Crappuccino

As Attorney General Eric Holder once famously observed, "America is a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about race while buying wildly overpriced hipster coffee."

To rectify this problem, Starbucks recently instituted a campaign called "Race Together," which encourages their employees to strike up meaningful conversations about race relations with poor bleary-eyed bastards who just came in for their morning caffeine fix.

And who better to give straight talk on one of the most sensitive issues in our country than a company which can't even use clear language like "small" "medium" and "large" when obfuscating the sizes of their own products?

Still, Hope n' Change is always in favor of open and honest dialogue, which is why we can imagine ourselves dropping in to a Starbucks to order a double-grande half-caff soy milk cocoa-dusted cinnamon-sprinkled whipped foam frappuccino and then asking our barista "what the hell happened with the OJ verdict, am I right?!"

Then again, the young servers at Starbucks may not be conversant on a subject so dated, and would perhaps rather discuss contemporaneous stories. "Do you believe that Kanye West accurately reflects the black man's perspective and societal aspirations," we might ask, "when he tweets pictures of Kim Kardashian's gigantic ass?"

Other topics abound: "Do you think the phrase 'baby daddy' fills a useful niche in the vernacular?" "How serious a faux pas was it for two policemen to be murdered in New York over the fictitious Michael Brown kerfuffle?"

And of course, "If Martin Luther King had been unable to sleep because he was jacked up on preposterously expensive caffeine-fortified coffee, could he even have had a dream?"

But in truth, we'll never have such a conversation because we're not planning on setting foot in a Starbucks until they rename themselves STFUbucks.

Better safe than sorry.

Irish I Could Get Out of Work Today

Hope n' Change is taking the day off. Well actually, we took yesterday off - St Patrick's Day - which is when we'd usually be preparing material for Wednesday.

Unlike those whose claims to being Irish are highly suspect (yeah, we're talking to you O'Bama), we really are part Irish - descended from a charming, red-headed son of County Cork who moved to the states, became a professional musician, knocked up our paternal grandmother without benefit of wedlock, then hot-footed it out of state.

It was his loss not to have known the marvelous bastard he fathered, and our loss that both men have now ridden the Cóiste Bodhar (the "death coach").

But today we lift a pint in their honor, and would be pleased if you'll do the same. After which we can all go back to drinking because of what we read in the news.

We actually really, REALLY want to find a beer company willing to make this.

Sloppy Secondaries

As if Hillary Clinton's lifeless, laughable excuses for her email scandals weren't bad enough, there's increasing talk that presidential puppet-master Valerie Jarrett is actually orchestrating the attack on the former Secretary of State. It's like one of those nature documentaries in which a scorpion is squaring off with a rattlesnake; it's hypnotically fascinating to watch, and you hope they'll both lose.

But with Hillary looking (at least temporarily) wounded and woeful, who do Democrats have waiting in the wings to possibly take her place? Right now, the choices seem to boil down to a Native American and a Naive American...

Senator Elizabeth "More Beads for Minimum Wage" Warren claims not to be running for president, and she's making that claim in front of every camera and potential voter she can find. If she is successfully drafted as a candidate, she is expected to run on a populist campaign of strengthening the middle class by making it legal for them to open casinos and sell tax-free cigarettes after they've had "cheekbone lifts" courtesy of Obamacare.

Also in the running (and just as reality-impaired) is VP Joe Biden, who recently appeared on an HBO program called "Our Rising Oceans" and declared that disbelief in manmade global warming is akin to denying gravity. 

"Gimme a break, man," said Biden (according to an unofficial transcript) "Gravity is the real deal. You're gonna question something invented by Newton? God bless ya, this is the guy who figured out how to put figs in cookies!"

In summary, it's going to be a long, long campaign season.