Wesley Pruden in today's Washington Times:

Mzz Pelosi and her "new Democrats" have just about completed their legislative agenda of "the first 100 hours." By the arithmetic the rest of us learned in grade school, hundreds of hours have elapsed since the clock started ticking with the convening of the 110th Congress on Jan. 4, but Democrats new and old march to a distant drummer, a confusing cadence and a stopped clock.
    
"We're just counting the legislative hours," the speaker's spokesman explains. (Only in Congress is someone employed to speak for a speaker.) By just counting actual working hours and minutes a clever Congress, excuse the oxymoron, might stretch out a hundred hours to cover an entire congressional session.... Congress didn't invent euphemy, the hiding of the evidence of a misdeed behind a perfumed word, but it has perfected the art. Euphemisms can camouflage manifold sins and disguise a mountain as a molehill.

Coming up in Mr. Pruden's next column: NBA basketball games -- somebody needs to investigate the fact that they don't take exactly 48 minutes to play!