What Are You Doing Thursday?

Lots of options:

01) Do nothing
02) Spend nothing*
03) Wear black
04) Turn your back
05) Pray and fast
06) Don't drive
07) Go to a funeral
08) Donate $120

or

09) Hit the streets, park your ass in the bleachers and seriously protest this cocky fucker's $40 million Republican circle jerk.

*By the way, I agree with Neal:

First, if anyone has been following the decline of the dollar against the euro and our rising trade deficit, they'll know Bush and his people neither understand nor care about commerce. Second, how will boycotting the purchase, as (novelist Stephen) King says, of "a loaf of bread, a gallon of beer, a pack of Pampers, or the daily newspaper," send any kind of message at all to people who are spending the day attending $40 million worth of inaugural balls? Does he think that Treasury Secretary John Snow is going to wake up on the 21st and say, "gee, the drawers at the Target in Skokie, Illinois, were a little short yesterday. I must alert the President!"? Third, what if some person whose family depends on him or her driving to work every day needs a tank of gas? Are they going to skip out and get fired because some anti-globalization freaks tell them that a tight wallet is the only way to let the President know that the anti-Iraq-war forces mean business?

If the protest really happens, which it won't, not in any significant way, small businesses would find themselves in a day's hole from which they cannot extricate themselves, particularly since anyone who's likely to participate probably frequents independent businesses anyway. If you live in Brooklyn and don't eat at that Ethiopian restaurant like you were planning, in what way does that hurt George W. Bush? It doesn't. It just hurts a neighborhood restaurant.

However, I do recommend that you Buy Blue.