SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- It was just another night at Sam's Anchor Cafe on San Francisco Bay, when a spacecraft suddenly appeared overhead and deposited a rumpled-looking figure in a Yankee hat on the outside deck.

"Where am I," said the man, clutching a Wall Street Journal dated Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2000, as the jaws of the regulars at the bar dropped into their beers. "Last thing I remember, I was on my way to the polling place on East 14th Street to vote for Ralph Nader. Then a blinding flash of light, and now I'm here."

"You better sit down and have a drink," I told him. "You're not in New York. You're in the Bay Area, and you've missed an entire year. It's the day after Election Day -- 2001."

"You're kidding. How can that be? My day-trading account will have expired. Oh well, should be OK, I was long Cisco, Lucent and Enron. Anyway, how'd Nader do?"

"He got crushed," I said. "But he took just enough votes to cost Gore the election, almost, well sort of. You see, it was kind of a tie."

"A tie? How can a presidential election be a tie? Who's the president?

"Well, Bush is president, and we're happy about that -- finally, we think. You see, the election was so close that the country basically came to a halt for two months, and split into two opposing sides accusing each other of stealing, cheating and general crookedness. Finally, the Supreme Court had to step in, declaring Bush the winner and the Constitution null and void. It also outlawed the name Chad."

"Bush, huh," he said. "Well, must be good for the stock market at least."

"Not really, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (: news, chart, profile) is down about 1,500 points since this time last year, and the Nasdaq (: news, chart, profile) been cut in half. Even the so-called Bush stocks have taken a hit. Stocks like AOL Time Warner (AOL: news, chart, profile), Yahoo(YHOO: news, chart, profile), and Microsoft (MSFT: news, chart, profile), which were supposed to benefit from a less regulatory regime, are all much lower since the last election.

However, some issues -- the sin stocks -- like tobacco companies Philip Morris (MO: news, chart, profile) and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco (RJR: news, chart, profile) have had nice gains. And shares of ChevronTexaco (CVX: news, chart, profile), the first big oil merger under the new Texan-led regime, are also up.

But generally, it's been a miserable year, for stocks and the economy. More than 1.6 million people lost their jobs, and it looks like we're in a recession."

"But where was Greenspan during all this?" the man asked, starting to perspire and turning his cap around. "Last I saw, he was raising interest rates to stop the runaway growth."

"Well, he went a little too far down that road," I said. "He finally started cutting rates in January and now we can't stop him. He's cut 10 times to the point where rates are as low as they were during the Kennedy administration. But it hasn't helped a lick. Nobody's spending. Probably to do with the war."

"War? We're at war? With who?

"We're not sure. This guy in a cave in Afghanistan blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and ... "

"Wait," he said. "I need another drink. Did you say the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?"

"Yeah, and now we're at war with him, along with terrorism and evil in general. We're making progress, but there's a lot of evil out there, as you know. We've got soldiers on our bridges and in our airports, and we're all on medication to prevent bio-terrorism. Other than that, things are pretty normal."

"What's happened to New York? How is Rudy doing?

"Rudy's not mayor anymore. They elected Michael Bloomberg."

"The computer guy? With the financial stuff? What does he know about politics?"

"No one's sure. But he's got a lot of dough. That's how you win these campaigns these days. Sure would've helped Nader."

"So in addition to missing an entire year and not knowing what happened, I'm now stuck on the West Coast, my city and country have been attacked, stocks are in the tank, we're in a recession, we're at war, and Michael Bloomberg is the second most-powerful man in the country."

"Yep. You missed quite a year."

"Well, at least I still have my Yankees."

"Umm, let me get you another drink

seems to me we have a couple of problems: The people of Afghanistan hate us and our economy is going down the dumper...since we have already bombed the buildings into rubble, and the rubble into craters and now we are just making bigger craters, why don't we just take all the billions that we are gonna be spending in the near future, to blow up the country and field a ground force, and buy up all the crap that Americans can't or don't want to buy right now and drop that on the Afghanis' heads...imagine, waves of bicycles, cars, boomboxes, all the food we don't want eat like broccoli, pagers, phones, books and the rest of all that crap. We wouldn't be killing any more people so they couldn't be mad at us and maybe they would take a good hard look at the people that they think are looking after their best interests, i.e. the taliban and bin laden. At the same time we would be helping the economy by buying all the products and services. This will give business the need for workers and they will hire the people back. The stock market will zoom back up and we will all get rich and not have to pay big capital gains taxes...

we are looking for you Osama...

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Terrorism must be erradicated, all countries in the middle east must be made accountable for their acitons. Equality and liberty must be guaranteed to all, Israel must be shown how their actions are forcing the world to compromise these beliefs by repressing the palistinians. The world will not be safe as long as these factions continue to spread their problems world wide. We can't wage a war on terrorism with carpet bombing. We will have to search out the culprits individually and eliminate them and then resolve the underlying inequalities that exist. America can no longer take sides in the region, we must hold all parties responsible for their behaviors.

18 terrorists went to be with allah, that's a good start...




we should endeavor to send the rest post haste...death should rain down like never before...

And now they are attacking us...

Life just seems to get wierder every day...in Pitsburgh women have complained to police that a middleaged man accosted them, removed their shoes and sniffed them...he took one woman's shoe from her foot and "sniffed it like it was a bouquet of flowers"

In other news Christians, Muslims, jews, Arabs, Catholics, Protestants and every other conceivable religous entity was engaged in some sort of repression, murder, hatred, or similar human indignity in order to show how supreme their GAWDS were compared to the other fellows...I believe in God but I have a problem with religion, the two don't seem to be able to relate to each other...

During the height of the shark season in florida, the surfers were having to jump over the sharks in order to get to deep water...little wonder we are seeing so many shark bites...is that why they call each other CHUM...

well the market got me again...here is georgy to dance for you...

in Huntington New York a man was shooting arrows with his kids when he was swallowed by his cesspool. The man, a DEA agent, was standing on the ground above the cesspool when it gave way. rescuers worked all night to extract him from the quicksand like goo...he was shit outa luck...

Mark Twain once said "there are lies, Damn lies and statistics"

in Chicago a train operator of a commuter train ran into the end of another train...the driver decided to ignore the requirement not to move his train while another one was in his way...

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