As predictions go, here's an easy one:  I predict things will get factually bumpy where politicians are concerned.  I also predict you'll detect today's Mystery Guest on Spot the Weasel, the game show that offers fabulous conundrums the longer you play!

Are you ready?  From the time tunnel of 2009, Clue Number One:  "Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term."  In case there was any confusion about the issue, there was additional clarification right away:  "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Is that Slope of Truth Morsels not slippery enough?  No guesses yet?  Here's another helping, from just this week:  "Just because we have a two-party system doesn't mean we have to be in perpetual conflict."  This was said at the same time along with an admission that representatives were sent to Washington "to fight all the time." Puzzled?  Here's one more clarifier:  "Gridlock in Washington can be ended."

Tick, tick, tick.... BUZZZZ.  Have you Spotted the Weasel yet?

Funny-peculiar (not funny-ha-ha) how often we humans get what we most fear.

Well, it's official, not that there was much doubt:  A majority of the nation's voters are freewheeling into full-blown psychosis, handing off a fixing of the Senate to those who broke it in the first place, to those who moved heaven and earth to sit on their hands and do precisely nothing for years on end, save work on their skills with barricades, stalls, quashes, and stone-walling.

The pieces of our political system, the Senate-sized ones, be assured, will be pummeled and smashed into finer and finer bits -- the political version of road-gang prisoners making small rocks out of the big ones.

There is no analogy I know of that completes the full conveyance of political imagery and what-nextedness, which would be the quasi-governmental quarrying of taking those first rocks and chipping them into flagstones, then grinding those into gravel, and then pulverizing them into sand, and then blasting the sand into talcum powder, and then disintegrating the powder further, in order to negate them for any purposes of human usefulness, and morph the powder into subatomic particles.

Money makes decisions Sanity never would.  Fear, too.  This adage applies to an awful lot of things, most of them pretty awful -- like politics and Ebola.  These are awful and also awe-filled, but not in a good way.  The critical difference between politics and Ebola?  It's possible to somewhat survive devastating, ignorant decisions by the country in politics, even Bush-league decisions.  Ebola, on the other hand, starts at death, and goes downhill from there.

Both are bad systems, way out of control.  Both operate in a wide range, anywhere from figuratively to literally lethal.  Both score lower than body lice in approval ratings.  Both clog up your TVs and radios.  Plus, there are more similarities at fighting the two than you might first think.

Tell you what I mean:  In my part of the world, when 19 snowflakes, by actual count, have hit the sidewalk around a local TV broadcast studio,  an official Snow Emergency is declared, and live, round-the-clock coverage begins.  The TV station's graphics department is alerted, and, inside of the time it takes to track and catch one snowflake in your mouth, a new, screen-blasting piece of artwork is created for broadcast, as a backdrop for the usual dizzy and ditzy, On the Spot, Eyewitness Action News-You-Can-Use, Eye-in-the-Sky anchor team.

Invariably, the graphic is muted and demure, modestly trumpeting out something like Snow Apocalypse Trauma Center Update Action Desk or something similarly boneheaded and jarring, sporting gigantic fonts touched up with icicle appendages for that chilling, but cutesy, You Are There feeling for the news anchor set.

Behind the scenes, as they are scrambling to get the character generator fired up and hail the Message Crawler Crew back from the tavern across the street, the crack marketing team is warming up in the playpen for a flurry of Snow Emergency calls to area businesses.

Their flaky pitches, of course, are all about the sudden bonus round of nearly endless local advertising time now available, falling like frosty manna from heaven, now that the station has dumped all network programming in order to run Snow Apocalypse coverage until further notice.

This is all done in the public interest, naturally.  Sure.

Yes:  Lauren Bacall.

A landmark, watershed moment of loss, finality.

End of an era much adored.

End of a storybook, starry-eyed romantic pair.

End of a warm, playful, and sly sort of style, grace, wit, charm.

End of a role model and path-maker for women, for people.

Too many ends.

Too many irrevocable lines drawn in the sand.

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