Bad weather

To a boy huddled in the backseat of his family's Rambler on a December night so cold his breath hung suspended in the air like gossamer, the weather balls had mystic qualities. Sometimes they shone white. Other times red. Other times green in their predictions. Whatever the shade, they were like peering into a crystal ball and discovering the future.

Nostalgia being the potent elixir that it is, I'm all for resurrecting the old balls. But instead of putting them in a park or somewhere downtown, we should ship the two surviving weather balls to Washington. One could be placed on top of the White House and the other on top of the Capitol.

There they could blaze red for the rivers of crimson ink bleeding from the federal budget.

Borrowing a page from the Reagan playbook, President Bush has spent the nation into a hole that reaches – literally – all the way to China. By the time he leaves office in January, Bush will have added more than $4 trillion of federal debt. Almost half a trillion will be owed to the Chinese.

Washington is like the couple that has maxed out their credit cards. He wears Prada shoes. She carries Gucci handbags. They have his and her BMWs, a boat big enough for whaling and so many plasma TVs, their house rivals the set of ESPN. By all appearances they seem to be rolling in dough, but everything they have is on installment. Gather their creditors and it would look like a banking convention.

Congress has been an all-too-willing accomplice in this bankrupting of America. Its spendthrift ways are enough to make a drunken sailor blush, and whether the next president is Barack Obama or John McCain, it appears red ink will continue to run neck deep in the nation's capital. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's tax plan will add $3.5 trillion to the national debt during the next decade while McCain's tax plan is even more derelict. It will add $5 trillion.

They used to stop the buck in Washington. Now all they do is spend 'em.

On those days when corporations come courting Congress or the executive branch, the weather balls could glow green.

That, it seems, is most days. In the lexicon of those on Capitol Hill, lunch and lobbyist have become mutually exclusive. Since 2001, for instance, members of the Senate Banking Committee have received more than $100 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These bags of money must have been blocking their view because apparently South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson and his fellow committee members failed to notice what the businesses they are supposed to be regulating were up to in recent years.

If they had bothered to check, they would have uncovered banks and other lenders making mortgage loans to virtually anyone who put their hand out. Now these ill-advised loans are going bad faster than you can say, "Well, duh," and the United States finds itself is in the midst of a financial crisis expected to cost the nation's taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars – or more.

The weather balls also could burn white for the rage America has bred through its torture of people both innocent and evil since 9-11.

In her book “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” journalist Jane Mayer chronicles the aftermath of the al-Qaida attack on the U.S. when the nation ceased being a defender of human rights on this planet and joined the ranks of barbarians instead.

Mayer's reporting is exhaustive. She trails Vice President Dick Cheney and his minions as they shred the rule of law – including the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions – and concoct their own decrees to provide the cover they need to snatch people off the streets of the world, whisk them to secret prisons and subject them to all manners of torture while denying them counsel or due process.

In their pursuit of information to prevent another terrorist attack on America, Cheney et al. encouraged U.S. military and intelligence operatives to use whatever sadistic means their minds could conjure. So they did. The brutality they employed is straight out of George Orwell's "1984."

In light of what is contained in "The Dark Side," instead of the weather balls beaming white, black might be a more appropriate color.