Free Republic

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vise? Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!" After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism...

When last we left our sneering caped crusaders, Rummy had testified under oath that he didn't really know who ordered what at Abu "Tortures R' Us" Grhraib prison, and George "Wha Happun?" Bush was mumbling into his hand puppet about how he was utterly shocked and aapalled, and was blaming the whole thing on "a coupla bad apples" and gul-dangit, he weren't gunna stan' fer it. And while he still loved Rumsfeld like a drunken frat brother and swore Rummy was doing a "superb job" and stood by him 'til or impeachment they do part, something must be done and...

I get this a lot: Mark, how can you write about light fluffy inconsequential things like dogs or yoga or car design or sex or music when there's so many vile gut-wrenching soul-curdling life-threatening atrocities and gang rapes and beheadings and Rumsfelds happening in the world right now that deserve immediate attention? How the hell can you possibly write a whole column extolling, say, the virtues of single-malt scotch or of having sex in the backseat of small luscious European cars, when BushCo is right this moment ravaging the planet and eviscerating the human spirit and the environment is teetering...

Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it's all-American rape and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. Mmm, patriotism. The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It's all flag-draped coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol whippings and miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just men -- with wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to stand up for hours and days on end until their feet swell and their lungs collapse and their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned death-drunk nation cry: Hey, whatever happened to our nice,...