Brooks Boliek

Click on the image for a photo essay…

TAKOMA PARK, MD — A fierce storm dropped record snowfall and stranded travelers up the East Coast from Virginia to New England, but its weekend timing helped reduce travel problems, and for many, it guaranteed a break from work and brought the prospect of an early, deep white Christmas.

Residents throughout the mid-Atlantic and Northeast mostly holed up for the weekend, according to the AP, then dug out from as much as 2 feet of snow to find sunny, mostly calm skies under a blanket of white “unspoiled by car exhaust and passers-by.”

Check here for a photo essay on the snow storm from Takoma Park near Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of D.C.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Historically, Christmas is one of my least-favorite holidays. This year, however, I am trying to gin up some hope with a little Christmas cheer.

Why? Because I think we need the break, for one thing. There are a lot of poor people suffering immeasurably this year due to the Bush recession. Anything that would give them a break and a boost would be a good thing.

Then, if the so-called “Christmas spirit” could do anything to end the partisan hostilities left over from the trauma of the Bush years, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas indeed.

Lest this curmudgeonly, Scrooge-like attitude about Christmas come as a shock to the hordes of new readers here, let me do a little word riff to explain.

Let me just say that if I was like Elvis, that is to say richer and more popular than god, I would blast the TV set every time I hear some talking head go on and on about “the true meaning of Christmas,” or go after ratings by trying to start up another fight over the “attack on Christmas” by “liberals.”

I quit even checking in on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News a long time ago, in part because of his fake, cynical strategy of attracting conservative viewers by blatantly distorting the Supreme Court’s rulings upholding the separation of church and state about nativity scenes on public property.

One of my favorite film depictions of this divide in America comes in Charlie Wilson’s War. Remember when Tom Hanks suggests to his constituent from Texas that moving the nativity scene from the firehouse to the church down the street would be the best solution where everybody wins?

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