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...

Short answer: Of course you do. Longer answer: Wait, a what? Are you serious? Where? It is a time of great wonder and sporadic hope and hot liquid sighs masquerading as just another day in your life. It is a time of vital physical awakening and innovative technological excellence resulting in unprecedented levels . . .

Bush's cinematic war on terror Gene Lyons Why do Republican-oriented pundits spend so much energy lashing out at Hollywood for its sins? Professional jealousy. Partly because so many Americans imagine the world beyond Wal-Mart as a movie set, the Bush administration does its best work in the realm of illusion. I was reminded of this when a Kansas student recently asked President Bush what he, "as a rancher," thought of "Brokeback Mountain." On cue, Cowboy W said he hadn't seen it and would rather discuss "ranching." The TV networks ate it up. Never mind that it was sheer fakery. Bush...

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,...

No, the WNBA doesn't count. What about the NFL? The NBA? What about the big, macho men?You know they're out there. The gay pro male athletes, grunting and sweating and spitting and running and crashing and hurling, right now, acting all manly and tough and rugged and heroic on the field or on the court. And they're signing autographs and getting themselves all beloved by largely homophobic 'Murkin men and swooning 'Murkin boys and even handfuls of women as they jam the secret of their sexuality way, way down and go on raking in their millions, leading their lives...

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...

I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the payroll. I just wish they'd stop putting them on the Homeland Security payroll. Can't they stick their pals who failed at business in the Small Business Administration and their tomatoes over at the Oilseeds and Rice Bureau of the Ag Department? At least Bill Clinton knew not to stash his sweeties in jobs concerned with keeping the nation safe. Gennifer Flowers said that Mr. Clinton got her a $17,500 job in Arkansas in the state unemployment agency, though she was ranked ninth out of 11 applicants tested....

Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly. Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denialand he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action. This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor,...

[snip] What Hillary has going for her is exhaustion. Exhaustion kicks in with any party in power for eight years, let alone one that tricked the country into war. And at some point, voters may be too exhausted to resist Hillary's relentless ambition any longer. But by hanging back and trimming her positions, by keeping her powder dry until a more politically advantageous time, she may miss the moment when Americans are looking for someone to emerge from her cowering party to articulate their anger about Iraq or their fear about a Supreme Court that will scale back women's rights...

W vactationed so hard in Texas he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation.So he headed West yesterday to get away from his Western getaway--and the mushrooming Crawford Woodstock--to spend a couple of days at the Tamarack Resort in the rural Idaho mountians. 'I'm kind of hanging loose as they say,' he told reporters. W. didn't go alone of course. Just as he took his beloved feather pillow on the road duing his 2000 campaign, now he takes his beloved bike.An Air Force One steward tenderly unloaded W.'s $3,000.00 Trek fuel mountain bike when he landed in Boise.I...

In which Mark Morford survives his high school reunion, still unmarried and childless. It's like that feeling you get when you smack your head into a brick wall and your skull reverberates and your vision momentarily blurs and you have a painful but somehow still nicely appealing flash of insight into Something Very Important, something you think you should know, something that can only be illuminated via cocktails and bloody prime rib and conversing with old flames. This is the high school reunion. It is the most curious thing. You attend one and you are calmly slammed up against the...

Richard Nixon once gave me a lesson in the politics of war. Howell Raines, then the Washington bureau chief for The Times, took some reporters to meet Mr. Nixon right before the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The deposed president had requested that Howell bring along only reporters who were too young to have covered Watergate, so we tried to express an excess of Juvenalia spirit. Before the first vote of '92 was cast, Mr. Nixon laid out, state by state, how Bill Clinton, who was not even a sure bet for the Democratic nomination at that point, was going to...

She writes two columns a week for the most prestigious newspaper in America, heckling the powerful with her trademark sarcasm while making witty allusions to movies and pop culture. It's a dream job for a journalist. But New York Times political columnist Maureen Dowd, on leave since early May to finish her second book, sounds a little burned out. "It [writing the column] is so stressful that I don't miss it at all," she said Wednesday by telephone from Washington. "For me, the hard thing is the psychological pressure of being original. I find that almost impossible. "You have to...