I got another one of those nice emails from one of the Washington senators, the one who is up for re-election this year, Patty Murray. She wanted to share the good news that our state will receive $590 million from the stimulus slush fund for “investment” in high-speed rail upgrades between the northern and southern borders in the Cascade corridor.

If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til it’s free.

I’ve heard a lot of lip service being paid to the need for creation of jobs by the administration and the majority party in congress. I say lip service because I’ve heard a lot of talk about jobs, but somehow they never seem to materialize, other than in the administration’s “hope”-filled imagination. But if there’s one thing the health care debacle has shown me, other than the depth of depravity, dishonesty, and corruption in Washington DC, it is that when the stakes are high enough, congress can actually make something happen.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve wasted a lot of time with wishful thinking, particularly over the last year. A few examples: Gee, I wish we had term limits. Man, I wish there was some way to actually have a dialogue with my elected representatives. Dang, I wish the people who swear to protect and defend the Constitution actually did it.

If you don’t believe in Santa Claus, well you just haven’t been paying attention. He is alive and well and handing out goodies left and right, in cold, hard cash, from Copenhagen to Nebraska. Well, that may not be totally fair to say. What’s actually been handed out so far are promises to hand out cold, hard cash. But the amounts in question are generous enough to make Santa blush.

After about 20 years of federal “protection,” in the form of essentially destroying the timber industry in the Northwest and other places, the population of spotted owls has – why does this not surprise me – plummeted. From what I can tell by the research I’ve done, the reason is because the people in charge of the “management plan” for spotted owls don’t know what they’re doing, and it took 20 years to figure that out.

If you want to really have some fun doing your Christmas shopping this year, I have a suggestion: don’t leave town when you do it.

I’ve heard the majority party in congress is already getting worried about the 2010 mid-term elections. I can understand why they might be. For example, one of our own Washington senators who will be facing the electorate in about 10 months voted to continue discussion of a Senate bill that could send you to prison if you don’t buy health insurance, and not just any health insurance, at that. No doubt she’d like to help decide the rules for just what kind of health insurance you have to buy. If she’s not worried, she ought to be.

At some point we need to recognize that about the only good that’s going to come out of the inept federal meddling in the U.S. economy is that at least it provides some comic relief. The funniest examples I’ve read about so far are related to the calculations that a number of community agencies used to determine how many jobs have been “saved” by the “economic stimulus.”

No doubt, the news that Boeing has decided to build its new generation of airplanes somewhere other than Washington is distressing. But I believe there is a bright side. At the risk of sounding unkind, it is this: Maybe enough of the lovely people that voted in the current governor (twice) and legislative majority will lose their jobs and leave the state to go bother somebody else, and the rest of us can restore some semblance of sanity in Olympia.