Free Republic

Here's a fun thing to do to calm your frazzled, saddened nerves in the wake of the CA Supreme Court's very unfortunate, but also merely annoying and karmically fleeting Proposition 8 decision: Head on down to your local high school -- hell, make it a junior high or even an elementary -- and take yourself an informal survey. Ask the various wary, bepimpled youth of Generation Tweet what they think about those scary gay people getting married.

Well, the San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford out does himself with sycophantic, hyperbole over his Obammessiah, today, February 27. He so revels in hero worship for The One, it's amazing that the White House doesn't feel compelled to get an order of protection against this creepy columnist. No one in the Old Media is more sold on The One and less credible for his girlish crush than Morford. He is a fount of mush as he wonders if he should be scared of today's problems or suffused with lust in his heart for Obama (if you'll remember the Carterism). It...

Let's not get carried away. Let's not go so far as to suggest we're about to enter into some sort of fluffy utopian tofu puppy happyland where nipples fly free and consciousness expands and the fetid rivers of racism and homophobia that course through the American heartland like acidic sewage somehow magically vanish, somehow become dramatically curtailed, should the twin forces of progress known as President Obama and a vanquished California Proposition 8 somehow come to pass. Let's not be naive. Just because it looks like the Western world is about to get its first black intellectual president, just because...

The entire world is, apparently, full of whiny no-good commie liberals. It's true. This is the only logical conclusion, the only way you can possibly parse the piles of (largely unscientific, but still pretty damn convincing) numbers and data and full-blown emotional consciousness now pouring in from all over the world, pumping our little presidential election full of all sorts of cosmic meaning and profundity and oh-my-God-can-it-be-true. Check that: Maybe it's not the only way to parse it. But if you're a hard-core McCainite and/or are under some sort of unfortunate, chemically-induced delusion that Sarah Palin is just exactly the...

Vote for him, Greedy Konservative, you must. It amuses me to no end the extent that the Kucinich Left will comingle fantasy and the real world. It goes far beyond the problems that some conservatives, such as John Miller, have had with being Teenage half-Orcs. While Miller personifies geekdom in a way that makes my highest level Cavalier-Palidan have to go back to the armory and re-sharpen his Bastard Sword, he knows well that he is wasting time on a game. He comprehends that he is indulging a hobby. Unlike Star Wars Creator George Lucas, he seems to grok the...

Victor Davis Hanson points out that Obama's past has, thus far produced two reactions. There are two disturbing—and now predictable—patterns to Obama's serial distancing from prior intimates. First, the post facto embarrassment is personalized in terms of "I" and "me," as if a Wright or Rezko is somehow doing something out of character aimed at Obama, rather than persisting in entirely predictable behavior that offends society at large. Thus in reaction to the racist Wright, we get "That's a show of disrespect to me," while Pfleger's venom prompts, "I am deeply disappointed in Father's Pfleger." But the issue is racial...

Well, I have come to the conclusion that Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle just threw away the last tiny shred of credibility he might have had left by dreamily imagining that Barack Obama is so omniscient, so "ethereal" and so messiah-like that he isn't a "normal" human being. Maybe Mark thinks he might be an alien from another planet, some trans-dimensional traveler, or maybe an angel come down in human form to lead us sheep into the promised land? I'm not exaggerating either. In his latest piece he calls Obama a "Rare Kind of Attuned Being," a "Lightworker,"...

Dear God: If you can't stop Mark Morford, please teach him to use the internet Wed Apr 30, 2008 at 02:20:20 PM by Benjamin Wachs I try not to call Chron columnist Mark Morford out on his stylistic problem as a writer, because who has that kind of time? But as a fellow journalist I feel that research – knowing at least a little about what we’re writing about – is the very least we owe the public. The very, very least. So a few months ago I called him out on the sheer ignorance of his attacks against Christianity....

Right now, deep in the GOP dungeons, they're planning their racist, disgraceful assault. Whatever will it be?

It's official: Less than one year until history slaps Dubya to the curb. Can you feel the tingle? It's just that kind of feeling, that sense of hesitant, embryonic optimism, the sense that says, oh my God, we as a culture and a smash-mouthed, war-hammered society really are fast approaching something possibly, potentially, heart-achingly new and different and — because it cannot get any worse — just a little bit better. Here is my suggestion: Mark your calendars, set your watch, program a celebratory ringtone well in advance, because the countdown has officially begun. It is now less than one...

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career. And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds...

What's it like to be married to the booze-friendly, party-ready Bush twin? A vision - Jenna Bush, President and Laura Bush's daughter, is engaged, the White House announced Thursday. Jenna Bush, 25, is marrying Henry Hager, 28, a former White House aide who used to work with Karl Rove. His father, John Hager, is the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party. (CNN) I got her trained just right. She brings me a steady supply of cold Bud Lights while I chill on the La-Z-Boy watching the Nationals game on the plasma. Here's a funny: After any home run, I'll down...

You have many things for which you can be deeply grateful. Here is one of the biggest: Yep, you've done some horrible things in your life. Embarrassing things. Stupid. Mean. Violent, even. Eaten dirt. Smacked a baby. Kicked a kitten. Stomped some flowers. Stole. Lied. Cheated. Beat up a tree. Spit instead of swallowed. Drank bad wine. Voted Republican. Shared a needle. Promised to call and then didn't. You know, the usual. But maybe some of these things now make you cringe and recoil and slump down a little lower in your chair when you think about them, because, well,...

Behold GodTube.com, the place where sex, humor and warm spiritual inclusiveness go to die The Internets, they're just so chock-full of gul-dang liberals, aren't they? This is, after all, the big conservative lament. It's like you can't hit your Gizmodo or your Fleshbot or your Savage Love without running smack into some well-read, free-thinking pseudo-hipster gleefully expounding on the joys of anal sex or a recent hilarious Jon Stewart/"Daily Show" riff or offering up a link to some dark, brilliant Polish anti-war animation. Horrible! Or maybe it's a hot sex blogger slapping Fox News for being such an obvious bastion...

Late for work? Hello Kitty! Cheat on your taxes? Hello Kitty! Kill some guy? Hello Kitty! Those Thai police, they know what for. Those bad-boy coppers know how to stick it straight to your fragile manly ego and twist that knife until you bleed and scream and whimper like an itty-bitty wide-eyed freckle-faced twinkle-toed girl. Oh yes they do. It's all about the fear, baby. All about the dire threat to the macho self-esteem. See, those cops have figured out what hunky men just like themselves really dread, and it turns out it's not gay sex and it's not peeing...

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob and he's hankerin' to be a Republican senator and try not to wince in sociopolitical pain...

Then no one would kill anyone, right? Also: Guns are fun. Americans like fun! You know what offers just tremendous amounts of pleasure? Shooting guns. It's true. Shotguns, handguns, rifles, BB guns, squirt guns, you name it. Try it yourself: Just head out to a shooting range and have the gun boys yank you some clay pigeons and blast those things out of the sky and oh my God it's just a ridiculous barefaced thrill, a sense of godlike power, a rush of adrenaline to go along with a hot buzz of precision and concentration and the smell of gunpowder...

It's something in the air. It's something palpable and buzzy and strange and it tastes a little like warm honey but also a little like burned coffee and a whole hell of a lot like something you'd find deep in the belly button of a cloud. Oh my God, it's hope. Do you sense it? Do you feel it? Is it all cheesy and silly and eye-rollingly exhausting to even think about? Well, too bad. Because it's that rarest and most precious of divinely human energies and it seems to come around about this time every year, when spirits are...

Yes, I said it. And I am very sorry. I was totally drunk. At least, I think I was. Forgive me? I would like to apologize, right here and now, to the entire black community. And also, of course, the white community. And the Asian American community and the Jewish community and also the Poles and the Latinos and the Italians and what the hell the Scots and the Welsh and the Germans and the nomadic herdsmen of Kuala Lumpur, too. After all, this is no time for bias. See, I did indeed utter that terrible slur. At least, I...

Either we're hell-bent on self-destruction, or we truly care about the planet. Or, you know, both - They say that when gas prices drop, SUV sales surge. Conversely, they say that when gas prices jump above three bucks a gallon and hover there for a while and everyone is slapped upside the head once again with the painful and obvious reminder that oh yeah we are in the midst of a brutal and losing war over waning petroleum deposits and we are heating up the planet like maniac monkeys and we are really really not paying close enough attention to...

That shirt? Those shoes? Your kids? Hates 'em, and everything else about you, too. Can you feel it? That shirt you're wearing right now? Chances are, Dick Cheney hates it. That car you drive? Thinks it's for whiny un-American pansies. The fact that you've probably eaten tofu and wear designer shoes and have actually had sex while standing up? Pervert heathen traitor to the real America, Dick thinks. He hates that. Some days, Dick has trouble counting all the ways in which he hates you, the world, life. Some days, he hates the fact that there are not enough hours...

More shacking up, more visible body art, less concern for the old ways. Is America dead? America is dead. No really, it is. And it's not just because we've lost habeas corpus, a bedrock protective law and a cornerstone of American freedom, to the rabid, stupid dogs of neoconservative fearmongering. That merely feels like a weird horror movie, the leatherfaced guy with the chain saw hacking off the head of the sexy college girl and laughing maniacally. The pain is simply too horrific and cartoonish to even register. Yet. No, Bush's ambling rape of the Constitution and moral law is...

Reminder: Microsoft's bloated OS is truly terrible in the sack. But a Mac will make you moan It has those beady little eyes. It has that seedy come-hither stare. It has overstretched pleather pants and million-dollar gold caps over stained teeth, through which glides that famously shrill voice that seems at once tempting and full of promise and yet also more than a little whiny, deceptive, ill. "Aww c'mon, baby," Windows pleads, kneeling at the foot of the bed. "This time it'll be different, I promise." It coughs that familiar phlegmy hack, like a busted Dell motherboard scraped over of...

Nation cringes as the worst president ever continues long, painful slog to the end - It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers. Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly...

It is not for Republicans. It is not for bow hunters. Also, no cat hoarders. Sign up now! Match.com does not allow cleavage. This much I learned from a female friend who used the enormous online dating service during a brief glitch in her dating career, and for whom I helped prepare the most modest of pix (waist up, cowboy hat, big smile, snug halter top, faintest sliver of shadow between breasts), only to have the photo immediately nixed by the site's apparently pallid and secretly Mormon editors who actively disallow even the slightest hint of flesh or pillow talk...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

Fathers make a profound gesture to support their daughters in their decision to save themselves for marriage, and what do they do in San Francisco? Mock them! Tolerance is alive and well in San Francisco… Read More...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

No wait, not 6. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light, sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cabdrivers (at least initially), metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone...

Anyone still care about the heap of disturbing, unsolved questions surrounding Our Great Tragedy? Here is your must-read for the month. Here is your oh-my-God-I'm-sending-this-piece-to-every-smart-person-I-know hunk of outstanding, distressing, disquieting media bliss. Here it is: an absolutely exceptional inside scoop on the white-hot world of Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, writ large and smart by Mark Jacobson over at New York magazine, and it's mandatory reading for anyone and everyone who's ever entertained the nagging thought that something -- or rather, far more than one something -- is deeply wrong with the official line on what actually happened on Sept. 11....

Another state you should never visit passes an appalling abortion ban, because they hate youAttention all funky sexy single intelligent women of South Dakota (assuming there are any left): It is time. Pack it up. Strip the bed, box up the cat, load the U-Haul, call your hip friends over in Minneapolis, move out West, or East, or anywhere with a mind-set not stuck like a bloody nail in the moral coffin of 1845. Let this be your clarion call. Get the hell out, right now. Here is why: You state hates you. Your state, apparently run be pallid sexless...

I have seen deep azure seas and delicious star-addled skies and crazily overdressed mariachi bands playing "La Cucaracha" for drunken tourists so many times in one night the poor bass player looked like he wanted to be shot. I have seen the classic American mullet and the epic Mexican mullet, both shockingly alive and well and for some ungodly reason flourishing like angry time-warp ferrets on the heads of beefy simpleminded men so utterly lost to time and space they should be in some sort of institution. I mean, my God...

Hello, I am an ex-hooker heroin addict with AIDS who eats live puppies. Please read my book. I shall start my story humbly, meekly, just like JT LeRoy and James Frey. Small town, somewhere in Idaho or maybe rural Montana, brought up by a sadistic pedophiliac Pentecostal preacher father who only has one good arm and a decimated colon, and a narcoleptic mother with 17 cats who sucks down cases of Tab and reads the "Left Behind" books as nonfiction and who passes out every night in a Percocet haze watching endless reruns of "Knight Rider." Me and my two...

West Hollywood -- I am a gift. A prize. After years of difficult repression, men with a secret seek me out as a reward for their good behavior. I make a living having sex with these closeted married men. I'm an "escort," to use the euphemism, which gives me a unique perspective on a potential, and particular, cultural fallout as "Brokeback Mountain" widens out not just to Britain but to every remaining crumb in America's breadbasket. Much has been made about the "turning point" effect Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee's Oscar-jockeying film could force upon Hollywood. The movie is based...

I was all wrong about "Narnia." Which is to say, about six months ago in this space I was hell-bent on the white-hot idea that Hollywood and the Christian-right group/billionaire that helped produce the tepid and saccharine flick would absolutely ruin "The Chronicles of Narnia" books, ruin the deep magic and the astounding sense of wonder these books held for millions of children (including this writer) by regurgitating them as a slick, dumbed-down, poorly acted smarm-fest full of ham-fisted Jesus allusions and excessive special effects, all from the director who brought you, ahem, "Shrek 2." Things did not, shall we...

By all accounts, bank thing was the last straw Mark Morford Friday, December 9, 2005 In an astonishing but not completely unexpected announcement, Jesus H. Christ, vice president and CFO of All That Is Inc., appeared today on a large tortilla at a roadside taco stand in Zacatecas, Mexico, to announce that, effective immediately, the pseudo-Christian group Focus on the Family, led by James Dobson and most known for its blazing hatred of gays and its fear of glimpsing the human female nipple during nationally televised sporting events, is effectively banned from His Divine Beneficence. "What happened was, the heavens...

More obesity means even syringes aren't long enough anymore. What the hell are we so hungry for? It's just one of those wicked telling signs, one of those sad little cultural punches that make you cringe and sigh even as you stifle a laugh and roll your eyes at the state of it all, as you read the one about how an increasing percentage of people -- mostly women but half of the men, too -- aren't receiving their proper dosage of medicine when given a shot in the rear by a nurse at the hospital because, well, their butts...

Screw joy and togetherness. It's all about retail, just like Jesus would have wanted. Does it not feel more manic and insane this year? Is there not more commercial pressure and consumerist mania and does it not seem increasingly surreal and obnoxious and silly? Or is it all relative and it just seems more utterly intolerable because we've had 10 months to try and forget the last holiday season's odious marketing-shopping miasma?

Where do you go when you've had enough of the urban grind but still crave it like heroin? Then come those times, like when you walk out your front door on a calm sunny Sunday morn and find your shiny new car has been smashed by a hit-and-run driver to the tune of 14 grand's worth of repairs and your heart sinks and your normally Zenlike ennui boils over and you look around your grungy metropolitan neighborhood with a sudden mix of resignation and revulsion and an uncontrollable hissing sigh, that you realize how fed up you are with life...

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Oh my waifish, coke-snorting love, how they have abused and betrayed you. We shall overcome. Oh my dearest Kate, Something is amiss. Something is deeply askew in the culture and you know it and I know it and the world knows it and something must be done. This much we know, Kate: Rock stars are supposed to be debauched and swaggering and dumber'n concrete. TV stars are supposed to be overrated and self-indulgent and wired on amphetamines and viciously jealous of movie stars who are, in turn, airbrushed egomaniacal limelight sluts, terrified of their own shadows and so desperately...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...

At last, one scientist BushCo will definitely -- albeit resentfully -- listen to. Sometimes. So now we know. This is what it takes. This is how far the nation has to crumble and this is how many people have to die and this is how many tens of billions it has to cost and this is how far his dirt-low poll numbers have to fall before Bush will finally come out and say he agrees with one of those godforsaken gul-dang book-learned scientist types. You know the ones. Those informed and well-educated data-crunchers he normally despises like a kid hates...

Sometimes there is just no way to know. Sometimes you are just handed a slab of raw perspective, a shocking dose of irony, and you have to do with it what you can. Some readers wrote me e-mails when I was out scorching my nether parts in the remote Nevada desert at Burning Man 2005, half naked and beglittered and intensely hung over and posting daily blog entries that read more like postcards from my moaning id than rational semicoherent slivers of BM reality.

Huge crowds, rabid devotees and no Mick Jagger in sight. Are you afraid? Mark Morford Wednesday, August 3, 2005 I have never been to a big creepy megachurch. This is my first confession. I have never been to, say, Lakewood Church in Houston, the biggest, glossiest megachurch of all, which just dumped a staggering $75 million to renovate the former stadium for the Houston Rockets and turn it into a massive pulsing swaying arm-raisin' eye-glazed weirdly repressed House o' Jesus.

OK, first things first. They say you're a hard-line conservative, new pope Joseph Ratzinger (a.k.a. Benedict XVI) of Germany. Very old school and drab, a real lover of repressive, bitter, orthodox doctrine. No fun at parties. Catholic in chains. What glorious times of joy and progress the church is in for, millions now say, dejected sarcasm dripping from their once-hopeful mouths. See, most spiritually progressive peoples the world over were sort of hoping for a new pope who would recognize this as a historic opportunity, an unprecedented moment for the church to finally get with the times, modernize, shake off...