Free Republic

Legal pot? Legal gay marriage? Universal health care? What's next, free porn and candy? Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north? Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations? Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires,...

Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north? Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations? Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires, redefine marriage to include gay couples, which it has declared it will do almost...

The odds are very good that you are on drugs. Right now. This minute. As I type this and as you read this and as false Texas dictators rise and sad empires crumble and as this mad bewildered world spins in its frantically careening orbit, there's a nearly 50/50 chance that some sort of devious synthetic chemical manufactured by some massive and largely heartless corporation is coursing through your bloodstream and humping your brain stem and molesting your karma and kicking the crap out of your libido and chattering the teeth of your very bones. Maybe it's regulating your blood...

This is what you won't see in the paper. This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any major media Web site anywhere and especially no goddamn way ever in hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News. You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and...

Here's my suggestion: let them have it. Just do it. Let the sexually bitter and morally frantic conservative groups now dictating governmental policy and FCC agendas and paranoid media attitudes have their time, their brief cultural burp, their little speed bump on the great and beckoning highway that will still lead us all, inexorably, irreversibly, though often agonizingly, toward grinning open-thighed progress. Because here's the fabulous thing: no matter what these faux-Christian groups do, no matter how hard they oppress and protest and clamp down, this is a road that leads, despite all dour headlines and sour prognostications otherwise, toward...

John Edwards was puppy-dog happy to be debating last night. Dick Cheney was the old hound who, only because he had to, agreed to show up and fetch some answers. So both men lived up to type and hype. Neither one stomped the other, but that doesn't make it a tie game. Republicans are still in trouble. After the veep venom fest, the GOP team is walking wounded. Democrats have the momentum, and Edwards stayed on offense most of the night. He went hard after the key to victory - sounding almost Republican-tough about killing terrorists. Cheney's job was to...

You know it's true. You know if, say, San Francisco had just been blasted by not two, not three, but fully four lethal trailer-park-eating earthquakes, why, the Right-wing Bible set would be yelping with barely disguised joy. Of course they would. They'd be jumping up and down and saying I told you so and pointing to Volume 18 of "Left Behind" and claiming that this was, of course, God's wrath upon the sinners and the gays and the heathens and sodomites and the tofu eaters and the Toyota Priuses and the yoga studios and the anal sex and the incense...

Aww, screw it. I mean, really. You just gotta love this thing. You just gotta love the fact that some semitruck company somewhere called International Truck and Engine Corp. is now coming out with what they claim is the world's largest production pickup, called the CXT, all 9 feet high and 8 feet wide, a whopping 21 feet long and 14,500 pounds and 18 million excruciating earthly groans of it. And in most states that don't give a crap for their roads or the environment or any human life that might be existing in the various passenger cars surrounding it,...

I have a good friend who believes, gloomily, bitterly, resignedly, that not only are we in for four more years of painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprision and aww-shucks dumb-guy shtick, but also that we are actually at the beginning of a long, brutal, fear-based Republican juggernaut that will last a good 16 more years, at least. Because this is how long it will take for the current horrific conservative cycle to play itself out, and this would resemble a more typical and historically proven 20-year pendulum swing, in this case one toward neoconservative right-wing hate and homophobia and...

This is the great thing about rabid fundamentalism. You really just don't have to give a damn. Take the environment. I mean, isn't it just a little pointless to care so damn deeply about the air and the soil and the water and the stupid little disposable animals on this silly spinning ball of expendable rock when the Second Coming is imminent and a blood-soaked fire-breathin' Jesus who looks remarkably like Mel Gibson will return very soon to smite the heathens and the gays and the vegetarians and the Francophiles, and who will rescue all those who worship patriarchy and...

I am searching for a few good things. Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is. And you say to yourself, these things, these radiant gems that live outside the mass-media miasma, I need them because they provide some balm, soften the fact that the nation feels massively off track and blinded and war torn and...

Bunny-curdling screams were heard throughout the Beltway last week and Laura Bush herself got all flustered and confused as vice president and noted hunk of rabid warmongering neoconservatism Dick Cheney broke ranks with his party of other hunks of rabid warmongering neoconservatives and admitted, in public, that he thinks gay people are, you know, mostly OK. Sort of. A little. In small doses. "With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free -- ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they...

And isn't it funny how at least 13 members of Congress have actually requested that the United Nations monitor this year's U.S. presidential election, just because, just in case, just to ensure there's no voter rolling and election rigging and chad hanging and outright shameless Florida reaming like last time? And isn't it even more funny how, when firebrand U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, from Florida, brought the issue up on the floor of Congress, she was actually shouted down by the Republicans, scolded that she was out of order and told her comments should be stricken from the record? And...

All the Nudes That's Fit to Print Radicals planning to cause mayhem at the GOP convention should accept this sad fact: Murdoch’s minions are waiting.The last time a major party held its nominating convention in New York City, I was among the tribe of protesters clamoring outside. I had hitchhiked from Oakland to Manhattan and, after adventures with a guy in Barstow who claimed he was jumping parole and barked, "I swear by my white skin!" after each beer, or the gentleman in southern Missouri who loaded the shotgun in his rifle rack and declared his intention to shoot the...

So then a largish envelope comes in the mail and it's from my mother and it contains a single, well-used comic book sealed in a plastic Zip-Loc bag, a book from my childhood she found in a storage box in the garage in our family's cabin getaway up in northern Idaho. And my mother, being smart and attuned and with the times as she is, she noticed the comic's title, and the main characters, and her eyebrows went up and she thought I might want to see it. Here's why: It's a Spider-Man comic. It's from 1976. It's in excellent...

How good and refreshing and inspiring is it, in these war-drunk, anti-everything, BushCo-ravaged times, to discover a gem of pure unadulterated free-thinking humanity and funkiness and animal tenderness sitting just outside the teeming city walls? How life affirming and encouraging is it to stumble, quite randomly, quite unexpectedly, across what is probably the funniest, most caring, most quirky, most unexpected, most hugely popular, intensely local veterinarian in the entire Bay Area even though I can't verify that because I've only been to like, two, but I'm willing to risk saying it anyway? I am here with an answer: It is...

Excerpt from Rolling Stone Magazine: Dave Matthews: "I'd drink with George W. just to get him out of the White House. Rolling Stone: Do you feel like an outsider in America? Dave Matthews: A lot of people feel like outsiders, and we are viewed as outsiders by the government. Or as Un-American. I am way more American than George Bush and Dick Cheney. They have no fucking idea what it is to be American. They are fucking idiots who are programmed to everything in the hands of the few. They think it's right that them and theirs have everything and...

Willie Nelson, who has endorsed Dennis Kucinich for President, and who will lead a fundraising concert for Kucinich's campaign in Austin, Texas, on Jan. 3, 2004, wrote a new song on Christmas that he will perform in public for the first time at the Austin concert. There's so many things going on in the world Babies dying Mothers crying How much oil is one human life worth And what ever happened to peace on earth We believe everything that they tell us They're gonna' kill us So we gotta' kill them first But I remember a commandment Thou shall not...

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Willie Nelson woke up early Christmas morning at the Lake Elsinore, Calif., home of his in-laws and turned on the news. "There was nothing but bad news, and here it was Christmas Day," Nelson said. "I said, `There sure are a lot of babies dying and mothers crying,' and (wife) Annie said, `That sounds like a song.' " By the end of the day, Nelson had written the anti-war ballad "What Ever Happened to Peace on Earth," which he will debut at Saturday's fund-raising concert for Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich at Austin Music...