Free Republic

Bored with the 'war' on Iraq? 4,000 dead merely induce shrugging? Need an incentive to keep caring? It is a time for a radical rethinking. It is a time to reconsider it all, to perhaps reassess how we are presenting and digesting America's most costly and lost and unwinnable and brutal and ignoble and inept and insidious and depressing war that's not really a war; it's time to revolutionize how it's all packaged and broadcast and pumped like hot sticky misery into the heavily narcotized American cultural bloodstream because, oh my God, we are sick sick sick of it all,...

Conservatives are outbirthing libs by a wide margin. How soon can you get knocked up? Let this be your rallying cry. Let it be your new hot-button topic, a raw naked condomless blog-ready wildfire underground grassroots crusade, your juiciest of incentive programs, your inspired call to hot naked impregnable sperm-a-riffic action. Because the statistics are ugly, getting uglier: Despite all divine hope and prayer to the contrary, it looks like baby-happy conservatives are outbreeding liberals by a margin of some 20 to 40 percent. It's a fact. It's a trend. It's an onslaught. It's a dreadful soul-curdling predicament and the...

I get this a lot, from the distraught and Bush-embarrassed right, whenever I happily cough up Dubya's name in a column that would seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with our bumbling, neck-groping disaster of a whimpering leader: Hey (I'm paraphrasing here) you gay-loving yoga pervert communist! What the gosh-golly hell does George W. Bush possibly have to do with (fill in the blank) cancer rates/MS Windows/electric sports cars/Christina Aguilera? Why do you insist on sneaking in little slaps and stabs at the beleaguered monkeyman even when writing about problems and issues that (seemingly) have nothing to do with...

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...

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...

One TV commercial says all you need to know about GW Bush's America. And trophy wives. Here is your fear. Here is your fear kicked and stomped upon and artificially inflated and jabbed with pointy rusty knives by teams of meandering capitalist jackasses over at a big American home security company and the advertising agency they've hired to openly hate you. Here is this security company's TV commercial (which one doesn't really matter) running on late-night television just after "Lost" but before "The Daily Show" and wedged precariously between dinner and a walking nightmare and a fistful of inane insulting...

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...

The astonishing collapse of the Bumbling One surely means healthy change is imminent, right? Here's the good news: It really can't get much worse. We cannot afford any more wars. The environment has been sold to the bone. The national spirit has been beaten like an Alaskan baby seal and the GOP has worked our last nerve, passed through the karmic blood-brain barrier, reached saturation to the point where even moderate Repubs and gobs of intelligent Christians are finally saying, Oh my God, what have we done, and how did it all go so wrong, and how much Prozac and...

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...

Little proof to the contrary that we are indeed in a very long, bleak tunnel. Is there any light? Then come those times when you read about a 16-year-old girl slashing the throat of a 75-year-old woman for no apparent reason, a woman who was merely walking with her husband near a Berkeley public garden and it's right next to the one about the 16-year-old kid smiling and waving and donning a bulletproof vest before shooting nine people and himself to death in a remote, poverty-stricken region of Minnesota and you can feel the numbness like a wave.

Polls are the genital warts of election year. They are the swarming gnats in your Jell-O salad, the dead escalator in your shopping mall, the sour milk in your coffee. Because clearly, if you attempt to follow any of them, the AP polls or the American Research Group polls or the Newsweek polls or the ABC News polls or the CBS News/NYT polls or the Zogby polls, you can only conclude one thing: These polls are designed solely to mangle your head and confound your synapses and elate you and titillate you and then plunge you into instant despair and...

<p>Hordes of quivering GOP lawmakers and vast throngs of proudly homophobic right-wing Christian Americans fell into an adorable tizzy the other day as the entire really, really big country of Canada announced it will change its law to allow full-on homosexual marriage anywhere in the whole country including Vancouver and Toronto and even "that weird province with all the gay French people."</p>