American Patrol

** Those of you who haven't yet read TD Mischke's "A Christmas Story" in last week's City Pages are urged to do so. Mischke, whom I have prized this year both for generating rare and precious readable column inches in the Pages and for being a fellow member of the Pretentious Initials Club (honorary President EJ Dionne), has truly created a Christmas classic. It is a modern day "Yes, Virginia..." and gave me visions after I read it this weekend of clippings of the story being handed on from generation to generation. Yes, I am an anachronistic old fart, thanks for noticing.

**Major mea culpas: I was obviously wrong about the inability of the Senate to pass the health care reform package before Christmas, which barring the unforeseen they are now set to do late Christmas Eve. No surprise, really—I finally posted the damn thing after five solid days of having the developing news cycle turn my draft copy into counterfactual poo, so being bitten in the ass yet again by the story isn’t exactly unexpected. Somehow, as hard as I may try, I’m always really bad at estimating the depths of cynicism-- it would never have occurred to me that Ben Nelson’s supposedly principled head could be turned by the mere offer of perpetual Medicaid funding for Nebraska, or rather, turned more than it already had been by campaign contributions from his old friends and colleagues in the insurance industry. I wasn’t wrong about the final bill containing indefensible elements, however, and the chances of those elements being eliminated in conference seem fairly slim.

**In the spirit of the season, Senator Tom Coburn, Sunday night before the cloture vote: "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray." Sorry to bring it up during the Holy Days, but the longer I live the more the failure of God to strike certain people down where they stand convinces me of His nonexistence.

**This time of year I often find myself wondering what sort of effect it has had on Western culture that the major holiday of its dominant religion celebrates that religion's central figure as an infant.