I am woken up this morning by loud winds outside my apartment. I get up to go to the bathroom, stumbling in still half-asleep.

When I get there, I’m flummoxed by something I’m not expecting — the toilet is missing. The carpeting extends to the wall as if it’s perfectly natural to have a small room with a sink, a mirror, some cabinetry, and no toilet.

I lean against the sink, wondering, “What the hell? Someone broke in, stole my toilet, and recarpeted my bathroom? Since 2 AM?” This strikes me as somewhat farfetched. I am still pretty confused when….

I am woken up by loud winds outside my apartment. I realize, “Oh, that explains it. I was still sleeping before.” I get up to go to the bathroom, which is now completely empty; apparently my apartment now comes equipped with a walk-in closet.

At this point, I’m pretty bemused, but distracted by the problem that I really need to use a bathroom.

Next thing I know, I am woken up by loud winds outside my apartment. I look around my bedroom, establishing that this time I feel really awake. I enter the bathroom with some trepidation, and huzzah! the toilet is in its rightful position. Then I notice the mirror is gone.

So I’m staring at the newly blank wall, thinking that I now have a conundrum. Four cups of coffee are insisting that it’s time to leave my bladder. The toilet is right there. And despite the fact that I am now upright and walking around my apartment, the missing mirror is telling me that, in fact, I am most likely still in bed on a windy day with four cups of coffee insistently wanting to leave my bladder.

In short, going to the bathroom right now strikes me as a very bad idea.

At this point my memory becomes pretty fuzzy — there’s something about being at a wedding and staying in room 301 of a hotel, none of which involves bathrooms. This is all normal dreaming without the lucid sensation of being awake and controlling my actions. When I wake up again, I head to the bathroom and find it all astonishingly and thankfully normal.

I also notice something I missed all morning: the bathroom that had been vexing me wasn’t my bathroom. The layout was entirely wrong. Somehow I managed to miss that detail.

It would be nice to say at the end that this has been a creative writing exercise, but I’m not that creative. Sadly, this is a true story.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I consume a metric truckload of news on a daily basis. And yet, it occurs to me that I don’t know the answers to the following questions about the stimulus:

1) Given all the hoopla over Obama’s tax cut concessions to the Republicans, are these tax cuts the ones he campaigned on, or different ones more common to Republican policy?

2) After tax cuts, and ignoring the 0.7% of the stimulus that the Republicans are arguing with (I, for one, think the National Mall is damn well in need of sod), just what the hell are we spending the other 99.3% on?

I mean, we’re spending $816 billion here. That should be newsworthy. And not to imply that we have a blitheringly incompetent news media, but at the moment the word “stimulus” does not appear on CNN’s home page. (Headlines: WWII vet frozen to death leaves $$$ to hospital; Sarah Palin takes on Ashley Judd; Boy, 10, gets porn text on birthday phone.) Amusingly, the CNN home page that does not include the word “stimulus” does include a story about how hard it is to understand the concept of “trillion”, called “Numb and Number”.

Accurate, if only they we’re talking about their own news room.

So, as a public service: here is the PDF of the Congressional Budget Office report which summarizes the costs of the bill, by explicating some of them. However, they have a habit of saying things like “$6.4 billion for other purposes”. So here is the complete text of H.R. 1, while these are the amendments in the House and the Senate.

The full text prints to a 362 page PDF, if you’re so inclined. It’s a shame we don’t have an industry whose job it is to analyze proposed legislation and report it to the public; perhaps we should do something about that.

I just had a bit of a revelation upon hearing this NPR report about CIA missile strikes in Pakistan:

CIA-directed airstrikes against al-Qaida leaders and facilities in Pakistan over the past six to nine months have been so successful, according to senior U.S. officials, that it is now possible to foresee a “complete al-Qaida defeat” in the mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan….

The intelligence reports have been shared with President Barack Obama and underlie his decision to authorize the continued use of unmanned aircraft to launch missile and precision-guided bombs against suspected al-Qaida targets in Pakistan’s border region….

The CIA has been using drone aircraft to carry out attacks on suspected al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Pakistan for several years, but such attacks were significantly expanded last summer under orders from President George W. Bush.

My epiphany relates to the attack of “Bush hatred” that’s frequently leveled against progressives, i.e., “you’re so blinded by irrational rage, you can’t acknowledge when he does something good.” And what I just realized was this: it wasn’t about rage, it was about trust.

Fact is, if I had heard this report 15 days ago, I would have immediately assumed it was bullshit. Even hearing it now, especially the claim that al-Qaeda is “defeated”, makes me wonder a bit about whether this is coming from the Obama military apparatus or holdovers. (NPR, all of your sources are anonymous. Stop it. You’re better than that.)

But today my first reaction is to think this is good news, whereas in December I would have needed a book of E-ticket passes to the newly-opened Peshawar Disneyland before I believed anything W said about the region.

So when this president says something good about what the last president did, well, props where props are due. It’s not that George couldn’t do anything right. It’s that he lied to us so often, we couldn’t believe him when he did.

I have to admit, Mr. President, you’ve got me really confused.

You’ve taken office with huge partisan majorities in Congress, and an approval rating that makes Jesus gnash his teeth with envy. Hell, you’ve even got adorable daughters to keep us all captivated. This is the sort of political momentum that gave most of your predecessors (especially the last one) the green light for a slash-and-burn, salt-the-earth crusade for his legislative agenda.

Remember “I’ve got political capital, and I intend to spend it”? That came of a few thousand votes in Ohio. If he had political capital, you’re King Midas.

And what have you done with this? Let’s see: you’ve got a Republican heading your military. Another one heading Transportation, which last time I checked was a pretty major item on the infrastructure agenda. And word is that you want another one to take over at Commerce.

Military, infrastructure, and commerce. Um. Pardon me, but aren’t those three issues on which you pretty much whomped the Republican party? If George Mitchell had negotiated those appointments as part of a cease-fire agreement after the war you won in November, he’d be a shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize.

And yet, each day of the news cycle is filling us up with the constant complaints of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, who are still getting a 2 to 1 advantage getting their message across. What am I missing here? The Republican strategy is obvious: weaken your proposals as much as possible, and blame you when they fail. Or, if you succeed, claim that Republican policies would have been oh so much better. Either way they try to take a chunk out of your majorities in 2010 and lessen your political advantage.

I repeat, your political advantage. I.e., the power you have now which you are currently not using.

Mr. President, I think you’re actually pretty damn savvy, and you have some kind of long game you’re playing with these initial attempts at bipartisan outreach. I think that there’s a flinty Chicago plan for how you’re going to turn that goose egg House vote to your political favor. And I think you’re genuine when you say you want to change the way the game in Washington is played; the problem is that this bipartisan thing so far is making you look as naive as Jefferson Smith.

I don’t buy that for a second. But at the same time, I sure as hell can’t explain to myself why you’re governing as if the election was a tie. You don’t inspire by finding the center. You inspire by picking a direction, grabbing a multicolored banner, and leading the parade with the audacity of Harold fucking Hill.

But you know that, and you’re still looking for centrism. It makes me wonder about your game plan. It’s certainly not what I expected, and it reminds me of past disappointment. I hope you’re better than that, Mr. Obama, so please, prove me wrong.