By DAN K. THOMASSON, Scripps Howard News Service

A grandchild asked me about the real nature of Christmas. Is it just to celebrate the birth of Jesus and wait for Santa to bring us presents, he wanted to know? Or is it something more? Such a probing question from one so young caught me completely off guard.
Thinking for a moment before I answered, a trait that I display all too seldom, I told him this story.

A grandchild asked me about the real nature of Christmas. Is it just to celebrate the birth of Jesus and wait for Santa to bring us presents, he wanted to know? Or is it something more? Such a probing question from one so young caught me completely off guard.
Thinking for a moment before I answered, a trait that I display all too seldom, I told him this story.

In the summer and fall of 1972, the FBI, in turmoil over the death of its longtime director J. Edgar Hoover in May of that year, was literally leaking like a sieve about the burgeoning implications of the break-in at the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate complex.

Now they tell us that there is a loophole in the bailout legislation that could negate pay limitations for chief executive officers. In other words the government, without some extra congressional action, may not be able to deprive top execs of those big-time compensation packages that helped get the economy where it is today.

An official history on the rebuilding of Iraq now circulating around town and on the Internet concludes that like so many other things in this impulsively launched and incompetently managed war that effort has been a miserable failure at great expense to the American taxpayers. So what's new?

The sheer monotony of it is overwhelming. A once-popular politician turns out to be corrupt -- or at least has aspirations of being so but may have been more inept than successful at it -- often after promising to clean up government. Over and over again, history repeats the scenario.

As a parting shot from the Bush Administration, courtesy of the gun lobby, those who seek the solitude and beauty of some national parks and wildlife refuges will face the fact that the visitor standing next to them just may be packing heat and is ready to use it at the first sign of any unfriendliness, such as an argument over a camping space.

Some days it just doesn't pay to get up in the morning.

So you have some cash and you could use a new car and believe this is a great time to buy, particularly the Detroit kind. After all the Big Three chiefs have gone hat in hand to Congress for relief from pending financial disaster and will be back this week to present a plan on how they would spend the billions of taxpayer money.

First, there was a post-election flat spot. All the news was about things like where Barack Obama's children would go to school and his pick up basketball games. But now, Obama has stepped forcefully into the vacuum left by an incumbent president who obviously wishes it was January 20 and that he was on his way back to Texas.