Photo by michael stargill

Howdy, Washington! On Friday, Gov. Martin O’Malley released a compilation of citizens’ suggestions for getting out of the $700 million sand trap that is the Maryland state budget. Direct democracy! Decried as a publicity stunt by the Maryland Public Policy Institute (boooo), the open-source budget overhaul included such suggestions as entirely eliminating O’Malley’s salary and using this one lady’s clothes line to do Montgomery County’s laundry (yaaaay). It’s like that West Wing episode where Josh and Toby have to listen to the guys who want to have just one state called Dakota!

In some 2,500 entries over “351 pages worth of rants, musings, riffs” — what we call around here a comments section — Maryland citizens took the red pen to the budget, looking for ways to stop the bleeding. Unfortunately, this self-selected citizen sample tended toward the safe, which is no surprise. The people with the dangerous ideas that might just could change the world don’t need an invitation to submit them — they aren’t afraid to shout them at you now, say, from a busy median strip along a major thoroughfare. O’Malley would do best to throw the cookie-cutter ideas right out: ideas like “eliminating government waste” or “firing inept government employees”. A Baltimore where heroin is legal but non-diet cokes are prohibitively expensive? Now you are talking, people of Maryland.

But the best ideas have yet to surface. Surely I’m not the only one who’s realized that changing Maryland’s name to “Md” would save ink and paper (and time!). And Third Thursdays Minus Streetlights! has a lot of potential to bring together families (in utter darkness). Don’t put it past O’Malley, who outs himself as the craziest one of them all: “He is confident the exercise will produce real savings.”

» Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) has secured the release of U.S. citizen John Yettaw from Myanmar, where he was detained after swimming across a lake to make an unannounced visit to democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. Of course, that quick lap across the pond was all the pretext the junta needed to extend Suu Kyi’s house arrest. So . . . yeah, Yettaw. Welcome home, I guess?

» Imagine if John McCain were President. The White House Flickr page (of course there wouldn’t be a White House Flickr page but go with me) would probably show him asking for his money-back-guaranteed from the Video Professor. President Obama’s all tech-savvy: Here he is on the First PC, uploading pictures of Max Baucus to FAIL blog. (courtesy)

» “Clothes encounter”? Really, Wapo? Not quite “death panel,” but still.