A new plan for reforming government

Any of you getting cranky about a bloated government unable to be reformed? Feeling frustrated with your inability to do anything about it? Losing hope because your efforts to bring government back down to a reasonable size have failed?

Consider this idea:

It was a highly public version of a drama that has touched many families. Former Maryland governor William Donald Schaefer, 86, famously stubborn and growing increasingly frail, refused to move out of his Pasadena townhouse.

After a fall in March, some friends and associates worried that he was no longer safe living on his own.

So longtime aide Lainy LeBow-Sachs devised a ruse. While she kept Schaefer busy over a long lunch at a restaurant last month, movers descended on the townhouse, packed up all his belongings and reinstalled them in an apartment at the Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville.

Has anyone got John McCain's phone number? And no, I was thinking of giving him advice, not of moving him to a retirement home. (We'll do that after the election.)

Note: Schaefer's friends must have read Christopher Buckley's The White House Mess.