I posted my first story/item about Barack Obama during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, or roughly 21 months ago. Today, in any event, marks the beginning of the final week of ’08 Presidential campaign. Eight and a half days from now, all present-tense anxieties will be stilled and we’ll all start to feel a huge depressing shift in the current.

It’s probably unrealistic to hope for 60 Democratic U.S. Senators once the dust has settled, but it’ll be beautiful if it happens. An FDR-like New Deal overhaul of priorities would be possible. The next step would be to go out and really do something about the right-wing crazies once and for all. If I could exterminate the lot of them by clapping my hands three times, I would clap my hands three times. No, that’s going too far. I didn’t mean that. What if the worst of them could be forcibly relocated to Alaska? Then they could all get together and eventually secede with Palin leading the charge and running the show. That wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. It really wouldn’t.