The results are in: you're all insane.

President Obama, according to CNN.com, is considering delaying a Hawaiian family vacation in an attempt to work out a deal with congressional Republicans on the Bush tax cuts that expire December 31.

This must be a tough pill for the other three Obamas to swallow, but hopefully they're used to this by now. He's the President and he's got to make some tough calls at the expense of his family. He desperately wants to fulfill as many of his campaign goals as he possibly can before Congress squeals to the right faster than Starsky and Hutch in their '75 Gran Torino.

The bigger question, in my opinion, is: Why? Why has he and so many thousands of other elected officials volunteered for this lifestyle? These people are subjected to unrelenting abuse, especially from biased media pundits. Whether liberal or conservative, entire networks exist to undermine their adversaries' platforms, as well as their friendships, associations, family ties, neck ties and haircuts.

I understand the idealistic reasons for which one considers a run at elected office. Many began with a quest to unite and lead, as I did when I had children. Many of us haven't made it too far on that quest.

Some entered the political arena to tirelessly serve others, which, apparently, I've decided to do by having children.

And many who hold public office had fully armored themselves for the unrelenting second-guessing, the personality attacks and the scathing criticism. That's where we differ, since I hadn't really thought about that when I decided to have children.

After reflecting on my first exposure to elected office, I've decided that no one should be surprised about this fiery atmosphere by the time they achieve adulthood, since all the factors are already at play. A kid running for fifth grade student body president campaigns the same way a seasoned politician does. One may promise universal health care, while the other pledges chicken chimichangas every other Thursday, but supporters jump on the bandwagon with equal gusto.

Each criticizes the prior administration. In one case, for igniting an unnecessary war based on false pretenses, and in the other, for not keeping the tether balls fully inflated as promised, leading to unnecessary shoulder blade welts among the constituency.

Once elected, the honeymoon ends quickly. Each is soundly rebuked for pandering to special interests; in one case, the insurance companies or energy industry. In the other, the chess club, which is allowed to stay in a comfortable classroom while the rest of the school crams into the play shed for rainy day recess.

Before long, each is constantly on the defensive, so there's no choice but to tout unnoticed accomplishments, whether it's affordable health care for thirty million Americans or the elimination of tuna fish pizza forever.

So let's not judge our President too harshly for entering the nation's highest office with virtually no executive experience, until we find out one crucial fact:

Was Barack Obama student body president at his elementary school?

Artificial Christmas trees: What would Santa do?

Christmas season is upon us, but you don't need this old scribe to tell you something so obvious. Between Halloween and Thanksgiving, it's like a lawn mower that takes a couple of cranks, sputters two or three times and then, usually on Thanksgiving night, roars to life with more decibel fury than the 1977 Motörhead arena tour.

I witness it every Thanksgiving evening on the ride home from Grandma’s house in our sapphire blue 2003 Kia minivan. Before the take-home turkey has even cooled inside the washed out Cool Whip container, my family’s thoughts and comments have shifted to Christmas.

Naturally, mine do as well. I can't help but ponder the new set of ads I'll see, and how long it'll take to become disillusioned with the rampant consumerism in our media. I envision the following holiday campaigns:

“Cialis for the holidays. Isn't it time you got that tree up?”

“From our children in China to your children in the developed world, Merry Christmas from your friends at Wal-Mart.”

“America, you ate 46 million birds on Thanksgiving. What's the big deal about a few more who died a slightly different way? Come back to us...please. Happy holidays from B.P.”

This weekend, we solidified our seasonal plans. It's almost like a little board of directors meeting, deciding for whom we'll bake or buy something, when we'll we get the girls’ pictures with Santa (Sure, they're fifteen and ten years old, but traditions die hard.), and most importantly, when we'll get the tree.

Naturally, the Christmas tree is the central focus in any Yuletide setting. Your house can ooze with Christmasness, but if there's no tree in the corner, it's like...I don't know...Rush Limbaugh without a bra, or a McRib sandwich sans ground up cloven hoof. 

We've always come home with a real tree; that's all I've ever known. One of my earliest memories is venturing out with my dad into rural western Washington to legally chop down a tree along county power lines. Hopefully, yearly exposure to high tension wires isn't the reason my elbow sprouted a couple of molars and a goatee, but I grew really fond of the hunt for the perfect tree out there with my old man. That woodsy living room smell is synonymous with Christmas.

That's why today's board meeting left me reeling a little bit. The family decided to finally get a fake tree, but to pick up some seasonal greens to garnish our house and soften the blow of no more wood pitch on the carpet. We asked ourselves, what's the point of driving forty miles to a tree farm, sawing down a nicely manicured, conical evergreen, paying sixty bucks and driving back? 

None, really. We resolved to channel the time and expense toward hosting friends for a Christmas open house. Sure, there are some upfront costs, like the artificial tree and a new red reindeer sweater and pipe for the man of the house. 

And I should probably go to the dentist about my elbow.

It's all about food...except when it's all about other food.

For most of us, yesterday had a singular focus—food—preparing it, eating a whole bunch of it, discreetly spitting an accidentally-eaten giblet into our napkin, packing it up, wiping bits of it off the counter and taking it home for later. During the other 364 non-Thanksgiving days, most people occupy themselves with other interests and pursuits.

Here's the thing, however: My family discusses food incessantly. Not just on Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter or birthdays, but every single day, several times per day. Here's an example:

Fifteen-year-old Daughter, on cell phone: Hey Dad, can you come pick me up from basketball what's for dinner?

Me: Okay. I'll be there in ten minutes cheese quesadillas.

Yesterday, we drove to Auburn to have Thanksgiving dinner at my wife's mom's house. She makes a fantastic, traditional Turkey Day spread, and since Auburn is about forty-five minutes away, that was forty-three minutes for us to spend talking about food. The other two minutes were devoted to deciding how loud to play the radio. We'd barely driven five hundred yards, when the first culinary salvo was fired.

Ten-year-old daughter: Do you think grandma will have shrimp with cocktail sauce?

Me: Yes. She always does.

Ten-year-old daughter: What if she doesn't?

Me: I don't know, but I'd say that chances are greater than eighty percent that she will.

Ten-year-old daughter: Dad, I don't care about percentages. I just need to know if she's having shrimp with cocktail sauce, because I've eaten very, very little today.

Fifteen-year-old daughter: Dad, I don't ask for much (Buzzer which symbolizes gross untruth should sound here). I just ask for shrimp and cocktail sauce on Thanksgiving Day. Don't deny me that simple pleasure.

By the time we had arrived at Grandma's house, each kid had a glazed facial expression representing a singular desire. If Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and a platter of shrimp with cocktail sauce sat in the living room together, my daughters would have screamed, jumped up and down and hugged the prawns.

As my wife joined her mother in the kitchen to help with dinner, I sat and observed my two young lionesses. They sat on the couch, still wearing their coats, and attacked the appetizers.

Me: You guys, save some for the rest of us.

Ten-year-old daughter: How many?

Me: I don't know. A few.

Ten-year-old daughter: What, like two or three?

Me: No. More than that.

Ten-year-old daughter: How many?

It was futile; I was merely talking to the tops of their heads as they bowed to their plates. Time for a different tack.

Me: You guys, finish what's on your plate and stop. Otherwise, I won't share the turkey neck with you.

Fifteen-year-old daughter: Ewwww!

Ten-year-old daughter: Ewwww! Turkeys don't have necks.

Me: Of course they do. What do you think holds their heads to their bodies?

I'd already lost them. Again, all I could see were my children's light and dark brown head crowns. Their plates resembled miniature shrimp Jonestowns, tails strewn about in smears of cocktail sauce. The paper plates had already begun decomposing in their hands as my older daughter wiped her mouth and finally looked at me.

"That was so good when's dinner?"

Snow and Seattle: A worse couple than McCain-Palin

I wonder if the Mayan calendar or Nostradamus prophesied about snowfall in Seattle. Every time we get the white stuff here, life as we know it morphs into something out of the Book of Revelation.

Yesterday marked the forty-seventh anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, one of our nation's defining moments, yet for those of us who live in the Seattle area, we'll just wait until next year and think twice as hard about number forty-eight. Come on, it snowed.

When it snows here, people choose up sides. They're either on the squad of those who panic and leave work with the first dusting, or they join the team of those who stay too long and leave work together in their rear-wheel-drive Lebarons. If you're a member of the latter group, it doesn't matter if cars litter the roadside like Camel butts, because dammit, you know your skills and your equipment. You'll make it.

Oops, you didn't make it.

I always make the mistake of turning on the local news when it snows, maybe just to get a glimpse of the Automotive Ice Capades. Reporters love this stuff—they plant themselves with a camera crew at the base of Queen Anne or Capital Hill and tape the poor suckers as they skid one after another into the ditch or another car. At this point, the camera will pan over to the reporter in her Action22 News Parka as she analyzes the situation:

"I'm standing here at the bottom of Denny Way in downtown Seattle, where it's snowing. As you can see, it's snowing where I stand as well as at the top of the hill, where our Action22 Superzoom video camera is providing a spectacular shot of some different snow. And now, as you can see, I'm bending over to scoop up some snow with my Action22 gloves, available on our website. This snow is cold and white. Please, if you don't have to go out in this snow, don't go out in it, and if you do, please wear pants, shoes, socks, a shirt and maybe another pair of pants. Back to you, Gil."

Always riveting. Why do I watch? No idea.

Of course, I'm not going to put myself above everyone else and claim that my behavior doesn't change during a winter wonderland. I always feel the need to set out on foot in search of provisions. You'd think that if I didn't fulfull my quest and make it to Safeway for some cheese and a sixpack of IPA, I'd be faced with deciding which family member to eat first. I always feel so satisfied upon entering the supermarket, a frozen Fu Manchu of snot coating my face as I traverse the aisles. I rarely give myself pause to ponder that the grocery store is fully staffed, fully stocked and the parking lot is filled with cars. Who cares? I made it.

I am a Seattlite. I wear odd clothes when it snows. I keep them in the basement and bring them out like Halloween decorations or camping equipment. The idea is to wear the tight stuff under the loose stuff for maximum warmth (please see the above image of my daughter and wife). Some people, like two women I saw at Safeway, only wear spandex and that's only acceptable if they are crawling out of their bobsled or paying tribute to Freddie Mercury.

Another blizzard of fun in the Emerald City.

Is One Less Prison a Good Thing?

Built in 1876, America's last "island prison" is destined for the scrap heap.

McNeil Island Corrections Center, located in Washington state's south Puget Sound, is closing next spring, due to state budget cuts and cost inefficiencies. Nearly fifty years after our country's most famous island fortress, Alcatraz, shut down, McNeil Island will finally lock its doors, but this time no one will be clamoring from the inside.

The facility has housed some notorious bad guys, most notably, that big man on campus, Chuck Manson. Manson served a five-year stint in the early 1960s, prior to his discovery that The Beatles needed him to stab some people for them. I might have washed their cars or walked their dogs, but I suppose Charles was just a little more of a pleaser.

Prisons have always fascinated me. I think it began at the tender age of fifteen, when a documentary aired, entitled Scared Straight, in which juvenile offenders visited Rahway State Prison in New Jersey. They sat in a room and listened as a group of inmates serving life sentences described prison life in intimate detail. The kids were screamed at, provoked and highly intimidated as they heard about what they would encounter should they continue down their delinquent paths.

Even though I was exceedingly "straight" when compared with these adolescents, I was still fascinated and terrified by this broadcast. By no means was I keen on following my "daddy" around the prison yard, my index finger hooked in his rear belt loop or being traded to a convicted arsonist for a Butterfinger and half a jar of Vaseline, but I couldn't pry my eyes away.

Ever since, I've been drawn to prison-themed TV shows and movies, like Escape From Alcatraz, Bad Boys (where Sean Penn smacks a guy with a pillow case full of coke cans), The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke, The Longest Yard and Papillion. I even liked The Andy Griffith Show, since someone occasionally ended up in Sheriff Taylor's cage.

It's difficult to imagine actually doing hard time, which feeds my obsessive anxieties about going to prison. For instance, what if I just happened to be walking downtown wearing jeans, a blue jacket, white Adidas shoes and a George Bush mask, right when some guy happens to be robbing a daycare center in an identical outfit. See how simple it would be to be sent away?

I'm not prepared. I don't have the skills to give someone a tattoo with a Tootsie Pop stick or make a shiv out of a large Cheeto. I do use liquid soap, though, so no problem there. And call me old fashioned, but I prefer a much longer courtship before a relationship is consummated than is par for the course in the big house.

So farewell, McNeil Island Corrections Center. After 134 years, you've served the public good by housing those who owed a debt to the public. If only your walls could talk.

On second thought, it's probably better that they can't.

Batman isn't too happy about these guys.

Finally, I've got something to fall back on if my day job doesn't work out.

I can be a superhero.

Hey, it's not funny. Okay, it's kind of funny, but not if I did it.

Seattle has witnessed an influx of real-life superheroes, banded into a group know as The Rain City Superhero Movement. They're a real-life Justice League, patrolling Seattle's mean streets and attempting to foil would-be crimes and apprehend criminals, while keeping their identities secret.

They go by names like Thorn, Green Reaper, Gemini and Phoenix Jones (that last one sounds more like someone Hugh Grant picked up for a five minute date on the Sunset Strip). All of these men claim to be either former military or mixed martial artists and, although they carry pepper spray, Tasers and nightsticks, none is packing heat.

They've actually spooked a lot of the good guys, including Seattle cops, with their strange uniforms and masked faces. I think the police are still a little squeamish about people who hide their faces ever since November of 1999, when roaming bands of masked thugs trashed our friendly little Mayberry and shut down the WTO conferences. Apparently, people like Catastrophe and Thunder 88 were still at Superhero Voc/Tech or they could have lent a hand.

I suppose I applaud their efforts, but every since I saw The Gimp in Pulp Fiction, I'm a little cynical about role playing in costumes. I think it's great when little kids dress up like their favorite comic book heroes; I can remember being four or five and my dad had forgotten his lunch at home. He was a high school teacher, so I asked my mom if I could deliver it to him dressed like Superman. I ran into his classroom, cape flapping, and was scooped up by my papa to the oohs and ahhhs of the nice teenagers in his room.

But I must say, when the cuteness factor evaporates, so does a lot of the public acceptance. When it's a chubby, adult male in a Batman costume paying a visit to an emergency room because he tore his ACL while "rescuing" his wife, well, next time just keep it to the back seat of the Taurus, I mean, Batmobile.

So good luck to you guys. Sure, none of you has true super powers like Spiderman, Flash or The Green Lantern, but you do have something that most of us don't:

A little too much time on your hands.

Life after Facebook de-friending: How to pick up the pieces.

It's cool. I'm okay...really.

Yesterday, I discovered that a guy had "de-friended" me on Facebook. Instantly, I was overcome with emotion— confusion, dismay, sadness. How should I feel, since he really wasn't my pal in the first place, yet he still cared enough to become my "e-friend?"

Rejection is never easy, and I've had my share of it. I decided to rank this setback among my life's other disappointments, just to keep things in perspective. Was it worse than realizing I could never grow a really good mustache? No way. Was I more distraught than when I discovered that I'd built my gas grill backwards, and I'd need another full day to reassemble it? Yes, I was.

In the final analysis, on the disappointment scale, my de-friending landed somewhere between the Seattle Supersonics leaving for Oklahoma City and Pee Wee Herman getting busted "red handed." I realized, yet again, that it's not how we deal with success, it's how we handle the slimy bologna slap of rejection.

After eventually swallowing the bitter pill, I turned inward. Why had this happened? What could I have done differently?

I'm fully aware that my writings have polarized and offended those who:

-believe that five thousand years ago, Adam was either created in God's image (which apparently resembles Mattel's Ken doll plus naughty area), or was dropped off by aliens from the planet Xenu.

-favor affordable health care, for those who can afford it.

-don't want their children taught by anyone gay, because the teacher may either sneeze the gay onto the child or accidentally touch the kid and transfer a lighter case of bisexuality.

-are convinced that our President is Chairman Mao's love child, conceived out of wedlock with an African succubus while on vacation at the Kenyan Club Med.

-Believe that Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh more closely resemble Abraham, Martin and John than Moe, Curly and Larry.

A large number of my friends and family members ideologically lean to the right, and they know I love them unconditionally. And for the rest of you, go ahead and de-friend me. Your scorn will only fortify my resolve.

Besides, I've found these new places called chat rooms, filled with new friends who happen to be single, hot and 22 years old.

I will love again.