Recent discussions and actions regarding rule changes in the U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee (over alleged improprieties by Representative Tom DeLay) and the U.S. Senate (over filibuster and cloture) remind me of one of my favorite comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes. One of the recurring themes in the strip was calvinball, a game wherein any rule may be changed by any player at any time.
In the comics, reading episodes of calvinball was always a LOL experience for me. When I read about such episodes in politics, my experience is more along the lines of WITFITS. My only consolation is Newton’s Third Law of Motion — "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" — and my belief that the political pendulum will swing back.