“Bipartisanship…” “On the table…” Y’know, gang, I’m actually from DC, and all this Capitol Hill Sunday Morning doubletalking bullshit still makes my brain hurt. Still, a well-informed citizen is a well-armed citizen; so, after many, many Sunday mornings of slogging through hours of Meet The Press and Hardball and Face The Nation so you don’t have to, I’ve put together this quick guide to the phrases and words you hear the most in Washington.

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I kid you not, gang…that was the actual headline on this Associated Press story, reporting on Obama henchman Larry Summers’ remarks at a meeting of the National Economic Club of Washington, where he commented on the supposed end of the long, long dive the economy’s taking right now.

Of course, Mr. Summers coyly sidestepped any mention of when or how or how suddenly this free fall would be ending which, of course, put me in mind of all those great old Road Runner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote finds himself taking yet another long fall from the top of a tall mesa and lands so hard that he leaves an impression of himself in the ground.

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So far as most of us can tell, the “economic stimulus” plan issuing from The Office Of The President-Elect (snicker) includes the most staggeringly pants-pissing amounts of cash to prop up failing corporations, banks and executives, and jack for the rest of us, unless we’re prepared to summon up some cajones and engage in a little good old-fashioned shop-floor smackdown, like those laid-off screen-door plant workers in Michigan.

On the local level, here in DC, as Inauguration Day – or, as now known to some, Barack Obama Day – approaches, The One’s economic stimulus program for DC has finally begun to jell; according to The Office Of The President-Elect (smirk), this plan will take a two-pronged approach: one prong for the quite well-off, and another big prong for the rest of us…

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Some weeks back, I was checking out this article on Associated Press about skyrocketing home foreclosure rates in Los Angeles and the equally skyrocketing number of people forced to live in their cars…

I couldn’t help wondering what the cops and city councils in L.A. and other cities plan on doing when the number of foreclosed and unemployed living in their cars starts to equal the number of people who still have houses or apartments. Will the pissed-off suburbanoids who still have their houses still complain when they start seeing ex-neighbors or ex-coworkers among the homeless “trash” living in their cars?

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