When you work around politicians and other Very Important People for a living, you tend to accumulate various forms of interesting memorabilia. After two-plus decades of doing this, I've only kept three items, since living in an expensive coastal city often means having to make brutal decisions about those items for which you have actually have the space to keep in your tiny coastal city apartment.

Holy crap. Has it been five years already? Because that?s the amount of time it takes for editors and writers everywhere to forget that someone, somewhere, has already said everything interesting or revealing that can possibly be said in print about New York City's infamous Black Party.

It's a myth so ingrained into many people's consciousness that I've had otherwise well-informed people react to my writing something critical of the Catholic hierarchy with some variation on the response: "Why can't they all just be more like Mother Teresa?"

My boyfriend's 80-year-old Jewish maternal grandmother is the sweetest thing you've ever met and she still gets around as well as someone half her age...

It must be tough to be a U.S. Senator from a place like Nebraska, yet still have the silly desire to decide issues based on fact.

Given all that has happened to us in the preceding year, it might not seem at first glance a story very relevant to this community when the Boston Globe began printing details Dec. 20 of the questionably cozy relationship between disgraced state lab chemist Annie Dookhan and prosecutors around the state.

There aren't many issues with which I find myself in agreement with the elderly male hierarchy of the Catholic Church, so when I do find now-and-again common ground with them, I have to check my positions repeatedly because they are so often prone to being counter-intuitive and cruel.

When Kevin Clash, the man behind the much-loved Sesame Street character Elmo was first exposed by what was said to be a former under-aged love interest -- the victim was alleged to be16-years old when the age of consent at the time in New York State was 17 years old -- it was immediately revealed that the accuser was a "male model with a criminal history."

After Obama won the last election, I wanted to take the next day off to spend time with my fellow travelers reveling in what seemed to be a new day dawning -- a time wherein the competent and paternal African-American president would finally prove to the trailer-park-and-Pabst-Blue-Ribbon set holding the GOP hostage that darker-skinned people, especially African American men, were not the dangerous lawless monsters they have been made out to be by two and one-half decades of the GOP?s vile Southern Strategy.

The closer we get to the November elections, the more glaringly obvious it becomes that Republicans and their supporters are becoming desperate now that it's becoming clear that their usual bag of underhanded tricks...