" issue and the Democrats will then go along for the whole thing at which point everyone will extend the unemployment benefits and all claim victory?

Uh, maybe because he is the only one of all of them to actually have served in the military? Whether he is right or wrong, could it be that he has had experiences they have never had? Perhaps his "cloakroom buddy" isn’t gay?

So why don’t male and female service people all live and shower together? Why do we read periodic newspaper stories about the how and why of female sportswriters being denied access to the dressing rooms of male jocks? When Maureen goes to bed with someone, doesn’t she employ any standard of sexual discrimination? All are equal? Why do we have women’s basketball teams and men’s basketball teams? For that matter, why are public restrooms segregated by sex? Does Maureen expect to find men in her bathroom at the NYTimes building? Would she feel the same level of comfort showering with a newly arrived male colleague as she would with a newly arrived female colleague? (If she wouldn’t feel comfortable showering with either one, what does that tell us about discrimination? If you discriminate against more than one group it cancels out? The right to privacy supersedes sexual discrimination...unless you are in the military?)

Certainly the answers are obvious: of COURSE we make certain discriminations based upon sexual orientation. We do it all the time. It’s normal, it’s human...well, for that matter, even animals know the differences involved.

The question isn’t about whether or not gays should serve any more than it is about whether women should serve in the military, it’s about the degree of physical proximity and intimacy which should be forced upon people who prefer not to find themselves the subject of unwanted sexual invasion of privacy.

Even clothed. Why do big-breasted women complain that they don’t like the way men sometimes look at them? What’s funny about a t-shirt with an up-arrow on the woman’s breasts saying "my face is up here"? If sexual harassment can consist of a woman simply being looked at the ‘wrong’ way by a straight male, why isn’t the same thing true for straight men being looked at by gay men? The idea would appear to be that it isn’t possible to sexually harass males, especially straight males...and what kind of discrimination is that?

If you truly aren’t going to discriminate in any way on the basis of sexual orientation then straight men and women plus gays and lesbians should all serve in the military under exactly the same circumstances with respect to one another. Anything else is discriminatory.

We need to find some compromise. I’ll bet the issue would be reduced for straight men if they got to shower with straight women and even physically attractive lesbians, figuring the trade-off would be worth it, but maybe that’s just me.

Unless Obama is a more-common name than I thought, this would apparently be the same President Obama who received his minority Republican captors in 2008 with more like a slug in the chops than a slap.

"I won!" he told them bluntly. No "see you around in a couple of weeks" or anything like that for him. He had no intention of showing Republicans any kind of good side. I won and you did not, end of conversation. The Republicans took him at his word.

This year, not all that long before offering to let his Republican captors come to meet with him, he told the press that Republicans were going to be allowed to come along on his ride, but they’d have to sit in the back of his new bus.

Yeah, he sure humbled himself, didn’t he?

Which might indicate the nature of the problem that he and Frank Rich share. Namely, both of them are so unaware of their own unconscious arrogance that they think that everything that they do towards Republicans besides actually spitting in their eye constitutes gracious hospitality. I mean, who wouldn’t accept a seat in the back with a heartfelt "thanks, massa!" happy to just be allowed to ride with the other folks? What was the matter with Ms Parks, anyhow, that she couldn’t see that?

If you foolishly thought this was the kind of action that a responsible president should have taken for the good of his fellow American citizens then you would be wrong. It was a gift intended solely for his Republican captors. And being not for the American people, but purely as a gift to Republicans, they should have been more appreciative of how far down he stooped to bestow it.

Amusingly, even Rich admits that Obama was making a worthless offer, as he complains:

And yet he still thinks it was a gift for Republicans which they should have fallen all over themselves accepting gratefully because, well, they have little intellectual sense?

And we all know that money should be spent as fast as people get their hands on it, none should be saved for their own rainy days let along turned into capital that the banks could, ah, loan to people who want business loans to expand and hire, foolish things like that.

I guess Frank Rich didn’t read the guy I quoted the other day, the one who told us that the recovery would begin and unemployment be cut 2% if the tax-cut money was spent on 3 million $30,000 a year jobs. Now Mr Rich tells us $75,000 a year salaries should not be frozen in order to help do that.

No, Mr Rich complains, all Obama did was...

And an intellectually meaningless olive branch at that. What really hurts is that the tiny olive branch extended turned out to be such an effective stick...but wielded by his own Democrats! Mr Rich, right here, does a pretty good job of telling us how little it really meant and how bad an idea it was...Republicans don’t even have to open their mouths, merely hold up the pages of this column.

Oops. Since the Republicans chose to sit out the health care issue, the "party of no" actually being the party of "no, I’m not taking responsibility for this fiasco," Rich is now forced to blame the "corporate players" instead. Saying "corporate players" is a lot like saying "George Bush"...people are supposed to reflexively recoil when those words are heard.

Mr Obama did not negotiate with the Chamber of Commerce until after his two-year war on "corporate players" who were members of the Chamber had resulted in the biggest demise of Democrats in the House of Representatives in living memory. Still, as Obama pointed out, HE didn’t lose, THEY did.

And I knew he was one of us, and a supporter of law enforcement, when I saw him proudly lift his stein and knock that baby back rather than sip it like a fine white wine. Transparent it indeed was. The YouTube video of Obama nonchalantly striding ahead down the steps while the cop solicitously assisted the handicapped professor down the steps behind him was particularly illuminating. If you recall, the cop got in trouble in the first place because he thought he was helping prevent the professor’s home from being burglarized, the only reason he was there to begin with.

Wait, though, Rich gets even funnier:

But that’s his entire life story in a nutshell. Not only across the political spectrum but all across America, no one knows who he is. You can count on the fingers of one hand the things about Obama that you know absolutely for sure and in as much detail as you’d hope to know about your daughter’s first date. Where are you from, son, and what do your folks do for a living, and how are your grades in school?

As for Obama, didn’t he spend time as a senator in Illinois? Can’t we discern from his votes there what kind of politician he is? Okay, during President Bush’s last two years in office Senator Obama was among the majority Democrats who opposed everything Bush did...doesn’t that contain any clue? Yes, I know, Republicans are not supposed to behave that way toward Obama today, it’s too partisan, but what about then? How did he vote on those issues?

Mr Rich says that his years in both senates plus two years as president have left Obama, ah, indistinct. No one knows who he is.

And Mr Rich is not exactly your poster-child right-wing conservative.

Look, let’s throw away all conspiracy theories, all of the socialist talk, all of the racist business, all of the partisan anti-Obama rhetoric and try to take as plain a view of the facts as we can, okay? Let’s be fair and take two voices which are both very liberal and very Democrat...Mr Rich and Hillary...and skip what Obama’s detractors say about him.

Obama is simply an ineffective president because he has no previous experience at being any kind of executive, chief or otherwise, and he has no track record in school or anywhere else to give us any confidence in the belief that he will somehow miraculously succeed in the on-the-job training program Hillary warned about.

Mr Rich doesn’t know who Obama is because Obama’s background has been almost completely obscured, whether by accident or intent makes no difference in the end with respect to what we know. Indistinct? If it were not for his own two autobiographies, of a certainty impartial, what other sources could we turn to in order to learn enough to bring him into stronger focus?

The fact that Frank Rich cites Obama’s "beer summit" as the only example of his transparency which did no damage to the public interest should be reason enough for worry.

Yes, somehow we smoothly segued between the total amount of the Bush-era tax cuts and only those "profligate" tax cuts for "the wealthiest" as if they were one and the same. I noticed. Did you notice that the Democrats now represent the wealthiest people in the country and the Republicans no longer hold that distinction? No? Hmmm...do you think that might explain why they haven’t been as eager as Mr Rich expects them to be in raising those taxes?

Occam’s Razor says look for the simplest explanation. If Obama did not pound home the case when Democrats held the Senate, what would be the simplest explanation for why not?

Mr Buffett, a man who very profitably employs those assets NOT taxed away by the government does not pay one penny more in taxes than he absolutely is forced to do. Mr Buffett knows full well, because this is what he does for a living, that the rich make money not by spending it so it will trickle down but by investing it so it will build up. You don’t make GM healthy by buying a Chevrolet from them, you make GM healthy by making enough investment capital available to them so that they can employ enough people to build enough Chevrolets to sell to a lot of people.

Poor people don’t have that investment capital available. Neither do the banks...unless the wealthiest banked their excess rather than spending it.

You have to admit it’s kind of funny watching that ball being batted back and forth every few years. One year Americans are in trouble, we’re told, because they don’t save enough and therefore there’s a capital shortage. The next year the wealthy don’t spend enough, they’re putting their money in the bank, instead.

American businesses seem to be sitting on quite a lot of cash these days. They don’t seem to be in a hurry to spend it because four years of Democrat control of both houses of congress, the last two including the presidency, have left them uncertain as to what their future obligations are going to be, particularly with respect to health care and taxes. Nor do they know what the new congress will do yet.

But that’s a lot of cash sitting there, depreciating and earning a low rate of interest, and Warren Buffett, no matter what he tells television shows, is positioning himself and his investors to take maximum advantage of the upturn when it comes.

If it comes in time, one of the grateful beneficiaries will be Barack Obama. Don’t be surprised if after he appears to argue heroically against tax cuts for the wealthy that he eventually very reluctantly gives in.

Imagine what leverage we would have if the Saudis told us, in return, that they understood very damn well that when the time came that we no longer needed their oil we’d drop them like a hot potato and walk away? As a result, they would say, they didn’t feel one damn bit more loyalty to us than we did to them, and since they knew we were untrustworthy, supporting them only out of our own need, not because we were truly friends and allies, they decided to cut a long-term deal with China now rather than dick around with us until such time as we found it convenient to abandon them.

Osama bin Laden, a man they remember well, said that he expected to win the war in Iraq because America, when push came to shove, would abandon those allies the same way that they did the South Vietnamese. And, oh yes, we most certainly did do that. We signed a three-way peace agreement (Kerry and Fonda were present but did not sign) which promised that We’d Be Back if North Vietnam acted up again, you can count on us, we said...but it turned out that they could not.

We offered one high-ranking South Vietnamese escape on one of our last helicopters out, you remember those famous shots of poor allies hanging off of the helicopter skids for dear life, but he refused, saying he’d rather die with honor than flee with people like us. Oh, yeah, we most certainly lost the war in Vietnam, all right. We lost when we failed to honor our word.

If we wanted to make deadly enemies out of the Saudis overnight we could start by making the technological "green" discovery or invention which would make us totally independent of imported oil. No, I’m wrong, that would only make them hate us more than they do now. No, if we wanted them to become mortal enemies we’d share our discovery/invention with the whole world.

The last thing the Saudis want is to go back to being only goatherds and camel drivers. They may from time to time scream about our stealing their oil, but the last thing they want is for us to ever say thanks, we don’t need to buy any more of it.

And the more that we invest in alternate-energy sources, the closer the Saudis know that day will be...just like Tom Friedman does.

Tom thinks he has discovered a negotiating tool. King Saudi, we will protect you from Iran and buy $28 billion a month of your oil even if we don’t need it, but only if you behave, so play the game our way or else we will quit buying. Come on, what the hell kind of bluff is that? How stupid would they have to be to believe we would buy their oil just in order to be nice?

Oops...here’s another guy who suddenly seems to think that the millionaires who put their tax breaks into savings accounts are actually doing some good!

Tell me something...would you rather owe China $900 billion they wanted to eventually collect and thus needed to keep you healthy in order to do so, or would you rather have China owe YOU $900 billion you needed some way to get back somehow if they told you to go piss up a rope?

One thing the banks learned the hard way when the borrower defaulted on a loan which was made for far too much money on a house far too overvalued...foreclosure at a huge loss gained you a house you had to maintain in order to keep from it losing even more value, but didn’t help a bit in getting your money back.

Even in good times lenders did not make money on foreclosures, because if the house was worth more than the loan balance the owner would sell it, instead, and pocket the difference.

Make no mistake...China buys treasury debt because it considers doing so to be good for China, not to benefit the United States, and they’ll stop doing so the instant they no longer feel that way. The US, likewise, will stop buying K-Mart stuff from China at the same time and for the same reasons.

Which brings to mind yet another way to make the rest of the world hate us. Balance the budget, better yet run a surplus, and issue no more t-bills and t-bonds to anyone. Oh, yeah, millions of investors will love that.

If you can’t wait to finish that, see you next time when you get back.