In times of crisis, Republicans always rush in, providing their own special brand of comic relief, if nothing else.

And, it always is nothing else.

House Republicans, for example, recently demonstrated a new way to flush 50 million tax dollars down the toilet -- the cost to taxpayers for taking 33 repeated, knowingly futile, politically-staged attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the helpful, but anemic, new healthcare law.

Every once in a while, an email floats in that you'd like to share with the whole nation.  It doesn't happen often, but it did happen again yesterday.  The Twainian email was in the form of a hopeful donation note from former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, who is now running in the newly-created 9th District there.

The letter is sharp, clear, and darkly humorous, filled with heady satire and parody. It is also filled with lots and lots of heart. There is much humor and truth here, and is of the kind you may have thought not made anymore.  As you read, be prepared to grimace some --  you know, where your face starts to smile through the insistent, persistent frown etched there by the times. Prepare to hear yourself laugh out loud, knowingly.

Closely watching the news can become a bleak deal, trying to follow and figure what's behind headlines, trying to see what may be written between the lines.  Nature of the evolved beast called news:  We want to know what went sideways, and how bad it got.  Not what went right.

Still, for good mental hygiene, balance is recommended -- not that we're about to burst into song and dance here.  Goodness knows those "happy news" attempts made decades ago crashed and burned, but, we can try to be a bit less dismal.

(Meanwhile, Perky and Sun-Shiney live on only, I imagine, in Disneyland, where it's instilled in service workers under threat of immediate dismissal.  Perky also shows up quite a lot in those morning network shows mislabeled as news -- the ones giving 12-minute segments to fashion, 8 minutes for movie box-office updates, and 2 minutes for a 14-member panel discussion on the possibility of life on other planets, with an update on nuclear power throughout the world tossed in for good measure.)

It was just another, typical, ho-hum, routine, Republican day at the Congressional office:  Republicans doing nothing whatsoever for the average American, but fighting tooth, nail, claw, skin, and fur to protect the rights of corporations and the obscenely rich.

"Don't tread on us?"  Oh, man -- that is sooo rich.  What a hoot!

Don't expect any of this to make the news, stated clearly, or show up at the water cooler in chit-chat, of course.  This yawner-material is the new normal -- has been, since ignorance was declared the new genius, since banks have been too big to fail, since theft was made the new success, and since astroturf groups like Teabaggers sprang up to do the artificial grassroots business of billionaires.