Free Republic

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.