It could have been worse, I guess.

If your holiday shopping this season finds you in a bookstore, ask for the section on presidential history and take a peek. I'll hazard a guess you'll find literally hundreds of works of presidential history, from the scholarly tomes with hundreds of footnotes to the downright silly works on presidential pets.

Now, take a moment and imagine it's 2033, and you're looking for a nice downloadable e-book history of the Clinton or Bush presidency.

It's a nice sunny day so you decide to go anti-war protesting with your friends.

You will be arrested.

While Ben Cohen's and Jerry Greenfield's goal of getting Iowa voters to pick a candidate in the upcoming caucus that will pledge to shift money from the Pentagon's discretionary budget towards domestic initiatives appears, at first glance, to be a noble effort towards ending unnecessary spending on defense programs that are no longer useful, one has to question how serious Cohen and Greenfield are about making these cuts a reality. (See "Guns and Butter: Can the Ben & Jerry's Founders Change Federal Spending Priorities?", River Cities' Reader issue #655.)