Charlie don't fetch: Sgt. Gwen Beberg of Minneapolis, currently deployed in Iraq, has been FORCIBLY SEPARATED from her puppy, Ratchet, by the U.S. Army, which decided to transfer her and the puppy to different posts. Now they want to send Beberg home to the United States, but they've extended Pvt. Ratchet's tour of duty in the Anbar province, where he'll serve as a military trainer with the 7th Iraqi Division in the Five Kilo District of Tammim. That's a little joke, because the puppy isn't American and is therefore probably some kind of Islamic insurgent, and besides, what can the Iraqi army learn from a puppy, anyway? Besides how to be much, much cuter? Anyway, 10,000 people signed an online petition to guilt-trip the Army into redeploying Private Ratchet to the United States.

Call me Ishmael: Now that the United States is buying equity stakes in nine banks, can we please quit calling Democrats Socialists, now, okay? Because, irony, hello.

In the small fishing village where I was raised, we didn't have much. In those days, an indoor toilet was a luxury, and ice cubes were also a luxury. Good water pressure and general HVAC infrastructure were also very luxurious. A Ford Explorer woody conversion with sweet rims and thumpers was a whole checklist of enviable luxuries. I'd now like to revise my original statement to read, "In the small fishing village where I was raised, we actually had quite a lot of luxuries."

Our upper-middle-class income was mostly due to the fact that the dolphins my dad caught in his tuna fishing nets could be sold to aquatic parks for thousands of dollars, or, if they died, to the same tuna companies that bought the rest of the catch. We usually had a couple splashing around in the swimming pool in the back yard, waiting for Seaworld purchase orders to come spooling out of the fax machine. The pool water was filthy and brown with the chum we fed to the delightful sea mammals, but that was really the only sacrifice we had to make to what was, in retrospect, a disgustingly opulent lifestyle.

Also, the North Atlantic right whale? Almost hunted to extinction by my dad. If the fucking U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hadn't stepped in with their Schindler's List of Endangered Species, dad would have achieved his lifelong goal of owning an island off the Maine coast, bought and developed on the blood of an entire ocean species. He came this close. Now he lives in a breathtakingly expensive Florida retirement community, where he sits on a deck in his wheelchair, shaded from the sun by a beach umbrella, staring bitterly out at the ocean and cursing U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall. He's already told me and my sister that what remains of his fishing fortune will be donated to the John Birch Society and the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, and that we should build our own fortunes on the backs of whatever species we can find to exploit, because he for damn sure wouldn't be providing any post- or pre-mortem handouts.

Uh, all of this was supposed to loop back around to my original observation that the Republican Party's decrying of socialist domestic policies was a bit ironic given the state of the U.S. financial system, but I've completely forgotten whatever connective thought I was going to use to get back there. Your business is important to us, so please accept this snowman as an apology for our lapse in customer service:

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