Two Thoughts

 1.  What if this House Speaker thing went 'on'.....say for 30 days.  No Speaker, no House business, no political chatter.....just a quiet period?  

Rather crazy, but it's worth asking.

2.  You ever noticed....whenever someone utters 'dire'.....about 90-percent of the time....you have come regard the moment as something pretty less than dire....like your dog tore up the newspaper, your cousin married a tramp, or your beer bottle expiration date was last week.   It's like we've all take dire to mean something a lot less to worry about.

Three Observations

 1.  On the Speaker of the House job.  Lets be blunt....if you had a job taking up forty hours a week as a Representative from your district, and serving on x-committee....what idiot would want to take the Speaker job to add another ten to twenty hours onto your bucket?  

You get a limo which comes by and picks you up at the residence....so you can read papers on the way to work.  You probably ought to spend a full hour reading newspapers during the day.  You have to worry about the operation of the House, the air conditioning, the security, etc.  

On the plus side?  Well....you'd get invited every weekend to parties (sponsored by the lobbyists), get plenty of free drinks at DC clubs, and receive insider stock advice every week.  

2.  Joe Biden on the NFL injury: “Look, the idea that you're gonna have, look you've got guys that are 6'8, 340 pounds running a 4.8 40… If you hit somebody with that kinda… now that's not what happened here… but I just think it’s, I don't know how you avoid it.”

Yeah, about every 2nd sentence....Joe 'cuts' out and leaves you with a empty space.  You just have to insert your own thoughts or perceptions into what he left hanging there.

3.  All that talk about CNN 'fixing' itself and evolving back into the old CNN?  Mostly BS.  It's still anchored down in crap.