Now that this new political era of the Obama presidency being mired in scandal has set in, I called my old buddy, veteran political operative Joe Redstate, to congratulate him, but found him in low spirits.

Joe, I don't see why you're unhappy about Obama's problems being exposed by what you usually call the lamestream media. I would think you'd be jumping for joy.

"Or jumping off a bridge. I don't see how it helps us at all."

Well, you've got ABC on your side for a change. And the Associated Press. Nobody's ignoring this stuff.

"It just shows that when they ignored us when we complained about Obama being a Muslim or that he secretly hated America, or that windmill company going bankrupt in California being his fault, they were right about it being a bunch of cow flop."

Wow, Joe. This lack of faith in the GOP message is not like you.  Or most Republicans. Dick Cheney just said Benghazi was the one of the worst things he could remember happening to America ever, even though he's old enough to remember Vietnam, the hostages in Iran and the attack on the Pueblo and was actually Vice-President on September 11, 2001.

"Only Dick Cheney's brave enough to go out on a limb like that and say something only a panel truck full of zoo monkeys would believe. We're not all heroes like Cheney. The fact is, none of those Benghazi emails implicate Obama at all. When we find an email that he fired off from Camp David on the day of the attack saying 'Leave that whiny bastard in Benghazi on hold until I finish my round.' or 'Screw our ambassador under fire. I've got to get par here,' then maybe we'll have him."

At least with Benghazi, you've got something on Hillary now.

"Something we desperately need. Here's a woman who's probably the best-qualified person in the country to be president, plus she'll clean up on the broad vote like Obama did on the black vote and our best bets so far for 2016 are a nasty freshman Senator from Texas who was born in Canada and a guy who belongs to the Hair Club for Men."

Probably you shouldn't call it 'the broad vote,' Joe.

"Right. Thanks. Got to keep reminding myself about that."

Sounds like you're not too optimistic about the IRS scandal bringing down the White House either, Joe. Can't blame you for that. It's pretty unlikely Obama was able to instigate the harassment of those Tea Party groups, since the IRS commissioner at the time was a holdover from the administration of Republican President George Bush.

"Okay, when you're a Republican, there are three things you never say. Number one is 'Global warming is real,' number two is,  'Somebody, somewhere might benefit from Obamacare,' and number three is, 'Republican President George Bush.'  Would you like to rephrase that last remark?"

Naw, just go ahead.

"We were real excited about that last scandal when we got a secret video in the mail at GOP headquarters. It showed a black guy in a hoodie talking to a group of IRS workers in Cincinnati. You couldn't see his face, but he was about the same height and weight as Obama and he sounded like him. The guy was saying "Hey, if you've got Tea Party in your name, which means you hate government workers, particularly minority ones, but you're claiming to be a non-profit educational group, why shouldn't we be investigating the crap out of you?"

Wow, that's a bombshell. Why aren't the Republicans broadcasting that all over the country?

"Somebody noticed the return address was the same as the Onion's."

I guess I can see why you're discouraged, Joe. Probably all of this is going to amount to nothing.

"Worse than nothing. The fact that the mainstream media will criticize the White House when the White House actually does something clearly wrong means that Obama hasn't screwed up much. Their real motivation is to make the American people think Republicans are full of crap for claiming Obama's the worst President since Millard Fillmore. When the mainstream media attacks Obama, they're actually attacking us."

That's kind of paranoid, Joe.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean nobody's out to get you, pal. 

I have a brother who still lives with our mother. A man in his mid-fifties who still lives with his mom is generally regarded as either gay or eccentric and while one look my brother's clothes, purchased almost exclusively at Wal or K Mart, pretty much rules out gay, he does not disappoint in the arena of eccentricity. One of the unusual habits that sets him apart from other men is a devotion to the Catholic faith that is only marginally exceeded by the Pope. If you do not share that devotion, he will not hesitate to mention the error of your ways to you. He was declared disabled some years ago, so he has plenty of time to reflect tranquilly on your life and how poorly you are leading it.

Like all Catholics, he loves saints. The aforementioned Pope just swore in a whole new batch of them, 800 or so in number. The devotion of the Church to its saints makes critics of the faith sneer that it is not a monotheistic one at all, since a Catholic can pray to a saint or saints rather than address the Deity directly. In some ways it makes sense, however. Religions like Islam and Protestantism pray to God or Allah exclusively, but they also credit Him for being busy at all times in the wheelhouse of the Universe. If Catholics are confronted with a problem that could use a little otherworldly intervention, such as a cousin skipping bail, they can pray to God, but if they feel a little awkward about bothering the Big Guy about their loser relatives, they can ask for the intercession of  St. James the Diffident, the patron saint of bail jumpers, instead.

My Catholic brother is devoted to images of the canonized. He decorates his room with crosses and saints (see above). He plants their images all about the property, plaster statues that my mother uproots and discards not because she is any less faithful but because they make the place look like a cemetery. One that she was too reverent to remove, though, was a 30-inch Blessed Mary figurine. This representation of the Holy Mother sits in a shaded grotto under the trees, about fifty yards from the house, peacefully exfoliating mold and moss. Another relative asked my mother decades ago if he could store his aluminum fishing craft in her yard. With her permission, he placed it close by the statue, upside down. This tableau of faith and skiff was dubbed Our Lady of the Overturned Boat by one of the more cynical members of the family.

I spend a few moments with her every time I return to my ancestral shores. She's a great girl to sit and have a beer with, thanks to the stone bench nearby. What I did not expect was to find another saint in the closet of my mother's guest room.

I admit I jumped back a little when I spotted this statue while attempting to hang up a shirt, not out of agnostic guilt but because at four feet or so tall, she was about the right height for the kind of evil gremlin that hangs out in closets. I realize most of those gremlins work little kids' closets, but you open a closet in a dark room and notice a shadowy figure lurking inside and see how you react. When I asked my mother who she was, Mom replied that she was Mother Cabrini. When I asked her how she got in the closet, the answer was much longer.

It seems the statue belonged to a devout, wealthy woman who died and left it to another devout lady. This lady was a friend of my mother and the two of them decided to give it to their favorite parish priest, so he could display it in his parish's Hall of Saints, a room devoted to statues the parish couldn't find any other place for.

Then the diocese decided to shut down the church. They assigned the priest to another parish and locked the building up. My mother was disturbed, since they had given Mother Cabrini to the priest, not the parish.

Most of you may be unaware of this, but few people can plot like elderly Catholic women. A scheme was hatched in which the former secretary of the shuttered parish "forgot" to lock the door to the Hall of Saints and my mother and another guilty octogenarian absconded with Mother Cabrini, Mission Impossible-ing her right out from under the Church's nose in the dead of the afternoon (Mom doesn't drive at night). Mother Cabrini currently sits in the closet because she is still in transit to her rightful priest.

So now when I return to my roots, I drink with Our Lady of the Overturned Boat and I sleep with Hot Mother Cabrini in the Closet.

I feel closer to Heaven already.

I’ve been visiting the East Coast for a week and one thing I’ve noticed is that cultural differences between the right and left Coasts seem to be narrowing.  No longer is California considered the land of fruits and nuts by Eastern cynics, populated by people whose values include being “laid-back” and “mellow.” The reality is that your regular Californian is no mellower than your average insurgent force, and Easterners have learned to respect that.

Back in the last century, you couldn't get decent Mexican food in the East, or a good sandwich in California. Now there's all kinds of great Mexican food here, thanks to the presence of all kinds of Mexicans who now do all the landscaping, house painting and concrete work around here as well as in the West. It's still tough to find a decent sandwich in California, but it's hardly anything to feud about.

Even rappers that used to shoot each other over which coast they rapped on seem to have chilled on that practice.

The only real difference nowadays is that people in the East are willing to live with insects, while Californians are not. If an insect is found in my Significant Other’s house in San Diego, its presence is greeted by an indignant howl beginning with my name, identifying the insect by type and location and a demand that I promptly grant that bug eternal peace.

My mother, on the other hand, greeted me as I walked through the door by saying “The ants aren’t bad this year.” Her house has ants. Tiny little ants that have lived there longer than she has. I'm not saying East Coasters like ants. There are many exterminators here that will try and kill ants for you, but none of them will kill them all. A completely hygienic household here, regularly doused with ant-fatal chemicals, will still have a few tiny ants patrolling their kitchen counters. This is considered successfully controlling them.

My mother doesn't believe in insecticides or exterminators, so her ants have to be controlled by eternal vigilance. Anything that might attract ants, and this includes water, has to be stowed where the ants cannot get to it. That is why there is a pineapple upside-down cake in her microwave as I write this, even though there is no such thing as microwaveable pineapple upside-down cake.

Pineapple upside-down cake attracts ants like Kate Upton attracts second looks. Just a crumb of it left vulnerable on the table will cause some wandering ant to throw on the robes of the Ant Moses and lead the rest of his peeps to a sugary Promised Land, which means that piece of cake will soon be carried away by an estuary of ants as thick as a pinch-hitter's forearms.

Don’t think that the insect life in my ancestral home is composed of only one species. It is too soon to put in the screens here, but too warm to sleep with the windows closed and there is a night light in the guest bedroom, which I presume my mother, being an exceptionally gracious person, has installed for guests who are afraid of the dark. Guests who object to sleeping under the flight path at Bug O'Hare are just plain out of luck, as most of the neighborhood biomass of tiny airborne creatures streams through the open window, vectoring towards the beacon of the night light.

These insects can only be identified by their buzzing and, occasionally, biting properties. The visible insect denizens of her house, besides the ants, are the stinkbugs. These things do not come by their name arbitrarily. When undisturbed, they emit a light but unpleasant odor. When they are lying on their backs with their legs waving in the air, which they do because they fall frequently, being the clumsiest members of the insect kingdom, their panic makes them smellier. If you succumb to the urge to crush them, you will regret it. They will still have natural enemies, but you will no longer be one of them.  

Colonies of them abide in the window wells and houseplants of my mother’s home.

If my S.O.’s house was mobbed by reeking beetles, she would consider torching it for the insurance money morally justifiable. East Coasters just coexist with them. My sister in law has a pair of gold stinkbug earrings. If you can’t beat them, salute them.

As I write this, real-time bug drama is unfolding before me. A spider is letting itself down from the ceiling by a strand, dropping straight for the bare skin of my knee. Not wanting such a close encounter, I grab its thread with my fingertips and bungee the arachnid towards the corner. It crawls away unharmed. I couldn’t kill it. Mom won’t let me.

After all, spiders eat insects. It’s on her side. 

There once was an unwritten but rigidly-adhered-to rule regarding all people who appeared on American television to entertain you or advertise products and that rule was that they should all be attractive people.

After a heavy week of TV viewing, I am of the strong opinion that we need to bring that back.

I should explain that I fell out of the TV habit long ago by getting a night job. For twenty years I worked in the bar business. I only watched what was on bar TVs, which were mainly sports and occasionally, wars. When I started working in the light of day again, I kept the non-viewing habit. I have actually seen only four episodes of "Seinfeld," the most popular sitcom of all time, despite the fact that hundreds of episodes were allegedly made. This is due to lack of interest, but also due to the First Law of Rerun Viewing, which states that the number of episodes of any TV series made is in inverse proportion to the likelihood that you will flip on the TV and see one you haven't seen before.

I only have to flash on the opening credits of "Seinfeld" to know that it will be the episode where Elaine pulls the plug on Kramer. Or hear the original "Star Trek" theme to know that it will be the one where Spock goes into heat. You know how it works.

But my Significant Other is a big TV fan. She just bought a TV with a screen bigger than a soccer goal. The definition on the thing allows you to see every flaw in every square inch of skin flashed by everybody taking a turn on the screen.

And believe me, there are flaws, because reality, as you have probably heard, has taken over TV.

There are reality shows where the people are not ugly. Dance competitions, for example, Dance strenuously your whole life and you will end up with a well-toned, attractive body. Or so I've been told. I might try it someday. And there is "Project Runway," where Tim Gunn takes a bunch of aspiring fashion designers to, say, a roofing supply company, gives each of them sixty bucks and tells them to buy something there and make a prom gown out of it. Heidi Klum sneers at the results.

I don't watch this show. My S. O. loves it. I tell her I don't watch because it is a gay screechfest, which is true, but the real reason I don't watch is because I have no designing talent whatsoever. That's a fact. Give me a roll of something universally useful, like duct tape, and I could probably make you a clump of duct tape out of it. Might take me a couple tries.

She also likes shows where guys swoop in and "rescue" failing restaurants. These restaurants are generally owned by people who might as well have bought a minesweeper, so little do they know about the operation of an eating establishment. They are rescued by either a foul-mouthed chef with dyed blonde hair or a gentle English giant who my girlfriend insists is gay. I would not call him that to his face unless I was dead solid certain he would regard it as a complement, however, since he has biceps the size of beer kegs.

She doesn't follow shows that feature spoiled rich women behaving badly. There are no shows featuring spoiled rich men behaving badly, since this is so commonplace it wouldn't be regarded as worthy of broadcasting.

She does like outback cop shows, but I don't see the point, since the cops in these pristine wildernesses end up dealing mostly with drunk, drugged, mentally injured people just like cops everywhere. They just have to drive further to find them.

But the worst offenders are the fishing shows. I don't mean the fishing shows I like, shows where people go onto the ocean or into the wilderness and kill a few of God's perfect marine creatures with rod and reel. That happens to be my hobby, so I empathize completely. No, these are shows that come on after the shows I like. They feature "hillbilly hand fishing," where a bare-chested obese man in cut-off shorts wanders the banks of a murky river, sticking his hand in underwater mud holes in the hope that a catfish will chomp down on his arm, enabling him to grab it by the adenoids and haul it in a truck to a competition featuring other fat guys who have caught other catfish by their windpipes. It's a convention of big ol' boys in wet jeans. While I'm watching, I'm just hoping the director has borrowed one of those Butt-Crack Blur-Cams from the cop show, just in case. 

The catfish are ugly as well. But God or Darwin made them that way, not Pizza Hut, and they also have the excuse of not owning shirts they ought to be wearing.

I had it right here. I got it the other day while I was at the ballpark with my Significant Other, who insisted I sign up for the Hooters' emailing list in order to obtain it. The Hooters girls had themselves a nice booth and some nice push-up bras and were encouraging passing baseball fans to grab an eyeful and a calendar while they signed you up for their list.

At least I'm still on that, or, to put it precisely, I remain a member of the Hoot Club. Every week they send me invitations to Hooters Events, and there are quite a few, most of them wing-centric. I've been invited to the West Coast Hooters Swimsuit Pageant, which is going to be held in Santa Ana, only a hundred miles of choking, crawling traffic jams away from where I live. As a reward for going and paying to ogle young girls in bikinis who wouldn't touch me under any roofie-free circumstances, I get five free wings.

Or I could meet Shawna, Hooters May Girl of the month. For that I get ten free wings. Apparently Hooters is feeling a little insecure about her. Couldn't say why.

Since north of here we're having one of our nice all-consuming California wildfires this weekend, Hooters emailed me notice that they are jumping on that bandwagon by giving everyone affected by the fire five free wings. That's right—as you drive away from the advancing flames while watching them consume all of your personal treasures in the rear-view mirror, you are supposed to think "Oh, boy—five free wings, here we come!"

Those Hooters execs aren't ashamed to market. No, they are not.

But my calendar is gone. It was sitting on the dining table in my special lady's house. I barely glanced at it, because my girlfriend and I have strict standards we hold each other to regarding ocular admiration of attractive young members of the opposite sex. I am allowed to look at young women in revealing clothes through my sunglasses as long as I merely shift the focus of my eyeballs and don't actually turn my head to do so. She is permitted to frankly stare at any attractive male for as long as she wants, and even mutter something like "yeah, baby," under her breath if she really likes what she sees. She was ogling a bare-chested jogger so unmercifully the other day from the car that I offered to swing around the block again so she could take a picture of the guy with her cell phone. She checked her watch and decided we didn't have time.

The calendar stayed on the table for a few days. I suggested hanging it up in her office, where I frequently work. She said "You're not hanging that thing up in my house!" in a tone of voice as decisive as a drone strike and not much quieter, either. "Hang it up in your house."

I failed to pack it, however, and then I made the mistake of opening it. I swear this was because I only wanted to find out what day of the month Memorial Day fell on this year and we didn't have any other calendars with the holidays marked on them in the place.

No sooner had the plastic wrap been peeled off of it than it disappeared. She decided that her graduate assistant needed the calendar more than me. She suspects him of having a less than completely successful love life, and apparently feels that a girlie calendar would help.

Me, I'm taking the guy out to Hooters and letting him have my five free wings. Wings aren't my favorite things. I don't dislike them; I just feel that, like crab legs, they are more trouble than they are worth. I prefer something meatier. I'll have a cold beer and think what I always think when confronted by a plate of Hooter's wings, which is, Doesn't anybody around here ever think about breasts? 

Tim Tebow was released by the New York Jets April 29th, a year after his much ballyhooed trade to that franchise. Tebow only attempted eight passes as a Jet, after leading the Denver Broncos to the playoffs the previous year. Subsequently, he was offered a job as quarterbacks coach for the Legends Football League, formerly known as the Lingerie Football League.—News items.

The noted  born-again Christian QB, famed for his practice of "Tebowing,' or publicly praising the Lord after a successful football play, was in a modest hotel room in the Southeast, holding a bag of ice wrapped in one of the hotel towels when he detected a faint odor of burning sulfur. Whirling, he saw the shadowy form of the Prince of Darkness materializing by the room refrigerator.

"Begone from me, Satan!" he shouted at the figure.

Satan, ignoring the command, sat down on a corner of the bed, brushing a bit of grayish powder from his robes onto the bedspread.

"You're getting dust on everything," Tim Tebow complained.

"It's not dust," Lucifer explained . "It's volcanic ash. It's kind of sooty in Hell today. Must have been a big disaster someplace. When we admit a bunch of souls all at once, we have to turn the heat up. Wouldn't want the place to freeze over. Hey, is that ice you're holding?"

"Yes."

"Pass a few cubes over here, would ya?" Tim Tebow, not really knowing whether giving ice to the Evil One was a sin or not, let him have a few pieces. Satan rubbed them over his horned brow. Steam came up from his forehead.

"Ahhh, that feels good," he said. "So, the Lingerie Football League. Been thinking about that offer?"

"No," Tim Tebow said. "I knew right away that was one of your temptations."

"Temptation is such an-old-fashioned word, Timbo. Nowadays I prefer to refer to them as recruitment calls. Being a coach in the Lingerie League, with all of those muscular, barely-clothed beauties at your beck and call—that doesn't make little Timbo start stirring?

"I've got a name for him, but it doesn't begin with 'little," Tim Tebow snapped.

"Naturally not," Satan said soothingly. "So huddling with eleven panting sex bombs doesn't float your boat, eh? Well, we'll find out what does, Timbo, because we really want you to play down in my place."

"They don't have football in Hell," Tim Tebow said confidently.

"On the contrary, it's our favorite sport. And some of the truly great ones play for me. A lot of the guys you played with are heading my way, too—linebackers who beat murder raps, quarterbacks who got away with raping waitresses, guys who knocked up one supermodel and then married another, anybody who took a few bucks to break somebody's leg—can't mention any names until the signing deadline, if you know what I mean—well, Bill Belichick, but everybody already knows he sold his soul to me. I just hope he doesn't figure out how to cheat his way out of the deal. All the top talent is gravitating to my league. Say, can I have some more of that ice? Unless you need it for your bruises?

Tim Tebow handed him the bag. "Go ahead. Can't figure out how to put it on my ego, anyway."

Satan slipped a few of the cubes under his armpits. "Nice. That NBA center who just came out, he's coming to my place, too. I mean, he's not a football player, but..."

"I'm not gay," Tim Tebow said.

"Okay, just checking. But there's nothing like the football season in Hell, Timmy. It's 52 weekends in a row, counting regular season and playoffs. Then I put the whole place in a temporal paradox so everybody can have the two weeks before the Satan Bowl off. And of course your playing career is much longer. All eternity. Some guys already have eleven or twelve Satan Bowl rings. I grow them additional fingers so they can wear them all. The linemen complain about the extra time it takes to tape up their hands, but the wide receivers are grateful for them."

"No thanks. I prefer to play football in front of people, not your imps."

"Hell has the greatest fans in the universe, Timbo. Philly fans, Giants fans, Raiders fans—nearly all of them go to my place. A majority of the rest of them, too. Some guys get tired of praying for their team to win the Super Bowl and turn to me. I make them wear black robes with their team emblem on them and sacrifice domestic animals and such. You'll find those guys in the corporate suites. And you'll be happy to know this, Timbo—only the Jets don't have any fans in Hell.

"Why's that?"

"Jets fans live in Hell already."


For more of Tim Tebow's spiritual experiences, read Tim Tebow Cut by Jesus.

Stella Tremblay, a New Hampshire state assemblywoman, was the first to play the conspiracy card regarding the Boston Marathon bombing, claiming that the attack  was a 'black op' engineered by Navy Seals at the direction of  the federal government, and that the alleged killers were just 'patsies.'

This comes on the heels of a multiplicity of theories concerning the mass murder at Sandy Hook elementary being carried out by government ops, variations on which claimed that the children were not really dead and actors had been hired to play the role of the grieving parents, in order to promote a gun control agenda.

What government end the Boston bombing was meant to achieve is not being actively speculated upon. Since the bombs were filled with ball bearings, it could have been ball-bearing control. Or marathon control. I have always maintained that marathons are a terrible idea. The first person who ever completed one died on the spot. Possibly, in the shadowy, mind-controlling upper echelons of the US Government, somebody else feels the same way.

Coupled together with the enduring belief that the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 could not possibly have been caused by terrorists flying airplanes into them, even though we all watched airplanes flying into them and one conclusion becomes inevitable—ONLY THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HATES AMERICANS AND WANTS TO KILL THEM.

Once one accepts this belief, everything becomes clear. First off, they're all in this together. All the bile and bitter accusations of election campaigns, all the bags of money begged from oil companies and Hollywood to finance attack ads—they're all cynical fakeries. Obama and Boehner, Pelosi and Cruz, even Ron Paul are all creatures of the United Nations. They communicate by secret courier-carried thumb drives to prevent detection. They've all got 'Agenda 21' tattooed between their toes.

Likewise, Navy Seals are not regular Americans, because it is pretty hard to believe that young American men, imbued with patriotism and a yearning to become powerful defenders of their country, upon their acceptance into Seal training and being told 'You know, your real job is to randomly murder American innocents in fake terrorist attacks,' would instantly say "Cool. I was hoping it was something like that.' No, these men don't come from among us. Possibly they are grown in huge, grisly pods like the ones in the Matrix. Or they get mind-wiped by that blinkie thing from Men in Black.

"Richard," I hear you saying. "Those are just movies. In reality, those things don't exist." My answer—HOW DO YOU KNOW? Suppose the Matrix is real, and there are Men in Black. Suppose those films are actually documentaries! 

I can see you nodding your head. Another thing—Armed Muslim fanatics actually love America. They only maintain secret combat camps so that they can spring into action on our behalf should we decide to invade their country. If you accidentally stumbled upon a bivouacking terror cell, they would probably offer you a bowl of Cocoa Krispies or some other classic American breakfast food as a token of their love for all things American and then let you shoot their guns.

That's why we kill them with drones--the government doesn't want you to find this out!

The whole North-Korea-has-the-bomb lie is the most terrifying portent of all. North Korea is really a peaceful country where the peasants spend all day holding hands and singing songs from Disney movies. They no more have the bomb than they have flying saucers. But the government wants you to think they have a nuclear-tipped ICBM that can lay waste to the West Coast. Why? BECAUSE THE US GOVERNMENT PLANS TO BLOW UP THE WEST COAST! We don't know why, but my guess is that they want to make room for more Mexicans to move there.

Don't believe me? Fine. You've been told. Just stick around, sheeple. Your next clue is going to be opening your window and feeling the morning breeze blowing in at about 50,000 degrees.

Me, I'm moving to Montana, and pulling out all my own teeth.

The horse-faced harridan of the hard right has to move over this week to make room for a new Most Hated Woman on the Planet, and she might not be getting her title back anytime soon.

Samantha Brick, prior to this week hardly a household name, at least here in San Diego County, made international waves when she appeared on British TV and said, among other things, that "fat women are failures," "woman hate me for being pretty," and 'my husband would leave me if I got fat."

The clatter of pork chop bones being thrown angrily at television screens echoed throughout the UK as all the women in Britain more zaftig than Samantha expressed their opinions of her.

Keep in mind this is Britain; here in America no man in his right mind would threaten to leave his wife if her clothes started to get tight. This is not because we American men are less shallow or body-conscious than our British cousins. It is because here in the USA we have vicious lawyers who would treat us to a divorce proceeding that would make being torn apart by ravenous piranhas seem as soothing as a bubble bath if we were to mention any figure flaws belonging to our wives out loud. To them or anybody else.  

As for Samantha's claim that fat women are failures, she should be reminded that Oprah made the equivalent of the Thin One's entire annual income this morning in the five minutes it took Samantha to eat her bowl of flower stems for breakfast. As far as other women hating her for being pretty, the easy answer is Not until now! Probably no one even noticed she was pretty before she put the claim in last week. I mean, she's a nice-looking middle-aged lady, but she's not going to make your eyes bug out. Sure, some of her immediate circle probably rolled their eyes whenever she touched up her makeup at the conference table, or sniffed when she consumed her lunch of a single slice of cucumber and a glass of tepid water in the company cafeteria and exclaimed "I'm so full!" afterwards, but she hadn't yet earned the scowling hatred of every woman in the English-speaking world who's ever considered buying control-top panty hose instead of vomiting before squeezing into a dress.

And now she has. Likely the thing that other women hate about her most is that fat guys get a pass from her. They're not failures, apparently, even if they order their pizzas so big they have to delivered on flatbed trucks or they fatally overdose on Quadruple Bypass burgers. We males can mac out all we want, and Samantha will still dine on half of a pack of airline crackers tonight, just to please us.

Love that girl.

The failure of the US Senate to pass a bill requiring background checks for all prospective gun buyers had veteran political operative Joe Redstate jumping for joy.

"At last the Senate has acted responsibly, by refusing to interfere with the American people's right to sell guns to each other without having to getting tangled in a lot of privacy-endangering red tape that could possibly lead to a national gun registry."

Or you could say the Senate has made it still possible for slobbering loonies and career criminals to buy all the guns they want.

"Wrong way to look at it, my friend. True, it's possible people with evil motives can buy guns at gun shows without any legal difficulties. But responsible gun owners will also be able to buy guns without undergoing some dreary background check, so when a bad guy with a gun starts shooting up school or whatever, a good guy on the scene won't be thinking to himself 'Geez, I wish I had been able to buy a weapon in a casual transaction, instead of thinking 'forget it—this background check is so boring. Then I could shoot back instead of just hiding under this desk crying.' Anyway, it's settled. Now on to the next step, which is to follow up on the NRA's suggestion for creating a national registry of the mentally disturbed."

Who's going to be in that registry, Joe?

"We haven't figured that out yet entirely. Everyone who's ever seen a psychiatrist, for starters. Maybe everyone who has ever seen a psychologist. Or a marriage counselor. Real, sane Americans don't need counseling. They just need their guns."

Don't you think creating that registry would be just as much of an invasion of people's privacy as a national gun registry?

"Who cares? The Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms. It doesn't guarantee the right not to be stigmatized as a wackjob. We already have a national system for keeping illegal aliens from working here and that has solid Republican support. It's called E-Verify."

I've heard of that, Joe.

"It's a great example of a national database that's an invasion of personal privacy and an inconvenience to law-abiding citizens working to achieve an important goal, which is to make it tougher for Mexicans to work low-paying jobs that nobody born here wants to do."

Why is making sure the guy scrubbing out pots at the local cantina has a green card more important than not getting shot, Joe?

"If illegal aliens were allowed to work here freely, there would be even more public conversations in Spanish that real Americans would have to overhear and wonder if they were being talked about in  a language they don't understand and more bilingual signs in Wal-Mart. Let's face it, random shootings get a lot of press. But they don't happen all the time. What really browns most people off is having to listen to 'Por Espanol, marca de dos,' every time they try to get their prescriptions filled."

So the Senate votes the way they do because they love guns and hate Mexicans?

"And random, gun-toting insane killers. That's why the National Mental Health database will effectively solve the problem of gun violence. Once we find out who these people are, we can keep them from getting guns."

And once you find out who they are, Joe, how are you going to keep them from buying guns?

"Simple. If they want to buy a gun, we run a background check on them....oh, crap."

You want to get back to me on that, Joe? You have my email.

I found myself thinking about buying a new car the other day. My present car is ten years old. It's got a crack in the windshield and a broken motor mount. It's not a fashionable set of wheels. The only reason I lock it when I park it downtown is so I won't come back to find some homeless person sleeping in the back seat. It's not that ugly, though, and it runs, so buying a new one would be purely an exercise in personal vanity.

I haven't bought a new car since my kid was born and he's old enough now to legally drink. I moved to Hawaii when I got divorced from his mom. One of the few things that you can get cheaply in Hawaii is a used car. People leaving the rock have a need to sell their cars and deals abound. I bought a perfectly passable car for $250 once. I drove an '82 Lincoln coupe two-door, a pure pimpmobile, nicknamed by one of my friends "Huggy Bear," for a couple of my carefree years on Oahu. This prestigious ride set me back $900. Often I could buy a car, drive it for a year, and sell it for exactly what I paid for it, which  made it a free ride.

So my used car habit was firmly fixed when I moved back to the East Coast. There I found the best person to buy a used car from was a dead person. They were always motivated sellers and their reasons for selling were as pure as the winter snow I told myself I had missed when I lived in Hawaii. The actual transaction would be handled by the surviving spouse. I preferred cars that had been owned by deceased wives, because I felt the widowers had maintained them meticulously, as putting the wife's car in for an oil change gave them a chance to get out of the house and talk to somebody who had no choice but to pay attention to them.  

However in California, where I now live, I am out of the dead person loop. People die here, but they are not friends of friends of mine and their cars are sold to people who are. I could buy a car off Craigslist, as I could buy love off Craigslist, but either transaction might entail unacceptable risks. I could buy a car at a sheriff's sale, but I cross the border frequently and I am afraid of the criminal repercussions that might occur should some diligent DEA drug dog discover that the sheriff hadn't vacuumed all of the cocaine from underneath the seats before he sold me the vehicle.

A new car seems like a good solution, but I don't think I'll be able to get one, because I am afraid that when the car salesman leans across the table at me to close the deal and tells me in a voice husky with emotion (he's emotional because he's thinking about his commission) "You deserve this car," I'm going to have an answer for him. And it's going to be the same answer as if he had said "You deserve these car payments," or "You deserve to have your auto insurance bill tripled."

I'm going to say, "No, I don't."

That's sadly true. And I never realize it more profoundly than when I look at the condition of my current car. Unwashed for months, it has a uniform coating of greenish pollen on its surface, it being the tree-mating season here. It is littered with spare clothes and emergency umbrellas and hoodies in case it rains or the temperature drops. Multiple pages of Mapquest directions to places I have been but will never go again lie scattered on the seats and floor mats, which are also festooned with empty candy and fast-food wrappers. I have more money in loose change under the seats than I have in my IRA. Each of my cup holders has a layer of cup holder glue in the bottom of it, a mysterious substance which forms when spilled beverages congeal in some sub-atomic fashion into an adhesive so powerful that it could be used to glue submarine hulls together. Pieces of hard candy, which I keep in case I need to pop a few into my mouth if I come across a DUI checkpoint after researching local microbrewing efforts, are useless for that purpose because they are mortared irretrievably into the cup holders, like fossils in a layer of Paleolithic sandstone. So cups sit unevenly in my cup holders, which means they spill more, which means another deposit of cup holder glue. The whole process is an inexorable as any geologic one.

And it's all my fault. It's because I don't think about my car except when I need to go somewhere and I stop thinking about it the moment I get there. If I bought a new car, in spite of all the exciting warranties and smells that owning that vehicle would entail, in a few months it would be just as neglected as this car. It would turn into the car I deserve.

No way I'm paying three hundred bucks a month for that heap.