Three was a little crowded

'TWAS QUITE a trifecta at the White House Tuesday. Tom Daschle got waylaid in heavy Capitol Hill traffic (Good riddance!) President Obama nominated a Republican senator, Judd Gregg, as his commerce secretary (We can hope!) and the president conceded in an NBC TV interview that "I screwed up" in the Daschle choice. (Wow! Never heard that kind of talk from the previous administration. That's change that I can believe in.)

With nannies, unpaid taxes, unreported limos etc., you begin to understand that the Washington scene is as perilous as the road to the Baghdad airport. Simply too much soft-earned money lying around as a growth industry. Even the IRS can't catch up with all of the double bookkeeping and off-the-books income that can make a rather straightforward-looking guy or gal an overnight millionaire. Tempting, huh?

So what did Daschle, a veteran of Capitol Hill politics, expect to gain before he had to flush himself out from the crossfire of Democrats and Republicans? You have to wonder why he was trying to fill in an inside straight while staring at a full house. And how many others on both sides of the aisle murmured, "There but for the grace of God..." and tip-toed home to their wives, or whomever. All of this while the economic news worsens grotesquely every day. California, the eighth largest economy in the world, is broke, gridlocked between the governor and the legislature with a $42 billion deficit and the nation's worst credit rating.

Is the gridlock an anomaly of a formerly wealthy state. Or does it foreshadow something much worse for the whole country from the nastiness that's occurring daily in D.C.? Time for somebody to pause and lead the Pledge of Allegiance.