Free Republic

You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs. Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh...

Gas, video games, meditation, booze. What, you were planning on paying bills? As if -- Here's the bad news: Your little recession-deflecting tax rebate? No rebate at all. Not even close. It's more like this: You've been continuously mugged and beaten and robbed blind for the past seven years straight, and as you lay there on the cold, hard economic ground, bleeding and gasping and wondering what the hell happened to your vacation time and your health care plan and your mortgage payment, your attackers scoff and leer and toss a couple of bloodstained nickels on your pulverized face and...

Behold, the ideal Republican wife: Prim, sexless, nearly useless, lets the men do the real thinkin'. Hot!I fondly recall, just before the tragic Bush/Kerry presidential election, an impassioned discussion I had with a family friend, a conservative Catholic mother of four and grandmother of six, headstrong, outspoken, hilarious, a real no-BS matriarch of her big crazy messy family and clearly the wearer of the pants in her marriage and a woman whom I always liked for her wit and her outsized personality, despite her unfortunate choice of religious and political affiliation, a woman who, it turned out in our discussion,...

Support the humble monks? You bet. But oh, let's not forget our own wonderfully abundant atrocities - I know I know I know — we don't exactly have huge platoons of nasty jackbooted soldiers storming through the streets in riot gear and gas masks and large sticks bashing down on the shiny heads of peaceful monks. We don't exactly have smashed and burning vehicles and dead bodies in the streets and vicious martial law, ethnic cleansings and curfews and media lockouts and blocked Internet access and all sorts of nefarious, disturbing reports of brutality and beatings and death. Well, except...

It's official: Sex therapists suck in bed. Also: Insane Idaho Senate candidates, Spitzer in the back - Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the media ... All the following Associated Press stories are true, except where they have been made completely false. Names have not been changed to protect anyone at all, unless they've been made up entirely. Caveat emptor. Gratis dictum. Nil desperandum. Ready? Allegations that third-graders hatched an elaborate plot to knock out, handcuff and stab their teacher were met with shock by neighbors and with doubt by psychiatry experts who said it...

No, not that. Or that or that or that. It's that other thing, deeper, crazier, intuitive - Nope, it's not what you might think. The best thing about Barack Obama has almost nothing to do with him as a person or as a leader or even as Oh My God The First Black President Who Could Really Change Everything I Mean Wow. It's not even the wondrous oratory power or the charisma or the sweet sense of deeper change overlaid with all kinds of sparkly utopian futuriffic goodness. There is, I think, something more. Something richer. And it's rather startling....

Imagine a world with more sexually open, sensual, happily libidinous politicians. Wait, can you? I want a smart, slutty senator. I want an effective, confident, sex-positive congressman or woman who, if asked, speaks openly and blamelessly and even happily about her proclivities, with a wink and a smile and maybe a bit of cleavage before Labor Day. Married, single, somewhere in between? Doesn't matter. And, dare I say it, I want president who not only freely discusses and shrugs off his or her loves and sexual desires and even affairs, but dares to enjoy sex and thrives because of it...

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,...

Schools? Health care? As if. Your taxes pay for brutality and Wall St. bailouts. Feel better? Just so we have this straight: You are not paying taxes merely to fund torture and bomb-dropping and the killing of countless innocents in Iraq in a futile and lost war that's not really a war and is far more of a massive fiscal, tactical and moral failure which will end up costing the nation an estimated $3 trillion, burn through any remaining sense of national dignity and leave repercussions that will last for generations. Ha. You should be so lucky. Because your tax...

Could the Olympics rain down shame on Chinese oppression and Tibet abuses? Let's hope. I hope it all comes crashing down on their heads. Is that wrong? Is it ill-minded and somehow unfair to wish that the Chinese government's notorious record of human rights abuses and absolutely horrid treatment of Tibet be exposed to the world — and the Chinese people themselves — to the point where it is shamed and humiliated and perhaps even forced by unprecedented international scrutiny to upheave its oppressive ways and improve conditions and even (heaven forfend) honor religious and political freedom within its borders?...

The Vatican unveils fresh new sins, as the world just rolls its eyes. Is your name on the list? This just in: If you're an obscenely wealthy drug-dealing pedophile stem-cell researcher who drives a Hummer and doesn't recycle, you are totally going to hell. Oh please, like you didn't already know. Hey, the Catholic Church wouldn't lie, mister. The Big Book o' Deadly Sins apparently has a whole new addendum and it looks like it ain't just gluttony and lust and murder and hot porn and witchcraft and coveting thy neighbor's way cool Flickr photo stream anymore. That stuff is...

Is it OK to switch religions, change denominations, even split from God entirely? Jesus says: Sure! This much we know: God is failing. Or more accurately, God is mutating. Changing. In flux. Becoming perhaps slightly less appealing as a dogmatic force of rigid closed-minded sit-down-and-shut-up paternal scowling and becoming perhaps more fluid, interesting, dynamic, unspecified, something you actually want to take into your heart and into your mouth and lick until you find the rich, creamy center and then define that taste for yourself, blissfully independent of what your parents or priest or president tells you, until you reach that...

Right now, deep in the GOP dungeons, they're planning their racist, disgraceful assault. Whatever will it be? There's no true genius hate artist like Karl Rove around anymore to attempt to unify the racists and the white evangelicals and the Latinos and the war-lovers into one giant, seething, Obama-fearing voting bloc. Which might be impossible, but given the deeply fractured nature of the conservative wing, it might be McCain's only hope. . The name thing is just too damn easy. Childish, sophomoric, a given. Of course, this doesn't mean they won't use it. A lot. I mean, my God, his...

Fidel Castro slumps away, Bush races to history's dungheap, and 13 million TVs prepare to die. Are you ready? You know what we don't really get enough of in American culture? Change. No, not the bland politicalspeak Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton brand of broad sloganeering bumper-sticker change, the kind where part of your naive perky innocent unicorns-in-the-sky self really wants to believe it's all going to be hopeful and good and radically different, but yet you kind of know, deep down, when you peel back the masks and the rhetoric and the spin, that when all is said and done, pretty...

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel ... like buying a new iPod and a boat - I have perhaps greatly misunderestimated the Bush administration. It's true. I have, lo these past 7.3 miserable and karmically bitch-slapped years, perhaps not clearly appreciated their ruthless and demeaning but perhaps rather insanely effective (well, sort of) economic plan for America. Or rather, 'Murka. Because it's clearly an stroke of nefarious genius, a wickedly underhanded economic strategy to induce such levels of pain and depression and misery across the nation, to load us up on war and...

Love means never accidentally running over her cat with a lawnmower. Also, avoid these - I am, as always, here to help. This Valentine's Day, be sure to avoid these highly unpleasant gifts. Hey, you want to find love and have sex, right? I mean, someday? OK then. 1) Copy of $3.1 trillion Bush budget. Do not tell that special someone you love them by gutting arts funding in schools, mental health services, Medicare and Medicaid and programs that bring low-income kids to Washington as you create record deficits and humiliate the nation once again, all in an effort to...

Dead soldiers, peak oil and mind-boggling profits; praise Jesus, the machine's still working - Surprisingly moving Barack Obama music videos? The potential end of the writer's strike? Cute young deer being saved by helicopters? No no no no no. Here are your most deeply inspiring news stories of the month: A flurry of pink slips fluttered over the job sector as corporate payrolls were sliced like sour pie. Foreclosures are skyrocketing and new home sales across the nation are plummeting faster than Britney Spears' serotonin levels. A nasty recession is either creeping or flooding in, depending on your perspective and...

Yes, you already knew. But now they're actually quantifiable. Like, say, stab wounds - Oh sweet Jesus, someone actually counted. Two independent nonprofit journalism groups apparently took enough laudanum and beat down whatever healthy sense of human decency they had in order to plunge straight into that quivering mountain of incompetence that is the official record of the Bush administration, all the false quotes and all the lie-strewn press conferences and all the squinty-eyed fabrications from Dubya, Colin Powell, Condi and Cheney and Rummy et al, that took place in the two years after September 11, 2001, and added them...

Yes, it's all doom and gloom and war and global warming and Bush. Except when it's not - Happiness knows no particular order, and neither does this list: 1) We may very well, within a year's time, have a black president. We may have a female president. We may, unfortunately, also have a bizarre robotic nutball Mormon president. No matter how it turns out, it will be very strange and unnerving and different and a bit startling and therefore at least remotely interesting to watch. Which, you have to admit, is far better than how it's been for the past...

Weak, gutless Democrats, sneering, oil-loving Republicans and cars that belch and shrug - As part of my ongoing effort to save my own soul and avoid repeatedly stabbing myself in the eye with a fork in screaming frustration, and also because it's Beltway politics and watching it too closely is akin to having your cerebral cortex raped by encephalitic trolls, I've only paid cursory attention to the massive, landmark energy bill that's right now passing like a painful gallstone through Congress and getting snagged here and gutted there and stripped of key provisions over here, all so Dubya won't veto...