Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds and Expats

At The Denver Post, Ed Quillen writes:

One of the few positive media developments in 2008 arrived after the national political conventions, when Rachel Maddow got her own nightly hour on MSNBC. Not that I always concur with her politics, but unlike most such hosts, she doesn't badger, talk over or needlessly interrupt her guests. She might argue with them, but she always offers them a chance to speak. Nor is she full of herself like Keith Olbermann, who can elevate pomposity to stratospheric levels. Lately Maddow's show has offered a nightly feature called "Lame Duck Watch," which observes that George W. Bush is still president of the United States of America, and thus in position to issue regulations, pardons and executive orders that deserve scrutiny, especially when most eyes are focused on the impending presidency of Barack Obama. This got me to wondering about the origin of the phrase "lame duck." We use it to describe an office-holder whose replacement has been elected but not sworn in. It connotes a sense of being crippled, even though the lame duck still holds the full powers of office. ... The phrase did not originate in politics. According to my favorite bathroom reference book, "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," the expression originally came from finance, and referred to "a stock-jobber or dealer who will not, or cannot, pay his losses" and has to "waddle out of the alley like a lame duck." It also applies to a defaulter on a loan, and goes back to 18th-century London.

What Mister Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney defaulted on was not a loan but rather their oath of office. Scarcely a more appropriate pair of lame ducks in U.S. history deserve to be flipped the bird.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story Anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman dies at 91.