Don't Forget to Vote Today, Democrats!

Now that the Republicans have cast all those votes for every Representative up for election, it is time for the Democrats to take their turn.

Don't be intimidated by how many votes you will need to defeat the Party of No or by how many people tell you the polling place is no longer accepting votes--JUST DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY and get Democrats into office.

Why? Well, because although most of them are reprehensible human beings, they are slightly better than Republicans.

Here's why:

- They actually want to pass laws, rather than just say "No" to everything and accept bribes
- Most of them are in favor of stopping the ridiculous tax cuts for the rich and providing aid to the poor and unemployed
- They do not want to eliminate the IRS, EPA, Department of Education, or Social Security because they are smart enough to realize we would be TOTALLY FUCKED if that happened.
- They weren't members of the party that got us involved in two expensive wars, deregulated and then got into bed with the financial industry, and bailed out Wall Street with no strings attached

Do you need any other reasons?

Okay, they seem to frequent prostitutes a bit less than Repubs, fewer of them are self-loathing homosexual gaybashers, and their party chairman's wife makes the best potato pancakes you have ever eaten.

So get out there and vote, Democratic America!

Or risk 2 years of frustratingly constipated government/name-calling, as the Dark Side plots and rubs hands together mirthfully in a dark room, ushering in a 4-year period of pain, torture, and destruction unrivaled since the days of Sodom, after some as-yet-unnamed Teabagger demon rides a throne of skulls from the banks of the River Styx all the way to Warshington, atop a tidal wave of disembodied souls, and turns back the clock to 1848, when "shit was pure" and the evil corrupt rich white man ruled unequivocally, sans pesky liberal fruit flies buzzing around their luscious picnic basket full of money.

Your choice.

With love,
Your Senator

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Republican Party Nominates 3 Newcomers to Defuse Tea Party Insurgency

Tired of losing ground to the Tea Party in the battle for who is the most irrationally conservative, the Republicans have decided to drag three newcomers--longtime listeners, first-time callers--into the political ring to avoid having the rug pulled out from underneath them this November.

This guy = Not crazy enough

The candidates for the new ruling committee known as the First Triumvirate of Idiocy--which would yield supreme legislative power over all three branches of the popularly-elected puppet government--are known only as the Three Horsemen of the Corporatocracy (their real names/identities will never be known) and are shown below in a photo taken at the stark press conference announcing both their candidacy and inescapable victory:

Where did these handsome young chaps come from and how is their victory assured, you ask?

Well, they came from nowhere, probably some place really remote, never listened in school, have the craziest ideas you have ever heard, and couldn't run a 7-11 on their own, but that is exactly why they will be elected--THEY ARE SOMETHING NEW AND DIFFERENT.

Besides, it's inevitable, right? You might as well just email them your ATM pin and jump headfirst into the party of the people before they force you to at gunpoint.

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Some Things Are Too Important to Ignore

Serpentine--the rock that seduced a state, who then betrayed it in front of everybody 

In an age where lawmakers across the globe have heaping plates of important legislation to deal with, unsustainable debts, and record unemployment, it is nice to know the industrious folks in Sacramento are doing their best to make time for less sexy, if still extremely important issues that might otherwise get swept under the rug.

From the New York Times:

California May Drop Its Official State Rock

The lawmaker and others who would like to see serpentine stripped of its title say the olive green rock found all over the state is a grim symbol of the deadly cancers associated with asbestos, which can be found in the rock. Geologists, who have taken to Twitter on behalf of the rock, assert that serpentine is harmless and is being demonized by advocates for people with asbestos-related diseases and possibly their trial lawyers, too.

The bill to defrock the rock — which recently passed the full State Senate and is awaiting a vote in the Assembly — is sponsored by Senator Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, with the strong support of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Declaring that serpentine “has known health effects,” the bill would leave California — one of roughly half the states in the nation with an official rock or mineral — without an official rock. (According to the bill, California was the first state, in 1965, to name an official rock.)

OMG! Say it ain't so, Californ-I-A! No official state rock? Why, that would change...absolutely nothing about the lives of every single Californian!

Please write your Representative today, call his or her office, post on their Facebook wall, send nude photos of yourself eating a hot dog atop a pony every single day until this offensive bill is stuffed into the shredder in the accounting department, because if there is one thing you deserve, California, it is an officially-designated state rock.

Get yours!

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Armageddon is Nigh?

A quick perusal of Huffington Post this afternoon was perhaps the most depressing thing I have done in a long time. For all of you out there that don't believe me, read on and see if you can stand it:

What Can Brown Do for You: Scott Brown blocks Wall Street reform to ensure that taxpayers, not banks, pay the $19 billion cost of the bill
This one wins best title, for its apt use of what is most likely the worst corporate slogan in history. I've said it before and I'll say it again: why is one man who is not the President powerful enough to stop anything from happening?

Los Angeles: Home of the Vaunted Broom Bear

That is some serious equipment there. The engineering involved in that thing is sick--aside from all the spinning brushes, the water system, and enormous engine, the middle segment jacks up and dumps the mess somewhere (the nearest Pacific tributary is popular, as it the most cost-effective solution). When we colonize the moon, this is probably what the astromen will clean it with once a week.

More importantly, this bear is evidence.  As a society, we have progressed from not giving a shit, to having actual humans clean our streets with brooms, to a citywide fleet of $127,000+ monster trucks [And that's used! -Ed.] that is valued more for its ability to generate bottomless profits from parking tickets than it is for leaving a trail of cleanliness.

Well done, world.

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"I am shocked--SHOCKED--to find there is corruption going on in here."

Ladies and gentlemen...there is corruption in the oil industry.

I know, I know--WHAT?!

But it's true. Apparently, all this time--when I thought they were being responsible businessmen and honorable custodians of the environment--they have been bribing government officials to let them do whatever they want, drowning Congress in money to prevent both regulation as well as alternative energy development, manipulating prices to engineer windfall profits, and cutting corners at the expense of the environment.

The question here is: What are we going to do about it?

The answer here is: Nothing, sadly.

The better question here is: What CAN we do about it?

The answer here is: Nothing, sadly.

And so the distressed ostrich tucks his little head into the bosom of Mother Earth and ignores the hopeless sadness of the world around him. Death will come soon, but not soon enough.

Until then, enjoy yourself, for Christ's sake, ostrich!

Take those jet skis out to Lake Havasu and tear some shit up! Throw your aluminum beer bottles to the wind! Shoot some guns in the park! Forget to feed your baby! Who cares! We'll all be dead in 50 years anyway! WHOOOOOOO!!!


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The Smiley Face Is the New Fuck You

So I was told recently by a group of friends that I am too negative, that my glass isn't even half-empty, but broken. "Why don't you just slit your wrists?" one of them sai

I tried to explain that just because I believe mankind’s Achilles heel is its own human nature, that a world full of 95% beatific lovebirds would unfortunately be enslaved by the other 5% with guns and no conscience, that there is no way to fix the American/global political/economic system, does not mean that I find my own existence hopeless.

Convincing them proved impossible. Was it because they weren’t listening, just acting on their own instincts and jumping to conclusions? Was it because I wasn’t clear? Was it because I am wrong and I do want to kill myself but just don’t know it yet?

Fear not, loyal reader who stumbled upon this site when Googling “Real Dolls”"Face Fuck" (it works--try it!), my end shan't come by mine own hand. I am not that kind of guy.

You see, I want nothing more than to live, to experience as much as I can while I can. Life is an adventure that I wish could last forever, but it can't--I will die some day. It is inevitable.

Equally as inevitable is the fact that while drinking in the endless beauty in this world, I too-frequently choke on a spot of sewage. Hey, whoa, whatever--sweetness and shit...that's life, right?

Right. Which was really the only point I was trying to make--no matter what we good people do, no matter how many wonderful happy things there are in the world, there will always be evil lurking. Always. And much like in Star Wars, the Dark Side is far more powerful, far wealthier; less like Star Wars, we have no Jedi on which to pin our hopes.

It is not pessimism that leads me to such a conclusion--it is realism. A common excuse, I know, but hear me out. Have you optimists not studied your history? Have you optimists not been reading the paper the last...since you've been alive? Has our government--or any government, for that matter--ever not been corrupt? Have there ever not been wars? Have many of these wars not been fought for religious reasons, of all hypocrisies? If we can't even trust our monks to not rape our children, whom can we trust?

(check this out)

Unfortunately, groups of people need leaders or nothing good ever happens (what does that say about us, by the way?). Have you ever gone to Las Vegas with 13 people who are "just there to have some fun and don't really care what they do?" I have--they do nothing. Or they do 13 things for five minutes each and spend the entire weekend in a taxi, stopping only to pay covers. Either way nobody has any fun or gets anything done and that's my point. They need a leader.

Whether that/those leader(s) is a monarch, a Parliament, a triumvirate, a President, or a Chieftan, it makes no difference. Those in power will eventually exploit those not in power, whether for sadistic or materialistic reasons.

If you are lucky enough to be a citizen of the Western World, your politicians smile and make promises, purport to be moral--all the while doing whatever is in their own best interests, which almost always makes your life worse and usually involves one of two ploys:

1. Talking a lot and doing nothing, when not in a hotel room with a prostitute (or sometimes even when they are in said hotel room, it makes me smile to say). This is a great tactic if they don't want their opponent in the next election (which they need to start thinking about as soon as they win the last one) to be able to say they supported a nefarious cause.

2. Blowing with the evil wind as they Kowtow to the quasi-legal bribes--campaign contributions, vacations, consultancies post-term, and/or favors for their otherwise inert offspring--offered by corporations through lobbyists (who I think we should just start referring to as Hessians), when not in a hotel room with a prostitute, because this not only makes them wealthy, but greatly aids their reelection since they will never want for campaign funds against a more honest candidate. Besides, if everybody else in their party is doing the same thing, it's hard for somebody to stand out as a bad guy--it just becomes 'party politics.'

If you are a citizen of the rest of the world, if you don't join them, you had better do as you're goddamn told or they kill you--or put you in a dungeon for the rest of your life. Your choice!

But just as there are happy people in China who lead good, honest lives beneath the shadow of an oppressive regime, I lead a good honest life in America. Just because I am aware that history has my back on the whole 'power corrupts' angle (and the whole 'the corrupt seek power' angle, while we're at it) doesn't mean that I let it bring me down. Much like the farmer in China, I simply am aware of the menace and try to avoid it at all costs while I do my own thing in a bubble of relative contentment. It's what I do.

It's what we all do--when we walk by a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk in the freezing cold, when we pay $12 for a beer at a basketball game, when our second consecutive governor is indicted, when the first four stories on the news involve grisly murders and rapes. We pretend it didn't happen, that it couldn't be as pervasive as it seems. It must just be the media exaggerating things, it couldn't be true that these problems were actually worse in the era before cameras, fingerprints, DNA tests, democracy, laws, the internet...right?

We bury our heads in our asses and get on with our lives.

But every time I come up for air, I find the world smells even worse than I remember, upon close examination of its inhabitants. Whether or not we like to admit it, the beauty that we know and love has a dark side that is something fierce and eventually it will swallow us whole before sashaying off as if nothing happened.

This will not happen in my lifetime, nor yours, nor that of any lawmaker, which is why many of them act as if they don't care about global warming, a fair distribution of wealth, or education--they are greediest when there are no direct consequences. As are most of us.

The reason we don't admit this to ourselves is because it is much better to imagine that our instincts are pure, the world will go on forever, good will triumph over evil, and there are only tiny pockets of problems in an otherwise gorgeous Garden of Eden. This is a comforting thought. Most people believe in God or follow a religion for the same reason--it is far easier than being burdened with the truth, that there is no meaning of life, that we are just here as one of many quirks in the universe, much like the badger, or bacteria.

Ever since I was younger than I should have been to know what a CEO was, I wanted to be one. I was a smart kid with lavish dreams and I wanted to be fabulously wealthy. CEOs are paid obscene amounts of money for decision-making and never have to break a sweat; it made sense.

I had a brain for business, as it turned out, and things were looking good. In high school, my favorite electives were Intro to Business, Business Law, Business Management, Accounting...I even won an accounting trophy! (Don't ask) I entered Northwestern University as an Economics major, but one of the reasons I went there over other schools was that they offered many more options should I change my career goals--top journalism, music, and theater programs, as well as a great film program (although not these days).

This was important because the more I learned about how to succeed in business, the less I wanted to be in business. To the detriment of mankind, good business decisions are rarely good decisions.

Fire a talented, loyal employee because you can pay a replacement less money? Done. Demand that your $20,000/year secretary have at least a master's degree and five years' experience? Done. Cancel your employee pension plan because the overpaid executives made too many bad decisions and your stockholders reaped too many dividends too soon? Done. Pay slave wages to Asians toiling in horrific work environments and pollute at will, in order to compete with all the other companies doing the same thing? Done. Bribe the government to let you keep making money at the expense of the health and happiness of the world? Done.

Once I gave up on my businessman dreams, I went searching for something that I would enjoy doing, something I was good at and felt good about doing.

I flirted with journalism, but realized that I did not want to spend ten years writing about PTA meetings at the fifth-grade level, a helpless puppet of some vast, self-serving media empire that wears its politics in its wallet. Political science? Yeah, right--try getting ahead in politics while still being able to look at yourself in the mirror.

Eventually, I realized that the most fun I ever had was making movies for class projects in high school, despite the fact that I spent easily 100 grueling hours to create a 30-45 minute low-budget costume epic that could have been a 5-minute unedited piece of shit shot in my kitchen by a dad with the shakes.

For better or worse, the fates and I chose the arduous path of the idealistic artist, easily the least-lucrative career I could devise. Especially if you have a bit of a motivation problem.

Once entrenched in the film industry in Los Angeles, however, I quickly confirmed that the film business is little more than a business these days, even for respected artists. Great movies still get made, but they are so rare it is embarrassing. Most movie ideas come from untalented film executives worried about their jobs at Must Have More Profit At Any Cost Corporation, Inc. And so P.T. Anderson struggles to get a movie made because easily-frightened investors would rather shell out for Shrek 4: His Shit is Green.

If Mr. Boogie Nights/There Will Be Blood has that much trouble, as an established auteur, what would it take for me to break in and how would it be any different once I got there?

There needs to be a game change if the movie biz is to survive, one which I believe is nigh. Nigh, I tell you! Online video is clearly the future, but its ultimate channels of distribution remain chaotically unclear. The necessary revenue streams are not yet visible. The art of cinema is in flux and, unlike photography, painting, and sculpting, movies are not only crazy expensive but require much more manpower. I can make it for the web, but how does this help me eat and pay rent? I can make it for the theaters, but how would I get a 1970s character piece without a love interest distributed by the big guys in a marketplace overrun by vampires, romcoms, and children's toys?

This continues to be a disheartening revelation. Short of moving to upstate New York and selling handcrafted furniture out of my garage as I fill the basement with banker's boxes of unpublished fiction and philosophy tomes, what the 'F' am I gonna do with my life that I can feel good about?

As much as it sucks, I guess I need to be an artist who works outside of the system, even if that means nobody notices, and I need to be really productive without encouragement, even if I never make any money. Besides, how many artists died penniless, only to be revered centuries later, when rich men start measuring their dicks with VanGoghs and Latrecs?

I don't have a figure, but I'm sure it is a lot, or too many, at any rate. So the next time you see one, hug a starving artist--especially if he seems depressed. Hell, give him a few bucks while you're at it--he's way more lovable than your average bum or banker and you just might melt away a bit of his disenchantment with the world.

_

C. Everett Koop:

The original flavor-saver.

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Ellis Island Re-Opens to Service Record-Breaking Exodus

In a bold move earlier today, the United States government decided to adjust its policies to mirror those of the Norwegian government, in an attempt to emulate the Scandinavian country's nearly universal economic, social, and cultural success.

As they say in Oslo, "Hva tilbakeslag?"

The legislation, sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) stipulates that all first & second-generation immigrants and non-whites currently residing in the United States are to be immediately deported if they do not choose to flee of their own accord.

The citizens who remain shall then receive--by no later than October of this calendar year--free health care, free university education, breathtaking public transportation, and their fair share of the plunder from the homes of the departed.

"Trust me on this one, America--as soon as we are able to successfully streamline our social policy and get our computers back online, you will enjoy all the benefits you should already have been receiving. As for those leaving us behind, we surely hope they come back one day as deep-pocketed tourists, but are well-aware that probably won't be feasible on the $2/day they will be making from now on."
- Sen. John McCain

As for the location of their new home, qualified candidates have their choice of any island in Indonesia or any nation on the continent of Africa. Military transport or inflatable rowboats will be provided as needed.

"Good luck to you out there! May you carry on the fine pioneering spirit of your ancestors or selves!" - Sen. Richard Shelby

Teen participation in the workforce, specifically in the food service, construction, and harvesting industries, is expected to increase dramatically over the course of the next fiscal quarter.

--

Wanted: Prime Minister* ---experience a plus---

Look at how beautiful Iceland is!
Wouldn't you love to live there?

There aren't too many jobs around these days, but if you are willing to rule the nation, you're in luck--cuz nobody else wants to!

Although it hasn't been released to the press at this time, an adorable little Icelandic mole informs me that--by an overwhelming majority vote--the people of Iceland are willing to sweeten the deal by offering the hand of the voluptuous virgin they were planning to sacrifice on Thor's birthday.

Criminals--this would be a great way to strike out a fresh existence.
(Yes, Barons of Wall Street--I'm talking to you...)

So...think about it!


*Will also consider a ruthless despot, but only if s/he promises to leave our handful of rich people alone.

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Things I Learned About My Governor Today

- His chair at the conference table is 4 inches higher than all the others. Nobody else is ever allowed to sit in it.

- Every square inch of his bathroom wall is covered by either a framed photo of him, a framed political cartoon about him, a drawing of him, or a painting of him.

- He likes almonds.

- He has a 3ft-tall, metal, blinking Terminator skeleton immediately behind his desk, over his shoulder.

- He has the sword from Conan the Barbarian on display in the President Ronald Reagan Cabinet Room adjacent to his office.

- When he wears a green velvet sportcoat, his orange hair makes him look like an elf.

- His Chief of Staff, Daniel, is totally a vampire.

- He's a Leo.

Child Pornography

According to the New York Times today, three leading internet-access providers (Verizon, Sprint, TimeWarner) are promising to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites nationwide that disseminate child pornography. Starting sometime in the relatively near future.

This wasn't already the case? Really?

Well, who am I to judge; I should take solace in the fact that at least these socially responsible corporations are finally taking action on their own to combat this problem, instead of waiting for it be forced upon them. Oh, wait--

"The agreements resulted from an eight-month investigation and sting operation in which undercover agents from Mr. Cuomo’s office, posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children.

"After the companies ignored the investigators’ complaints, the attorney general’s office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and began weeks of negotiations."

How heroic...we had to go undercover and then threaten them. I mean, who wears the pants in this country? How does that old ditty go?

"I pledge allegiance, to the corporation..."