If you haven't read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, get a copy right now and do it. I haven't been moved by a book in a long time like I have by this one. The book's been out for almost three years and can be had cheaply from Amazon.

I found myself in the peculiar position of needing to teach the book recently, when I was asked to take a course on an imergency basis with a week of the spring semester already passed at the university where I teach. I had never taught the course before and was thrown into it with someone else's syllabus and reading list. This gave me a little taste of what Ehnrenreich is trying to get across to us in her book.

Writing straight out of the boom years of the late 1990s, she makes a compelling case for the wealth of the nation being built on the bent backs of the working poor. I'm now waiting for her, or someone like her, to do the same for our soldiers and veterans. The military has always been a poor man's army, and the current situation is no different from the past.

First thought: Some people don't seem to care who they flash to get a little attention.

Second thought: Nice way to escape the constant political talk. A boob beats a Boob every time out, er, so to speak.

The local NPR affiliate was playing a retrospective on the blues, which I was listening too while watching the game. The program was featuring interviews with aging British rockers who were reminiscing about the 60s when they first encountered their Black blues stars in live performances and later discovered the men who had such an influence on them were more interested in pursuing wine, women, and money than they were in singing the balads of the underclasses and the repressed members of society. Welcome to hip-hop? Or just plan Pop. It's about the money, fool, it's always about the money.

So Senator Dean had a pen knife in his luggage when he was searched before boarding a plane. Let's see how that stacks up against the CIA providing a lot of bad info to successive presidents. We're they getting all their intel from the Brits, who were probably getting theirs from the CIA? Would the CIA be the CIA if they reported "All's quiet on every front?" If your job is to deliver news, hadn't you better have some news to deliver? Was Saddam really reading Dostoevsky while he was hiding in his hole? Notes from the Underground or The Idiot? And whose translation? Maybe it was "The Grand Inquisitor."

When all around you fail to catch their breath, maybe you've run out of air.