Friday, April 26, 2013

New Political Orientation Discovered


A team of exploratory taxonomists from the Center for American Political Studies is announcing the now official emergence of a brand new breed of political being.

Said team co-leader Dr. Benita Riley, “Chalk this breakthrough up to the dogged stick-to-it-iveness of our team. Over the last four plus years it would have been so easy to satisfy ourselves and our NIH grant monitor with the finding that the seemingly aberrational behavior of so many on the American left was simply a function of the kinds of human foibles that plague almost every political orientation we’ve ever discovered.

“But we just kept looking and looking and looking some more at the nagging data that kept trying to tell us that for all their quacking like the self-serving, power-corrupted ducks of a simply ridiculously hypocritical badling of flacks for a presidential ducker so to speak of his alleged Democratic principles, we were looking at some other animal entirely.

“And the numbers, refreshingly, weren’t lying to us. All the left’s embracing of once seemingly reviled stances and policies regarding financial and war crimes and countless violations of the US Constitution and the social contract is actually not a matter of a standard political bent being bent a little out of shape in the political winds of these particularly dishonorable times.

“What I’m thrilled to announce, in fact, is that we’ve identified a whole new genus of political creature, one driven by forces that are orders of magnitude more complicated than simple leader worship and self-seeking and valueslessness.

“Provisionally called the Bohr Party, after Niels Bohr, arguably the Father of Quantum Physics, its members, or partycles as they’re being called, exist in a highly fluid quantum state that interacts quite strangely with the political left-right spectrum.”

Said Dr. Riley’s partner Dr. Rich Tanaka, “All but thrumming with an oscillatory hyper ever-readiness for the collapse of the next wave function that determines their position and their spin, this new wave of partycles keeps flaunting right and left the left-right duality.

“We’ve even seen them pull off the nifty trick of inhabiting two positions at once. And they can stop one direction of spinning on a dime and get from zero to light speed in the opposite direction in literally no time.

“The behavior of the Ignatiuses and Egans and Harris-Perrys of the world, and the Jonathans Chait and Alter are explained quite elegantly by Quantum Field Theory. With the help of probability amplitudes and eigenvalues and Planck’s Law and the Heisenberg  and Schroedinger Equations, there’s no reason to scratch our heads anymore when these increasingly distant cousins of the liberal do something like flip-flop from one administration to the next on the issues of illegal idiotic war and indefinite detention and unchecked executive power, for instance, or when they keep oscillating with regard to common sense populist approaches to fixing the debt the super rich exploded.

“Thanks to the uncertainty principle, we of course can’t predict with 100% exactitude when these partycles are going to act like the Democrats they almost seem to be. But we can at least stop expecting them not to act like Republicans.”

Added Dr. Riley, “The quantum analogy, we’ll admit, isn’t perfect. In the world of physics we’re dealing with laws of probability and other constants that don’t get fudged on. In the political world, the probability that this Bohr Party will act like conservatives, however, seems to just keep rising.”

In related news, another team of exploratory political taxonomists is announcing that after sifting through 30 years of data, they believe they have confirmed the long predicted existence of the so-called Black-White Party on the conservative side of the constellation of political orientations.

Called the Black-White Party not because they see everything in black and white but because of their defining trait of automatically saying black every single time a liberal says white, this phylum of reactionary differs from its true conservative cousins in that it derives its unshakable sense of rightness not from rightness necessarily but from the knee-jerk inverseness of its positions relative to the left even when the left is right and/or right.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Sequester Backfiring


In an irony being called a sign of these dire times, the sequester has reportedly decimated the budget of the formerly flush, highly classified Office of Intangible Weights and Measures which, working jointly with the Army Corps of Sociological Engineers, has been closely monitoring all the innumerable stretches of the imagination supporting the infrastructure of the Democratic façade the American Oligarchy is hiding behind.

Said Amy Bueller, laid off former leader of the team charged with routinely stress testing the false front in question, “Look where the geniuses we’ve been concealing are leading us. The sequester, as sure a tell-tale manifestation of the Oligarchy running things behind the scenes as you can think of, is now making it next to impossible to keep the scenes the Oligarchy is running things behind from collapsing under the weight of all the bigger and bigger and fatter and fatter lies.

“With only semi-weekly instead of daily and even hourly reports on the status of this aging and ever growing patched together democratic edifice, so many bridges too far are now springing up all over the place that the secret Social Engineering division of OSHA has had to be completely defunded to avoid the high cost of buying it off to avoid the even higher cost of astronomical fines.”

Explained Ben Simpson, laid off agent with OSHA’s former Social Engineering division, “Now grossly underbriefed, the go-getting oligarchic Makers are reflexively outdoing each other in the making over of the illusion of a democratic openness.

“They’re punching so many bay and casement and floor-to-ceiling garden and picture windows into any and all weight-bearing walls they’re not taking out altogether in this façade now posing as a cave-in waiting to happen that a 13-story house of cards on a hyperactive fault line in a third-world country with a worldwide rebar embargo imposed on it looks like a model of structural integrity by comparison.

“The skeleton crew left to adjust the governors on these oligarchic engines of American go-getting is making the nation’s measly regulatory corps look like a veritable horde.”

Said Ms. Bueller, “Even one year ago, the boys and girls in charge would have known better than to let the Senate make another big long drawn out show of re-visiting gun control in a showdown that was never in a million years ever going to leave standing even the least meaningful common sense legislation the masses are demanding. The same goes for all that hokum about fixing the filibuster.

“And nobody would have let a bipartisan committee just up and provide the right answer to the painstakingly manufactured question of whether the torture the Oligarchs wallowed in for years was torture or not. And of course state secrets gets invoked big time before Reinhart and Rogoff have to cough up the spreadsheet that demonstrates nothing but that those two are a couple of hacks and that this whole global austerity business is grounded on the horseshit the Oligarchs have known it’s grounded on all along.

“And even a sequester dressed up like the byproduct of a messy but democratic two-party process never happens. And the boneheads conducting the so-called Independent Foreclosure Review don’t get to just give up when they get a little tired of maintaining the unbelievable make-believe that they’re trying to do right by all the fraudulently foreclosed upon.

“I mean, come on, folks. Mary Jo White? Rahm Emanuel? Erskine Bowles? Obama? Obama? Really? Those 98-pound Democratic Atlases are going to shoulder this overgrown dream world the American people are living in?

“The thing is, that big ball of nonsense couldn’t be about to get dropped at a worse time. The Office of Looking Forward is now so underfunded thanks to the sequester that there’s no way to mount an effective campaign to get the American people to not look back with a dangerous ruefulness at a time when they at least thought they were living in a democracy.

“And also thanks to the sequester, the Office of Not Looking Backward doesn’t even exist anymore.”

In more sequester and Office of Looking Forward news, the Obama administration is reportedly diverting funds from other sequester-decimated shadow agency budgets to redouble the Office of Looking Forward’s efforts to put the Boston Marathon bombing behind us.

Apparently the concern is that overstimulating the areas of Americans’ hearts and minds known to be associated with feeling the pain of innocent human beings whose bodies and lives are horribly torn apart by the bombs of bad people will trigger the areas of Americans’ hearts and minds associated with feeling the pain of innocent human beings whose bodies and lives are horribly torn apart by the bombs of good people.

Friday, April 19, 2013

Red Tape Snares Maker


According to reports, the United Makers of America, Ltd. have been encountering a rare series of setbacks as they have pursued the trademarking of the term “Maker” as a hedge against the theft of any and all profits and profits from profits ever to be accrued for goods and services that are or may become related to this so far legally unprotected moniker of the super rich class.

Said the visibly irate Maker Thomas Nelson Taylor, point man for UMA’s venture to make “Maker” unavailable to anyone who isn’t one, “How hard could it be for one of these cubicled doofuses at a certain marathon Taker convention going by the name of the US Patent and Trademark Office to find one of the rubber stamps we Makers have paid a small fortune to equip every desk drawer in Washington with?

“My kingdom for just one go-getting Maker slumming it in a Taker’s job so I could maybe get this thing put to bed and move on to putting the next light year of distance between us and America’s Taker class.”

Standing between Mr. Taylor and the Makers’ taking legal ownership of the word “Maker” is the USPTO’s Rita Peterson, a self-described stickler when it comes to dotting and dotting and crossing the small i’s and the small j’s and the small t’s, respectively and alphabetically.

Said Ms. Peterson, “It’s called paperwork, not paperplay. Mr. Taylor is just going to keep getting his application sent back to him until he fills in the box for item 12C with a definition of ‘Maker’ that makes sense.

“A large majority of the applicants on whose behalf Mr. Taylor is seeking joint ownership of the word ‘Maker’ don’t make anything at all, except a lot of money by means that would more accurately be described as taking.”

“Dammit,” said Mr. Nelson Taylor, “the plain, simple fact that we’ve got enough of the American entrepreneurial spirit to make money from a word tells you all you need to know about what separates a Maker from a Taker.

“You can’t look or swim or quack more like a North American Crested Duck in his greatest role as a Maker than that. Here’s a definition of Maker for you:  ‘Makers are the ones who can pass a damn gimme duck test.’

“Or maybe I should define Maker by counterexample: ‘As opposed to a Maker, a Taker is the kind of American who keeps sending an application back because she can’t make sense of a Maker’s simply and clearly defining the Makers as the ones who make the Americans who make all the stuff take it when the Makers not only take all the profits from the Takers’ making but also make out like they’re not the Takers.'

“The good news,” said Mr. Nelson Taylor, “is that the Makers are in no danger whatsoever of having the term ‘Maker’ taken from them by the Takers, as in the Takers of forever to get around to getting anything done.

“Or should I say the Takers of literally forever to make it into America’s Maker class.”

Said the USPTO’s Rita Peterson, “At this point, I would just tell Mr. Taylor to take some advice from this maker and taker of the decisions around here: Before you make your next definition of Maker, take a minute and look up douchebag in the dictionary.”

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Social Higgs Boson Sought


In the heady wake of their near miraculous pinning down of the so-called God particle that holds all physical matter in the universe together, subatomic physicists from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions are teaming up with America’s best and brightest subatomic social scientists to undertake the even trickier feat of ferreting out what on Earth could possibly be still holding together the collective pretense that America has not become a full-blown irreversible Plutocracy.

“It’s really quite extraordinary,” said Dr. Ramani Agrawal, chair of the Quantum Social Psychology department at UC Berkeley. “Even our most conservative micro-sociological models, even after a thorough double and even triple checking of the data, predict that five years ago plus or minus a couple of months we should have reached a tipping point with respect to the collapsing of this American dreamland where the well meaning One Percent is taking good care of our democracy.

“According to most of our models, however, we are decades past the moment when this expanding cloud of group delusion should have begun dissipating into thin air.”

“It’s quite intriguing,” said Dr. Wesley Amos, Dr. Agrawal’s harder scientific counterpart at M.I.T. “Some mysterious, perhaps irreducible pseudo Jungian adhesive unit is keeping this fiction socially glued together no matter how far-fetched it gets.

“There must be some sort of astonishing collective denseness at the center of this fog creating the social equivalent of the kinds of gravity we associate with black holes, or at least neutron stars.”

Said Dr. Agrawal, “The new ground this fantasy keeps breaking is really forcing us to re-think our current understanding of what holds wishful social figments together.

“Our standard theoretical conception of the social universe has long accounted quite robustly, even elegantly, for what happened in late 18th century France, for example, and early 20th century Russia and 1930’s America. In one double blind confirmational test of our paradigm after another our equations have pinpointed almost literally to the day when the masses in various times and places got over the notion that their powerful wealthy class did not need to be beaten back down to manageable proportions if the society was to survive.

“But now right and left our models and equations are failing us. We just can’t get a handle on how it could scientifically be that at this late date in the rise of the new American Plutocracy the masses are still wasting precious energy on voting. They’re still even pouring their increasingly hard-earned money and their ever diminishing time into this instrument of majority rule that has long since been almost completely disabled.

“And then when all this hokey pokey calling itself an election cycle is over, somehow they can’t seem to get enough of all the fiscal dog and pony shows posing non-stop in Congress as two-party governance.

“At this point, I don’t know that any amount of new evidence gets us to critical mass. I mean, a Democratic president starts promoting the going after of Social Security and no corner gets turned. His visitor logs and the rosters of his regulatory agencies and his teams of economic advisors read like a Who’s Who of plutocratic all stars. He prosecutes a grand total of not one red-handed member of the international crime syndicate calling itself the Makers. Post-election he goes right back to buddying around with the nonsensically austerity-pushing Fix the Debt crowd.

“And for goodness sake, corporations are now persons. And if America harnessed the energy generated by the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street we could be coal and oil independent tomorrow.

“We’re going to keep searching for the so-called social Higgs Boson. That’s what science does—it just keeps plugging.

“But at the risk of getting myself ejected from the Age of Reason, I have to say, I just can’t help feeling that whatever unnatural thing is going on here is confirming the hypothesis that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.”

Friday, April 12, 2013

Guidance Counselors Destroying America


In a bombshell rocking American high school corridors and the corridors of American political and economic power alike, Wikileaks has just posted a highly classified report showing unambiguously that the US government has known for several years that the American Association of High School Guidance Counselors is actually a terrorist organization that has been patiently working for nearly two generations to bring America to its knees.

According to the report proper and its thousands of pages of supporting documents, guidance counselors across America have spent decades intentionally steering the worst possible people into positions of American leadership.

Through the highly complex manipulation of vocational interest inventories and Myers Briggs personality tests, along with a battery of modified behavior modification techniques borrowed from the American Kennel Society, these powerful gatekeepers turned social saboteurs have been remarkably successful at filling America’s ruling class with nothing but the top one percent of the nation’s citizens in terms of a proneness to narcissism, mendacity, group thinking, myopia, venality, corruption by power, hypocrisy, big-headedness, hawkishness, collective self-delusion, and a compassion-sapping self-satisfaction.

The terrorists have reportedly had the best luck over the years with the students who also struggled with the most basic concepts in their civics class.

Said Ray Mendez, an unemployed firefighter now working part-time as a private counter-terrorism intern, “The success of this longstanding cabal is all the more remarkable when you consider how badly they shot themselves in the foot with the plan they devised.

“I can’t imagine they anticipated the problem with crowding the Beltway and state capitols with the kinds of leaders who would do something stupid like decimate the ranks of low-paid public employees dedicated at least as far as they knew to improving the life chances of America’s youth, who, by the way, have needed more and more guidance counselors not fewer as America’s leaders have made it more and more difficult for the nation’s youth to succeed in life.

“The early successes of these terrorists in steering only the least qualified people into positions of power meant that soon these counselors were reduced to a skeleton crew outnumbered 100’s to one by their students.

“I think it may have steeled their will to bring down America as the very failed people they made leaders out of began ruthlessly vilifying their class of worker and working night and day to bust their unions and privatize their mission.

“So determined in fact has this ever dwindling terrorist cell been that not only have they managed to place all the wrong people on the path to leadership, but they’ve also kept all the right people off it.

“It’s amazing, really, how almost perfectly they filtered honesty, integrity, social consciousness, humility, and modesty out of the upper echelons of the political, corporate, media, academic, religious, and other spheres.”

Said Dana Albright from Washington, DC, “I would love to have been a CEO or maybe a senator or a judge, but back in high school my Strong Interest Inventory kept coming out negative for those vocations and positive for the helping professions.

“So I was a special education teacher for 20 years in a poverty-stricken community before my school was shuttered by Michelle Rhee and other education leaders.”

Said Mr. Mendez, “I hate like hell to admit defeat in the war on terrorism, but I don’t see how America pulls out of this nosedive the dipshits stuffed into the cockpit have steered us in.

“Who’s going to stop this army of unwitting Manchurian Candidates falling all over each other in their bubble to keep churning out horrific idiotic wars and Patriot Acts and cruelly ballooning plutocratic wealth and power inequality and unblinding Lady Justice when they’re not flaunting the rule of law altogether and relentlessly rendering the machinery of democratic governance more or less useless?

“At this point, now that the invoking yet again of state secrets has failed to keep the lid on this bombshell that all our leaders are tools of terrorism, the best we can hope for I suspect is a nationwide campaign of Reaper and Predator drone strikes on public high school teachers’ lounges, and of course the double taps that come after them.”

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

America Wins Class War


According to sources inside the White House, President Obama’s new budget proposal for 2014 is intended to represent no less than a declaration of victory in America’s brutal 30-Year Class War.

One senior aide-de-economic-camp of the president told Shining City Gazette, “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all America’s undeclared ongoing wars elsewhere on the globe have left rank and file Americans not only incredibly war weary but also starving for a win.

“Well this commander-in-chief has just given them one. The Class War is over, America. The upper class won. Everybody go home if you have one, or if you were already home because you don’t have a job, just stay there. Hug your spouse, even if he or she is the same sex as you. Hug the person you’re just living with if marriage doesn’t make economic sense anymore for you and your opposite or same-sex partner. Hug any small children you have that are home because America can’t afford Head Start anymore. Hug the adult children and any aging maternal and/or paternal Takers under any roof you might still have.

“This is the week the Class War to end all Class Wars was brought at long last to an end. President Obama has brought peace to the land while also, by the way, making the Nobel Peace Prize Committee out to be geniuses after all.”

Said Jane Newhouse, media relations director for the so-called Obama Nation, “He did it. Obama really did it. He snatched victory from the jaws of perpetual class warfare.

“He pretty much alone looked out there from sea to shining sea and saw that after 30 years in the less and less inhabitable trenches, the Takers in America weren’t exactly going to just snap back after the shock and awe of the Makers’ exploding of the deficit by blowing up the economy for all those below them.

“When the other side changed the Pottery Barn Rule to read ‘We break it, they pay for it’, it took this president to spell out the writing on the wall, which reads, ‘Good news, America: Give them victory and it will trickle down.’”

Said former class warrior and Taker Josh Green, “At the risk of sounding like a sore winner to the Obama Nation, some of us in the 99% just can’t help feeling like this victory deferred is a little like another defeat.

“In some ways I feel a bit like a 98-pound mongoloid who’s just been told he’s a big winner for having had his ass handed to him in the Special Olympics boxing ring by a fellow American suffering from megalomaniacal sociopathic gigantism compounded by ‘roid rage.

“I have to say, though, it definitely helps that there are so few spoils left for the more immediate victors in America to take from the Takers right now. It would have made victory that much harder to feel if we were experiencing the kind of rampant, unchecked plundering we were subjected to throughout the Great Class War.

“And it certainly seems like sound advice when President Obama tells us all to just keep looking hopefully forward and not backward at all the class war crimes the Makers were committing while the Takers were playing by the rules of engagement.

“Of course it would be nice as we’re doing all this looking in the forward direction to see something more along the lines of a Marshall Plan, or even Reconstruction, and less along the lines of a Treaty of Versailles situation with all its war guilt clauses and crippling reparations payments.

“Swapping the dogs of class war for even meaner wolves at our doors doesn’t seem like much of a peace dividend.

“But hey, who am I to tell President Obama that I’m not feeling all the hope to be had from embracing austerity by way of not really even lowering the national debt our former mortal Class War enemies racked up while plundering all the classes below them like there was no tomorrow?”

Friday, April 5, 2013

America Gets Good Drone News


In a much needed piece of good news regarding the president’s now controversial killer drone program, the New York Times is reporting the government leak of a story about a signature drone strike in Pakistan that serendipitously annihilated a grief-stricken widower just as he was about to open fire on dozens of children courageously gathered for the re-opening of a drone strike-damaged elementary school.

According to the leak, thought to have originated from the president’s secret Office of Selective Transparency, the militant in question had luckily been exhibiting patterns of behavior almost doubly consistent with his being a militant.

In particular, his age, his sex, his country of residence, and his having lost a wife by drone strike put him front and center on America’s radar screen just in time for America to avert a deadly school shooting in Pakistan along the lines of what America is witnessing in America.

Anonymous sources close to the leak have told Shining City Gazette that the militant in question, before becoming a militant by dint of his being surgically annihilated by a drone strike, was actually not a militant.

In a rambling note left behind at his house, the militant in question to-be apparently promised to shoot as many elementary schoolers as there were bullets for his legally purchased high capacity assault rifle to avenge the death of his young bride, who in recent days had innocently crossed deadly paths with a gang of careless school children playing chicken with an overhead drone by engaging in patterns of behavior known to be associated with militancy.

Unfortunately it is not possible even for the Office of Selective Transparency to say with precision how many children America saved from being shot to death in this incident, partly because so many were collaterally damaged beyond recognition as entities separate from one another, and partly because of all the impossibly Byzantine military red tape involved in overriding the strict command to never include women and children in drone-strike body counts in the interest of preserving the president’s perfect record of never having blown up anyone but a militant.

The official unofficial best estimate of the number of children America saved from being massacred by gunfire is said, however, to be in the range of 40 to 50.

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, “The two-for-one takeaway from this leak is that, one, the president’s hypothetical drone program just pulled off the nearly impossible feat of stopping a random school shooting before it could happen, and, two, no civilized society should have to rely on America’s drone program to make up for its inability to pass a little common sense gun control legislation that keeps deadly automatic assault weapons out of the hands of the unstable.

“And I would also direct America’s attention to the high praise the president is receiving from fellow Democrats for opting not to double tap the school where this horrific mass shooting would have taken place.”

In more good drone-related news, the US Office of Travel and Tourism Industries is reporting near record first quarter tourism business from the Middle East and the African continent as a direct result of the president’s decision to hold off on bringing his killer drone program home to US soil.

Said OTTI’s Jennifer Weeks, “More and more Pakistanis and Yemenis and even Syrians and Somalians are choosing to take their much needed family vacations right here in the US.

“Ironically, America seems now to be the only place on Earth where these people can get a vacation from the constant overhead threat of death by America.”

Added Ms. Weeks, “Our hospitality associates are having wonderful luck convincing our sometimes a little shell-shocked Muslim visitors that their stay in America is sure to be a pleasantly memorable one if they will only religiously heed the travel advisory warning to stay out of movie theaters and elementary, middle, and high schools and colleges and rural marijuana patches and any and all inner cities and convenience stores and of course the state of Colorado.”

According to Ms. Weeks, her office is in the final stages of a plan to use Reaper and Predator Drones to carpet bomb Arab and African nations with travel brochures from participating US states.

A bidding war has also reportedly broken out between tourist-hungry states eager to buy the sky ad banners America’s hundreds of active drones are currently being retrofitted for waving above their target populations.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

DOMA Supporters Cede Marriage

In what some are calling a case of anticipatory sore losing, DOMA support organizations across the Heartland are not waiting for the Supreme Court to rule against them to start drawing up and promoting new government legislation they're calling the Defense of Homophobia Act.

On one major front in this so-called war for America's soul, the Academy of Theistic Scientists will in their words be "burying" the growing body of scientific evidence that homophobia is a choice.

Said the Academy's Dr. Wendel Marbury, "You can't choose to get the willies every time you see or even think about two guys kissing."

Added Dr. Marbury's longtime research partner Dr. Blake Adams, "I don't choose to be irrationally afraid of snakes and choking. Dr. Marbury doesn't choose to be afraid of tight places. And trust me, nobody is choosing to be afraid of anal and homo oral sex, much less choosing to be afraid of what Leviticus 20:13 says about what should happen to men who engage in such behaviors.

"The next thing you know,..." began Dr. Adams.

"...the boys over in the so-called hard sciences will be pulling scientific proof positive out of their test tubes if not their anuses that we're all choosing to be afraid of God," finished Dr. Marbury.

"And/or instantaneous catastrophic salinization," added Dr. Adams. "Like what happened to Lot's wife for just taking one peek at men doing with men what they do with women."

Said Brian S. Brown, president and co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, "Everybody wants to make the homophobes out to be the crazy ones. Well I ask you, who's the nut job--Lot, or the most infamous non-homophobe in biblical history, his wife?"

Explained Mr. Brown, "We're being the reasonable ones here. Leviticus 20:13 couldn't more explicitly tell us that homos are to be put to death for their detestable acts. We're not really asking for that. All we ever wanted was for the gays to keep out of our married state, so to speak."

Said NOM's co-founder Maggie Gallagher, "We hereby give up. What we're now saying to the Sodomites and their masculine counterparts is this: You want to ruin marriage for the rest of us? Fine. You can have it. It's all yours. We don't want it anymore. Go knock yourselves out. The wedding industry can't wait to set you back, oh, about the cost of a lifetime membership at San Francisco's finest bathhouse, which guess what, you and the new mister don't get to frequent anymore.

"And hey, rack yourselves up some brats while you're at it. And some step- and half-brats. And some grand step- and grand half-brats and all the grander and grander brats after that.

"And while you're racking up the brats and all the missed anniversaries and all the weeks and then months and then years without your precious gay sex, at least within the sanctity of your marriage, and while you're watching your partner turn into your mother- and/or father-in-law when he or she's not busy growing hair in some inappropriate places and losing it in others and flirting all night long with terminal sleep apnea and surrendering without a fight to gravity, please rest assured that you can find that marital bliss you're looking for in the knowledge that in these unholy no-fault times there are always plenty more balls and chains out there where the one you've got came from, and they come in an endless array of shapes and sizes and ages from your basic trophy husband to your pruned sugar mama with one stomach-turning foot already in the grave.

"And don't worry. There are plenty of Renos and Las Vegases already set up to help you save in next wedding costs what you lose thanks to brat support and community property laws and the rapacity of divorce lawyers.

"Oh and by the way, some of the brand new newlyweds will need to take time out from their happy happy lifelong honeymoon with their same-sex partner to take over from Brian and John and me and the rest of us here at the National Organization for Marriage the thankless job of defending the married state.

"I mean, who's going to futilely put their foot down when everybody now starts demanding the right to marry their monkey? As everybody knows, monkeys are our evolutionary first cousins, and you really shouldn't be marrying your first cousins."

Said John C. Eastman, NOM's Chairman of the Board, "The question is, what would Lot do? And the answer is that he would Zoar again to new heights, the little town of Zoar being the refuge Lot repaired to with his daughters when the Lord had to ruin his marriage thanks to the Sodomites.

"And now as biblical history repeats itself only on a much larger scale, it's off to another Zoar the faith community goes, each of us this time helping his helpmeet resist a peek at the ungodly dog's breakfast of misters and misseses the gays have made of our holy matrimony."