By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

One option for us citizens as this inaugural moment in Washington, D. C., comes and goes is to dodge the news, stay uninvolved in our communities, adopt cynical attitudes and curse those who disagree with us.

Barack Obama is contemplating getting a Portuguese Water Dog for his two daughters, and I say go for it, forget the Labradoodle option, but be sure to hide the meat loaf.. The best thing is to put it in a safe and don't tell the dog the combination.

Even Alan Greenspan has said it.
In congressional testimony, the conservative, capitalism-loving former chairman of the Federal Reserve confessed he had trusted too much to market mechanisms and too little to regulation in that job, and that this is among the reasons for the current financial crisis.

"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, first inaugural, 1933

For peace purposes, Israel gets out of Gaza, the terrorist group Hamas takes over and uses the evacuation as an excuse to bombard innocent Israeli civilians with missiles, there are further peace efforts and a ceasefire and then more missiles. What's Israel supposed to do? Back in July, Barack Obama had an answer.

President-elect Barack Obama has this multi billion infrastructure plan, and there's a fair amount of hollering that it's just the stimulus the economy needs for recovery. It could be something else entirely: a road paved with good intentions leading to you know where.

In Poland recently, representatives of the European Union were discussing ways to look like soldiers in the war against global warming while once more dodging the draft, and outside there were the usual sorts of doomsday-prognosticating protesters. Some were dressed as penguins, devils and polar bears, it's reported.

If the governor of New York appoints Caroline Kennedy to take Hillary Clinton's seat in the U.S. Senate, it will likely be because of the Kennedy name, but not necessarily because the governor himself is wowed by it.

Greed, greed, greed. It's a refrain that is endless these days as liberals especially blame virtually all our problems on this vice supposedly endorsed and amplified by a free market that carries this message: Go for the biggest prize possible, and if decency gets in the way, knock it on the head.

It's an astonishing story. This seemingly trustworthy guy named Bernard Madoff was supposedly investing something on the order of $50 billion for some of America's richest people, pretended it was earning gobs of interest, actually used the principal of some to pay others wanting redemptions -- and lost practically everything.