Sorry, guys. Too many obligations collided this morning for much blogging. So until I can break free, here’s something y’all might enjoy: America’s elites have a duty to the rest of us.

Discuss. I’ll be back later.

I guess you guys are all waiting for a new entry, so we can start the day’s comment-thread conversation. I don’t have a lot to say at the moment, having spent the last 10 minutes watch the cardinals eat safflower seeds at the feeder. Last winter, they were timid, and would let the sparrows’ superior numbers push them away. Now, they fight back; a particular female has been eating casually for a few minutes now, making threat displays to any finch or sparrow who dares to land on the platform with her. Alan thinks they’ve learned; I think it has more to do with mating season, and the need to hoard scarce food resources.

And you might think: This is so boring I may die. Sorry. An erratic sleep cycle was further disrupted by the need to rise at oh-dark-forty and pack Kate off on a two-day class trip to Our Nation’s Capital ™. The bus pulled out at 5 a.m., bound for Detroit Metro and a 7 a.m. flight to Baltimore. This is an eighth-grade tradition at her middle school, although only about 50 kids are going. I have to assume cost is the reason; even in an affluent district, $700 for a whirlwind speed-tour of monuments might be a pinch to many pockets. We committed and made payments over several months; we don’t travel enough as a family, and like Sinclair Lewis, I believe travel is so broadening. For a kid, travel made apart from parents is even more so. I am reminded of Anthony Soprano Jr., returning from a similar trip, and reporting his most overwhelming impression: “They had PlayStation 2 right in the hotel room.”

Early on, I hoped to go as a chaperone, but it is a parent-free trip — only teachers. Anyway, I couldn’t keep up with the pace, and there doesn’t look to be a spare five minutes in the schedule to, say, meet with your many internet correspondents and have a drink. Although I would have happily scratched the Newseum visit for that.

So for now, I’m just happy they are going ahead of the shutdown.

Let’s jump to the bloggage. Disrupted sleep or no, I still have work to do.

I’ve mentioned here before that Michigan has a form of Vouchers Lite in its public schools. Not 100 percent school choice, but districts are able to vote themselves open to students who live outside their boundaries, and those kids bring their per-pupil state funding with them. (Our district isn’t one of them; if it were possible to put walls and moats around it, I’m sure the residents would happily build them.) One of the things this leads to is marketing by districts, who try to catch the favor of the invisible hand with radio and TV ads touting their advantages. And in one case, it’s looking as though it led to $400,000 disappearing down a rathole in an already desperately poor district that watched its enrollment fall by 50 percent over the time it was paying a company to attract students. Nice investigative work by the Freep there.

I was never a Glenn Beck viewer, so I always heard accounts of his lunacy thirdhand. Dana Milbank explains how utterly off the rails he’s gone in recent months, including two weeks ago…

…when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what his happening in our world today.”

These guys were prevalent when I was doing talk radio in the early ’90s in crazy, right-wing Fort Wayne. Until I sat behind a microphone, I had never heard of this stuff. At the time, they struck me as antiques, like those Japanese sailors who crouched in Pacific island caves for years and hadn’t heard the war was over. Guess not.

Lance Mannion finds a new metaphor for Paul Ryan’s budgetary technique.

Off to work.

The day we’ve all been waiting for has arrived: “Sex and the City 2” is now on HBO, and lo, I watched it the other night. I wanted it to be so-bad-it-was-good, but alas. It was merely so-bad-it-was-excruciating. The only good to come out of it may be that it finishes off the series for good, although you never know. The entire production cost looks to have been covered with ham-fisted product placement — did you get a shot of that Rolex? can we get the tech specs for the Maybach in the script somewhere? — and for all I know, it may well have been a big hit among the sort of women who are not you.

I’m thinking of it today because one of my students came by to visit for a while yesterday, a Muslim woman. If you haven’t heard, the main part of the action takes place in Abu Dhabi, to which the quartet jets off as part of a deal Samantha makes with an Arab movie producer. (Samantha’s one-woman PR firm now occupies a glass-fronted office overlooking Times Square, at a fairly low level, too, like the studios for Nickelodeon. I figured this is so she can occasionally get up and press her bare breasts to the window for the tourists, but no, instead we see her sitting at her desk, panties around her knees, applying the various hormonal creams she needs to hold menopause at bay. WIth her back to the window! This makes no sense.)

Anyway, once the gals are in the UAE, a certain number of script pages are devoted to their discussions about Islamic standards of modesty, of which they disapprove. It all comes to a head in one truly appalling scene where hot-flashin’ Samantha (they confiscated her hormones at the airport so they could set this all up) is surrounded by Arab men in a public market who disapprove of her outfit. I wondered why they waited until this one to object, as I’d nearly gouged my eyes out over several others, one of which could literally do the job (No. 2). She responds by pelting them with condoms, until the girls are saved by some veiled and covered women, who drag them into a safe room, strip off their black abayas and reveal outfits every bit as awful as our heroines’.

Then — then! — there is a question of how our girls will escape from the market, still in an uproar over Samantha’s condoms. They actually say this: But how will we get out? I actually said, “Three, two, one,” and as I got to “one” the shot changed:

EXT: THE MARKET, DAY.

A female head emerges from a doorway, covered in BLACK SCARF and VEIL. She turns to look toward the camera, and we see BLUE EYES. She is joined by three others as they look up and down the street. The coast is clear, and they cautiously emerge.

It’s never explained how the Arabic women they borrowed the abayas from got home that day. Perhaps they were stoned to death for those outfits. I was certainly tempted.

And you know what? This wasn’t even the worst scene in the movie. Not by a long shot. I’d nominate the nightclub scene, where the girls sing, “I am Woman” while the Arabic belly-dancers look on with pride and approval, a scene that made me bury my face in a pillow.

The title of the post today is a tribute to my brother-in-law, who christened the series “the ‘ho show” when it was still on HBO, and still somewhat watchable. He also calls Sarah Jessica Parker “Miss Nelsonville” for her family’s brief residency in that Appalachian Ohio town, on their way to Broadway and SJP’s fateful part in “Annie.” You have to have driven through Nelsonville to fully get it, but there’s one scene where we see Carrie putting on her makeup in closeup, and that’s all I could think: She really is Miss Nelsonville.

I can’t believe Salman Rushdie got fatwa’d for “The Satanic Verses,” and every single person who enabled this thing walks free today, with no apparent fear of car bombs and scimitar attacks.

With that bad taste in our mouths, let’s skip to the bloggage:

Paul Ryan’s budget proposal: Splutter, splutter.

Someone needs a heapin’ helpin’ of GET OVER YOURSELF.

Coozledad’s next project: Teach Llewd to jump like Lola Luna. I’m pleased to offer this link in keeping with our theme today (it’s from Al Jazeera):

I’m out. A great hump day to all. And no, don’t do it like Samantha.

I was taking out the trash early this morning when my neighbor, who works for Autoweek and frequently brings home a test model for a day or three, left his driveway in a red Chevy Volt. The only sound it made was the whisper of the tires on the pavement (and the slight scrape of the front fairing, just a smidge too low to go out a driveway headfirst without touching). Price of gas today: $3.89.

I wonder where he plugged it in overnight. (I’ll take “the garage” for $200, Alex.)

Mercy, it was a rough night. Didn’t sleep much at all, and I don’t know why, as I am most definitely not one of the “sleepless elite,” the tiny slice of the population that legitimately needs little shuteye to make it through a day. So seeing as how my brain is failing, l think we need to make this a popcorn-y, snack food-y sort of entry today, and you can take it from there:

I am falling behind on my royal-watching. Monaco is getting a new princess? And she’s a South African blonde giantess with shoulders that make Michelle Obama look like Wally Cox? A former Olympic backstroker? And she’s marrying this bald 52-year-old dweeb who already has two out-of-wedlock children? For the sake of the world’s gossip consumers, I hope they have one of those very modern marriages, where it turns out she’s a lesbian, or, even more shocking, a great lady who can bring a bit of class to that palace full of commoners. How many kids has Stephanie produced by how many bodyguards? Caroline is on her third marriage, her second to the kind of guy who cheats in view of paparazzi? A giantess can only improve the line, although lord knows they’ve had enough new-blood infusions to last a while.

My inbox has filled in recent days with ham-handed phishing attempts. Please send your account number and log-in to this address as soon as possible, your account has been breached! Help I am stranded in a hotel in London, and I am sending this poorly spelled email to everyone in my inbox in hopes they will wire me sums of cash! I assume this is why.

Speaking of blood-will-tell, getta loada the Judds these days. As Tom & Lorenzo say, “Sweet Jesus on a breadstick. We’re speechless.” Plus a lot more.

Time to make some eggs and plan for the tatters of a day.

With apologies to Linda, who is using her hydroponic greenhouse for salad greens, I have to establish ground rules for any discussion of the medical-marijuana issue. It’s pretty simple: I will happily concede that marijuana has a role to play in the health care of many people who either are not helped by conventional pharmaceuticals, or don’t wish to take them. In return, I only ask that they stop pretending legalized medical marijuana isn’t the best thing to happen to recreational pot smokers since the invention of Zig-Zags.

Not so much to ask. And yet, here is medical marijuana, happily taking root in Michigan, and to listen to one side, you’d think the entire state is filled with chemo patients, or MS sufferers, or victims of AIDS-related wasting, or some other affliction that can only be helped by Nurse Mary Jane. And the other side says it’s all about potheads who are claiming “anxiety,” “insomnia,” “excessive whiteness of the eyes” or whatever else they can come up with, to Drs. Feelgood all over the state who will happily write “prescriptions” for a drug whose strength and efficacy — even the dosage — is either a big question mark, or left up to the user.

Before I get Prospero all up in my grill, I hasten to add I have no particular problem with pot smoking, as long as a) it’s not done by my husband or child; and b) it’s done in a place where it won’t affect my own personal safety — which is to say, not behind the wheel. I have no interest in it personally, having reached a point where I most often cut myself off alcohol after two. The way I look at it, the world is already full of attractive substances that will make me dumber, from Facebook to poorly executed LOLcats. I don’t need any more.

I should add this: De facto legalization seems to have made the air a little more herb-scented. In my unscientific observations, I see pot appearing more often in the police reports I see, smell it more often on the street. Some guy was smoking a blunt in the butcher shops at Eastern Market this weekend. Just standing there, self-medicating in front of dozens of people, no effort to conceal it at all.

Two “dispensaries” have opened in our neck of the woods in the last couple of weeks, both on the Detroit side of our border. This is the story behind one of them. I guess Big Daddy got what he needed from medical marijuana. (Although I’m puzzled by the math in the story. It says a work injury and subsequent convalescence pushed Big Daddy from 300 to 600 pounds, and that treating himself with marijuana allowed him to shed 250, which means he’s still 350 pounds. Well, munchies can be a pow’ful thing.)

For what it’s worth, I’ll be surprised if it’s still legal in 10 years. It’s possible the legislature will tune up the law to everyone’s satisfaction, but I doubt it. Bigger fish to fry, etc.

Why the New York Times is worth whatever they’re charging; A.O. Scott on Charlie Sheen’s Detroit show:

You could say that Mr. Sheen and the audience failed each other. The ticket buyers did not show him the “love and gratitude” to which he felt entitled, and he did not give them the kind of entertainment they thought they had paid for. But you could also say that the performer and the audience deserved each other, and that their mutual contempt was its own kind of bond. The ushers, in their black gold-braided uniforms, retained an air of inscrutable dignity in the midst of an orgy of depthless vulgarity. Everyone else in the room — onstage, backstage, in the $69 orchestra seats — had to swallow a gag-inducing, self-administered dose of shame. And no, the journalists who traveled to Detroit to gawk and philosophize at the spectacle are not exempt from that judgment.

What is this horrible man, Clarence Thomas, doing on our Supreme Court?

Via LGM, a little wit from Krugman.

Finally, a tax-season cautionary tale of stupidity: Don’t be as dumb as this TV anchor, who thought, because she was on the teevee and everybody else did it, that she could deduct the cost of all her work clothes, as well as her contact lenses, teeth whitening, manicures, hairdressing, and thong underwear.

Monday commences now. Have a good one, all.

If it’s Thursday, I must be a) sleep-deprived; b) cranky; and c) feeling the swamp-gas breath of the Reaper, thanks to the New York Times Thursday Styles section.

I know some of you can no longer access the copy, so allow me to describe. Today’s cover story starts with a scene-setter: Brooklyn hipsters gathered around strange machines at a flea market, snapping iPhone photos and tentatively touching them, like chimpanzees confronting a wind-up monkey. Finally, a “lanky drummer from Williamsburg” pays $150 and carries off his prize, which he says is “about permanence.” And what is this strange thing?

Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Smith had joined a growing movement. Manual typewriters aren’t going gently into the good night of the digital era. The machines have been attracting fresh converts, many too young to be nostalgic for spooled ribbons, ink-smudged fingers and corrective fluid. And unlike the typists of yore, these folks aren’t clacking away in solitude.

They’re fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events called “type-ins,” they’ve been gathering in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest.

Seven years ago, when I was a-fellowshipping in Ann Arbor, we got into a discussion about typewriters. First we culled those who had never had to use one at work, then at all, and found our last man standing with our youngest member, 30 or 31, who had never fought with a margin setting or confronted a blank page that was actually a page. We never broke it down to manuals vs. electrics, as I’m sure I would have been at the other end, someone with strong opinions on exactly how a keyboard should feel, and favorite brands (Smith-Corona for manual portables; Royal for manual desktop, although of course the IBM Selectric changed everything).

God help me, I hope I would die before being caught at a type-in, one of those details that makes me wonder, as Roy Edroso once said, whether they assign pieces like this as hazing rituals for new reporters.

But that’s to be expected, right? As an essential tool of a writer’s life, of course we will develop strong opinions about our writing machines. There was a Royal at my college newspaper. Someone had written SUSIE on her with correction fluid, and she was the one everybody fought over. Susie had just the right feel on the keys, her Magic Margin function worked perfectly, and she had the sort of heft that would stand up to an angry editorialist banging out a few hundred words without hopping all over the desk. If I remember correctly, she was the Royal HH, seen in this fanboy array.

Susie put me off electric portables for good. When I was thinking of my next line, Susie was silent; she didn’t have that spinning-the-wheels hum they all brought to the table. And when I leaned forward to paint correction fluid on a page, her carriage didn’t jump out of place because my boobs touched the space bar.

This was my family’s home machine. Many, many letters to Deb were written on this one. When I had nothing to say, I would peer underneath and reacquaint myself with how the bell worked. (The last three spaces in the line raised the clapper up, up, up, and the fourth brought it down.) Something I learned en route to something else — carpal-tunnel syndrome did not exist when typists worked on typewriters. Something about stopping every page to roll in a new one, and stopping at the end of every line to hit the carriage return, was enough to keep the motion from being too repetitive.

There are other virtues, too, outlined here:

Why celebrate the humble typewriter? Devotees have many reasons. For one, old typewriters are built like battleships. They survive countless indignities and welcome repairs, unlike laptops and smartphones, which become obsolete almost the moment they hit the market. “It’s kind of like saying, ‘In your face, Microsoft!’ ” said Richard Polt, 46, a typewriter collector in Cincinnati.

Another virtue is simplicity. Typewriters are good at only one thing: putting words on paper. “If I’m on a computer, there’s no way I can concentrate on just writing, said Jon Roth, 23, a journalist who is writing a book on typewriters. “I’ll be checking my e-mail, my Twitter.” When he uses a typewriter, Mr. Roth said: “I can sit down and I know I’m writing. It sounds like I’m writing.”

In other words, no Google Brain. Before I get too nostalgic, however, I recall that while Susie sat there quietly, awaiting my next line, I would frequently light a cigarette. Tradeoffs, people.

OK. Time to blow off the Dentu-Creme nostalgia and hop to work. Much bloggage today, and it’s mostly pretty good:

Go ahead and put this on a window or tab you can tuck behind the others, because frankly the video is pretty lame. But for Opening Day, how can you resist Ernie Harwell reading “Casey at the Bat”?

By the way, here in Detroit it snowed just a dusting overnight. Fortunately, the home opener isn’t for another week. Doubtless we’ll see a blizzard.

For his thousands of fans, a picture of Coozledad with a chicken on his head. Pretty funny story, too.

One more for the bad-clown file.

Lake Superior State has its lame-ass Banned Words list, but Wayne State takes a more positive approach: Words we should use more often. I’m pleased to report all but one — “concupiscence” — is in fairly regular rotation in my own vocabulary.

Finally, an amazing look at the Gingriches, Newt ‘n’ Callista, in action as co-hosts of their own video series. Seldom has two people’s character showed so plainly in their physical bodies. Callista is 10 years younger than me, and looks old enough to be my grandmother. Short ad, but worth it. Discuss.

Me, I’m off to work.

This isn’t my idea — it’s John Carpenter’s, my former Grosse Pointe buddy who now lives in Chicago — but it’s a good one, and I’m stealing it. A little background:

Today’s issue of the Metro Times features a remarkably lousy interview with Elmore Leonard. It’s lousy for many reasons, starting with the cliché on the the cover (“The Dickens of Detroit”) and running throughout the copy, which in several thousand words manages to turn up practically nothing about the man that isn’t already known. With no obvious hook — a new book or movie to promote — the writer asks no questions that haven’t already been asked a million times. Leonard gives the same answers he’s already given a million times, which makes him look like a bore, but what else can he do? How many times can he describe his writing routine, or why he thinks the movies made from his books almost all suck?

What’s more, there are some remarkable omissions. There’s no mention of “Justified,” the TV series based on his work, which is running new episodes now and would have presented some new ground to plow, had the writer noticed. There’s no mention of his son Peter, who recently launched his own writing career and now appears with his father when he (pére) is book-touring. And there’s a ton of description of Leonard’s painstaking research that fails to mention that he doesn’t do his own research anymore. He hasn’t for years. He pays a guy to do it for him, which is an unusual arrangement right there. His researcher, Gregg Sutter, has been the subject of many stories in his own right, and I for one find their relationship interesting. But Gregg isn’t mentioned anywhere.

You expect crap like this from Entertainment Weekly, but not from the alt-weekly in Leonard’s own hometown, which should know him better than anyone.

But that’s not the point of this. The point is that if someone is looking for a fresh angle on Leonard, I have an idea. Or rather, John Carpenter had it: We need a Dutchday in Detroit.

Dutchday — I like the one-word usage better than Dutch Day — would be based on Bloomsday in Dublin. The whole city celebrates on June 16, the day described at great length in “Ulysses,” in which Leopold Bloom wanders the city and has lots of interior monologues. Among the many activities of Bloomsday is to retrace Leopold’s steps, stop at places mentioned in the novel, and read those passages aloud.

I think we could easily put together a tour of Detroit where we could do the same thing. There would be some problems I can see right up front. Leonard’s books range widely over the metro area, from Detroit to Macomb to Oakland to Port Huron, and doing it by bus wouldn’t be the same thing. So, say, we’d limit it to those places that can be easily reached by bicycle. A bike tour of Elmore Leonard venues, on a weekend close to his birthday, which I believe is in early October. So, a bike tour of Leonard’s Detroit venues in the fall, one of the prettiest months of the year here. With a small PA system for the read-aloud portions, which you could tow in a bike trailer. It would all wind up in some pub for lager and discussion. Maybe the Dickens of Detroit could be persuaded to join us for a signing, and to sell a few books. Now that’s a story, Metro Times.

Who’s with me? I’m serious.

If anyone in Baltimore hasn’t done this with the works of Laura Lippman, they should do that, too.

So, bloggage:

So now it’s a right-wing group here in Michigan who’s gone a-FOIAing for college-professor dirt, that’s if you describe union activities as dirt:

The Mackinac Center, which describes itself as a nonpartisan research and educational institution and receives money from numerous conservative foundations, asked the three universities’ labor studies faculty members for any e-mails mentioning “Scott Walker,” “Madison,” “Wisconsin” or “Rachel Maddow,” the liberal talk show host on MSNBC.

The Mackinac Center hasn’t stated a reason for the request — it doesn’t have to — but the conventional wisdom is that public employees are prohibited from political activities on company time or with company resources, so if they can find one e-mail where a professor says, “I saw on Rachel Maddow that the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is a fink, and that he lives in Madison,” well, jackpot!!!!!

Note to the Mackinac Center: One of the libraries at Wayne State is named for Walter Reuther. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. I don’t know what to say about this, other than: Enough. I know it’s fashionable in some circles to fly-speck every minute of public employees’ time, to find whether they’ve cheated, somehow, using “taxpayers’ time” to send personal e-mail or shop for shoes online or whatever. I know every job in the world includes some down time, which may be used to call one’s doctor or fill out NCAA brackets or whatever. Let me know when it gets ridiculous, but for now, this is cheap bullying and harassment, and the people who run the Mackinac Center should be ashamed.

(Most people know other conservative groups are doing this in Wisconsin, and if you haven’t read the target’s extremely reasonable response, you should.)

A couple of you have asked me, over the years, why I wasn’t more taken with Jennifer Granholm, the now-former governor of Michigan. She appears on national chat shows from time to time, and always impresses the rest of the country as attractive, personable, reasonable and articulate. She is all those things. She is also not much of a leader, who let two terms pass while the state’s economy went into a ditch, without doing much more than talking about it — in a very articulate manner, granted.

Now she’s taking a page from the Evan Bayh playbook. She just accepted a richly compensated seat on the board of Dow Chemical.

A Michigan company, granted. Still. I’ll also grant the absurdity of a conservative editorial writer calling this “a payoff” for tax breaks Granholm steered the company’s way when she was in office, as this happens regularly in Republican politics, and is called Works Well With Business. Still. The ex-guv and her husband both recently accepted two-year teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley. I guess this is part of the let-the-well-refill strategy all politicians seem to think they deserve once they leave office.

Finally, an obit for a San Francisco food writer, whom I wish I’d known. Among her last words: Never eat margarine! A woman after my own heart.

Work beckons. Have a great day, all.

My goal this morning is to get the blog updated and a story written about the budget meeting at my local city council in the next 75 minutes. Hang on, folks — we’re going to see just how fast mommy can screw things up this morning.

Fortunately, I have supplemented last night’s 5.5 hours of sleep with three cups of coffee.

And I already edited and posted one story from my intern. Because that’s how hyperlocal online news runs these days — all the meetings happen early in the week. That makes for a miserable Monday and Tuesday, but by Thursday, the air smells like Weekend.

My intern’s story was on the first budget meeting of the year for the school board, which is facing the possibility of seeing $5.8 million in cuts if the governor’s budget goes through as proposed, a pretty hard swallow for a 8,500-pupil district. That means larger class sizes at a bare minimum and the usual no-more-this, can’t-have-that elsewhere in the district. I used to marvel sometimes that pretty much the last decade of my newspaper career — and, really, many years before that — were spent in a fiscal environment where all you knew for certain was that next year would suck more than this year. Now, the whole country lives like this. (Well, except for Goldman Sachs. And General Electric. Et cetera.) I always knew I’d find my true calling as a canary in a coal mine.

Speaking of sucking and newspapers, my alma mater — which I have taken to describing as the paper I might have worked at, had I not been in that tragic, 20-year coma from 1984-2004 — is in a minor ethical kerfuffle, thanks to its sports editor’s tweeting. I hope you all understand how hard it is for a person of a certain age to think of tweeting as serious communication worthy of sustained attention, but that’s what you get in a world where Sarah Palin is looked up to. Anyway, evidently the sports editor advised a recent Indiana University basketball recruit to play for Butler instead, his alma mater. In a tweet. Which ended with the phrase, “Go ‘Dawgs!”

I guess this is a problem. I guess some people consider this recruiting, and it’s a blow to the hard work of many who have tried to give sports departments more respect. I see their point, although every sports department I’ve ever worked near has fanboys galore. Still, journalism is journalism, and you’re supposed to keep this stuff to yourself.

But not if you work for Fox! Ahem:

Bill Sammon, who’s responsible for the network’s Washington coverage, linked Obama to socialism many times during the 2008 campaign, but didn’t believe the allegation, he acknowledged. In the final stretch of the 2008 campaign, a Fox News executive repeatedly questioned on the air whether Barack Obama believed in socialism.

Now it turns out he didn’t really believe what he was saying.

Bill Sammon, now the network’s vice president and Washington managing editor, acknowledged the following year that he was just engaging in “mischievous speculation” in raising the charge. In fact, Sammon said he “privately” believed that the socialism allegation was “rather far-fetched.”

OK. Now, to me, this is a scandal at the very, very least on a par with the recent NPR affair. This guy isn’t a fundraiser on contract, but a bureau chief in the nation’s capital, i.e., the very person in charge of directing and shaping the network’s coverage of Washington, D.C. And he was being “mischievous” with repeatedly making a charge that the Democratic candidate was a socialist, something a vast segment of his readership viewership takes as an article of faith.

I can’t fucking stand it. I just can’t.

The audio of that speech is nauseating — the amount of back-scratching, log-rolling and ass-kissing in the first two minutes alone is just vile. “My good friend James Carville,” “his lovely wife Mary Matalin,” “my old friends from Hillsdale.” Urgh.

But then, what is GOP politics at this point but a giant vaudeville act. Donald Trump, born-again birther, wants the governor of Hawaii “investigated,” he tells Fox ‘n’ Friends. What is this, a performance art piece? No other explanation makes any sense. Also:

“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump asked. “I wish he would, because I think it’s a terrible pale that’s hanging over him.”

What is “a terrible pale?” Can someone explain?

OK, well. I have a budget story to write in the next…42 minutes. So I best go. Let the above be your bloggage, although I close on yet another journalism-related nugget. Alan and I saw “Kill the Irishman” last weekend, a film about a Cleveland gangster named Danny Greene, whose compelling story and Belfastian death would make a pretty good movie someday. Alas, “Kill the Irishman” isn’t it. But a guy I know had a small part in it, and Ray Stevenson, aka Titus Pullo in “Rome” a few years back, played the lead, so it seemed worth the time.

There are two shots in the movie where we look over a character’s shoulder at the front page of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s muscular, dominant newspaper and at the time the film covers, the best daily in Ohio. I always look at the other stories on prop pages like this, because I know that’s where the art department’s inside jokes go. I was able to read two. One was:

High school
gets new
lockers

and the other was:

Attorney
opens
practice

Somewhere, an editor is weeping.

Gotta run!

If you feel like the only sucker in the world who pays taxes, you’re not alone — in your feeling, or in your taxpaying. Friend, I too pay taxes. That makes you and me. There are probably a few more of us out there. Enough to form a small, wan cocktail party, perhaps. (BYOB!)

General Electric, they pay no taxes. Not a dime. Not even on profits of $14.2 billion, $5.1 billion of it domestically.

Not only do they pay no taxes, they get a refund on what they haven’t paid. (Although you can’t really call it a refund then, can you?) Srsly:

In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

You are paying taxes, in part, to pay General Electric’s tax benefit. Feel better now?

It so happens I’ve had taxes on the brain of late. The slow-motion catastrophe of the real-estate collapse will send aftershocks through our local and state governments for years, thanks to the gutting of tax receipts, affecting services, schools and, oh yeah, those richly compensated, lavishly benefitted state and local employees. The governor’s proposed budget slashes state aid to those schools, which will suffer greatly. And, of course, April 15 is right around the corner.

It’s contemporary GOP religion — thanks, Ronald Reagan! — that Americans labor under a crushing tax burden, which simple number-crunching shows to be untrue. But if it’s not true for American individuals, it’s ridiculously untrue for corporations with the right people doing the lobbying and calculations. If you’ll permit me a larger-than-usual excerpt, I think this gets to the point:

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

Yet many companies say the current level is so high it hobbles them in competing with foreign rivals. Even as the government faces a mounting budget deficit, the talk in Washington is about lower rates. President Obama has said he is considering an overhaul of the corporate tax system, with an eye to lowering the top rate, ending some tax subsidies and loopholes and generating the same amount of revenue. He has designated G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, as his liaison to the business community and as the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and it is expected to discuss corporate taxes.

Doesn’t that make you feel better? They pay hardly anything, but they simply cannot compete with foreign companies. Because then, y’know, they might not be able to pay Jack Welch’s dues at three different country clubs. And who do you think Jeffrey Immelt is looking out for in this arrangement?

Oh, I don’t have time or stomach for this today. Let’s move on to something cheerier. Like many of you, I frequently have no idea what Prospero is talking about in the comments, but I liked this video he posted yesterday. I know exactly how these cows feel. This is the time of year when, after a long winter of couch-sitting and casserole consumption, I feel positively bovine myself.

Or we could discuss the grimly amusing case of Carlos Lam, the second Hoosier public servant to lose his job after he let his enthusiasm for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union busting get the better of him:

Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”

“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions,” the email said.

“Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC and umbrella union organizations in the protest. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”

God bless, Carlos. Sorry you’re losing your health care. By the way, I was trying to find this guy in the Indiana Bar Association directory, with no luck. Based on the mugshot in this story, I’ve narrowed down his probable undergrad alma mater to Butler, Wabash or — and this would make me especially happy to be such a shameless dealer in cultural stereotypes — Hillsdale. Anyone in the Hoosier state have info on the guy?

By the way, his first response to being found out? “That’s not me. My identity was stolen.” Laaaaame.

OK, time to get to work. Let’s leave on a weekend-y sort of note: Jim Griffoen on yet another of his crackbrain old-timey enthusiasms, in this case, Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Soap.

Open thread today, folks. Michigan’s census numbers were released yesterday, and I’m up to my eyebrows in data, trying to figure it out. Plus office hours and a writing gig that has to be finished by week’s end, so in the eenie-meanie of priorities, you lose.

In the meantime, for those of you who think I’m too hard on Charles Pugh, ex-Fort Wayne TV “journalist” and current president of Detroit’s City Council, how about this nugget of Pugh-y goodness:

City Council President Charles Pugh is blaming high rates of incarceration and car insurance premiums for U.S. Census figures pegging Detroit’s population at 713,777.

Pugh told The News today that city officials know of thousands of Detroiters who are incarcerated in other municipalities who will soon get out. Those people should be counted “when they get out and come back to Detroit,” said Pugh, adding that he doubts the city has lost more than 200,000 people in a decade.

“We know that there are thousands of people because of car insurance that have addresses in the suburbs,” he said. “We need to let those people know, look, this is not an effort to catch you and to prosecute you. We want your numbers so we can get federal dollars and state dollars.”

An undercount of prisoners! What a maroon. As a friend says, “Why make it easy for Rush Limbaugh to fill an hour?”

OK, so: Sayonara. The rest of the week looks pretty grim, but I’m going to try to grab time here and there for you, dear readers. And at week’s end, I’m gonna sleep like a corpse.