You'll note that this is a significant departure from my normal work. Every Friday from now until the convention, and every day during the DNC, I'll be doing a new feature I call "Long Time Passing." Those of your old enough to remember the folk music craze of the sixties will get the reference. If you're under forty, ask your parents. It's a serialized graphic blog (it's too short to call it a graphic novel), generally (but not entirely) a musing about the coming of the Democratic National Convention to Denver. I hope you'll enjoy it.

The Denver Archdiocese has settled all but two of its outstanding clergy abuse cases, and issued a deeply felt (if long overdue) apology for the suffering of the victims. I don't know if Archbishop Chaput's apology included the horrific lapse of judgement (or worse, criminal enablement) the Archdiocese committed in allowing priests guilty of serial abuse to remain on the job. Let us hope that we are finally nearing the end of this sordid chapter in the Church's history.

I post this cartoon with a certain amount of trepidation, because nothing gets the saliva of an NRA-brainwashed gun fanatic flowing more than an anti-gun cartoon. If you can come up with something original to say, go for it, but spare me the canned repetitions of the NRA-packaged gun arguments, please. (Let's play it this way: if you have actual facts from reliable sources--not some unattributed something you found on the internet--to back up your assertions, let's hear them. Otherwise, don't simply recite chapter and verse of pro-gun philosophy.) I'm convinced that the Roberts court reached pretty far on this one in endorsing a view of the intent of the founders unsupported by any actual evidence. In ruling for the first time in history that the Second Amendment confers individual gun rights, the court ignored its own precedent and the repeated decisions of the federal courts, and in so doing, opened a huge can of worms likely to result in years of lawsuits to settle exactly how much regulation states and cities can impose. Worse, despite the fervent (and factually inaccurate) belief of the gun crowd that more guns make us safer, this decision is very likely to make it easier for criminals to lay their hands on weapons, making us all considerably less safe. Gang-bangers, rejoice. Terrorists, have at it.

The protesters, many of whom will have come from far away and will have no place to stay during the convention, now want to camp in City Park for the duration. Bad idea. Let them rent hotel rooms or lofts in Lodo at wildly inflated prices like everyone else.

As John McCain fleshes out his agenda and courts the mainstream of his party, he is moving closer and closer to George Bush's ruinous policies in a number of areas, the latest being his brain-dead energy notions, which follows his complete reversal on tax policy and his steadfast support of the war in Iraq. In the process, he is jettisoning the maverick reputation that endeared him to so many in the first place. More and more, it's looking like a McCain presidency will be more of a continuation of the horrific Bush years than not.

Dubya, in the last throes of his presidency, is making an all-out push to open every possible square inch of land to his oil and gas buddies before his reign mercifully ends. This includes Colorado and Utah's vast oil shale deposits. The only problem is, there is still no commercially viable method for extracting oil from the shale. This minor detail, of course, will not dissuade Dubya from using the shale to pander to a public fed up with high oil prices. Folks, we are not ever going to be able to drill our way out of this mess. The US, which accounts for 25 percent of the world's energy, has only three percent of the proven reserves, and even if we were to start drilling every possible deposit now, we wouldn't see any appreciable price reduction for years, if ever. And this scenario ignores the fact that four-fifths of the reserves are already leased, but not being developed as rapidly as the oil companies might. So even if we do open up the remaining 20 percent on environmentally sensitive lands, the result will be negligible. But given that this is an election year, we will be told that rabid environmentalists and evil Democrats are standing between you and cheap gas. Never mind that it's a lie.