The Senator from Saturday Night Live

Al Franken is a step away from getting the nomination to run against Minnesota's Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in November.

This month, his competition dwindled down to an under-funded activist college professor who is given little chance of beating him at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor convention in June. The party of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone will be nominating the author of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot."

For Franken, since he first announced over a year ago, the political race has been no laughing matter. He's been working hard at fund-raising, matching the incumbent, and lining up the state's liberal constituency behind him. Serving as a Fellow with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 2003, he knows a thing or two about serious politics.

In Coleman, Franken will be facing a popular Republican, who was against the Surge in Iraq a year ago but has not otherwise broken ranks in opposing all Senate efforts to stop or slow down the war.

In a state that elected a professional wrestler as governor, Franken's show business resume won't be a fatal handicap, although Republican will be mining his books and standup routines for the most outrageous statements to use again him.

But Stuart Smalley should be up to the challenge of getting the first graduate of Saturday Night Live into the US Senate to show the jokers there how it really should be done.

Free Money for All

The bipartisan smiles in Washington signify that the President and Congress have agreed to give the economy a $150 billion jolt, less than a year's worth of what it costs to keep American troops fighting and dying in Iraq.

Democrats who gave up on de-funding the war will face the voters this fall with a "victory" over an impending recession to paper over their failure to do what they were elected to do in November 2006.

For consumers who overspent by $3 trillion dollars since 2001 (according to Business Week's chief economist), there will be free money and cheaper credit thanks to the Fed to keep doing what they did to get us into trouble in the first place.

The talking-head economists on TV will give us contradictory explanations of how this all works, but the bottom line seems to be that "fiscal discipline" for both individuals and the government has gone out of style in the Bush era, along with restraint over the use of military power.

Is it naïve to suggest that the money being wasted in Iraq could be stimulating the economy and rebuilding America's infrastructure without any loss of life?