New Year's Eve and flying cars

Originally published 1/3/09

I was promised flying cars.

I can’t remember exactly when or by whom. I think it was just a collective assurance by the entertainment industry that by 2009 I would be flying to work.

They’ve been telling me since I was a child. How long am I going to have to wait? I mean, it’s only one more year until the world ends, according to every science fiction movie I’ve ever seen.

You know the movie trailers with the scary voice that start like this:

“It’s the year 2010 in a post-apocalyptic world ...” or

“In 2010, humans dare to fight back against the machines that took ...”

I think I’ve been perfectly patient, and don’t tell me it’s not time yet. I know another year has passed because I turned on ABC this week and watched the really excellent programming choice of a mush-mouthed stroke victim with an unwrinkled, 26-year-old face and 100-year-old, liver-spotted hands stammering out the wrong numbers during the ball-drop countdown.

I’ve been writing the wrong date on my checks for the last few days and pondering suicide after noticing that the “born-on” year for cigarettes in the 7-11 is now 1991.

And still, no flying cars.

I walk down the street and I see the same stupid Pontiacs. Granted, now they have GPS systems that drive for you while you watch the dashboard DVD player, but the point remains, they’re still rolling on the ground.

To be fair, I guess there have been recent technological improvements that have made life easier.

Between iPhones, iPods and handhelds, now I don’t have to talk to anyone for any reason ever.

Not to mention the new game I love to play when I see someone walking down the street talking to themselves. It’s called “Bluetooth or homeless?”

Asian woman? Bluetooth. Ten points.

Man in suit? That’s easy. Bluetooth. Eight points.

Disheveled man in torn jeans and unkempt beard? Ooh. Tough one. Homeless. Oh no! An upper-middle class white kid who’s purposely messy to attain an Ashton Kutcher-esque rebellious style! Bluetooth — minus 40 points!

If only they could develop a ray gun of some sort to kill or at least stun those brilliant people around the office who say, “See you next year” when they leave after the last workday before New Year’s Eve.

That joke is like Dick Clark’s face — it never gets old even when it’s dead.

I mean, even if the sci/fi movies were wrong and 2010 isn’t the end, Nostradamus predicted the destruction of the world in 2012, at least according to the History Channel.

As impressed as I am with his skill at foreshadowing a Sarah Palin presidency all those years in advance, I’d at least like to have ridden in a flying car before it all goes down.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask. Maybe they can include that in the conditions for the automotive bailout.

Happy New Year.

Barack's abs and the pope's new clothes

Originally published 12/27/08

For years now it’s been hard to differentiate cable news from entertainment TV. Graphics, crawlers, logos that take up a third of the screen. A broadcast from Paris Hilton’s driveway here, six months of Natalee Holloway there.

Ever since the media took the president’s word for it that Saddam Hussein had the Stewie Griffin death ray, it’s been harder to tell which guy is supposed to tell me about politics and troop casualties and which guy is supposed to tell me who’s sleeping with who, who’s fat, who’s gay and who’s drunk.

And then it happened. This week, CNN, Fox and MSNBC officially became TMZ, only without the dry-erase board.

We’re at war on two fronts and our economy is now based on seashells instead of money, but all three news networks this week led with the same story: Look at our black president’s sexy body!

There he was, strolling on a beach in Hawaii, shirtless and looking like a perfectly normal version of something that is completely foreign to most of America’s Fluffernutter sandwich-eating population: A man who exercises.

The headlines said it all: “The stomach to lead,” “The most powerful man in the world” and, my favorite of all, “Barack-hard abs”.

The media then used Christmas as an excuse to parade around the rest of the world’s woefully out-of-shape leaders. Sure, they called them “holiday messages,” but I know a critique when I see one.

Queen Elizabeth II of England went on TV to remind the world not to forget the poor during the economic crisis.

When she spoke, that underneath part of her arm where her triceps should be jiggled like rice pudding in a Ziplock bag. Shameful!

Then they trotted out Mahmoud I’m-a-dinner-jacket from Iran. His holiday message was that if Jesus were alive today, he would be against the warmongering of imperialist countries like America.

Yeah, that’s all fine and well, but he looked emaciated. Karen Carpenter had better thighs — and did you see that hair? His head looked liked James Gandolfini’s back.

Then they brought out the pope, who also asked not to forget poor nations that are suffering from economic trouble.

Now, the pope looked pretty good for his age, he had a whole Jack LaLanne thing going on — in fact, I almost bought a juicer from him. But the E! fashionista in me couldn’t help but find it odd that the leader of the most homophobic organization in the world wears the gayest outfits ever.

A magic Harry Potter hat with flowing embroidered robes? Fabulous!

So, in a world where one out of every three people will live their entire lives without ever having a reliable source of clean water, there we sat like Hans and Franz from Saturday night live, proudly yammering about our president’s sexy obliques.

Did we do it on E! or TMZ or Entertainment Tonight?

No, we did it on CNN – in the land of the free and the home of the vain.

Caroline Kennedy, Jesus and the ghost of JFK

Originally published 12/20/08

My dad is great at his job. He’s always moving up the ladder, he wins awards and everyone always tells me how much they admire him. If only he had been a politician. Then I would know the direction my life would take because in this country, if your dad was a great politician, you must be, too.

Caroline Kennedy is Sarah Palin if Sarah Palin’s dad was on our money, and here’s why they’re the same: If a reporter asks you why you’re qualified for high office and at any point for any reason you feel the need to blurt out that you have children, you’re not qualified, even if your dad was.

Sarah Palin was three steps away from illiteracy with a hayseed dad from a state that no one has ever set foot in, so she became a Saturday Night Live skit.

Caroline Kennedy is a glorified socialite — Paris Hilton with a law degree — but her dad was really good in that Oliver Stone movie so she gets to take Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat.

If Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, at least she’s a self-made embarrassment. At least she hit a triple. Caroline Kennedy was born on third base and now I’m supposed to shower her with accolades over DNA.

Are we England? Does your lawyer wear a James Madison wig in court? Then why should we choose our leaders on bloodline? We just tried that and we got eight years of a president who’s greatest accomplishment was a perfect shoe dodgeball record.

And if we don’t care that there’s no criteria for how we pick our leaders, let’s not pretend to care how they’re sworn into office.

Gays and the people who don’t think gays should have to wear yellow star armbands are upset with Barack Obama for choosing Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration because Warren publicly compared homosexuality to pedophilia, incest and bestiality.

Rick Warren is the leader of one of the many hate groups in this country that we call churches. Gays say he’s responsible for spreading paranoia and bigotry and intolerance. Yeah? So what? That’s his job description.

I think the same thing about the Rick Warren uproar that I did about the outrage over Reverend Wright.

Why is anybody shocked when church elders make crazy, stupid, dangerous statements? You’re talking about people who make a living pretending to know what happens after we die.

America’s religious leaders say that hurricanes are God’s wrath for abortion and that condoms are a bad idea in Africa. In other countries, they convince people to fly airplanes into office buildings. In a jungle tribe in New Guinea they might have a voodoo lady blow a handful of cinnamon at you to ward off spirits.

It’s all Scientology. Why are you worried about which shaman shows up to the White House? Barack Obama’s pastor isn’t any more important than Caroline Kennedy’s father.

No matter who we elect, they’re not bringing Jesus or JFK with them to help.

Vote for the person, not their ghost.

Caylee Anthony and the Titanic

Originally published 12/12/2008

I knew I was right not to waste time voting. They said it was un-American, but I refused to participate, secure in the logic that if we were at the point where George W. Bush could be a two-term president and Sarah Palin could be a few million votes away from the White House, the country was so far gone that we were doomed even if Barack Obama knew how to turn rocks into gold.

It seemed to me that the Titanic had already hit the iceberg, but it just takes a long time for the boat to sink.

The debate over McCain and Obama sounded like the discussion between the people on deck dressed in tuxedos and lifejackets, drinking Scotch and talking about how the ship was unsinkable as the water poured in beneath their feet.

One is a socialist. The other is out of touch. I don’t like his religious preacher. I think he’s too old.

To me, we were Romans pondering art and debating politics in 410, not knowing that the Goths had already poisoned the aqueducts and that within a few months there would be barbarians inside the city walls.

Everyone said I was being cynical and shirking my civic duty. But now I’ve been vindicated.

This week we got final proof that the republic is beyond redemption.

It’s not that we have a president-elect who comes from a city and state whose governments are essentially a mafia syndicate. It’s not that we’re giving away the 11 dollars we didn’t waste in Iraq to car companies with millionaire bosses and overpaid workers who have spent three decades putting out garbage products. It’s not that we bankrupted our country and destroyed our military by fabricating a reason to start a war that killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden and about as many Iraqis as Saddam Hussein.

I can tell that the tilt we feel really is the sinking of the ship because of Caylee Anthony.

Between the bailout, the unemployment, the layoffs and the Chicago scandal, the media paused this week to devote time to one single, solitary story that didn’t have to do with our national calamity or their own impending economic collapse: The soap opera of one white trash family and their one missing kid.

Originally published 12/12/2008

Was it Caylee’s mom or the grandmother who did it with Colonel Mustard in the study? Is Casey falsely charged or was it the butler with the candlestick?

They’re giving us a distraction to talk about in the unemployment line. Now it’s time to worry. The Caylee Anthony story is the 2008 version of the orchestra playing string instruments as the people on the Titanic panicked in the realization that there weren’t enough lifeboats.

The ship can’t sink. The bailout will work. Another boat will rescue us. The market can’t stay down forever.

We clearly don’t have time to stop and listen to the music, so if it’s playing, it’s only to drown out the screams of the other passengers.

Bon voyage, America.

Black Friday fatalitities and lots of dead Indians

Originally published 11/29/08

This time of year, I usually make a list of the things for which I am thankful. All-in-one body wash, shampoo and conditioner got my gratitude this year. A society slanted in favor of my race and gender often comes to mind. Cheap Mexican labor usually makes the list.

But as I watched the Mumbai terror attacks send shock and panic through India this week, I became thankful not only that I don’t live in a place that borders a country ending in the suffix “stan,” but I also became more appreciative of American ingenuity.

If we wanted to create chaos, disorder and a trail of dead bodies here in the United States, we wouldn’t have wasted all those guns and explosives. We could have done it with our bare hands — or at least the shoed feet of bait-and-switch, sucker ad-prone Wal-Martians with department store circulars and nearly maxed-out credit cards.

After 9/11, when a previously indifferent generation of young Americans waited for their leader to tell them how they could channel their newfound desire to volunteer, fight and sacrifice for their country, they were told to “go shopping” if they cared about the United States.

And nowhere is the brilliance of George W. Bush’s America more obvious than during the national spending orgy known as black Friday.

But this year we went even further for our country as a herd of people infected with shopping rabies literally shopped to death.

A worker at a Valley Stream, NY, Wal-Mart was killed early Friday morning when a mob of patriotic patrons piled out of their flag-and-yellow-ribbon-sticker-clad SUVs, busted through the closed doors, trampled him to death as he tried to hold them back and then shopped around his corpse.

His co-worker painted a grim picture, telling reporters, “He was bum-rushed by 200 people. They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.” Witnesses told reporters that the mob knocked him down, stepped on him and ran over and around him as he gasped for air.

But it wasn’t all callous indifference. Early reports indicate that the Wal-Mart happy face logo paused long enough to bounce on top of him and change his status from “living” to “deceased” before moving on to the electronics section to slash prices on TVs.

A pregnant woman reportedly miscarried her child at the same Wal-Mart, changing her shopping strategy from looking for a cheap stroller to finding lots and lots of extra-absorbent paper towels.

Well, it ain’t always pretty, but as a shopper named Tommy DeGennaro explained his reason for participating in Black Friday to a news reporter, “Hey, somebody's got to help out the economy.”

Spoken like a true patriot. Now get outta my way.

Skinny pirates and the pope

Originally published 11/22/08

People should have a healthy fear of the ocean.

In the early 1900s we were afraid of the water because of shark attacks. In the 1970s they were scared because of a movie about shark attacks. Before that they thought there were sea monsters and that they’d fall off the world if they sailed too far. But the best time in the history of the water was the pirate era. Swords. Earrings. Plank walking.

But all of that ended and lately, the most dangerous water in the world has been the stuff you brush your teeth with in Mexico. The only piracy has been committed by 13-year-olds stealing torrents on their dad’s Dell.

Until, that is, people in Somalia decided there are better activities than unintentional anorexia and being so broke that they’re actually envious of Ethiopians. Somalia has made piracy sexy again. They board any boat that enters their waters, take hostages and terrorize powerful countries like Saudi Arabia, who had a giant boat with $110 million worth of oil jacked and held for ransom this week by a handful of grown up Live Aid children in a modified raft.

The world, of course, is outraged.

But what’s the real harm? Sure, a few people get killed, but most of them are from weird places like Indonesia and Yemen, so that doesn’t really count. And sure the owners of the ships are extorted for money, but if the countries that pay the ransom want the cash back they can always just call it a bailout and ask Congress.

I mean, Congress just hands it out now. The other day I found a prostitute on Craigslist and Congress bought the condoms and gave me money for a hotel room. Then they gave my wife money for a private investigator and even paid for her to send the tape to “Cheaters”.

The economic crisis — although not as bad as the one that drove Somalia to reenact the 1600s — is out of control, but it didn’t come as a surprise to everyone.

Italy’s finance minister said this week that the pope had “a prophecy” in 1985 about the current financial collapse.

I’m not sure when he planned on telling us about this. Firsthand knowledge from God on an impending global meltdown seems like something you might want to share — unless you don’t like the financial system in the first place.

On Oct. 7, the pope — who lives in a castle and sits on a thrown and wears a crown and carries a gold staff and runs a multi-billion dollar tax-exempt real estate corporation — showed his contempt for materialism and wealth when he said, “Money vanishes, it is nothing” and warned that “the only solid reality is the word of God.”

Yeah, I tried to pay my rent with the word of God. My landlord had a prophecy that I’d be homeless in the near future.

Oh well. If he’s right and all else fails, I can always take to the seas.

Whining, pain-in-the-ass child murderers

Originally published 10/15/08

If you’re old enough to do the crime, you’re old enough to do the time — even if you’re not old enough to tell time.

This week in Arizona, an 8-year-old boy was charged with premeditated murder after he shot and killed his dad and his dad’s friend.

I’ve been saying this for years. Sure that big Arizona fence works against Mexicans, but stronger measures are definitely going to be needed for these pesky children.

It’s about time we started dealing with grammar school kids like they’re grown adults. They’ve been hiding behind their age for years.

My brain isn’t fully developed! I don’t understand consequences or the concept of the finality of death! Waaaaaahhhh!

The prosecutor said the boy “methodically” killed his father and a family friend. Methodically. That’s a word I think accurately describes third graders. I remember how methodical I was when I was eight. I thought a magical fairy came into my room and traded me coin change for my teeth if I left them under my Star Wars pillow when I went to bed.

The prosecutor has taken the death penalty off the table, but I don’t know why. If we play this right, we won’t even need a trial. He’s so young I think we could just say it’s the fourth trimester and call it a retroactive abortion.

It’s not like this is without precedent. I think there was a case in Texas where a zygote was prosecuted for assault for kicking inside the mother’s stomach.

I don’t want to let this methodical child off the hook, but let’s speculate for just a moment. I know it’s crazy, but what if the father holds some responsibility for leaving firearms in a place where an 8-year-old can get them?

And how did the kid even know how to shoot the gun, which he had to re-load after each round? I bet it’s the TV’s fault! No, wait — it’s probably those evil video games!

Actually the father — an avid hunter — taught the boy how to load and shoot guns and trained him to kill prairie dogs, which psychologists say may have contributed to the incident.

Yeah, right. Whining liberal excuse makers.

The New York Times reports that only a handful of 7- and 8-year-olds have been charged with murder in the last 30 years, and most of them have a history of severe mental illness or physical or sexual abuse.

Great, more excuses.

In most states, the paper says, children under 7 aren’t prosecuted. You see? Before you go whining about fairness to children, this proves that we’re a nation of laws — laws that aren’t at all arbitrary or random. First grade? That’s just crazy talk. Second grade? Hang him!

People need to understand that children are adults, too, only smaller. If they’re old enough to use firearms they were prematurely taught to use and were irresponsibly left out, they’re old enough to pay the price.

At least we kept those damn gays in line

Published 11/08/08

Don’t worry, the news isn’t all bad.

Sure the different-looking guy with that weird skin that’s darker than mine won the presidency, and sure there’s going to be a basketball court instead of a bowling alley in the White House now with little Huxtable kids running around.

But the news isn’t all bad for guys like me who want the rest of the world to look, act and have sex just like I do.

The silver lining is in California, where voters approved Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage by overturning a court decision that said restricting marriage to heterosexual couples violated the state’s constitutional guarantee of equal rights.

But who needs courts when you have the invisible man in the cloud castle and the people who pretend to speak for him.

We should be thankful that we have a straight God who’s not only totally into chicks, but smart enough to bless us with these ballot initiatives that churches can use to overrule decisions made by courts. After all, it’s not the place of the judicial branch to interpret the Constitution in ways that protect minorities from being abused by the majority — like during the civil rights movement, for example.

I don’t want to tell anyone what to do, but my conservative ideals — which are founded in the concept of limiting government intrusion into the private lives of citizens — force me to support laws that regulate how grown, consenting adults may and may not pair up, share expenses and be intimate with each other.

I mean, once you allow committed, monogamous couples to get married, pretty soon they’ll want to adopt children into their loving and stable homes instead of leaving them to rot in some hell-hole foster institution where they belong. What’s next? Letting them decide for themselves if the traditions and values of my religion are right for them?

The thing is with these gays is that they’re different, and if this last election proves anything, it’s that it’s important for everybody to be the same. We’ll give you black, but not gay and black at the same time. And anyway, it’s not all bad for homosexuals. They have civil unions, which carry the same rights as marriage, and if our nation’s history has taught us anything it’s that separate but equal always goes off without a hitch.

If they behave, they might get their own water fountains and special sections to sit on the bus. Who knows, one day we might even give them adorable little yellow-star armbands to wear if they want to leave the house.

They’re into fashion anyway, right?

Listen, the separation of church and state says that morals should be evaluated and applied by religious groups, even when they function as hate groups, and then those morals should be voted into law.

And if the private lives of people who disagree get trampled in the process, they can always just put it to a vote.

Hanging Barack and Sarah by the neck from a rope

Published 11/1/08

Halloween is always a good time, but never more than in an election year.

This week in California, homeowners finally caved in to community pressure and took down a hanging Sarah Palin mannequin that had offended neighbors for weeks.

The mannequin, which gained national media coverage, portrayed almost exactly Palin’s real-life hair, glasses and knowledge of our constitutional history. The homeowners were allowed to keep their “Halloween doll” intact but finally bowed to pressure this week and removed it voluntarily.

McCain had vowed to take it down himself but he couldn’t lift his awful little Allosaurus arms high enough to do the job.

But on Halloween day, a group of students in Kentucky — students in Kentucky? — were arrested by the police, charged with crimes and forced to remove their hanging “effigy” of Barack Obama.

A hanging Palin is a “doll” and a hanging Obama is an “effigy”? Liberals! Even their mutilated plastic likenesses are elitist.

But my favorite thing this Halloween had nothing to do with politicians, but with a much more noble class of people: pedophiles.

In what police called “Operation Boo,” sex offenders in California were not allowed to wear costumes, offer candy or turn on their porch lights for trick-or-treaters. Apparently, cops had the crazy idea that it might be smart to deter boys dressed like Hannah Montana from knocking on the doors of people who consider ESPN 3 a pornography channel during Little League season.

But the best part of the whole thing is that the sex offenders were forced to put up a sign, distributed by their parole officer, that read “NO CANDY” on a poster shaped and colored like a pumpkin.

So, not only do they take away the holiday that’s basically the World Series of kid touching — where it’s par for the course to lure children with Tootsie Rolls — but they patronize these poor people by allowing them to have one Halloween decoration and then forcing them to use it to announce their exclusion from the activities.

That is just heartless. I don’t want to feel bad for pedophiles, I really don’t. But to picture these poor guys peeking though the curtain as wave after wave of vulnerable, naive minors dressed in Tinkerbell costumes walks past just breaks my heart.

It’s like the kid in Philadelphia who’s grounded on the day of the Phillies parade.

And Operation Boo? Wouldn’t that be the name the pedophile would have for his mission if he were allowed to participate?

“Trick or treat?”

“Boo! You’re not going home tonight.”

Or “Boo! Now you get to live in a crawl space until I find someone cuter.”

Or “Boo! That hard candy was actually a Ruphinol and you’re, like, so caught.

Oh well, it’s not a perfect world. You can’t expect to have safe children AND happy pedophiles if we can’t even find a way to have equality between the effigies.

But it can’t hurt to dream.

Palin's clothes and mutliated white people

Originally published 8/25/08

I don’t follow the liberal media.

I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon for whatever I’m supposed to attack Sarah Palin for this week.

But I will be honest. Sarah is not the most qualified woman for the job. She’s popular with the right largely because she gives sexually repressed religious fundamentalists a female image that’s semi-attractive enough to fantasize about yet Jesus-y enough that they don’t have to feel dirty in the process. And now, there’s a new detail for them to add to their illusion — the clothes they’d like to talk her out of.

You’ve all heard about Sarah’s shopping spree, and I know it’s easy to attack her hypocrisy for dropping a mortgage worth of other people’s money on clothes while pretending to be a one-of-the-gang, hockey mom, I-hate-New-York-too-unless-I’m-shopping-there, regular gal. But give the poor girl a break, she needed to upgrade. After all, she has some younger, hotter competition coming her way.

The other naughty conservative fantasy, “The View’s” Elizabeth Hasselbeck, announced this week that she’ll be teaming up with Sarah on the campaign trail. For those who don’t know, Elizabeth is the one on “The View” who doesn’t make you go, “Ew! Gross!” — until you take the TV off of mute, that is.

The partnership — called the “Two Women Who Might Be a Legitimate Lesbian Fantasy if They Never Talked” tour — is designed to help McCain as he enters the final stretch.

If nothing else, at least they’re safe to visit Pittsburgh now.

It was revealed this week that an election worker fabricated her widely published story that a man robbed her, beat her and carved the letter "B" into her face after noticing her McCain bumper sticker — and I sure am glad because the whole thing seemed un-American.

Not the robbery part, of course, just look at Wall Street. And the beating is as American as Rodney King or Reginald Denny.

But using knives to torture political rivals? That’s not American. That’s African. That’s how guys like Robert Mugabe and Charles Taylor stay in power in places like Zimbabwe and Liberia.

Just because Barack Obama is an African-American candidate doesn’t mean we should bring the tactics of one place to the other.

If you really feel the need to mutilate someone over a bumper sticker, make it the braggart who boasts about their kid making honor roll.

Remember those stickers? I mean, if you’re going to be a show-off, at least have the dignity to be honest enough to report the bad news along with the good. Honor roll? Fine. As long as on the other side of the bumper you have something along the lines of “My Kid Got Touched Where His Bathing Suit Covers At CCD.”

All I’m saying is don’t just feed me one side of the story — because if you do, you’re no better than the liberal media.

Colin Powell, Barack Obama and other nappy-headed hoes

Originally published 10/18/08

Things weren’t looking good for Barack Obama. He’s too liberal for conservatives, not liberal enough for liberals and — most importantly — from the day he was nominated there was always a question among black people about whether or not he was black enough.

But all that’s about to change.

Obama is about to get all the street cred he needs when the man who embodies the very concept of what it means to be black in America ventures out of the hood to go on “Meet the Press” this weekend.

That’s right, former Secretary of State Colin Powell is expected to break GOP party ranks and endorse the Democratic nominee for president.

The other nine black Republicans were unavailable for comment.

This is huge. Powell has advised the last three Republican presidents, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and (here’s where you pour out some of your 40) Ronald Reagan — all of whom, of course, are wildly popular with the brothers.

Powell spent the week reminding the world about his roots when he went to London for a celebration of African music and fashion.

He even busted into a hip-hop dance during a performance by Nigerian rap group Olu Maintain.

The group later sent e-mails beginning with “Dears sirs and madam”, asking if I wanted to share their dead uncle’s oil fortune.

Powell later said, "I stand before you as an African-American. Many people have said to me ‘you became Secretary of State of the USA, is it still necessary to say that you are an African American or that you are black?’ And I say ‘yes, so that we can remind our children.’"

Oh, for the children? I just assumed he had to remind people that he’s black because he talks like William Jennings Bryan and if you stuck a corn-cob pipe in his mouth he would look like either General Douglas MacArthur or Frosty the Snowman, depending on whether or not he was in his uniform.

In closing, he conjured the memories of Huey P. Newton and Malcom X when he said, “People came from my continent in chains. There's no reason a new Africa can't be created right here and now."

He then asked if the merlot had been properly decanted.

And maybe that’s good, because it’s not just blacks his endorsement will convince.

If Colin Powell says it’s so, it must be so. After all, he’s the guy who went on TV at the U.N. and whipped the country into a panic, saying we had to attack Iraq right this second or they would melt us from a mobile weapons lab that turned out to be Hannah Montana’s makeup trailer.

So maybe he’s lost a little credibility among anti-war liberals and after this endorsement, he might anger some pro-McCain Republicans, but this is something Powell has to do — for the children.

For the children.

Originally published 10/12/08

I'm going to keep this short.

When the money finally runs out and we revert back to caveman society where we have to use coconuts for currency, I'm going to want to have plenty of computer paper to burn for heat.

But we're not there yet. As of right now, I've only killed two of my dogs for food and I still have one whole hand that I haven't yet sold to the university for medical research.

I don't know much about this stock market stuff, but from what I understand, it's definitely time to worry when the Dow is lower than Cloris' weekly average on "Dancing with the Stars."

I can't even pretend to understand this bailout either. It's too complicated for me, but apparently if Barack Obama says "deregulation" and John McCain says "my friends" once for each dollar we owe, money

will fall out of the sky.

But I have faith. This country's business leaders are bold thinkers and I'm sure they'll come up with something. This week I went to the bank and tried to refinance my mortgage since I could no longer afford

my home and they sent Bill Ayers to blow my house up.

But it's not just America. The world economies are suffering right along with us. The Japanese had to cut production of creepy, humanoid robots and China could only poison half their supply of baby milk.

I'd like to talk to President Bush, but he's been hiding out like a meth addict during daylight. I'm not saying it's his fault, but I think I know where he's been spending all of our money. Someone needs to tell him that no matter what he sees on "Wheel of Fortune," you don't actually have to buy a vowel every time you don't know how to spell a word.

Oh no. They just turned off my electricity and I'm running on battery power now. I'm curled up in a tent crying like the girl in "Blair Witch," but instead of telling whoever finds this to tell my mom I'm sorry, I'm just mumbling, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong. The fundamentals of the economy are strong. The fundamentals of the economy are strong."

Someone's knocking at the door. I think it's the Albanian loan I shark I went to after the banks all turned me down for a loan. Getting hungry now. I'm staring at my last remaining dog. I'm starting to hallucinate that he's a big chicken leg like on the Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Oh no, I just heard a loud thump outside on the street. Either the guy in the apartment next to me just committed suicide or the sky is literally falling.

I'm eating my credit cards now, even those three little numbers on the back.

Getting weaker, getting tired … the fundamentals of the economy are strong, the fundamentals of the economy are strong, the fundamentals of the economy are strong.

Does anyone want to buy a vowel?

Originally published 10/4/08

If I ever get to moderate a presidential debate, I’ll have just one question. I’ll say, “I’ll spell a word, and then you pronounce it, OK? Here goes. N-U-C-L-E-A-R.” If the person says anything other than “NEW-klee-ur,” they lose — especially if they talk like Ed Rooney’s secretary from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. I don’t mean to rag on Sarah Palin. If this is what America wants, this is what America should have, but between the “hecks” and the “darns” and the “doggonnits” in the Marge Sweetwater voice, I feel like I should be buying a car from William H. Macy in a Coen Brothers movie.

Before moving on, I’d like to say a quick prayer for O.J. Simpson. The outcome of his hotel robbery case is now in the hands of the jury and I’m really hoping for another acquittal. Sure, he cut two people’s heads off and got to play golf for 15 years, but now that Palin did well enough that McCain might win again, we can’t risk having an Obama loss and an O.J. guilty verdict in the same month. It’s just too unfair to black people.

It would be like if they canceled “The Jeffersons” the day after the King assassination.

But let’s move on. Between the election and the boring financial stuff, it’s easy to miss the really good stories, like one this week in the New York Times that shows just how tough it is out there for families.

Some parents are getting so desperate that they’re abandoning children as old as 17 at safe-haven-law drop-off sites, which were designed as an alternative place for infants to begin their really bright futures instead of being left in the garbage to die by their unprepared teenage mothers.

Things are so bad that one mother left her 14-year-old son. Another left two boys and a girl, ages 11-14.

But then, in my favorite drop-off-your-kid-and-hope-for-the-best story since Neverland Ranch, a man surrendered nine of his 10 children, ages 1-17.

OK, there are a few problems with this.

First, 10 children? Really? What are you a sharecropper in 1890? But more importantly, how do you pick which one to hang onto? First I felt bad for the kids, but what about this poor dad who has to sort through his entire litter and decide which 90 percent to dump off and which one to hang onto?

You know you have a difficult which-kid-should-I-keep decision if the concentration camp lady from “Sophie’s Choice” feels bad for you. At least she just had a coin toss to deal with.

Between this and the Katie Couric interview, I’d say it’s been a tough time for overburdened mothers everywhere, and if these parents need some inspiration, they should remember that having too many children could be their ticket all the way the heck to the doggone White House.

Originally published 9/6/08

I feel much better after this week. Before this week, I wasn’t sure that Sarah Palin had the stuff it takes to lead the country when John McCain dies in office, which statistically he will, according to the accepted average lifespan of male human beings.

I knew she had been in the PTA and that she loves her children, which is definitely a start because my mom was in the PTA and she loves me and I know SHE’S qualified to be president. I also knew she was good at shooting things and making stuff out of their skin and antlers, which I’m pretty sure is relevant in 2008.

But still, I just wasn’t sure that being governor of a state that borders Russia and has less than a million people — most of whom know what whale blubber tastes like — was enough preparation.

But this week, I found out Sarah Palin must know what’s best because, like many great leaders before her, she talks to God.

Time magazine said Palin referred to a gas pipeline she wanted to build as “God’s will” and called the war in Iraq “a task that is from God.”

I mean, I didn’t even know God was in the natural gas business. I had been calling him “That Great T. Boone Pickens in the Sky,” but I was never sure why up until now. Then again, I’m so stupid I thought Iraq was the will of idiots who thought God was talking to them, not God himself.

Then again, I’ve never been to Crawford, Texas, or Alaska, where God apparently vacations and gives most of his speeches, but I know people who hallucinate conversations with spirits are reliable. I’ve met them in the parking lot at Grateful Dead concerts and they always make great grilled cheeses.

But I didn’t need much convincing.

I already knew she thinks abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest, which is awesome. I mean, if my wife is raped, I don’t want to us to be burdened with the decision of whether or not to bring her rapist’s baby to term when that could be decided for us by a hockey mom I’ve never met — and incest? This means that we’ll be guaranteed another Osmond whenever Donny and Marie finally do it.

And she’s pro choice where it counts.

Palin thinks creation should be taught alongside evolution in schools. Genius! I mean, why argue whether kids should learn about science or superstition when you could just give them both at the same time and let them sort it out?

Also, her litter of children that is now starting to have children of their own is a wonderful example of the effectiveness of the abstinence-only education that she wants for all schools.

Plus, in 1984 she was voted the second-hottest chick in Alaska. Then again, it’s dark there for half the year.

Hopefully, with God’s help, Sarah Palin can show us the light.

Originally published 8/31/08

I’m glad I went to school when I did.

Those little brats at Columbine really made American schools boring, uptight places for kids to spend their days.

First they came up with something called “zero tolerance,” which means that a toddler can get suspended from preschool for saying “pow.”

Then they came up with anti-bullying laws and see-through backpacks and put metal detectors in the halls and chained the doors like Joe Clark.

But now, for the first time since Klebold and Harris wrote their own parody version of “School’s Out” nearly a decade ago, a small, poor town called Harrold in Texas has finally found the solution to preventing school shootings: Let the teachers carry guns.

I know, I know. At first glance, this sounds like an absolutely brilliant idea, but let me play devil’s advocate for just a moment.

I’m not saying firearms don’t have a place in schools. Most schools are already violent, overcrowded places where the herd could use a little thinning, but do you know who teachers are? Regular schmucks. I had a few really good teachers, a few horrible teachers, and then about a hundred middle-aged, coffee-breathed burnouts who I don’t remember anything about except that its probably good that they weren’t packing heat in school.

They wore bad sweaters, they did the minimum, they bought your excuses. They were about as qualified to make split-second, life-and-death decisions as the school nurse was qualified to do stem-cell transplants.

Most teachers were lucky if they could keep us from tearing down their bulletin board and locking them out the classroom.

So what’s the alternative? A school-safety officer? That’s no good, I don’t like a cop running around a school, poking around in lockers. I have cigarettes to smoke in the bathroom, go bother an adult. That won’t work anyway because, as the Harrold superintendent told the New York Times, if there’s a uniformed officer, the imagined assassin would “know who to shoot first.”

So what do you do? The odds of being killed in a school shooting are about as good as being struck by lightning on the same day that you win the Powerball, so it obviously needs to be dealt with instead of using that time to make sure kids can read and add when they graduate.

But how far is too far for untrained, unqualified, overzealous teachers to go in the name of safety?

Will it be like a black guy in New York City where the cops can pump 83 bullets into you because you reach for your wallet?

What about for minor infractions, can the teacher pistol whip you for putting gum under the desk?

What if you get caught cutting class? Can the teacher draw and force you back in at gunpoint?

It’s high school, where the weak are singled out and alienated. Kids already know to be frightened and paranoid, they don’t need to learn it from their teachers.

Originally published 8/24/08

Old people had it tough, at least you’d think so if you listen to them.

You get one of these old codgers, give him a highball or whatever it is they drink, and you’ll hear all about how weak kids are today. How when they were kids they said “sir” and “ma’am” and respected their parents and teachers because if they didn’t, they’d get beaten by both.

Really? A teacher would beat you?

Oh yeah, they say. The teachers, the nuns — and then our parents would beat us for making the teachers beat us.

Wow ... your teachers, your parents ... they, um, sucked.

I mean, who beats a kid? What role model rules a weaker person through intimidation and teaches violence to the very kids they’re supposed to be preparing for the world?

Well, lots of people apparently.

The ACLU and Human Rights Watch released a report this week that says corporal punishment — which is to beat children, preferably with objects — is still surprisingly common in U.S. schools.

The report says 223,190 kids were beaten by teachers in 2006-2007, including a visibly pregnant 16-year-old who was hit by her principal because she was late.

Poor girl. First you have to tell your parents that you ARE late, then your principal hits you for being late.

In another incident, a three-year-old boy with attention deficit disorder came home “terrified with bruises from hips to belly button after being beaten for taking off his shoes.”

Minorities and children with disabilities were far more likely to be beaten than white kids who keep their shoes on.

In Texas, disabled children make up 10.7 percent of the student population but got 18.4 percent of the beatings. But dark skin makes you even more of a target — blacks are twice as likely to be physically beaten and humiliated in school than anyone else.

Although 21 states still allow corporal punishment, only 13 use it frequently.

I know this is hard to believe given the South’s long record of fairness toward minorities, but — surprisingly, shockingly — the 13 states where black children are most likely to be legally assaulted by their teachers are: Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida.

The report cited “a culture of intimidation where beatings serve as a public warning ... principals turn on loudspeakers while beating students, staff roam hallways with paddles, and teachers display their ‘boards of education’ on their desks.”

Maybe I’m just a warped product of a non-violent upbringing, but if a strange adult had ever put his hands on me in anger, my mom would have buried a steak knife in his chest, and if I had a daughter and a grown man smacked her behind in front of other kids, he’d very quickly find himself in Hell’s teachers lounge.

Kids are a pain in the butt, but if you can’t control them without giving them one, maybe you should find a different job.

Originally published 8/16/08

Complaining should be an Olympic event.

A Swedish wrestler complained that “politics” cost him a gold medal. He then threw his bronze medal and ran away. The U.S. women’s gymnastics team complained that they could tell just by looking that their Chinese opponents were too young to be eligible.

Funny, I couldn’t tell the difference between the the 36-year-old Chinese coach and the little girl who got caught lip synching at the opening ceremony.

But all of this was overshadowed by the complaints of another group of olympians when the Special Olympics protested the movie “Tropic Thunder” because of its use of what they called the “R-word.”

The R-word, of course, is “retard,” a word that — like “cripple” or “mongoloid” — was once an acceptable way to talk about people with disabilities. As society became more sensitive, those words gave way to “handicapped” and then “mentally or physically challenged” — and that’s where I thought it stopped.

But the S.O. now says that the R-word is demeaning to people with “intellectual disabilities.”

Intellectual disabilities? Listen, words like “retard” are crude and mean, and if you make fun of people with disabilities, you’re an idiot. But how much can I be expected to remember? Because it’s not just them.

Those with an aversion to the “N-word” are also mad at the movie because white actor Robert Downey Jr. appears as a black character.

While it is a little odd at first, this isn’t Fred Astaire blackface we’re talking about, yet many activists are offended. But why?

What about “White Chicks,” where the Wayans brothers put on white face? That was cool?

How am I supposed to know what’s OK and what’s not, especially since I’m spending so much time trying to keep my word-hyphen-word terminology up to date?

But I won’t have to worry for long. This week, the Census Bureau reported that whites will be a minority in America by 2042, years earlier than previously thought.

I can’t wait to be a minority. This is going to be great. The ruling class is for the birds. Too much pressure, too many expectations — and our encounters with police aren’t nearly as interesting.

I’ll be able to use racist language against my own people but then protest when other people do the same thing. I’ll get a number on the telephone to push so the operator will speak my language. I’ll get to use historical events from hundreds of years ago to justify absolutely any behavior, no matter how despicable.

“You shot a clerk for $47!”

“Um, uh, the Roman Empire!”

I’ll reclaim the month of February, stop using plurals and they’ll build a big fence in Texas and Arizona just for me.

But most of all I just can’t wait to see how you like it when you have to keep up with the switch from “pigmentation challenged” to “bilingually deficient.”

Because keeping this stuff straight should be an Olympic event.

Originally published 11/8/08

Sometimes you have to know when your best days are behind you.

Whether it’s New Kids on the Block, 90210 or smallpox, coming out of retirement is usually a recipe for disaster.

But this week, 38-year-old Brett Favre — who announced last year that he was quitting football — proved it’s never too late to chase a dream when he accepted a trade by the Green Bay Packers to the New York Jets.

Favre is leaving his post as the beloved leader of one of the most celebrated teams in history to lead an organization that claims to be from New York, plays in New Jersey, practices on Long Island and has to suffer the indignity of hosting their home games in a place called “Giants Stadium.”

The last time they won a championship, John McCain was in a Vietnamese prison camp and it had only been legal to eat lunch next to black people for five years.

With the exception of Kevin Arnold’s jacket, the Jets have gotten no respect in popular culture in a generation.

But suddenly, Jets fans everywhere are reinvigorated by a guy whose career began before John Madden started making Dick Clark sound like an eloquent broadcaster.

In a culture obsessed with youth, Favre is proving that you’re never too old.

But girls can play, too.

This year — in the 75 liters of water in China that won’t give you cancer — a swimmer will capture the imagination of middle-aged women everywhere.

41-year-old Dara Torres is going for her tenth medal since she won her first Olympic gold in 1984, a year before Live Aid. I haven’t seen a woman that old in the water since the bathtub scene in “The Shining.”

But she’s not just special because of her age. This is the first year that the biggest female role model in the Olympics isn’t a male figure skater.

But if you’re never too old for sports, are you ever too young?

With all the good jobs in America having already been stolen, 10-year-old Michelito Lagravere left Mexico for France to be a bullfighter.

Same as in neighboring Spain, the French consider torturing and slowly killing animals for entertainment a sport. So, same as in Spain, I root for the bull and watch in the hopes of seeing a dead bullfighter, dead spectators, or preferably both.

Since I love animals, my favorite matadors are the ones with internal bleeding resulting from horn-shaped puncture wounds. But this is a little boy we’re talking about. So if Brett Favre and Dara Torres aren’t too old for me to root for, is this adorable little sadist too young for me to root against?

What is the age cutoff where I can laugh at a person with a crushed windpipe and minutes left to live?

Is it like executions in Texas where it’s OK to kill you if you’re tall enough to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl?

Who knows, but this year the world of sports will be one wild ride.

Originally published 8/3/08

This week, a tragedy happened in Los Angeles. No, not the earthquake. I can't call that a tragedy because no one was seriously hurt and it almost killed Judge Judy.

The tragedy involved two of my very favorite things: racism and hamburgers.

The predominately white Los Angeles City Council voted this week to forbid any new fast-food joints from opening in poor, predominately black neighborhoods.

Here's the logic: Poor inner-city blacks die earlier than more affluent whites because they're more susceptible to basically every health problem known to man due to the crappy level of health care they receive from pre-natal to the grave.

The response: Since we live in a country where poor people can't go to the doctor because we need our national fortune to bomb other poor people in other countries, the least we could do is force grown adults to eat fewer hamburgers and hope for the best.

I've been to Watts, I've been to Compton. Basically every street has a pawn shop, a gun shop or a liquor store. McDonald's ain't the problem.

The problem are these token, symbolic solutions — like the U.S. House of Representatives' apology this week to blacks for slavery and segregation. We're sorry that your ancestors were beaten, raped, kidnapped and dragged here in chains only to be freed and then virtually enslaved for another hundred years ... but could you just try to lay off the Whoppers?

The hypocrisy of the whole thing was voiced this week by Ludacris, a rapper who released a song praising Barack Obama, trashing Hillary Clinton and John McCain, telling blacks to be angry and whites to be afraid. From the many, many white people who are scared to death of having a black guy in their own house, much less the White House, this brought the reaction of, "I told you so! You see how this will turn out!"

As if Ludacris is on the V.P. short list.

But it's not just racism. The other group of white people — the ones who don't mind having a president who happens to be black but don't want a "black" president — were more worried about something Obama said than Ludacris.

Obama said that since John McCain has no substance, he'll try to scare white America by reminding them that he doesn't look like the other people on our dollar bills. McCain said that Obama was playing the race card "from the bottom of the deck," whatever that means.

While it's good that we're finally having the uncomfortable but necessary discussion about the relationship between blacks and whites in this country, it's not surprising that the presidential contest is becoming a race based on race.

On one side is a light-skinned black man. On the other side is a man whose skin color changes with each new lesion he has to get scraped off his face.

And in between are hamburgers ... lots and lots of uneaten hamburgers.

Good luck, America.

Originally published 7/27/08

MySpace is everyone’s space.

Even if you’re one of those prudes who hides your profile to try to avoid psychos and stalkers, everything you post is visible to someone who really wants to see it.

Now, I don’t want to live in a country where young people are afraid to express themselves, so ordinarily I’d tell them to taunt law enforcement by openly mocking illegal behavior in online photographs — unless they’re near the sentencing phase of their trial.

Recently, more and more prosecutors are using incriminating pictures posted online to seek harsher punishments for people they’ve convicted.

A 20-year-old student named Joshua Lipton got two years in prison instead of probation when his prosecutor showed the judge a Facebook picture of him drinking, laughing and dressed as a prisoner at a Halloween party two weeks after a DWI accident he caused seriously injured a woman.

Now, I’m not saying that this is an abuse of power. It’s the criminal’s fault. Posting those photos would be like Christian Bale giving his mom a Jokey Smurf exploding present for Mother’s Day next year. In the current context, it just wouldn’t be funny.

But right or wrong, MySpace is being used as an excuse to prosecute criminals twice — once for their crime and once for their attitude.

It wasn't always that way. MySpace started as a place for bands to promote their music. Then someone discovered that using the same technology, you could silently track the girl who you always wanted to sleep with in high school, look at her pictures and video, read her blog and arbitrarily contact her while you’re drinking in the middle of the night 10 years later.

What baby boomers insist on calling "social networking" was born, but it came with a Catch-22: Sure, it was now easy and fun to track and monitor anyone from vulnerable children to naive employees to frightened exes, but now anyone looking for you would find easy prey as well.

People who don’t understand the generation gap wonder why anyone would publicize photos of themselves doing something wrong in the first place.

Baby boomers and whatever came before them (I think mostly jellyfish and small invertebrates) are big on data secrecy. If you pull out a camera when they’re behaving badly, they’ll act like Barzini at “The Godfather” wedding.

Why? Because they know that if there were readily available photos of them wearing smocks and eating dandelions or whatever they did before they sold out their principles to rule the world, they may have never gotten the chance to rule the world in the first place.

Sure they want to be the cool uncle with the Grateful Dead parking lot story at Thanksgiving, but when they’re being vetted for the promotion, they just want to diversify the company’s assets.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, sometimes it’s better to just keep quiet.

Originally published 7/19/08

We need a new scandal.

Well, not really. As long as we don’t get rid of alcohol and Andy Dick — at least not at the same time — we’ll always have plenty of scandals.

But at the very least we need a new suffix that isn’t “gate” to attach to the end of otherwise non-scandalous words when referring to a scandal.

I mean, how much more can we ask of “gate?”

Leakgate, Bowling-gate, Lewinskygate, Katrinagate, McGreeveygate, Spitzergate, Attorneygate, Rathergate, Gonzogate.

It makes me hope the secretary of defense and the head of Microsoft aren’t caught in a kickback scheme, because I don’t want Kieth Olbermann ranting about GatesGatesGate.

It all started, of course, with Watergate, which was named after the hotel that Nixon’s goons busted into like OJ Simpson looking for stolen football cards in Vegas.

Watergate was a scandal that toppled the president and rocked the nation, but now, “gate” is used for everything involving coke, a hooker, a boy or a baby.

They just give it away, even if the scandal is something as non-scandalous as Madonna giving it away to a pro baseball player.

Alex Rodriguez, a married New York Yankee, was recently caught sneaking around with Madonna, a married reason to never let your daughter leave the house.

Now, she’s notoriously promiscuous and he’s a handsome millionaire, so I don’t really see the scandal. I mean, she already slept with the Yankees in the 80s — and I’m not not even referring to the baseball team, I’m talking about everyone who lived above the Mason-Dixon Line at the time.

But anyway, they had the nerve to call this thing “Madonnagate.” First of all, we’re at war on two fronts, why is this news? But more importantly, are these media executives so miserably out of touch that they have to reach back to Vietnam times for an analogy?

It’s like when people see a good dancer and they say he moves like Fred Astaire. I mean, I’m willing to settle for an Al B. Sure or a Kriss Kross or something, but you shouldn’t need a flux capacitor (1985) to find a relevant pop-culture reference.

So if you’re going to dredge up Watergate, at least have the decency to apply it sparingly.

When John McCain last week contradicted his POW story about giving the name of a pro football team to his interrogators, he switched “Packers” to “Steelers” because he was in Pittsburgh.

I was waiting for that to turn into “Crazy-old-man-is-either-pandering-or-he-actually-can’t-remember-gate,” but it never materialized, and I’m glad.

All McCain did is what people in show business call “localizing.”

When I saw the rock band “The Eagles” in Philly, “Hotel California” became “Hotel Pennsylvania.”

Don Henley didn’t forget the lyrics, he just wanted me to feel like I was getting my money’s worth.

He changed the words to keep things relevant, and so should we.

Originally published 7/12/08

Sometimes the stories just write themselves.

This week, two things happened that made it impossible to talk about anything else. First, a famous civil rights leader forgot that the microphone on his shirt meant you could hear the stuff he said even if he whispered. And second, Fox News had someone on hand who could speak Jesse Jackson.

Maybe they flew in the guy who interpreted the teacher for Charlie Brown. Maybe they got the actor who played Luca Brasi. But either way, when Jackson leaned over to the much wiser and quieter man sitting to his left and said that Barack Obama talks down to black people and then fantasized out loud about tearing off his genitals, I couldn't help but think we were that much closer to realizing Dr. King's dream.

I'm not sure why. I don't recall King saying anything specifically about attacking blacks with different views – and I certainly can't remember anything about the mutilation of their private parts – but this is Jesse Jackson we're talking about here, so it seemed

appropriate to bring it up.

If you didn't see the incident just Google "Jesse Jackson profane slur," then go past the part about "Hymie-town," scroll down after "white devils," and it should jump right out at you.

The first thing you'll notice is the portion of the video the news outlets chose to censor.

Jackson used playground slang to refer to the plural part of the male genitals, and they beeped out that word. Now, they kept the part about him wanting to rip them off of Barack Obama – presumably while he was still alive and not anesthetized – but the word itself (which is OK in every other context) had to go.

Mutilation of the human body: OK. The human body itself: Oh no, can't have that.

The second thing you'll notice is Jackson's complete disregard for all prudence when talking about a black guy who isn't there. I mean, he didn't even do a shoulder check. He called Barack out by name, angrily said he talks down to blacks and then vocalized a daydream in which he plays Lorena Bobbit – only Lorena in this case is a black man

who sounds like he's talking with a mouthful of marshmallow fluff.

Now, who knows why Jesse was mad. On Father's Day, Barack made a speech about black men who have children they don't take care of.

Since Jesse Jackson is an adulterer who had a child out of wedlock, he may have interpreted this as "talking down" to him. And since Jesse Jackson presumes to represent and speak for all black people, I see how this could be interpreted as "talking down to black people."

Whatever the logic, it was the best thing he could do for Barack. All the whites who were unsure about Barack's blackness now know that he's on Jesse Jackson's list of enemies, which they can relate to. But I think the real story is that – for the first time in a long time – people are paying attention to Jesse Jackson.

Originally published 7/4/08

Nothing like the Fourth of July. Beers, barbecue, stories about some kid who blew his fingers off with fireworks. Everything is pretty much perfect this time of year except for one thing: the national anthem.

I hate to be the one to bring it up because I know how sentimental everyone gets, but I think it’s time for a new song. It’s old, it’s not catchy and it’s too hard to sing even if you’re one of the 13 people who actually knows the words.

I never knew how to mention it, but this week, an African-American singer named Rene Marie saved me the trouble when she started off the Denver mayor’s State of the City address with the “black national anthem” instead of the “Star Spangled Banner” as planned.

Now, I just assumed the black national anthem was “Thriller.” Not only is it the song behind the best video in history, but Michael Jackson wrote it before he became a white woman.

But I was wrong. It’s actually an old spiritual called “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing.” I’ve never actually heard it, but I’m glad we’re experimenting because I have to say, I’m a little embarrassed by what we’re going with now.

At the hockey games where they sing both our song and the Canadian National Anthem, I find myself humming right along with the Maple Leafs fans. In “Rocky IV” who can really say with a straight face that they weren’t jealous of Russia’s anthem?

Now, I’m not saying we should necessarily go with “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (although I do like how they held the hip-hop tradition of intentional awkward spelling) but it’s good we’re having the discussion.

But Ms. Marie wasn’t the only black person stirring it up this week. As Barack Obama performed the political rite of passage of pandering to religious fanatics, he promised to continue George Bush’s faith-based initiatives, which is a cute-sounding way of saying he, too, will disregard the separation of church and state by giving my tax dollars to tax-exempt organizations that teach their followers that I’ll burn in hell for disagreeing with them.

That’s OK, I’ve gotten used to having Jesus in the White House, but if the government is going to steal my money and give it to churches, I’d like to have a say in the distribution.

This week, the controversial Texas FLDS polygamy sect launched its own clothing line, and I want all of my stolen faith money to go to their online store, where you can purchase clothing that is “reminiscent of 19th century American pioneers.”

It’s sort of like the clothes that Will Smith had to wear on the first day of school in “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

Austere dresses, long sleeves, high collars and wide pleats — now I see how these polygamists were pulling in all the chicks.

A new song, new clothes and a new president with old ideas. Happy birthday America.

Originally published 6/28/08

This week, George Carlin finally got back all the things he ever lost. Cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens, balloons.

Those of you who know and love Carlin’s work will get it. Those of you who don’t, well, just don’t get it.

When I heard this week that George Carlin died after a half century of challenging what people are willing to laugh at, seven words came to mind. I can’t say any of them here because Carlin’s lifelong battle against America’s war on language was a fight he was doomed to lose from the beginning.

Carlin died as he lived: In a society of adult children who use words like “heck” and “darn” and do things like put two hyphens in between the letters “F” and “K” when writing an expletive because they superstitiously believe that some words are bad — not the concept that the word represents, but the actual combination of letters itself.

Our country has language schizophrenia. One America claims to cherish free speech as an inalienable right that is is protected in the very first amendment of our Constitution. The other America allows itself to be ruled by the FCC, an unelected group of politically appointed people who determine which words can and can’t be used, which thoughts can and can’t be expressed and what the punishment will be for those who disobey.

The space between those two Americas was the empire of a skinny man with a beard and pony tail who wondered why he “could go on TV and say ‘don’t prick your finger’ but would be fined and fired for saying the exact same words the other way around.”

A former altar boy who left the Catholic Church because he “reached the age of reason,” Carlin started his career in a world where comedians could be dragged off stage in handcuffs and arrested for cursing (he was in Milwaukee in 1972). He left the world a place where guys like me can call the pope or the president a criminal without worrying about anything more than a few nasty e-mails.

All week I saw tributes to Carlin and his career. Most of them focused on his famous “seven dirty words” routine that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that the government can ban certain language under the threat of punishment.

Some of the tributes called his death “tragic” and imagined him laughing and joking in heaven, forgetting that Carlin thought the sanctity of life and tragedy of death were childish and arrogant concepts invented by a self-obsessed species — and, of course, that heaven is nothing more than a storage warehouse for all the items you lose on Earth, including every balloon that ever got away.

You want to honor Carlin? Go to church less, question authority more and teach your kids that there are no bad words, only bad actions.

Oh, and don’t forget to curse as loudly and as often as necessary.

Farewell George. Nice work.

Originally published 11/03/2007

It would be racist to assume that someone else is a racist just because they’re a tattooed, quasi-law-enforcement white guy with a prison record and a mullet. Knowing that, I gave Dog the Bounty Hunter the benefit of the doubt when I first saw him and assumed he was just an idiot, and not necessarily a racist idiot.

Sure he looked like one of the bad guys from the Double Dragon, but he did have leather gloves and a Super Soaker filled with pepper spray, so I gave him a chance.

Since then, A&E has claimed upwards of 100 hours of my life because they understood one basic truth: If a rational person sees one episode of “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” he will never be able to turn away.

And that doesn’t mean I actually think it’s good.

Part of me watches it just for the oh-no-he-didn’t embarrassing cringe factor, the same reason you can’t turn off Borat or Flavor Flav or a George W. Bush speech.

Dog was like the Steve Irwin of bounty hunting: He was leathery and dangerous and intense, but at the same time, he was loveable.

Dog made bounty hunting funny again, which it hasn’t been since Robert DeNiro’s Jack Walsh in “Midnight Run.”

But Dog reinvented the whole thing, leading his posse – his bean-bag-chair-with-eyes wife, his maniac kids and a creepy, non-related uncle figure called Youngblood –around Hawaii, stirring things up and pretending to be cops – only with no guns and feathered hair.

There were lots of braided ponytails and there was lots of yelling, but it was all tempered with a Christian message of charity and values that Dog would force feed you every episode with a little prayer in the beginning or motivational speech at the end.

The language of Dog’s motivational speech apparently changes when his kids date black people.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tape by now of Dog dropping N-bombs on his son – who wound up selling the tape to the Enquirer – about his black girlfriend. It was about as bad as it can get.

But not as bad as ratting out your dad to the media. You want to get back at him? Join Islam with your Nubian girlfriend, don’t embarrass your family.

But that’s a cop out, because the blame clearly lies on Dog. I mean, who says something like that out loud in a situation where it could be taped? Michael Richards, Mel Gibson. I mean, I understand if you have to hate blacks and Jews, but do you have to be so obvious about it?

Oh well, the damage is done and it appears there will be no Don Imus-style resurrection on this one, and that’s a shame.

Who else can I watch chase Polynesian meth heads around Maui?

Can’t we keep Dog? Do we have to like him to watch him? I mean, it’s good TV, and anyway, we’ve always ignored all those racist black comedians, like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

I mean, what fun is a Dog if you keep him on a leash?

Originally published 10/27/2007

American presidents have always been, at least in my lifetime, embarrassingly out of touch. In 2000, Bill Clinton – the guy who determined whether or not nuclear weapons should be launched – referred to a demonstration of a simple screensaver as “amazing!”

President Bush – the one who could make words into sentences, not the tall child who occasionally shows up for work dressed in a fighter pilot or cowboy costume – once reported being “amazed” when the lady at the grocery store read a bar code with a scanner.

During the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan was amazed to discover that you could sleep through your second term and be still be considered a great president by three-quarters of the population just by dying.

So this week, when Bill Clinton proudly reported that he sent his first-ever text message, at first I cringed. Here we go again. But then it hit me how lucky all these guys are to have never sent a text or shopped at a grocery store – to have so much power and so much money and so many assistants to do your legwork that don’t even need to learn to use a phone.

It dispels the “regular guy” theory of presidential appeal. I want a guy who’s so finely honed that he can’t even perform ordinary tasks, not a regular guy who can’t pronounce the word “nuclear,” just like your uncle Dusty.

But this week wasn’t just about politicians who are alive or dead – it was also about politicians who are alive but were almost dead without their knowledge. It was revealed during a mob-connected FBI guy’s trial that at one point the New York Mafia chiefs voted, 3-2, not to kill Rudy Giuliani.

First of all, can we stop going after 78-year-old Italian men who were maybe in charge of something in the 1970s? Is the mafia anything more than 10 senior citizens whose names happen to end in vowels? It’s a marriage of convenience where trials let the mob guys feel relevant and let the cops go after easy, glamorous targets.

I mean, the Italians were really scary up to and including maybe 30 years ago, but now they have like the 16th best mafia after the gay mafia, the diabetic mafia and the left-handed Eskimo mafia.

What are you going to do if I don’t pay up? Send the AARP to my house?

You want to impress me? Go after the Latin Kings or infiltrate MS-13 instead of wasting resources on white-haired greaseballs with Alzheimer’s and ear hair.

But, I have to admit, the mafia is dead in large part because Rudy killed it when he took down John Gotti, and left the whole system to be run by three Abe Vigoda looking dudes with names like Phil the Bowl of Soup and Johnny the Elbow and Harry the Coffee Table.

The rest of the time he spent getting divorced, cross-dressing and marching in gay parades as preparation for seeking the nomination for the anti-divorce, anti-gay party. Good luck with that.

Oh well, he’ll never be president, but at least he’s alive.

Originally published 10/20/2007

When the seasons change, so does your diet. It all starts with the decorations. Seasonal decorations, which signal the end of summer, get your mind accustomed to being comfortable around bizarre food. Everywhere you look, people are using purple corn-on-the-cob and hay and straw and inedible, deformed vegetables as part of their home décor.

“Dude, your pumpkin has polio.”

“That’s not a pumpkin. That’s a gourd.”

“A gourd?”

“Yeah, I think it’s like a zucchini, but different.”

“Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Can I have some candy corn?”

Candy corn. Ultimately, the thing that separates adults from children is candy corn. Children think it’s delicious and will sit there and eat it until there’s none left. Adults think it’s disgusting and will sit there and eat it until there’s none left.

But if consumers like it, or if their kids like it, why is it inaccessible for nine months? How do holiday snacks and drinks defy the law of supply and demand as it exists in American capitalism?

I mean, if there are people – lots of people – who like candy corn, how come the stuff only comes around a few months out of the year before disappearing, like good ecstasy?

But it doesn’t stop there, either. Soon they’ll be coming at you with cider. That’s another one. Everybody seems to love it, but again, you only have like a two-month window to get your hands on the stuff.

“Well, it’s seasonal,” they tell you.

Really? I seem to have a pretty reliable apple juice connection all year long. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of that – or applesauce, for that matter.

Isn’t cider just apple juice that someone boiled and sprinkled with cinnamon?

And why can’t anything just be innocent? Cider proves that if it’s liquid, there are always going to be people who have to find a way to catch a buzz off of it.

The same thing happens with eggnog. You can only have it at a certain time of year and old people love getting tanked on it, which I’ve always found odd because essentially, it’s a kid’s drink.

What would happen any other time of year if you asked for a beer and I gave you a milkshake with whiskey in it?

And soon after that, you’ll be offered another snack that you mysteriously can’t get any other time of year: Valentine hearts candy. Don’t you think maybe it’s time for an upgrade with those things – at least with the little inscriptions?

“Steal my Heart.”

What is this, Ivanhoe times? Who’s still saying that?

How about something, like “If we get married we could get a tax cut” or “I’m not gay, I’ve just made some mistakes.”

Anything but the same old stuff. And that will lead into Cadbury eggs and those cancer-causing sometimes-pink, sometimes-yellow marshmallow bunnies. I guess it never stops.

But the candy corn supply does, so get it while you can.

Posted by Andrew at 8:53 PM 0 comments Links to this post

Originally published 10/12/08

I'm going to keep this short.

When the money finally runs out and we revert back to caveman society where we have to use coconuts for currency, I'm going to want to have plenty of computer paper to burn for heat.

But we're not there yet. As of right now, I've only killed two of my dogs for food and I still have one whole hand that I haven't yet sold to the university for medical research.

I don't know much about this stock market stuff, but from what I understand, it's definitely time to worry when the Dow is lower than Cloris' weekly average on "Dancing with the Stars."

I can't even pretend to understand this bailout either. It's too complicated for me, but apparently if Barack Obama says "deregulation" and John McCain says "my friends" once for each dollar we owe, money

will fall out of the sky.

But I have faith. This country's business leaders are bold thinkers and I'm sure they'll come up with something. This week I went to the bank and tried to refinance my mortgage since I could no longer afford

my home and they sent Bill Ayers to blow my house up.

But it's not just America. The world economies are suffering right along with us. The Japanese had to cut production of creepy, humanoid robots and China could only poison half their supply of baby milk.

I'd like to talk to President Bush, but he's been hiding out like a meth addict during daylight. I'm not saying it's his fault, but I think I know where he's been spending all of our money. Someone needs to tell him that no matter what he sees on "Wheel of Fortune," you don't actually have to buy a vowel every time you don't know how to spell a word.

Oh no. They just turned off my electricity and I'm running on battery power now. I'm curled up in a tent crying like the girl in "Blair Witch," but instead of telling whoever finds this to tell my mom I'm sorry, I'm just mumbling, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong. The fundamentals of the economy are strong. The fundamentals of the economy are strong."

Someone's knocking at the door. I think it's the Albanian loan I shark I went to after the banks all turned me down for a loan. Getting hungry now. I'm staring at my last remaining dog. I'm starting to hallucinate that he's a big chicken leg like on the Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Oh no, I just heard a loud thump outside on the street. Either the guy in the apartment next to me just committed suicide or the sky is literally falling.

I'm eating my credit cards now, even those three little numbers on the back.

Getting weaker, getting tired … the fundamentals of the economy are strong, the fundamentals of the economy are strong, the fundamentals of the economy are strong.

Does anyone want to buy a vowel?

Originally published 10/4/08

If I ever get to moderate a presidential debate, I’ll have just one question. I’ll say, “I’ll spell a word, and then you pronounce it, OK? Here goes. N-U-C-L-E-A-R.” If the person says anything other than “NEW-klee-ur,” they lose — especially if they talk like Ed Rooney’s secretary from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”.

I don’t mean to rag on Sarah Palin. If this is what America wants, this is what America should have, but between the “hecks” and the “darns” and the “doggonnits” in the Marge Sweetwater voice, I feel like I should be buying a car from William H. Macy in a Coen Brothers movie.

Before moving on, I’d like to say a quick prayer for O.J. Simpson. The outcome of his hotel robbery case is now in the hands of the jury and I’m really hoping for another acquittal. Sure, he cut two people’s heads off and got to play golf for 15 years, but now that Palin did well enough that McCain might win again, we can’t risk having an Obama loss and an O.J. guilty verdict in the same month. It’s just too unfair to black people.

It would be like if they canceled “The Jeffersons” the day after the King assassination.

But let’s move on. Between the election and the boring financial stuff, it’s easy to miss the really good stories, like one this week in the New York Times that shows just how tough it is out there for families.

Some parents are getting so desperate that they’re abandoning children as old as 17 at safe-haven-law drop-off sites, which were designed as an alternative place for infants to begin their really bright futures instead of being left in the garbage to die by their unprepared teenage mothers.

Things are so bad that one mother left her 14-year-old son. Another left two boys and a girl, ages 11-14.

But then, in my favorite drop-off-your-kid-and-hope-for-the-best story since Neverland Ranch, a man surrendered nine of his 10 children, ages 1-17.

OK, there are a few problems with this.

First, 10 children? Really? What are you a sharecropper in 1890? But more importantly, how do you pick which one to hang onto? First I felt bad for the kids, but what about this poor dad who has to sort through his entire litter and decide which 90 percent to dump off and which one to hang onto?

You know you have a difficult which-kid-should-I-keep decision if the concentration camp lady from “Sophie’s Choice” feels bad for you. At least she just had a coin toss to deal with.

Between this and the Katie Couric interview, I’d say it’s been a tough time for overburdened mothers everywhere, and if these parents need some inspiration, they should remember that having too many children could be their ticket all the way the heck to the doggone White House.

Originally published 9/6/08

I feel much better after this week.

Before this week, I wasn’t sure that Sarah Palin had the stuff it takes to lead the country when John McCain dies in office, which statistically he will, according to the accepted average lifespan of male human beings.

I knew she had been in the PTA and that she loves her children, which is definitely a start because my mom was in the PTA and she loves me and I know SHE’S qualified to be president. I also knew she was good at shooting things and making stuff out of their skin and antlers, which I’m pretty sure is relevant in 2008.

But still, I just wasn’t sure that being governor of a state that borders Russia and has less than a million people — most of whom know what whale blubber tastes like — was enough preparation.

But this week, I found out Sarah Palin must know what’s best because, like many great leaders before her, she talks to God.

Time magazine said Palin referred to a gas pipeline she wanted to build as “God’s will” and called the war in Iraq “a task that is from God.”

I mean, I didn’t even know God was in the natural gas business. I had been calling him “That Great T. Boone Pickens in the Sky,” but I was never sure why up until now. Then again, I’m so stupid I thought Iraq was the will of idiots who thought God was talking to them, not God himself.

Then again, I’ve never been to Crawford, Texas, or Alaska, where God apparently vacations and gives most of his speeches, but I know people who hallucinate conversations with spirits are reliable. I’ve met them in the parking lot at Grateful Dead concerts and they always make great grilled cheeses.

But I didn’t need much convincing.

I already knew she thinks abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest, which is awesome. I mean, if my wife is raped, I don’t want to us to be burdened with the decision of whether or not to bring her rapist’s baby to term when that could be decided for us by a hockey mom I’ve never met — and incest? This means that we’ll be guaranteed another Osmond whenever Donny and Marie finally do it.

And she’s pro choice where it counts.

Palin thinks creation should be taught alongside evolution in schools. Genius! I mean, why argue whether kids should learn about science or superstition when you could just give them both at the same time and let them sort it out?

Also, her litter of children that is now starting to have children of their own is a wonderful example of the effectiveness of the abstinence-only education that she wants for all schools.

Plus, in 1984 she was voted the second-hottest chick in Alaska. Then again, it’s dark there for half the year.

Hopefully, with God’s help, Sarah Palin can show us the light.

Originally published 8/31/08

I’m glad I went to school when I did.

Those little brats at Columbine really made American schools boring, uptight places for kids to spend their days.

First they came up with something called “zero tolerance,” which means that a toddler can get suspended from preschool for saying “pow.”

Then they came up with anti-bullying laws and see-through backpacks and put metal detectors in the halls and chained the doors like Joe Clark.

But now, for the first time since Klebold and Harris wrote their own parody version of “School’s Out” nearly a decade ago, a small, poor town called Harrold in Texas has finally found the solution to preventing school shootings: Let the teachers carry guns.

I know, I know. At first glance, this sounds like an absolutely brilliant idea, but let me play devil’s advocate for just a moment.

I’m not saying firearms don’t have a place in schools. Most schools are already violent, overcrowded places where the herd could use a little thinning, but do you know who teachers are? Regular schmucks. I had a few really good teachers, a few horrible teachers, and then about a hundred middle-aged, coffee-breathed burnouts who I don’t remember anything about except that its probably good that they weren’t packing heat in school.

They wore bad sweaters, they did the minimum, they bought your excuses. They were about as qualified to make split-second, life-and-death decisions as the school nurse was qualified to do stem-cell transplants.

Most teachers were lucky if they could keep us from tearing down their bulletin board and locking them out the classroom.

So what’s the alternative? A school-safety officer? That’s no good, I don’t like a cop running around a school, poking around in lockers. I have cigarettes to smoke in the bathroom, go bother an adult. That won’t work anyway because, as the Harrold superintendent told the New York Times, if there’s a uniformed officer, the imagined assassin would “know who to shoot first.”

So what do you do? The odds of being killed in a school shooting are about as good as being struck by lightning on the same day that you win the Powerball, so it obviously needs to be dealt with instead of using that time to make sure kids can read and add when they graduate.

But how far is too far for untrained, unqualified, overzealous teachers to go in the name of safety?

Will it be like a black guy in New York City where the cops can pump 83 bullets into you because you reach for your wallet?

What about for minor infractions, can the teacher pistol whip you for putting gum under the desk?

What if you get caught cutting class? Can the teacher draw and force you back in at gunpoint?

It’s high school, where the weak are singled out and alienated. Kids already know to be frightened and paranoid, they don’t need to learn it from their teachers.

Originally published 8/24/08

Old people had it tough, at least you’d think so if you listen to them.

You get one of these old codgers, give him a highball or whatever it is they drink, and you’ll hear all about how weak kids are today. How when they were kids they said “sir” and “ma’am” and respected their parents and teachers because if they didn’t, they’d get beaten by both.

Really? A teacher would beat you?

Oh yeah, they say. The teachers, the nuns — and then our parents would beat us for making the teachers beat us.

Wow ... your teachers, your parents ... they, um, sucked.

I mean, who beats a kid? What role model rules a weaker person through intimidation and teaches violence to the very kids they’re supposed to be preparing for the world?

Well, lots of people apparently.

The ACLU and Human Rights Watch released a report this week that says corporal punishment — which is to beat children, preferably with objects — is still surprisingly common in U.S. schools.

The report says 223,190 kids were beaten by teachers in 2006-2007, including a visibly pregnant 16-year-old who was hit by her principal because she was late.

Poor girl. First you have to tell your parents that you ARE late, then your principal hits you for being late.

In another incident, a three-year-old boy with attention deficit disorder came home “terrified with bruises from hips to belly button after being beaten for taking off his shoes.”

Minorities and children with disabilities were far more likely to be beaten than white kids who keep their shoes on.

In Texas, disabled children make up 10.7 percent of the student population but got 18.4 percent of the beatings. But dark skin makes you even more of a target — blacks are twice as likely to be physically beaten and humiliated in school than anyone else.

Although 21 states still allow corporal punishment, only 13 use it frequently.

I know this is hard to believe given the South’s long record of fairness toward minorities, but — surprisingly, shockingly — the 13 states where black children are most likely to be legally assaulted by their teachers are: Missouri, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida.

The report cited “a culture of intimidation where beatings serve as a public warning ... principals turn on loudspeakers while beating students, staff roam hallways with paddles, and teachers display their ‘boards of education’ on their desks.”

Maybe I’m just a warped product of a non-violent upbringing, but if a strange adult had ever put his hands on me in anger, my mom would have buried a steak knife in his chest, and if I had a daughter and a grown man smacked her behind in front of other kids, he’d very quickly find himself in Hell’s teachers lounge.

Kids are a pain in the butt, but if you can’t control them without giving them one, maybe you should find a different job.

Originally published 8/16/08

Complaining should be an Olympic event.

A Swedish wrestler complained that “politics” cost him a gold medal. He then threw his bronze medal and ran away. The U.S. women’s gymnastics team complained that they could tell just by looking that their Chinese opponents were too young to be eligible.

Funny, I couldn’t tell the difference between the the 36-year-old Chinese coach and the little girl who got caught lip synching at the opening ceremony.

But all of this was overshadowed by the complaints of another group of olympians when the Special Olympics protested the movie “Tropic Thunder” because of its use of what they called the “R-word.”

The R-word, of course, is “retard,” a word that — like “cripple” or “mongoloid” — was once an acceptable way to talk about people with disabilities. As society became more sensitive, those words gave way to “handicapped” and then “mentally or physically challenged” — and that’s where I thought it stopped.

But the S.O. now says that the R-word is demeaning to people with “intellectual disabilities.”

Intellectual disabilities? Listen, words like “retard” are crude and mean, and if you make fun of people with disabilities, you’re an idiot. But how much can I be expected to remember? Because it’s not just them.

Those with an aversion to the “N-word” are also mad at the movie because white actor Robert Downey Jr. appears as a black character.

While it is a little odd at first, this isn’t Fred Astaire blackface we’re talking about, yet many activists are offended. But why?

What about “White Chicks,” where the Wayans brothers put on white face? That was cool?

How am I supposed to know what’s OK and what’s not, especially since I’m spending so much time trying to keep my word-hyphen-word terminology up to date?

But I won’t have to worry for long. This week, the Census Bureau reported that whites will be a minority in America by 2042, years earlier than previously thought.

I can’t wait to be a minority. This is going to be great. The ruling class is for the birds. Too much pressure, too many expectations — and our encounters with police aren’t nearly as interesting.

I’ll be able to use racist language against my own people but then protest when other people do the same thing. I’ll get a number on the telephone to push so the operator will speak my language. I’ll get to use historical events from hundreds of years ago to justify absolutely any behavior, no matter how despicable.

“You shot a clerk for $47!”

“Um, uh, the Roman Empire!”

I’ll reclaim the month of February, stop using plurals and they’ll build a big fence in Texas and Arizona just for me.

But most of all I just can’t wait to see how you like it when you have to keep up with the switch from “pigmentation challenged” to “bilingually deficient.”

Because keeping this stuff straight should be an Olympic event.

Originally published 11/8/08

Sometimes you have to know when your best days are behind you.

Whether it’s New Kids on the Block, 90210 or smallpox, coming out of retirement is usually a recipe for disaster.

But this week, 38-year-old Brett Favre — who announced last year that he was quitting football — proved it’s never too late to chase a dream when he accepted a trade by the Green Bay Packers to the New York Jets.

Favre is leaving his post as the beloved leader of one of the most celebrated teams in history to lead an organization that claims to be from New York, plays in New Jersey, practices on Long Island and has to suffer the indignity of hosting their home games in a place called “Giants Stadium.”

The last time they won a championship, John McCain was in a Vietnamese prison camp and it had only been legal to eat lunch next to black people for five years.

With the exception of Kevin Arnold’s jacket, the Jets have gotten no respect in popular culture in a generation.

But suddenly, Jets fans everywhere are reinvigorated by a guy whose career began before John Madden started making Dick Clark sound like an eloquent broadcaster.

In a culture obsessed with youth, Favre is proving that you’re never too old.

But girls can play, too.

This year — in the 75 liters of water in China that won’t give you cancer — a swimmer will capture the imagination of middle-aged women everywhere.

41-year-old Dara Torres is going for her tenth medal since she won her first Olympic gold in 1984, a year before Live Aid. I haven’t seen a woman that old in the water since the bathtub scene in “The Shining.”

But she’s not just special because of her age. This is the first year that the biggest female role model in the Olympics isn’t a male figure skater.

But if you’re never too old for sports, are you ever too young?

With all the good jobs in America having already been stolen, 10-year-old Michelito Lagravere left Mexico for France to be a bullfighter.

Same as in neighboring Spain, the French consider torturing and slowly killing animals for entertainment a sport. So, same as in Spain, I root for the bull and watch in the hopes of seeing a dead bullfighter, dead spectators, or preferably both.

Since I love animals, my favorite matadors are the ones with internal bleeding resulting from horn-shaped puncture wounds. But this is a little boy we’re talking about. So if Brett Favre and Dara Torres aren’t too old for me to root for, is this adorable little sadist too young for me to root against?

What is the age cutoff where I can laugh at a person with a crushed windpipe and minutes left to live?

Is it like executions in Texas where it’s OK to kill you if you’re tall enough to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl?

Who knows, but this year the world of sports will be one wild ride.

Originally published 8/3/08

This week, a tragedy happened in Los Angeles. No, not the earthquake. I can't call that a tragedy because no one was seriously hurt and it almost killed Judge Judy.

The tragedy involved two of my very favorite things: racism and hamburgers.

The predominately white Los Angeles City Council voted this week to forbid any new fast-food joints from opening in poor, predominately black neighborhoods.

Here's the logic: Poor inner-city blacks die earlier than more affluent whites because they're more susceptible to basically every health problem known to man due to the crappy level of health care they receive from pre-natal to the grave.

The response: Since we live in a country where poor people can't go to the doctor because we need our national fortune to bomb other poor people in other countries, the least we could do is force grown adults to eat fewer hamburgers and hope for the best.

I've been to Watts, I've been to Compton. Basically every street has a pawn shop, a gun shop or a liquor store. McDonald's ain't the problem.

The problem are these token, symbolic solutions — like the U.S. House of Representatives' apology this week to blacks for slavery and segregation. We're sorry that your ancestors were beaten, raped, kidnapped and dragged here in chains only to be freed and then virtually enslaved for another hundred years ... but could you just try to lay off the Whoppers?

The hypocrisy of the whole thing was voiced this week by Ludacris, a rapper who released a song praising Barack Obama, trashing Hillary Clinton and John McCain, telling blacks to be angry and whites to be afraid. From the many, many white people who are scared to death of having a black guy in their own house, much less the White House, this brought the reaction of, "I told you so! You see how this will turn out!"

As if Ludacris is on the V.P. short list.

But it's not just racism. The other group of white people — the ones who don't mind having a president who happens to be black but don't want a "black" president — were more worried about something Obama said than Ludacris.

Obama said that since John McCain has no substance, he'll try to scare white America by reminding them that he doesn't look like the other people on our dollar bills. McCain said that Obama was playing the race card "from the bottom of the deck," whatever that means.

While it's good that we're finally having the uncomfortable but necessary discussion about the relationship between blacks and whites in this country, it's not surprising that the presidential contest is becoming a race based on race.

On one side is a light-skinned black man. On the other side is a man whose skin color changes with each new lesion he has to get scraped off his face.

And in between are hamburgers ... lots and lots of uneaten hamburgers.

Good luck, America.

Originally published 7/27/08

MySpace is everyone’s space.

Even if you’re one of those prudes who hides your profile to try to avoid psychos and stalkers, everything you post is visible to someone who really wants to see it.

Now, I don’t want to live in a country where young people are afraid to express themselves, so ordinarily I’d tell them to taunt law enforcement by openly mocking illegal behavior in online photographs — unless they’re near the sentencing phase of their trial.

Recently, more and more prosecutors are using incriminating pictures posted online to seek harsher punishments for people they’ve convicted.

A 20-year-old student named Joshua Lipton got two years in prison instead of probation when his prosecutor showed the judge a Facebook picture of him drinking, laughing and dressed as a prisoner at a Halloween party two weeks after a DWI accident he caused seriously injured a woman.

Now, I’m not saying that this is an abuse of power. It’s the criminal’s fault. Posting those photos would be like Christian Bale giving his mom a Jokey Smurf exploding present for Mother’s Day next year. In the current context, it just wouldn’t be funny.

But right or wrong, MySpace is being used as an excuse to prosecute criminals twice — once for their crime and once for their attitude.

It wasn't always that way. MySpace started as a place for bands to promote their music. Then someone discovered that using the same technology, you could silently track the girl who you always wanted to sleep with in high school, look at her pictures and video, read her blog and arbitrarily contact her while you’re drinking in the middle of the night 10 years later.

What baby boomers insist on calling "social networking" was born, but it came with a Catch-22: Sure, it was now easy and fun to track and monitor anyone from vulnerable children to naive employees to frightened exes, but now anyone looking for you would find easy prey as well.

People who don’t understand the generation gap wonder why anyone would publicize photos of themselves doing something wrong in the first place.

Baby boomers and whatever came before them (I think mostly jellyfish and small invertebrates) are big on data secrecy. If you pull out a camera when they’re behaving badly, they’ll act like Barzini at “The Godfather” wedding.

Why? Because they know that if there were readily available photos of them wearing smocks and eating dandelions or whatever they did before they sold out their principles to rule the world, they may have never gotten the chance to rule the world in the first place.

Sure they want to be the cool uncle with the Grateful Dead parking lot story at Thanksgiving, but when they’re being vetted for the promotion, they just want to diversify the company’s assets.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, sometimes it’s better to just keep quiet.

Originally published 7/19/08

We need a new scandal.

Well, not really. As long as we don’t get rid of alcohol and Andy Dick — at least not at the same time — we’ll always have plenty of scandals.

But at the very least we need a new suffix that isn’t “gate” to attach to the end of otherwise non-scandalous words when referring to a scandal.

I mean, how much more can we ask of “gate?”

Leakgate, Bowling-gate, Lewinskygate, Katrinagate, McGreeveygate, Spitzergate, Attorneygate, Rathergate, Gonzogate.

It makes me hope the secretary of defense and the head of Microsoft aren’t caught in a kickback scheme, because I don’t want Kieth Olbermann ranting about GatesGatesGate.

It all started, of course, with Watergate, which was named after the hotel that Nixon’s goons busted into like OJ Simpson looking for stolen football cards in Vegas.

Watergate was a scandal that toppled the president and rocked the nation, but now, “gate” is used for everything involving coke, a hooker, a boy or a baby.

They just give it away, even if the scandal is something as non-scandalous as Madonna giving it away to a pro baseball player.

Alex Rodriguez, a married New York Yankee, was recently caught sneaking around with Madonna, a married reason to never let your daughter leave the house.

Now, she’s notoriously promiscuous and he’s a handsome millionaire, so I don’t really see the scandal. I mean, she already slept with the Yankees in the 80s — and I’m not not even referring to the baseball team, I’m talking about everyone who lived above the Mason-Dixon Line at the time.

But anyway, they had the nerve to call this thing “Madonnagate.” First of all, we’re at war on two fronts, why is this news? But more importantly, are these media executives so miserably out of touch that they have to reach back to Vietnam times for an analogy?

It’s like when people see a good dancer and they say he moves like Fred Astaire. I mean, I’m willing to settle for an Al B. Sure or a Kriss Kross or something, but you shouldn’t need a flux capacitor (1985) to find a relevant pop-culture reference.

So if you’re going to dredge up Watergate, at least have the decency to apply it sparingly.

When John McCain last week contradicted his POW story about giving the name of a pro football team to his interrogators, he switched “Packers” to “Steelers” because he was in Pittsburgh.

I was waiting for that to turn into “Crazy-old-man-is-either-pandering-or-he-actually-can’t-remember-gate,” but it never materialized, and I’m glad.

All McCain did is what people in show business call “localizing.”

When I saw the rock band “The Eagles” in Philly, “Hotel California” became “Hotel Pennsylvania.”

Don Henley didn’t forget the lyrics, he just wanted me to feel like I was getting my money’s worth.

He changed the words to keep things relevant, and so should we.

Originally published 7/12/08

Sometimes the stories just write themselves.

This week, two things happened that made it impossible to talk about anything else. First, a famous civil rights leader forgot that the microphone on his shirt meant you could hear the stuff he said even if he whispered. And second, Fox News had someone on hand who could speak Jesse Jackson.

Maybe they flew in the guy who interpreted the teacher for Charlie Brown. Maybe they got the actor who played Luca Brasi. But either way, when Jackson leaned over to the much wiser and quieter man sitting to his left and said that Barack Obama talks down to black people and then fantasized out loud about tearing off his genitals, I couldn't help but think we were that much closer to realizing Dr. King's dream.

I'm not sure why. I don't recall King saying anything specifically about attacking blacks with different views – and I certainly can't remember anything about the mutilation of their private parts – but this is Jesse Jackson we're talking about here, so it seemed

appropriate to bring it up.

If you didn't see the incident just Google "Jesse Jackson profane slur," then go past the part about "Hymie-town," scroll down after "white devils," and it should jump right out at you.

The first thing you'll notice is the portion of the video the news outlets chose to censor.

Jackson used playground slang to refer to the plural part of the male genitals, and they beeped out that word. Now, they kept the part about him wanting to rip them off of Barack Obama – presumably while he was still alive and not anesthetized – but the word itself (which is OK in every other context) had to go.

Mutilation of the human body: OK. The human body itself: Oh no, can't have that.

The second thing you'll notice is Jackson's complete disregard for all prudence when talking about a black guy who isn't there. I mean, he didn't even do a shoulder check. He called Barack out by name, angrily said he talks down to blacks and then vocalized a daydream in which he plays Lorena Bobbit – only Lorena in this case is a black man

who sounds like he's talking with a mouthful of marshmallow fluff.

Now, who knows why Jesse was mad. On Father's Day, Barack made a speech about black men who have children they don't take care of.

Since Jesse Jackson is an adulterer who had a child out of wedlock, he may have interpreted this as "talking down" to him. And since Jesse Jackson presumes to represent and speak for all black people, I see how this could be interpreted as "talking down to black people."

Whatever the logic, it was the best thing he could do for Barack. All the whites who were unsure about Barack's blackness now know that he's on Jesse Jackson's list of enemies, which they can relate to. But I think the real story is that – for the first time in a long time – people are paying attention to Jesse Jackson.

Originally published 7/4/08

Nothing like the Fourth of July. Beers, barbecue, stories about some kid who blew his fingers off with fireworks. Everything is pretty much perfect this time of year except for one thing: the national anthem.

I hate to be the one to bring it up because I know how sentimental everyone gets, but I think it’s time for a new song. It’s old, it’s not catchy and it’s too hard to sing even if you’re one of the 13 people who actually knows the words.

I never knew how to mention it, but this week, an African-American singer named Rene Marie saved me the trouble when she started off the Denver mayor’s State of the City address with the “black national anthem” instead of the “Star Spangled Banner” as planned.

Now, I just assumed the black national anthem was “Thriller.” Not only is it the song behind the best video in history, but Michael Jackson wrote it before he became a white woman.

But I was wrong. It’s actually an old spiritual called “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing.” I’ve never actually heard it, but I’m glad we’re experimenting because I have to say, I’m a little embarrassed by what we’re going with now.

At the hockey games where they sing both our song and the Canadian National Anthem, I find myself humming right along with the Maple Leafs fans. In “Rocky IV” who can really say with a straight face that they weren’t jealous of Russia’s anthem?

Now, I’m not saying we should necessarily go with “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (although I do like how they held the hip-hop tradition of intentional awkward spelling) but it’s good we’re having the discussion.

But Ms. Marie wasn’t the only black person stirring it up this week. As Barack Obama performed the political rite of passage of pandering to religious fanatics, he promised to continue George Bush’s faith-based initiatives, which is a cute-sounding way of saying he, too, will disregard the separation of church and state by giving my tax dollars to tax-exempt organizations that teach their followers that I’ll burn in hell for disagreeing with them.

That’s OK, I’ve gotten used to having Jesus in the White House, but if the government is going to steal my money and give it to churches, I’d like to have a say in the distribution.

This week, the controversial Texas FLDS polygamy sect launched its own clothing line, and I want all of my stolen faith money to go to their online store, where you can purchase clothing that is “reminiscent of 19th century American pioneers.”

It’s sort of like the clothes that Will Smith had to wear on the first day of school in “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

Austere dresses, long sleeves, high collars and wide pleats — now I see how these polygamists were pulling in all the chicks.

A new song, new clothes and a new president with old ideas. Happy birthday America.

Originally published 6/28/08

This week, George Carlin finally got back all the things he ever lost. Cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens, balloons.

Those of you who know and love Carlin’s work will get it. Those of you who don’t, well, just don’t get it.

When I heard this week that George Carlin died after a half century of challenging what people are willing to laugh at, seven words came to mind. I can’t say any of them here because Carlin’s lifelong battle against America’s war on language was a fight he was doomed to lose from the beginning.

Carlin died as he lived: In a society of adult children who use words like “heck” and “darn” and do things like put two hyphens in between the letters “F” and “K” when writing an expletive because they superstitiously believe that some words are bad — not the concept that the word represents, but the actual combination of letters itself.

Our country has language schizophrenia. One America claims to cherish free speech as an inalienable right that is is protected in the very first amendment of our Constitution. The other America allows itself to be ruled by the FCC, an unelected group of politically appointed people who determine which words can and can’t be used, which thoughts can and can’t be expressed and what the punishment will be for those who disobey.

The space between those two Americas was the empire of a skinny man with a beard and pony tail who wondered why he “could go on TV and say ‘don’t prick your finger’ but would be fined and fired for saying the exact same words the other way around.”

A former altar boy who left the Catholic Church because he “reached the age of reason,” Carlin started his career in a world where comedians could be dragged off stage in handcuffs and arrested for cursing (he was in Milwaukee in 1972). He left the world a place where guys like me can call the pope or the president a criminal without worrying about anything more than a few nasty e-mails.

All week I saw tributes to Carlin and his career. Most of them focused on his famous “seven dirty words” routine that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that the government can ban certain language under the threat of punishment.

Some of the tributes called his death “tragic” and imagined him laughing and joking in heaven, forgetting that Carlin thought the sanctity of life and tragedy of death were childish and arrogant concepts invented by a self-obsessed species — and, of course, that heaven is nothing more than a storage warehouse for all the items you lose on Earth, including every balloon that ever got away.

You want to honor Carlin? Go to church less, question authority more and teach your kids that there are no bad words, only bad actions.

Oh, and don’t forget to curse as loudly and as often as necessary.

Farewell George. Nice work.

Originally published 11/03/2007

It would be racist to assume that someone else is a racist just because they’re a tattooed, quasi-law-enforcement white guy with a prison record and a mullet.

Knowing that, I gave Dog the Bounty Hunter the benefit of the doubt when I first saw him and assumed he was just an idiot, and not necessarily a racist idiot.

Sure he looked like one of the bad guys from the Double Dragon, but he did have leather gloves and a Super Soaker filled with pepper spray, so I gave him a chance.

Since then, A&E has claimed upwards of 100 hours of my life because they understood one basic truth: If a rational person sees one episode of “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” he will never be able to turn away.

And that doesn’t mean I actually think it’s good.

Part of me watches it just for the oh-no-he-didn’t embarrassing cringe factor, the same reason you can’t turn off Borat or Flavor Flav or a George W. Bush speech.

Dog was like the Steve Irwin of bounty hunting: He was leathery and dangerous and intense, but at the same time, he was loveable.

Dog made bounty hunting funny again, which it hasn’t been since Robert DeNiro’s Jack Walsh in “Midnight Run.”

But Dog reinvented the whole thing, leading his posse – his bean-bag-chair-with-eyes wife, his maniac kids and a creepy, non-related uncle figure called Youngblood –around Hawaii, stirring things up and pretending to be cops – only with no guns and feathered hair.

There were lots of braided ponytails and there was lots of yelling, but it was all tempered with a Christian message of charity and values that Dog would force feed you every episode with a little prayer in the beginning or motivational speech at the end.

The language of Dog’s motivational speech apparently changes when his kids date black people.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tape by now of Dog dropping N-bombs on his son – who wound up selling the tape to the Enquirer – about his black girlfriend. It was about as bad as it can get.

But not as bad as ratting out your dad to the media. You want to get back at him? Join Islam with your Nubian girlfriend, don’t embarrass your family.

But that’s a cop out, because the blame clearly lies on Dog. I mean, who says something like that out loud in a situation where it could be taped? Michael Richards, Mel Gibson. I mean, I understand if you have to hate blacks and Jews, but do you have to be so obvious about it?

Oh well, the damage is done and it appears there will be no Don Imus-style resurrection on this one, and that’s a shame.

Who else can I watch chase Polynesian meth heads around Maui?

Can’t we keep Dog? Do we have to like him to watch him? I mean, it’s good TV, and anyway, we’ve always ignored all those racist black comedians, like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

I mean, what fun is a Dog if you keep him on a leash?

Originally published 10/27/2007

American presidents have always been, at least in my lifetime, embarrassingly out of touch.

In 2000, Bill Clinton – the guy who determined whether or not nuclear weapons should be launched – referred to a demonstration of a simple screensaver as “amazing!”

President Bush – the one who could make words into sentences, not the tall child who occasionally shows up for work dressed in a fighter pilot or cowboy costume – once reported being “amazed” when the lady at the grocery store read a bar code with a scanner.

During the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan was amazed to discover that you could sleep through your second term and be still be considered a great president by three-quarters of the population just by dying.

So this week, when Bill Clinton proudly reported that he sent his first-ever text message, at first I cringed. Here we go again. But then it hit me how lucky all these guys are to have never sent a text or shopped at a grocery store – to have so much power and so much money and so many assistants to do your legwork that don’t even need to learn to use a phone.

It dispels the “regular guy” theory of presidential appeal. I want a guy who’s so finely honed that he can’t even perform ordinary tasks, not a regular guy who can’t pronounce the word “nuclear,” just like your uncle Dusty.

But this week wasn’t just about politicians who are alive or dead – it was also about politicians who are alive but were almost dead without their knowledge. It was revealed during a mob-connected FBI guy’s trial that at one point the New York Mafia chiefs voted, 3-2, not to kill Rudy Giuliani.

First of all, can we stop going after 78-year-old Italian men who were maybe in charge of something in the 1970s? Is the mafia anything more than 10 senior citizens whose names happen to end in vowels? It’s a marriage of convenience where trials let the mob guys feel relevant and let the cops go after easy, glamorous targets.

I mean, the Italians were really scary up to and including maybe 30 years ago, but now they have like the 16th best mafia after the gay mafia, the diabetic mafia and the left-handed Eskimo mafia.

What are you going to do if I don’t pay up? Send the AARP to my house?

You want to impress me? Go after the Latin Kings or infiltrate MS-13 instead of wasting resources on white-haired greaseballs with Alzheimer’s and ear hair.

But, I have to admit, the mafia is dead in large part because Rudy killed it when he took down John Gotti, and left the whole system to be run by three Abe Vigoda looking dudes with names like Phil the Bowl of Soup and Johnny the Elbow and Harry the Coffee Table.

The rest of the time he spent getting divorced, cross-dressing and marching in gay parades as preparation for seeking the nomination for the anti-divorce, anti-gay party. Good luck with that.

Oh well, he’ll never be president, but at least he’s alive.

Originally published 10/20/2007

When the seasons change, so does your diet.

It all starts with the decorations. Seasonal decorations, which signal the end of summer, get your mind accustomed to being comfortable around bizarre food. Everywhere you look, people are using purple corn-on-the-cob and hay and straw and inedible, deformed vegetables as part of their home décor.

“Dude, your pumpkin has polio.”

“That’s not a pumpkin. That’s a gourd.”

“A gourd?”

“Yeah, I think it’s like a zucchini, but different.”

“Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Can I have some candy corn?”

Candy corn. Ultimately, the thing that separates adults from children is candy corn. Children think it’s delicious and will sit there and eat it until there’s none left. Adults think it’s disgusting and will sit there and eat it until there’s none left.

But if consumers like it, or if their kids like it, why is it inaccessible for nine months? How do holiday snacks and drinks defy the law of supply and demand as it exists in American capitalism?

I mean, if there are people – lots of people – who like candy corn, how come the stuff only comes around a few months out of the year before disappearing, like good ecstasy?

But it doesn’t stop there, either. Soon they’ll be coming at you with cider. That’s another one. Everybody seems to love it, but again, you only have like a two-month window to get your hands on the stuff.

“Well, it’s seasonal,” they tell you.

Really? I seem to have a pretty reliable apple juice connection all year long. There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of that – or applesauce, for that matter.

Isn’t cider just apple juice that someone boiled and sprinkled with cinnamon?

And why can’t anything just be innocent? Cider proves that if it’s liquid, there are always going to be people who have to find a way to catch a buzz off of it.

The same thing happens with eggnog. You can only have it at a certain time of year and old people love getting tanked on it, which I’ve always found odd because essentially, it’s a kid’s drink.

What would happen any other time of year if you asked for a beer and I gave you a milkshake with whiskey in it?

And soon after that, you’ll be offered another snack that you mysteriously can’t get any other time of year: Valentine hearts candy. Don’t you think maybe it’s time for an upgrade with those things – at least with the little inscriptions?

“Steal my Heart.”

What is this, Ivanhoe times? Who’s still saying that?

How about something, like “If we get married we could get a tax cut” or “I’m not gay, I’ve just made some mistakes.”

Anything but the same old stuff. And that will lead into Cadbury eggs and those cancer-causing sometimes-pink, sometimes-yellow marshmallow bunnies. I guess it never stops.

But the candy corn supply does, so get it while you can.