Issues of class warfare aside, if the victim (Ronald Poppo) was like every other homeless person I’ve run into, he hadn’t bathed in months. Now I understand that tastes are subjective, but, for Christ’s sakes, couldn’t Eugene have at least had the decency to skin and clean Poppo first?

Seriously folks, cleanliness is next to godliness in my book, and there is no “five second rule” when it comes to homeless people. Once they hit the street, they’re off the menu: end of story.

Etiquette aside, once you get beyond the shocking aspects of the story and understand that the chemists cooking up these bath salts have stumbled upon a particular formula that tends to trigger cannibalistic strip teases, the military applications of the drug become quite obvious.

I imagine the military is already isolating the specific combination of chemicals that cause this urge to feast. The good news is, since most of the work is already done, it shouldn’t cost the military much to perfect the drug—not that “cost” would ever deter our military.

In fact, over the next month or two, Congress will finalize the Department of Defense’s 2013 budget, with both chambers working on drafts that would put America’s defense spending at an estimated $631 billion. And while that’s over five times what any other nation spends on their military, it’s only about twice what Californians will spend on Lap Bars in the coming year, so it’s all about perspective.

Of that money, roughly $543 billion will go to the DOD’s baseline budget, while $88 billion will be set aside for the war in Afghanistan—which, let’s be honest, could be handled much more cheaply if we started blasting the country with bath salts instead of Tomahawk missiles. Regardless of how you look at it, though, over 16 percent of our Federal budget will go toward defense spending (or close to one out of every five tax dollars folks like Mitt Romney won’t be paying because they park their assets in offshore accounts). That’s a lot of money, and it’s a perfect example of the big, excessive government that Republicans have been screaming about since never.

All kidding aside, Republicans never worry about wasteful military spending, and we all know why: they love, love, love their guns. Now, I’m not a card-carrying member of the NRA, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy shooting them (guns, that is). Plus, I’ve never agreed with my liberal friends who passionately declare that “you don’t need an Uzi to hunt.”

For starters, if you’ve ever hunted sasquatch, you know an Uzi is exactly what you need.

More importantly though, the NRA and GOP are correct on one aspect of the debate over gun control: the 2nd Amendment didn’t grant “the right of people to keep and bear Arms” so we could hunt. No, the 2nd Amendment grants people an inalienable right to possess the weaponry they would need to defend themselves against a tyrannical government.

But good luck defending yourself against a military that can turn your ass into a zombie. Seriously, just imagine what will happen the next time you and your fellow Bo Gritz wannabes hole up in some cabin in the woods with a stockpile of weapons, refusing to surrender to the ATF officials surrounding your property.

Oh sure, that Mexican stand-off of yours will sound like a good idea until some pretty flyboy crop-dusts your combine with bath salts, turning your ode to Ruby Ridge into George Romero’s wet dream. And what good will all those guns do you when the loyal patriots around you all start looking like a Doritos Locos taco?

At this point, you might be thinking my suggestion that the military would develop or use such a weapon is absurd. If so, that’s because you’re likely unaware of weapons our military has actually already developed.

For example: the vomit gun.

Back in 2007, the U.S. Navy developed a weapon that uses radio waves to alter a person’s equilibrium and auditory abilities, causing motion sickness and, you betcha, vomiting. At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security developed a high-tech flash light that when stared at induces headaches, queasiness and, right again, uncontrollable puking.

And while these weapons probably wouldn’t be particularly effective in stopping a suicide bomber from blowing up a deli, they undoubtedly would make your standard activist think twice before heading down to the next Occupy protest.

Hell, if you thought people scattered when they got tear gas launched at them, just wait to see what happens when they’re being peppered by last night’s Filiberto’s.

And you know if the Navy has a gun that can make you puke, some of that $631 billion is getting used to develop a weapon that will make you shit—giving the military the power to have activists protesting out of both ends. Seriously, it’s just a matter of time before the only thing the 99 percent will be occupying is a Porta Potty.

Of course, vomit rays and dump guns are a messy solution to crowd dispersal. Fortunately, such weapons won’t be needed, as our military has developed a much cleaner tool: the Active Denial System (ADS). Also known as the pain ray, an ADS device emits a wave similar to a microwave. This device was actually deployed in Afghanistan, and when turned on it literally cooks people who happen to be in its path, causing you to feel like you’re on fire. The good news is, once you step out of the path of the beam, you’re all good.

According to the military, the weapon is not meant to kill or actually burn anything, but rather to inflict momentary pain. Certainly, this could be useful against enemy combatants or, as stated above, it would kick ass at clearing out a park full of camping protestors.

This said, it’s not like the U.S. military is alone in creating such bizarre weapons. In Japan, researchers have created a gun that, by echoing someone’s voice back at them with a .02 second delay, creates an auditory confusion that causes the speaker to shut up. Literally, if this weapon were shot at you, you would lose the ability to speak. And don’t get me wrong, something like that would have come in real handy with my ex-wife, but is this the kind of tool we want governments to have?

Oh, and for the coup de grace? Russian President Vladmir Putin acknowledged earlier this year that his country had developed a weapon that will temporarily put people in a zombie-like state. Using electromagnetic radiation to attack a person’s central nervous system, the weapon causes people to feel like they are on fire and, for as long as the weapon is active, makes them susceptible to suggestion.

So yes, Russia has a weapon that can legitimately create a zombie army, which is why I am so glad Americans have bath salts. The Cold War may be over, but if we keep our fingers crossed the Zombie Apocalypse might still be on.

Since it’s clear there’s absolutely nothing a fully-automatic assault rifle can do to defend me against the current American military, I’m just going to go ahead and concede that the 2nd Amendment is no longer relevant. The U.S. military has “Arms” that no citizen will ever have access to—tanks, Apache helicopters, fighter jets, nuclear weapons, advanced computer viruses with which to wage cyber wars, etc. And despite our nation’s amazing—and frightening—excess of traditional weaponry as well as crap pulled straight from a comic book, we keep handing the DOD an economy-crushing budget so they can continue developing weapons that will make your standard Smith & Wesson as useless against a tyrannical government as it always has been as a substitute for a penis.

So farewell 2nd Amendment. It’s been a fun, if somewhat shallow relationship. Truth is, we never really believed people had an inalienable right to arm themselves. If we did, the U.S. wouldn’t actively be thwarting Iran and North Korea’s efforts to develop the same weapons we’ve had for decades, nor would we ever have started a war to prevent the spread of the same WMDs we actively develop to this day.

It was all hogwash that played well in another era. But today, it’s increasingly clear that future wars and aggressions won’t be won with guns or bombs, but rather by chemists and geneticists, by hackers and computer programmers. And it’s very likely that in the not-so-distant future, the only real field of battle will be our biology, our DNA.

Sorry NRA, but you can’t Rambo your way out of that—no matter how automatic your weapon happens to be.

Either way, the bill didn’t pass—but before you get ahead of yourself and think common sense found its way into the ranks of the GOP, PRENDA was brought to the floor during a suspension of rules, meaning it required a two-thirds majority of the vote to win the day. In the end, the vote was 246 votes in favor, 168 votes opposed, and 3 votes in fucking disbelief. All but seven Republicans voted for it. And while the Republicans were clearly upset by the bill’s defeat, after the vote they all regrouped and immediately got back to the hard work of doing absolutely nothing for America.

Though PRENDA—which would essentially have made any woman getting an abortion a “suspect” while simultaneously putting any one performing an abortion into the position of discerning “motive”—failed, I wouldn’t take a sigh of relief just yet, as this bill was more about seeding the electorate than changing law. For that reason, you should prepare yourself to get really sick of the word “gendercide.”

Because if evangelical Christians and the right-wing media have their way, “gendercide” will quickly become a major buzz word that will for many define this November’s elections (and when, by the way, are we just going to start calling them what they are: auctions). For those of you unfamiliar with gendercide, ABC News defines it as the practice of “terminating pregnancies solely because the fetus is female,” as opposed to aborting a fetus because it’s male, which is a practice known in the industrialized world as plain old common sense.

Okay, okay, ABC’s definition isn’t entirely true. For starters, gendercide can be waged against both males and females (though, female gendercide has received far more scrutiny in recent decades). Plus, gendercide is a term that’s traditionally used to describe a culturally pervasive tendency to manipulate gender ratios—occasionally by infanticide but largely through sex-selective abortion.

But it’s not a term you would generally use to describe a Jersey housewife trying to engineer the perfect nuclear family. For that kind of situation, we have words like “Snookie” and “Kardashian.”*

Fortunately for us all, American journalists are too busy to look words up to guarantee they’re using them properly, preferring instead to let religious fanatics redefine abortion in a way that links the act to occasionally brutal and socially damaging practices in countries like China and India. The press’ laziness is particularly good news for the GOP. Desperate to distance themselves from their well-documented history of working against women’s rights, Republicans are going to jump all over the issue of gendercide. Aside from being a backdoor way of defending a pro-life agenda, denouncing female gendercide will prove, once and for all, that the GOP is the only party that will truly fight for women’s rights.

Well, unborn women’s rights, but you get the point. It’s a war on women in the name of women.

Still, if “gendercide” does start trending, it won’t be because of PRENDA, but rather because of a rather timely (and well-coordinated) video released earlier this week by Live Action, a youth-led, pro-life cult of people we’d call “dangerous extremists” if they practiced a religion other than Christianity. That said, in this video—which accuses Planned Parenthood of gendercide—an undercover woman visits a local PP in Texas and says she only wants to have an abortion if she’s having a girl. Throughout the duration of the video (which as you can imagine has been heavily edited to provide a properly damning context), a clearly uncomfortable PP-counselor offers the woman basic information relating to how and when to determine the fetus’ gender, as well as how far into the pregnancy one can get and still have an abortion. Towards the end of the video, the counselor—who has since been, pardon the pun, terminated—walks the undercover woman to the door and says, “I hope that you do get your boy.”

And let’s face it: in this case “I hope that you do get your boy” is basically the same thing as saying, “I hope you don’t have an abortion.” You would think that kind of sentiment from a PP employee would make Republicans happy. Right?

Yeah, they’re not happy. At least not on the surface—deep down, I’m sure they’re all delighted at yet another opportunity to go after PP while, at the same time, accusing a non-profit organization that helps millions of women of being complicit in female gendercide. Why, I have no doubt that Rush Blimpaugh and Glenn Beck are currently manufacturing all kinds of phony outrage with which to launch their next attacks against PP.** Hell, just by closing my eyes and cupping a hand over my ear, I can already hear Rush putting down his sammich just long enough to scream, “Your tax dollars are being funneled to a group that’s actively assisting in the gendercide of women. It’s an atrocity.”

Of course, the real atrocity is that groups like Live Action continue to get taken seriously by anyone. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s really cool that a bunch of Jesus-Camped freaks whose parents taught them to fear critical thinking are taking an active role in the politics of the world. What saddens me is that at such a young age they’ve reached a level of shamelessness that it took Karl Rove a good 30 or 40 years to achieve.

Up, up with Jesus, I guess, but this video is particularly shady. For starters, within the video the narrator mentions that throughout April Live Action visited abortion clinics all over America, pretending to be patients. This fact has me shaking my head and wanting to remind these Christian warriors that PP gets a lot of its funding from our taxes; when you pretend to be a patient, aside from diverting care from those who might actually need it, you’re also wasting a lot of tax dollars that could be used on, I don’t know…abortions?

As a tax payer, I’d like to see some sort of itemized list of all the clinics they went to and the services they received, because I think we’re all entitled to a bit of reimbursement.

I mean hell, I thought these people were Christians, and according to the Christian network I occasionally watch (FOX News) wasting tax dollars is the greatest sin of them all.

Still, they went to clinics all over the country, and from that all we get is a highly edited, seven minute video from one clinic in Texas? Live Action doesn’t even mention what, if anything, occurred at any of their other attempts to make PP look bad. Still, the video charges PP with gendercide several times, so I imagine it’s a safe bet that what we see happen at this Texas facility is reflective of all the clinics they visited. Right?

Either that, or this video merely proves that if you visit enough PP locations, you’re eventually going to find someone to step into your noose.

Now, the video opens up with some snazzy piano work, the number “100,000,000” blazing across the screen as a woman’s voice says, “One hundred million girls are missing today. These girls are victims of female gendercide.” This bugs me for two reasons. First, the girls aren’t missing; if you visit all those abortion clinics, the doctors there will be glad to tell you exactly where those fetuses were incinerated.

But what bugs me even more is the fact that the video makes no effort to explain that almost all of the victims of gendercide are from Asian countries, where a combination of laws, cultural preferences and socio-economic issues have led to dramatic gaps in gender ratios (a fact that is having far-reaching implications for many nations, beyond the obvious human rights concerns).

But instead of shining a light on this fact, Live Action is more content to draw our attention away from the real issue of gendercide and direct it toward PP—which is the journalistic equivalent of setting some matches to a trash can and occupying the fire department’s time and resources while houses are burning to the ground a few blocks over. So yeah, this is shameless, but le me remind you that Live Action is run by Evangelical fanatics and “shameless” is pretty much what those people specialize in.

In all fairness, I totally agree with Live Action that terminating a pregnancy because the fetus turns out to be one gender or the other is a pretty vulgar thing to do. Just speaking for myself, here, but I’m an equal-opportunity aborter and gender doesn’t matter a lick. That said, this line of argument misses out on something pretty important—I mean, aside from the fact that while gendercide is a serious issue in many parts of the world, in America (where women outnumber men by four million, which is roughly the amount of extra women needed to keep Mormons happy) it’s probably not the social pandemic Live Action would have us believe it is. Does sex-selective abortion happen in America? I am sure it does, but when those women terminate their pregnancy because of the gender of the fetus, it’s not PP’s fault.

It’s God’s fault.

What, you don’t think those women didn’t spend a few minutes every night, pouring out their hearts to God, praying, “please, dear lord, let it be a boy” only to learn after the ultrasound that the Alpha and Omega had totally punked them with a girl? No, as far as I’m concerned, if you pray for a boy and get a girl (or vice versa), that fetus’ blood is on God’s hands. If God doesn’t like abortion, he can get off his ass, answer some prayers and save some babies’ lives.

Until then, though, Planned Parenthood will continue to have my full support.

Planned Parenthood, going on 70 years of answering all the prayers God won't.

*Before you write to me to point out that the Kardashians are not from Jersey, I’d like to point out that you really suck for knowing that.

**Republicans can’t stand PP, but not because they perform abortions. They can’t stand them because they give highly discounted medical coverage to people who otherwise would be forced to pay way too much for health care at a for-profit hospital. The GOP is all about the Benjamins, and all their bluster about moral issues is little more than smoke and mirrors to disguise their unbridled greed.

As shocking as these numbers are, what should surprise no one is why we’re all so damn fat. Aside from our collective tendency to have activity levels comparable to that of a couch, we also eat like shit. Because of this, over the last 10 years we’ve seen increasing efforts by many to push a healthier lifestyle—not just upon the consumer, but upon the companies providing us with this food. In particular, the fast food industry has been under siege, and now the menus and staples of crappy dining that we all grew up on and love are changing.

But I can think of at least one man—me—who’s not going to stand for it anymore—because A., standing’s a lot of work and B., I have chairs for a reason.

In all seriousness, though, I am getting more than a little tired of the War on Hamburgers. Don’t get me wrong: I can appreciate the health concerns that come along with fatty diets and processed foods, and I also understand the national importance of a fit, healthy citizenry. So while I understand everyone’s concerns, I also don’t care.

Things I do care about: Either really good hamburgers smothered in cheese that squirt a cow’s worth of grease onto my plate after the first bite, or really disgusting hamburgers that admittedly taste like solidified, beef-flavored baby food but have the wonderful benefit of costing $.99 per pound. Seriously, I don’t care if your burgers are made from that stuff that always seems to be falling off Ben Roethlisberger’s face, if you’re going to cook up a pound of it and sell it for a buck, I’ll take ten.

If you think I’m kidding, consider this: my all-time favorite fast food snack is a taco from Jack in the Box. I love those things, and I have them all the time. Here’s the rub, though: I have no idea what that taco meat is made of, and, in fact, I’d be flat-out stunned to learn that it has actual meat from a cow in it. That said, I really don’t care because they taste like a deep-fried dream, and you can get two of them for a buck.

I am aware that these tacos are not healthy, and that’s why I don’t eat them everyday.* Though, there’s no guarantee that doing so would necessarily kill me. Take a look at Don Gorske, who in May of last year ate his 25,000th Big Mac. You see, for 39 years straight, he has eaten two Big Macs each and every day of his life—according to him, in all that time there were only 8 days where he didn’t have a Big Mac. That’s a picture of him below. And as you can see, at the age of 58, he’s doing fine.

His sex life is a different story.

Don Gorske, seen here doing the only thing a man who eats nothing but Big Macs can: dine alone.

We first met Gorske in the film that really kicked off the end of America’s love affair with fast food: Super Size Me. In the 2004 documentary, Morgan Spurlock showed America what happens to the human body after eating nothing but McDonald’s fare for 30 days.

And if you have to ask what does, in fact, happen, then you are the problem, not the burger.

Either way, after the film was released, fat, lethargic and depressed people all over the world were horrified that the food they’d been eating for decades can make you fat, lethargic and depressed.

Really? People didn’t know why they were fat? What, did they think the asses they’d been dragging around were the result of a particularly nasty strain of flu? The answer, apparently, is yes. How else can you explain things like the Men’s Health columns titled Eat This, Not That. These columns list the very worst meals (health wise) people can have at national restaurants, and offer up healthier alternatives to those meals—by the way, none of those alternatives is ever to “cook something at home.” By reading these stories, people learn stunning things such as the fact that Burger King’s Triple Whopper with Cheese is not the best choice for those looking for a light lunch. The burger, which the good people at Eat This, Not That rated as the worst fast food hamburger in America, has over 1,100 calories and 75 grams of fat.

While I appreciate Eat This, Not That’s noble goal of making Americans aware of what they’re eating, I tend to think if you’re regularly eating Triple Whoppers with cheese because you think they’re helping you fight cholesterol, then the heart attack you have is what scientists like to call natural selection. The rest of us, on the other hand, know to save Triple Whoppers for special occasions, like when we’ve lost a bet or are sick of life but are too chicken to use a gun. That’s right, most of us understand that Triple Whoppers are ridiculous.

There is one thing more ridiculous, however, and that’s Eat This, Not That’s suggested alternative to ¾-a-pound of beef covered with three slices of cheese. According to them, instead of a Triple Whopper you should have a regular Cheeseburger. Admittedly, this is good advice, but the reality is if you can comfortably eat a Triple Whopper, a cheeseburger will do for you what a single fry does for those of us who don’t need a Hoveround to go shopping.

I.e., to the writers of Eat This, Not That: eat shit.

If you’re still not convinced that the problem isn’t with our food but with stupid people, consider America’s response earlier this year when everyone suddenly realized that grocery stores and fast food restaurants were making burgers with pink slime—a gelatinous, creamy mixture of mechanically separated meat that is bathed in an ammonia mixture to kill the bacteria. For decades, no one cared that you could eat a Big Mac without having to chew it, but the second we found out why we didn’t need to chew it we all freaked out and start demanding that pink slime be banned?

In response to the public outcry, most grocery stores and fast food chains did away with the pink slime,** and schools across the country removed the product from its school lunches—which is a damn shame, really, because for many kids that meal represents the only pink slime they’ll eat all day.

Of course, years before the pink slime fiasco, the fast food industry had been trying to revamp its image with healthier options like salads, not-so-healthy but different kinds of crap like sugary coffees and chicken wraps, and, my personal favorite, the arrival of “real hamburgers.” In the past four years or so, nearly every fast food company has introduced the bigger, better burger, usually made with fancy things like sirloin or Angus beef. Consider them the fast food industry’s way of apologizing for serving you crap for decades.

It’s pathetic. For nearly 70 years, McDonald’s proudly boasted about how many burgers it has served, but in a shameful admission that all those burgers were crap they’re now offering a not-as-shitty burger, the Angus Apology. Burger King is still selling the crappy Whopper which made it an international power house, but it’s also redone its entire menu, added its own Angus burger and some weird-ass thing called the Chef’s Cuisine burger. And Wendy’s, not to be outdone, went the Full Monty, completely scrapping their old burgers and fries while switching to an entirely different beef.

Hell, if you’re going to go that far, why bother to keep calling it Wendy’s? Doing so makes them the Halloween III of the burger world.

It’s not just the burger joints racing to apologize for the food we’ve been gladly eating for years. Look at the changes Domino’s Pizza has recently made. They actually ran a months-long media campaign in which they came out and basically said: “Our product sucks, and we can’t figure out why you keep buying it. Still, to reward your loyalty, we’ve completely redone the entire recipe you’ve come to know.” And the absurd thing about this tactic (aside from the fact that the only thing different about the pizza is the garlic sauce rubbed over the crust) is that millions of Americans bought it hook, line and sinker. Domino’s business is up big time, and why shouldn’t it be?

It’s still the same crappy pizza, and it still is far cheaper than real pizza. That’s why I ordered from them back in 1991, and that’s why I occasionally order from them now. It’s a simple, but winning formula.

Sadly, it’s a formula Domino’s burger brethren are no longer following. Because while McDonald’s Angus Apology is, in fact, a bigger, better burger, they charge almost as much for it as a sit-down restaurant charges for a real hamburger. And while McDonald’s still serves the old crappy burgers that built them into the empire they are today, the prices are being jacked up considerably (to be more in tune with the pricing of the new deluxe menu offerings). Last time I checked, a Quarter Pounder Value Meal costs over six dollars, and while that’s really not that much money for that much food, it’s a horrible deal when compared to what I can get at Red Robin for a buck or two more.

Which brings me back to my point and the only reason we’ve all eaten so much fast food over the years. Yes, it’s quick, but it was also cheap. As the industry, as a whole, converts to a healthier cuisine, and as its prices continue to rise, they will continue to look less and less like the establishments that are so embedded into the last four or five decades of American life.

And while many of you might think that’s a good thing—as all your doctors undoubtedly do—I have to say there’s something about this transformation that feels downright un-American.

*Tacos are a weekday thing, as I prefer to class it up on the weekends with some KFC.

**Actually, the joke’s on us all, as most companies didn’t do away with the slime, just the ammonia solution that turned the slime pink.

P.S.: When you walk into any Fat Burger restaurant, you will see a sign on the wall that proudly declares, I shit you not: “We have the leanest beef in town.”

Seriously, did the jackass who made that sign not see the name on the door?

Apparently, the Republican-dominated legislature seems to think distracted drivers are vital to Arizona’s future, and if I drove a tow-truck I’d agree. Since I don’t, I’m more than a little concerned.

You see, HB 2757 will officially make legal the use of digital billboards along federal and state highways. You’ve likely seen these colorful, flashing displays while driving to work or running over the motorcyclist you didn’t see because he was in the blind-spot that exists between the aforementioned billboard and the road you weren’t looking at.

Admittedly, these billboards have been around for years, distracting drivers with important consumer messages like “Look, this woman’s damn-near naked” and “In a wreck? Need a check? Call Lerner & Rowe.” If HB 2757 is approved by the Senate, however, it will open the door for hundreds if not thousands more of these TV-like signs along our roadways. Which I suppose is a good thing, as those signs will give you something to watch while waiting for the five-car pile up in front of you to be cleared.

Joining this bill is HB 2125, which—had it passed—would have banned texting while driving. Fortunately, this bill failed, which means we can all continue driving while at the same time updating our friends on the fact that “OMG! I just drove over a speed bump, and I swear it screamed. #NegligentManslaughter.”

Now, when you take the State Legislature’s response to these bills alone, it’s puzzling. But when you combine them with some of our state’s other recent bills—both passed and proposed—those puzzle pieces fit together into a dark and haunting picture. From efforts to allow guns in government buildings and on college campuses, to denying health care to thousands of Arizonans; from ending mandates that force school districts to provide lunches for needy children, to legalizing distracted driving; and from phasing out long-term health care for the terminally ill, to ending federally funded emergency unemployment—the message is clear.

The Arizona GOP is trying to kill us.

Not that it’s personal, mind you. It’s just good old supply-side economics. You know: since they’re incapable of increasing the supply of jobs, the next logical thing to do is reduce the demand for them. Sure, it’s a hard-liner’s approach to population control, but I suppose it’s better than the god-hating, anti-American use of birth control. Right?

Either way, if the GOP gets its way, some of us are going to have to die. And whether your death comes from an armed college student jacked up on meth and a Nietzsche pocket reader, or from a teenage girl “OMGing” her VW into your right of way, take comfort in the fact that you will have died for the greater good.

I, on the other hand, am prepared to survive the current legislature because I lived most of my life on the outskirts of Arizona’s Sun City—a Del Webb retirement community built exclusively for senior citizens and cheap buffets*. Due to this, I’m well adapted to sharing the road with drivers who don’t give a crap about what they might happen to drive into, over or through.

That’s not to say old people are necessarily bad drivers, though. In fact, most of them are wonderful drivers who simply have a tendency to overlook the fact that they’re actually driving.

Case in point: About a year ago I made the mistake of letting my 91-year-old grandmother drive us to lunch. I admit this was a bad idea, but she was insistent. Plus, she offered me a Werther’s Original if I let her. So I did. And to be honest, her driving was perfectly fine until she forgot that she was in her car. Somewhere between her apartment and Red Robin, she apparently convinced herself she was in her living room watching TV, and she kept pointing to the road in front of her saying, “I never liked this show.” She then tried to change the channel by turning the TV’s knob—known in most parts of the world as the steering wheel.

And while no one was hurt that day, I can think of at least one pair of underwear that will never be the same again.

Poor grandma. She thinks she's watching "Golden Girls," when in reality she just ran over a few of them.

In any case, living within a few miles of the gray-haired-and-dentured demolition derby that is Sun City, I’ve picked up some amazing defensive driving skills, such as: staying the fuck home.

And that’s a skill that will come in handy now that HB 2125 has been rejected, handier still if HB 2757 is passed. HB 2757’s passage in the Senate is a no-brainer. Not because the bill makes sense, but rather because the bill was heavily lobbied for by Clear Channel Outdoor, a subsidiary of media giant Clear Channel, as well as one of the world’s biggest suppliers of outdoor advertising. Coincidentally enough, CCO is based out of Phoenix, AZ, a fact that pretty much converts their lobbying dollar into $2 from anyone else.

Long story short: get used to those rapidly changing HD billboards telling you about all the hot slots at the local casino, and say goodbye to those amazing Arizona sunsets you used to be able to see.

More troubling than the Vegas-style billboards, though, is the legislature’s failure to ban texting—an act that takes your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, and your mind away from the responsibility of driving a two-thousand pound weapon. It’s more troubling because, at first, the legislature did the right thing with HB 2125. Last week, the House passed the ban with a 45-15 margin. Literally, within a week’s time, a bill that passed with 75% of the vote was repealed by the same elected officials who so overwhelmingly approved of it.

Why, you ask? To answer to that question, we have to turn to Rep. Jack Harper, a Republican from—ironically—Surprise. Last week, Rep. Harper voted to ban texting while driving, but this week he demanded that the House take up the bill again because he didn’t know what the bill was about when he voted for it originally.

Let that sit in for a moment.

As appalling as it is that Rep. Harper A., voted “yea” on a bill he knew nothing about, and that B., he’s dumb enough to admit this fact publicly, you have to admit it does explain all the crazy shit Arizona has passed into law the past few years.

Still, in Rep. Harper’s defense, the simple fact that he’s an elected official demonstrates that, just like him, Arizona citizens didn’t bother to read up before voting either. I.e., you get the government you deserve.

Rep. Harper is not alone is his reversed vote, as 17 other legislators switched from “yes” to “no” on the bill in the last week. Perhaps none of those legislators knew what the bill was about, or perhaps someone—I don’t know, a provider of cellular services maybe—intervened? The end result was a quick renunciation of a ban that the overwhelming majority of the House approved of last week.

Now, if you’re an Arizona citizen upset with something your legislature passed into law, all you have to do to override it is wait 18 months, collect hundreds of thousands of signatures, make a million calls, knock on thousands of doors, and make an argument you hope can win come election day.

But if you’re Verizon Wireless, all you have to do is write a check.

Can you hear me now?

Well, maybe the more appropriate question is: “Can I kill them now?”

For the record, the GOP’s response, this week at least: “Yes.”

*If you ever happen to make it down to Sun City, a little friendly advice: don’t go anywhere near a buffet before 5 p.m. If you do, you’re more than welcome to complain about the 10 cent tip my grandmother leaves the wait staff. As for the car she parks on your face?

That’s totally on you.

Sadly—and I do mean sadly—the story is inaccurate. It turns out the bill had been referred to the committee by Bartlett’s staff, which did so without the Congressman’s knowledge. Rep. Bartlett has since made it clear that A., he doesn’t support the legislation, and B., there’s a few new openings on his staff.

In reality, the bill was written by the American Mustache Institute, an organization formed in 2006 by Aaron Perlut because he didn’t have a wife or girlfriend to stop him—which is, admittedly, one of the side effects of nostril bangs.

According to the group’s Web Site, AMI is dedicated to “Protecting the rights of, and fighting discrimination against mustached Americans, by promoting the growth, care, and culture of the mustache.” Now, I don’t have a mustache myself, as it’s not the ‘70s and I hate fondue, but I find it hard to believe dudes with hairy lips have to deal with too much discrimination. I mean, if people discriminated against men with mustaches, how do you explain the picture below?

Former Arizona State Rep. Doug Quelland, seen here flossing his septum with a ferret.

This is a picture of my former State Representative, Doug Quelland, sitting in his office down at the state capital. It doesn’t appear that that “w” thing on his face held him back any. In fact, he sported that thigh-tickler through three separate and successful bids for office. Admittedly, his last electoral win in 2008 was a real nail-biter, and Quelland probably would have lost that election if not for his brilliant election-day strategy of tying his opponent to railroad tracks.

Either way, that there is a picture of success and proof that you can get ahead in life even if it looks like a cat puked a hairball on your face.

Still, perhaps Quelland is an anomaly, and men around the world truly are looked down upon because they’ve chosen to grow mustaches. Fortunately, AMI has been down in the trenches fighting for them for years.

And while the group is a largely tongue-in-cheek organization, its full-time staff currently supports over 700 global chapters, proving that stache-discrimination is either a world-wide epidemic or Wikipedia is full of shit.**

One fact that’s not in dispute, though, is the Million Mustache March that AMI is staging in Washington, D.C. on April 1st. That’s right, on April Fools’ Day AMI and Perult will be leading a march of the mustached down to the famous reflecting pond, where all those men will gaze into the water and hopefully realize how creepy mustaches are.

Okay, okay, I’m joking. In truth, I find the mustache to be incredibly sexy, which is why I’ve been growing them on my back for years. But as my face is currently clean shaven, I won’t be joining these men in their crusade. Still, I support their cause—which, let’s be honest, has less to do with mustaches and more to do with highlighting just how silly American politics has become.

And frankly, satirical protests such as a Mustache March are likely the only reasonable response to our current model of government, which has evolved from a system of checks and balances into one simply balanced by checks. Plus, real attempts at protests—like we saw with the Occupy movement—tend to end with mace, jail time, and a nation of Republicans who hate you for not loving or leaving America.

Regardless of whether the march is a spoof or not, I actually want the politicos to take note of it. Sure, the Stache Act won’t ever be passed, but if we can get even a few members of Congress to take it somewhat seriously, just think of the doors that could be opened. Because let’s face it: Americans have a ton of unique, physical demarcations just ripe for asinine tax breaks.

For example: My ass.

I have a big, fat ass, and I benefit greatly from that fact because I sit on it all damn day. Seriously, if I had bony little cheeks, there’s just no way I could plop down in my Lazy Boy and make it through an afternoon marathon of Divorce Court while still being able to watch, in the evening, all the different CSIs. Fortunately, my well-cushioned derriere provides my back with the kind of support necessary to prevent me from developing scoliosis, compressed discs, or a sex life.

But a big ass doesn’t just happen, people. No, to keep my cheeks in proper recliner shape, it takes pizza and lots of it. Plus, some beer. Now, I’m not necessarily one of those people who believe hard working men and women should get stuck with the bill for my health care, education or retirement. But if there’s a way I can stick them with a butt-tax that funds my monthly Domino’s tab, I’m going to do it.

Which is why it would be nice if a few members of Congress took the Stache Act seriously. I mean, lord knows a lot of them likely would if they didn’t happen to have interns to tell them it was a joke and/or take the blame when the press learns their boss supports deductions for mustaches.

Still, if we can convince a few of them to sponsor the bill and defend the Stache Act this year, perhaps next year we can get their support for my pizza-fund legislation, the Ass Act.

Of course, to get their support I’ll have to get this valuable legislation as much attention as I can, which is why on an as-of-yet-undetermined date in 2013, I plan to go to Washington, D.C. and lead the Million Man Moon. On noon of that day, while Queen’s “We Will Rock You” blasts over loud speakers, a million men will turn their backs to the capital, unbuckle their belts, and moon Congress.

Either that, or I’ll be there alone getting pistol-whipped and shipped to Gitmo.

I won’t let the thought of imprisonment deter me, though, because I have a dream, and for some reason this dream involves the naked asses of one million men. And while it may be more frightening and less sanitary a dream than Perult and AMI’s mustache march, the basic point will be the same: to take politics as seriously as our politicians take us.

*Stimulus to Allow for Critical Hair Expenses. Literally.

**In this case, Wikipedia is full of shit, as its entry on AMI draws largely from the fictional history of the group found on its Web site. Without question, the group’s somewhat hard to define sense of humor led to the confusion over Rep. Bartlett’s involvement with the Stache Act.

That lesson? That in America there are fortunately 49 other states to go to college in.

Or at least that’s the lesson students will learn if a bill Kavanagh introduced last week is ever made into law. The bill would force students at state universities to pay a minimum of $2,000, annually, toward the cost of tuition. That $2,000 can’t come from scholarships, financial awards, or grants that a student might receive; it has to come out of the students’ pockets and/or their parents’ withering retirement funds.

For the record, HB 2675 is not designed to save the state money, as it doesn’t affect, in any way, the amount of money Arizona’s legislature is currently not giving to universities.

Rather, Kavanagh proposed the bill because he believes students can’t appreciate the value of an education when they “have no skin in the game.”

Admittedly, it’s odd that Kavanagh wants students to value education, when he himself clearly doesn’t. Well, he at least doesn’t care about the education of others, because should the bill become law the dream of a higher education will only grow more illusory for thousands of lower-income Arizonans: You know, the people who would benefit the most from a college education.

Of course, Kvanagh might have some skin in the game himself. As a professor at Scottsdale Community College, his students won’t be affected by the legislation he’s sponsoring. In fact, SCC—and other local community colleges as well as private and online schools—will benefit from the bill, as many students unable to manage that extra $2,000 will likely opt to attend two-year institutions and private colleges—where they won’t be told they can’t use their Pell grants to cover tuition.

That’s not to say Kavanagh has a conflict of interest, only that he just wrote a bill that impacts state universities while, at the same time, working for a major competitor of those same universities. And if that’s a conflict of interest, you can just call me Mike Stevens.

So, um, yeah.

But back to Kavanagh’s reason for proposing the legislation. “Not everyone, but some people take things they get for free less seriously,” Kavanagh said after the “Give Me Your Lunch Money” bill was passed by the House Appropriations Committee last Wednesday.

And as a former teacher at ASU, I can’t say I entirely disagree with Kavanagh on this point. The truth is, students who were working jobs—even if only part-time—were in most cases more dedicated to their studies than were students on full scholarships or whose parents were covering the costs of school. And, while they weren’t necessarily any smarter or gifted than my other students, they probably did get more from their education than many of their peers.

That said, it’s not the government’s job to tell people what is and isn’t meaningful, nor is it the State Legislature’s duty to regulate perspective. The government’s job, when it comes to universities, is to ensure that all people have equal access to the opportunity higher education provides—not to limit opportunity, as HB 2675 does.

And it will severely limit opportunity. When I earned my MFA from ASU back in 2003, tuition was roughly $3,000 a year. Today, nine years later, it’s almost $11,000. That’s a heady bit of inflation, don’t you think? Ironically, a major justification for the annual tuition increases was to help the university provide financial aid to needy students—aid which this bill would render illegal.

Of course, the biggest tuition increases have come since the stock market crashed in 2008—a crisis Republicans were quick to take advantage of. Even before the Bush administration began rolling out its bailout for bankers, Republican legislators all over the country were gutting their state’s education systems. In the last three years in Arizona—or ever since Jan “Scorpions for Breakfast, shit for brains” Brewer became governor—the amount of the state’s budget spent on education dropped from just over 60% to just over 30%. And while the GOP will defend this dramatic reduction as a response to the times, they were simply being shameless opportunists: using the economic crisis as an excuse to reduce public schools to rubble.

Or, in GOP parlance, to level the playing field for private schools.

So, yeah, Kavanagh’s HB 2675 is just one more shot fired in the GOP’s war to privatize everything. But the bill presents many, logistical problems, particularly when it comes to forcing students to roll up their sleeves and moonlight at Circle K so that each time they mop up a Slurpee spill they’ll appreciate their schooling more.

The truth, however, is that most students who currently don’t pay their own tuition aren’t suddenly going to go get a job to cover that $2,000. No, either their parents will pay more, or they will—in most cases—borrow more money.

In the end, the only thing that will change about their educational experience will be the number of years it takes them to pay off their student loans. And sadly, that appears to be the only real impact of Kavanagh’s bill: To punish apathetic students and their parents with a debt they’ll carry around for decades: call it a capitalist’s version of a Scarlet Letter.

Which brings us to the only group of people, aside from the aforementioned privates schools, who will actually benefit from this bill should it become law: the financial aid industry that provides all those student loans. In recent years, financial aid providers have been the target of increasing federal scrutiny for predatory lending practices, particularly in the arena of online education. With tighter regulatory policies in place, the financial aid industry is undoubtedly looking for new ways to grow its bottom lime. A bill like HB 2675 could prove to be a model piece of legislation for student loan lobbyists.

That’s assuming, of course, that it’s not already the model (ALEC, are you out there?).

The real shame for students, and America in general, is the net effect all of these GOP sponsored bills are having on education as a whole. Stripped of resources, hamstrung will silly regulations, America’s public education system has been weakened so greatly in the last four years, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll be able to compete, globally, any time soon. And considering the state of our economy, that’s a disturbing fact to consider.

Republicans like to brand themselves as the party that best understands the economy. They point to the economic boom of the ‘80s and ‘90s—which they attribute to Ronald Reagan and his trickle-down economics, a pyramid scheme which served the 1% quite well—as proof that Republicans are the ones best suited to fix a broken economy.

They are wrong, of course. The truth is that the boom of the ‘80s and ‘90s is the byproduct of the civil rights movement. In that movement’s wake, millions of Americans who previously never had access to education—higher or otherwise—suddenly were allowed in.

The ‘60s and the ‘70s saw an educational revolution in America and the birth of the first truly educated generation in the history of this nation. Men and women of all stripes and colors had access to the one tool that had historically been the sole provenance of the wealthy and the privileged: an education.

The result was the explosion of innovation in the sciences, the arts, and in medicine that was the core of America’s economy in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In the end, the American education system gave birth to the most prosperous decades in our nation’s history.

And for some reason, the GOP has no interest whatsoever in allowing that to happen again.

Well, at least that’s been Santorum’s overarching message to evangelical Christians the past few months. And while his notions of gender equality might frighten those historically on the losing end of patriarchy, you can’t question the effectiveness of his strategy. With the GOP primaries beginning their swing through the Bible belt—you know, where all the “real Americans” live when not tipping cows for giggles—Santorum’s chief opponent, Mitt Romney, will have a hard time convincing voters he’s the best representative of their beliefs. For though Romney is a man of faith, the right’s evangelical fringe tends to greet Mormons with the same open arms with which they’d greet a practitioner of Voodoo.

And by open arms, I of course mean a shotgun.

So, Santorum is wise to position himself as a champion of Christianity. I mean, the only things Bible-belters love more than a pious Christian are Dale Earnhardt commemorative plates and deep-fried butter. But hey, that’s the South, which for the record downloads more snuff films per capita than any other region in the world. I don’t have the statistics on this (because I’m making it up), but how could it not be true?

Either way, as long as Santorum is running against Romney, he can continue to win big by cloaking himself in Christian revivalism. Should he advance to the general election, however, Santorum will likely become desperate to distance himself from the headlines he’s made the past two months. If he approaches the general election with the same religious fervor and righteous chauvinism that have catapulted him into front-runner status, he’ll get blown out in November.

In sticking with his tired, culture-war clichés, Santorum will find himself campaigning against much more than a slick, well-funded Democratic incumbent with an impressive record. No, to become the next president Santorum will need to do far more than beat President Obama.

To win in November, Santorum must ultimately defeat the women’s movement, itself.

To his credit, Santorum is gearing up for that challenge like a revitalized Andrew Dice Clay on a comeback tour. This past weekend, he again tried to frame the choice between he and Obama as one between good, Christian values and a phony theology—science and reason—that places “earth above man.” And while most have questioned how a man who believes a burning bush can deliver prophecy has the temerity to question anyone else’s beliefs, what should be getting the most attention is Santorum’s ‘50s-era usage of “man.”

Seriously, George W. Bush was two generations removed from being born an ape, and even he knew to say “people,” “Americans,” or something otherwise so confusing it would totally mask his chauvinism.

But the sad reality is, Santorum didn’t misspeak. He meant “man.” And if there is anything his candidacy has demonstrated, it’s that the former Senator from Pennsylvania totally “hearts” all things penis. We learned this shortly after he was announced the winner of the Iowa caucus. The following weekend, in a speech at a private school in New Hampshire, Santorum stated that a child would be better off with a father in prison than with no father at all. You see, the male influence is so vital to proper childhood development, that without a father—even a despicable one—children will just end up believing all the stupid shit their moms say.

You know: like women are people too?

The notion that women are people, by the way, is one of those “phony” lessons kids pick up in schools, which is why he declared in a recent New York Times interview that he would home school his children at the White House if elected. In defending his stance, Santorum said, “Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.”

And hey, I have to agree with Santorum here, because while I learned a lot in school—like how to pluralize verbs—I’m not sure where I’d be without my father’s guidance and instruction. I mean, without him, I would never have learned about the flammability of flatulence or how to eat a Big Mac in one bite, and those are exactly the kinds of lessons that really prepare a child for alcoholism.

Not that Santorum will be passing similar lessons on to any of his seven children, because there’s an unstated reality behind his decision to home school his kids: namely, that he’ll be too busy meeting with heads of state and playing golf to do any of the schooling he, as a parent, is responsible for. Nope, in Santorum’s White House, the children will be taught by the first barefoot-and-pregnant lady. And though Rick doesn’t trust his wife, Karen, to make decisions about her body, he does trust her to adequately teach their children the three Rs of education: repent, repress, and repeal Roe vs. Wade.

Having Karen stay at home to raise the kids, aside from being the way God and backwards-thinking men want it, will free Santorum up to do what men do: which, if you’re Santorum, is spreading a model of Christianity so anachronistic it’s as out of place in the 21st century—what with its notions of civil liberty and enlightenment—as Kim Kardashian would be at a Mensa meeting.

And though it’s a message that’s served him well in the primaries, it won’t sit well with most who aren’t daily praying for the rapture. Women, in particular, aren’t going to warm up to the man. Though if his sweater vest is any indication, the last thing Santorum is worried about is appealing to women. Only Christians.

Which speaks to the real problem behind Santorum’s recent surge in popularity: namely, that he’s trying to pass off his medieval gender stereotypes as inherently Christian. The issue for Santorum is that when he says Christian, he acts as if there is a universal doctrine into which is folded all Christians, whereas nothing is further from the truth. In the real world, Christianity consists of hundreds of different denominations, all with contrasting views and biblical interpretations, some of which differ so greatly from orthodox tradition that they share more commonalities with Islamic faith than with anything Santorum preaches. So, in trying to define American Christianity by his own strict limitations, he succeeds only in suppressing the true Christian character of this nation.

And that nature, for the record, is a liberal one.

After all, can you think of a more liberal document than the U.S. Constitution? Born of enlightenment-era ideas, that document places the protection of the rights, equality and dignity of the individual as the primary purpose and responsibility of this nation. And it’s the Constitution’s dedication to the preeminence of the individual that shapes most American Christian’s notion of charity, kindness, dignity and compassion.

So, as much as Republicans like Santorum would have you believe the upcoming election will be a battle between Christian beliefs and secularism, the truth is—since most Americans identify themselves as Christians, including the majority of liberals—the culture war is not about religion.

The culture war pits, on one side, the majority of Americans who hold to the freedoms and liberties that are the promise of this nation, and on the other side that endlessly vocal group of Americans terrified by the consequences of freedom and liberty, of both the power and responsibility that comes with personal choice.

Santorum doesn’t trust Americans to make the right choice.

Something tells me that, come November, the American voter will prove him wrong.

Because think tanks, just like the bard’s meddlesome seers, are rather fond of doling out misleading prophecy then sitting back to watch the havoc they’ve created unfold. And lately, they appear to be doubling down on the toil and trouble.

Take the Heartland Institute, for example, which had several internal strategy memos leaked to the media on Valentine’s Day—hey, some people say it with roses, whereas others prefer to say it by hacking your hard drive. And as far as I’m concerned, if you’re a duplicitous organization with the nerve to put “heart” in your name, you kind of have it coming.

Anyhow, those memos revealed several of Heartland’s strategies for undermining global warming science. The memo getting the most attention is the one which included plans to pay an Energy Department consultant $100,000 to develop K-12 school “curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain—two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.” No, not to teach both sides of the science—as there’s only one—but merely to teach how the topic itself is divisive. Even if that divisiveness only exists because groups like the Heartland Institute are getting paid to create and teach it.

It’s kind of like the question of which came first, the chicken, the egg or the smoldering atmosphere that nuked them both into a Southern-style McGriddle.

Still the interesting thing of note here—aside from Heartland’s willingness to turn our children’s minds into a for-profit battlefield—is the silent admission on Heartland’s part that man-made global warming is, in fact, an inconvenient truth. Well, to be fair, it’s only going to be inconvenient for those of us not wealthy enough to purchase some prime acreage in either Antarctica or on Newt’s proposed moon-base.

Considering the right’s eagerness to scream the sky is falling, it’s odd to see groups like Heartland arguing that it’s not—particularly when they privately acknowledge that it is.

Okay, okay, I’m kidding, as it’s not odd at all: Truth is, there’s a lot of money to be had in obscuring the truth, and according to those leaked memos, nearly half of Heartland’s donations have come from a single, anonymous source.

And no, you’re not alone if you believe that anonymous source has a brother named Koch (a name that is, for the record, pronounced “douche”).

It’s also been interesting to watch Heartland’s response to the leak. Much like their response to global warming, Heartland appears to be both acknowledging the memos as legitimate, while at the same time questioning their legitimacy.

“The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on Jan. 17,” Heartland said in a press release after learning of the leak. And while that may sound like an admission of the memos’ authenticity, consider the next line in that press release:

“The authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.” Later in the statement, Heartland says that one of the leaked memos is completely fake (though it merely echoes what is said in the other memos).

In other words, these memos were written by the President of Heartland for a Jan. 17th board meeting, though one is fake, and there’s a good chance none of them are real. And in those memos we learn that Heartland believes in global warming science but wants to create skepticism about the science’s validity. But of course, those memos—written by Heartland’s president—could very well be fakes. So, you know, take them with a grain of salt.

Say what you will, but you’ve got to give Heartland credit for sticking to its basic strategy of “creating skepticism”, no matter how greatly circumstances change.

Still, no one should be surprised or shocked by the revelations in these memos. Conservative think tanks (or, more appropriately, don’t-think tanks) have nurtured such strategies, almost exclusively, for over 30 years. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be angry, and not just at the slipperiness of the strategies being employed.

The simple fact is Republicans and the corporate world are increasingly directing their political actions at our children, hoping not so much to win votes today but rather to guarantee they won’t need to win them tomorrow. By corrupting the public school systems—casting doubt on science and banning subjects contrary to conservative ideology—they’re creating a separation between our children and the ideas and information that would allow them to form educated opinions: to choose.

Some might call that brainwashing, and it is, but it’s also an attempt at intellectual genocide—the complete destruction of an idea or fact simply because it doesn’t jibe with Exxon’s anticipated quarterly reports.

The simple fact is the culture war isn’t one being waged in the media, or on the campaign trail: it’s one being waged quietly, far from the lens of the media, on school boards across America. It’s a war being funded anonymously, as well as by tax payers through programs like No Child Left Behind, which provides federal aid to charter schools—which for the most part are little more than Jesus camps occasionally interrupted by math—as well as funding options for those committed to the intellectual incest known as home-schooling.

And in case you didn’t know, NCLB was not President W’s pledge to make sure every child in America was educated, it was merely a reference to that crappy Kirk Cameron film about the rapture.

The culture war is being waged by well-funded groups that you’ve never heard of—like Heartland—who are descending on our schools like pederasts with puppies and chocolate. No shit, the high school by my house is surrounded by no less than a dozen churches within eye-sight of the school’s parking lot. Whenever a plot of land opens up, the various denominations launch into the kind of bidding war you’d only expect to see when the Yankees and Red Sox are battling it out for an untested Asian pitcher.

That kind of predatory behavior would generally be received by the local community with rage, but I guess when you’re only interested in molesting the mind of a child—as opposed to their body—it’s not that big a deal.

Either way, whether groups are penetrating public schools to spread the word of their god, or corporate interests are altering educational material to ensure future profit, it’s clear that the real activists of the day will need to bring their fight to the school yard, passing out smokes, booze and copies of the Kama Sutra.

Because if the right wins the recess demographic, we’ll all eventually be left murmuring “out damn spot” while rubbing at the melanoma growing on our noses. As for Kirk Cameron?

Well, something tells me that the boys at Exxon, whilst packing for Newt’s moon-abode, will decide to leave him behind.

That’s right, Klein’s bill will hold teachers to the same decency standards set by the Federal Communications Commission—which means if it’s not fit for the public airwaves, it’s not fit for the classroom. Well, as far as teachers are concerned: the students, on the other hand, get to continue cussing like they’re on HBO.

It’s surprising that this State Legislature has taken so long to finally address what has clearly been a problem in our schools for decades. And let’s face it, Arizona teachers are some foul-mouthed m@#$*&-f$@#ers. (Though to be fair, you would be too if you were a teacher in Arizona.)

I am a living example of this fact. Having taught in Arizona for nearly a decade, I started each new year by walking in and saying, “hello class, I’m your f@#$%ing teacher Mike Stevens, and this is English 10-f#!@$ing-1. Get ready to learn some sh#@.” Admittedly, this made educating my students difficult, as they kept interrupting my reenactments of Chris Rock bits with stupid questions like, “Dude, why you always cussing so much?”

“It’s ‘why ARE you always cussing so much’,” I’d inform the student, then instruct them all to “learn the f#@$ing language you sh!#-eating f#@#-faces.”

Of course, I’m just one example, but I doubt highly that Sen. Klein would have introduced this legislation if cussing teachers wasn’t a sincere pandemic. That said, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to hold teachers to the same standards we hold Jerry Springer to.

Seriously, has Sen. Klein watched television lately? Between the jibber-jabber of defendants on Judge Judy and the sexucation that is a Jack-in-the-Box commercial, the public airwaves aren’t exactly a model for public decorum. To be honest, if not for public television, I would have never picked up a phrase like vaginoplasty—which apparently is only one of the 739 cosmetic surgeries doctors have used to turn Joan Rivers into a talking cheese dip.*

Plus, on TV, you can show full frontal nudity just as long as you black out the bullseyes. And while most school districts have strict dress codes for their teachers, gateway bills like SB 1467 will only open the door for teachers and their pro-nudity agenda. Place teachers under FCC guidelines, and they’ll bounce from dress slacks to pasties in the time it takes a 4th-grader to repeat the words, “God damn.”

And that’s my real concern about Sen. Klein’s bill, and likely something she has ironically overlooked. After all, is there a more god-less arena in all of America than public television? On TV, we learn to celebrate lesbians like Ellen, tragically unfit gay fitness gurus like Richard Simmons, and closeted homosexuals like Ed Cantor. On the public airwaves, we find Desperate Housewives, learn to respect Cartman’s “authoritah” and discover how gross it is when contestants on the new Fear Factor eat walrus testicles.

During the commercials, we learn how to beat a DUI conviction, get a quick and easy divorce, and to give women what they really, truly want—apparently, it’s either a full head of hair or a four-hour erection.

And that’s just during the daytime: students in night school will be up against the Girls Gone Wild measure of obscenity. And come on, there’s no way those poor bastards will learn a thing if their teachers are legally allowed to go wild–an act that generally includes a glass of wine, a novel and a scoop of Ben and Jerry’s.

Considering all this, does Sen. Klein really want teachers to be governed by the extremely loose and largely nonexistent guidelines we’ve established for broadcast television?

That’s a rhetorical question, because of course she doesn’t. Klein doesn’t want the bill—somewhat reminiscent of one introduced by former Sen. Thayer Verschoor in 2006 which proposed banning teachers from engaging in political discussions in the classroom—to win the day. She merely wants the valuable press it will get her in an election year. And though she’s only in her first term, she’s a pretty quick study at getting press.

Remember when she pointed a loaded gun at an Arizona Republic reporter last year? Remember, she was in the middle of an interview with Richard Reulas when she picked the gun up and pointed it at his chest to make a point. That point?

“I’m a crazy bitch.”

And who could forget the time when she stood up on the Senate floor and read a letter supposedly written by a substitute teacher complaining about all the illegal immigrants in public schools, almost all of whom were more interested in being gang bangers than in education? If you remember that—and can get over the fact that Klein is the only person in history to take what a substitute teacher says seriously—then you understand that Klein’s got a knack for garnering headlines through her willingness to do amazingly stupid crap.

But SB 1467 is more than mindless, stupid crap. Let’s forget, for the moment, that state legislatures have no way to compel the FCC to monitor classrooms in Arizona. Let’s also forget the fact that her bill provides no answer to how teacher profanity will be policed—even if it does provide a three-strikes-and-you’re-fired approach to punishment. And let’s forget the fact that the bill has no chance of passing, even in a state as red-necked as Arizona.

All we really need to look at is the fact that while Sen. Klein may be offended by the “f word,” she’s far more offended by science. And though she probably wouldn’t care for the words any of her three children use to describe “mommy dearest” when she’s not around, she’s far more disturbed by the thought of her kids learning about Mexican-American history. And Sen. Klein might believe profanity, in general, is a bad thing to teach our children, but I’ll bet a year’s salary she’d rather our children learn the seven words you can’t say on television than to learn about natural selection.

And because teachers at public schools teach all those things, the good senator has answered back with SB 1467, which is not so much a bill as it is a middle finger to teachers. You know, the same solid “fuck you” Republican politicians have been greeting teachers with for the last four decades.

Because honestly, if you truly wanted to stop teachers from cussing, you could do so simply by implementing a swear jar. You know, a teacher calls a student what he is instead of what he’s named, and he has to drop a buck in the jar. It’s a time-tested formula that would actually probably work quite well in today’s economy.

And though that may sound like an overly simple approach to the non-problem of cussing teachers, it undoubtedly would raise more revenue than anything Sen. Klein has proposed in her tenure as a state senator.

That said, if Sen. Klein really wants teachers to quit cussing, perhaps she should quit legislating them into poverty while treating them as if they were devil worshipers who want to turn our children into promiscuous drug fiends who hate America.

After all, that’s why I cussed so much when I was a teacher.**

* You have to admit, after 739 plastic surgeries, the 78-year-old Joan Rivers doesn’t look a day over dead for decades. Seriously, that woman’s going to decompose slower than dinosaur bones. I.e., that bitch has the carbon shelf life of granite and is in no way biodegradable.

Get on it tree huggers.

**While reading this column, you imagined more swear words than I actually used. In other words, “bleeping” doesn’t protect people from profanity, it only stimulates their imaginations. Redaction gives birth to imagination. Take note Sen. Klein. As Derrida argued, absence creates difference.

That said, something tells me if the church had known about a recent development in birth control technology, they wouldn’t have been so eager to file a lawsuit. Or, at the least, they’d be too busy laughing to worry about insurance mandates. I am of course referring to the study—published in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology—which found that a dramatic decrease in sperm production could be achieved via a simple process of zapping the testicles with an ultrasound beam.

Yep, as it turns out, zapping your boys with waves of noise may very well be the future of contraception.

While I’m not sure if the tests were conducted in a lab or on the set of the next Jackass movie, what I do know is that by zapping the nuts of rats doctors were able to kill the germ cells that produce sperm. According to the study, for best results the rats had to endure two separate 15 minutes sessions of boombox-crotch therapy. The report doesn’t say, however, if that gave the female rat enough time to come to her senses and call a cab.

Either way, this is great news on two fronts. For starters, none of the rats were hurt in the study—in fact, most of them are reportedly doing fine and are already on their way to Arizona to stump for the Feb. 28th primary. Of greater importance though is the procedure’s potential use on humans. Sadly, that day might still be a few years away, as there apparently are a few differences between a rat and a human male.

Okay, okay, mainly just the tail, to be honest, but according to the study “size does matter.”

As the director of the Turek Clinic in San Francisco, Dr. Paul Turek, points out, the average rat testicles are like “lima beans, compared to the kiwi-sized testicles of humans.” And while I don’t know what kind of doctor he is, he’s likely not the kind of doctor that he needs to make an appointment with if his nuts truly are the size of kiwis.

Still, Dr. Turek rightly points out the trickiness of properly zapping the testicle, because in a human “the laws of physics may differ a bit and if the beam misses a single area of the 700 feet of sperm producing tubules in the human testicle, you may have a sperm count,” Turek said. In the end, measuring the proper dosage—or, in this case, ampage—might take some trial, error and college frat boys juiced up on gin.

Many skeptics have already dismissed the potential of this procedure, noting that men are statistically less likely to take on the responsibility for birth control than are women. If men won’t wear or carry condoms, these skeptics argue, there’s no way they’re going to apply a current of noise to their junk.

But what these skeptics are missing is the fact that men are also, statistically speaking, far more likely than women to electrocute themselves for fun. Seriously, I once worked at a publishing firm where we had one of those glowing electric glass orbs. One day, a coworker noticed that if he placed his hand on the orb and then touched something metal he would receive a little shock. Then he discovered that if he held his hand on the orb and touched something metal with his elbow, that little shock turned into a biting flash of pain. Then he discovered that if he held his hand on the orb and touched something metal with his tongue, he’d piss his pants.

Needless to say, for the next six months every male working at that publishing house—including the owner—took their turn trying to one-up everyone else by shocking themselves in the most painful, creative way they could. It didn’t matter the time of the day or how busy things were, every 20 minutes or so you’d hear a little “zap” from the back room followed by some dumb ass yelping in pain to a chorus of laughter. Now, for the record, none of us ever tried putting our hand on the orb while touching something metal with our balls, but if we hadn’t been in a work environment we probably would have tried that first.

In any case, if we can do that with electricity, just imagine what we’d do with testicle-shaped headphones and Metallica’s “Master of the Puppets.”

So yeah, blasting your balls with sound waves is a form of birth control men can totally get on board with. In fact, I’d encourage guys to help speed up the scientific process by experimenting with this at home. I know I will. Hell, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the heat of the moment only to discover neither of us had a condom—all the while not knowing I could have simply solved the problem by grinding my iPod.

So guys, get on this. We need to know how strong a sound wave is required to fully neutralize a human sac. Plus, with any new medical procedure, there are likely going to be side effects that we’re going to want to be aware of.* That said, I do want to stress that you should use caution and good judgment in you experiments, however, as zapping the testicle is a new procedure, largely untested on humans outside of Germany.

In other words, you don’t want to go overboard with the stereophonics. Start with a small dosage to test your tolerance, then build up from there. Leave the real nut-bruising volumes for the military, which has likely already discovered that if you generate enough base, you’ve got yourself a handy little device that will make even the most hardened terror suspect beg to be water-boarded.

And while that may violate our Constitution and the tenets of the Geneva convention, I doubt highly that there’s anything in the Papal Encyclicals that prohibits sac-zapping.

*While the rats presented no discernable side effects to the procedure, many of them continue to experience spontaneous erections whenever a microwave is in use.

Well, that’s one way of looking at the Komen foundation’s politically-charged decision to discontinue its funding of breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood facilities. The other way is to realize that the Komen foundation has merely joined the growing army of Christian evangelicals who have been taking aim at Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions, the past few years.

And surprise, it’s an election year. The economy is still in the dumps, and even though the president is black most Americans still blame Republicans for our financial woes. So, it makes sense that the Christian White—er, right—are banging on their God drums once again, attempting to push their unwanted-babies agenda into the headlines. But the Komen foundation’s entrance into this ongoing cultural war is a particularly disheartening one. In taking a political stance on abortion, the group is essentially holding cancer research hostage, not to mention the lives of the thousands of women who benefit from Planned Parenthood’s services.

Most of those women, by the way, are living in poverty and have few if any options when it comes to monitoring their health. And if those women can no longer get breast exams at Planned Parenthood, they’ll just end up getting them in some dark alleyway from some shyster with a coat hanger.

Oh, wait: that’s what they do when they can’t get abortions.

Scratch that last thought, as it doesn’t apply in this case anyway because Planned Parenthood will still comfortably be able to perform the tens of thousands of breast exams it does each year. Without question, Planned Parenthood will miss the money, but with an annual budget of over $1 billion dollars, the yearly loss of Susan G. Komen’s seven or eight hundred thousand dollars won’t exactly lead to the wholesale suspension of any services. Besides, according to The Washington Post, Planned Parenthood raised over $400,000 in online donations since Susan G. Komen officially severed ties with the family-planning organization on Tuesday.

The lesson here is that when fanatical Christians attack, liberals donate.

Thankfully, this is merely a symbolic move meant to satiate Susan G. Komen’s evangelical donors and not one that will heavily impact Planned Parenthood. Sadly, though, the move will likely have a huge impact on cancer research, as pro-choice advocates are tearing up their pink ribbons, dropping out of Komen’s three-day race for the cure, and returning all those pink boxes of cereal they bought to support the organization.

Current public perception aside, the Susan G. Komen foundation has for over three decades done an amazing job at raising both awareness of breast cancer and money to fight it. In fact, until recently, the group was one of the few non-profits in America beyond reproach, universally admired for the services it provided. It’s mind-boggling then that Komen’s board members would jeopardize the future of that great and important work by taking a purely symbolic stance on abortion.

Sadder still is that they’ve turned a charitable organization into a political one. If other such groups take their lead, pretty soon the Salvation Army will only help people out once they’ve been baptized, the Red Cross will force you to invite Jesus into your heart before your transfusion, and your grandmother will have to say grace before the Meals-On-Wheels driver hands over dinner. If you want to call that Christian charity, go ahead; I’m going to stick to calling it extortion.

The ironic thing is that, while Planned Parenthood is the nation’s leading provider of abortions, they’re also America’s leader in preventing them. Between the birth control and contraceptives they provide and the counseling and family planning they offer, the group prevents hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies each year. If the Christian right had their way and Planned Parenthood was run out of town completely, the number of abortions in America would increase dramatically.

Which wouldn’t sadden me in the least, though I’m probably not the best person to speak on the subject because I love abortions as much as I likely would the child I’ll coincidentally never have to have. Seriously, I think they’re so wonderful, I’d give them out for Christmas gifts if I could.

Of course, I’m not a Christian fundamentalist—most of whom would probably be saddened by a dramatic spike in abortions. Still, I find it hard to believe Christians so greatly value the sanctity of life when they clearly don’t value the sanctity of anything else. Women’s rights, the separation of church and state, the basic principles of the Constitution, quality education, science, the welfare of the needy: all of these things are disposable to the Christian right when it comes to their pursuit of a god-fearing America. It’s an America in which all sins have been outlawed, which for Christians is a good thing because it’s easier to outlaw temptation than to develop the strength of character required to resist it.

Still, many Christians strongly believe that God’s will directs everything, and that’s why they argue that a fetus is only conceived because God wants that baby to live. Following that line of logic, though, you pretty much have to accept as well that if you develop cancer, God wants you dead.

And perhaps it’s this kind of thinking that led Susan G. Komen’s board members to make a decision that could so adversely impact its ability to continue doing the good deeds they’ve done for decades. Still, I hope they do continue that work, and I’d encourage people angered by the foundation to seek out other groups devoted to cancer research and preventative health care to donate to instead. Because unlike God and apparently the Susan G. Komen foundation: If you get sick, I want you to live.

Unless you’ve yet to develop a consciousness or a heartbeat, in which case: Merry Christmas.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a simple question: How many unborn fetuses did God abort when he flooded the world back in the days of the Old Testament? The truth is, I don’t know the answer to that question, or if there even is an answer to it.

But if there is one, I imagine the number is a far greater total than Planned Parenthood will ever reach, so if you want to boycott the wicked might I suggest you start first with your church?

Anger at the gall of the man to step down from the post he attained last year through means so questionable they sharply divided the unity of the party, but elated at the fact Democrats don’t have to face 2012 while being led by a man who has less poise in front of a crowd than a seven-year-old at his first spelling bee.

In a letter sent out this morning, Cherny listed the reasons he was stepping down, none of which I read because, quite frankly, he had me at goodbye.

You know, I felt completed?

Okay, okay. I read the letter, and after I punched a hole through my TV with my face, I read it again. While reading it, I couldn’t help but revisit the controversy over Cherny’s election in January of 2011. If you don’t recall, Cherny was not an elected PC, thus making him unqualified to run for the position. That is until Ann Wallack, the somewhat de facto Chair of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, appointed him as a PC at the last minute. The legitimacy of this move was questioned by many, so much so that after Cherny narrowly defeated Rodney Glassman many dismissed the entire election as invalid and proof that the party was controlled by elitists no longer capable of serving the Democrats it’s supposed to represent.

Contrast last January’s controversial election with Cherny’s assertion in today’s letter that “at the urging of many of our state leaders, I agreed to serve for at least a year” because the party needed leadership after the disastrous 2010 elections, and you’ll understand why I—and likely Mr. Glassman—was so angry.

Now, Cherny doesn’t mention who those state leaders were that wanted him to “serve for at least a year,” but they must not have been amongst the 500 state committee members who participated in 2011’s election, because Cherny promised those people at least two years of service. Had the voters known that Cherny was running not to do a good job or to rebuild the party or even to serve Democrats, but simply because some undefined “state leaders” urged him to do so—for at least one year—that election likely would have gone the other way or not have happened at all.

Still, if you’re a Democrat, at least you now know how it feels to be a college football recruit who signs a letter of commitment one day only to learn on the next that the coach who recruited you just jumped to the NFL. And if you’re Rodney Glassman? Well, now you know how it feels to get Punk’d.

Needless to say, I was pretty angered by this news, but I can’t lie: it also made me happy as hell. If you have to ask why, you haven’t been paying attention. The simple fact is Cherny was an abysmal Chair. I won’t go so far as to say incompetent—more on this in a bit—but he certainly failed to fulfill any of his promises to Democrats (though those undefined state leaders might be thrilled with his lack of performance).

That may sound like an odd thing to say considering the many good things that have happened for Arizona Democrats in the past year. After all, Russell Pearce was recalled, Sheriff Joe is being pummeled by scandals, and the Independent Redistricting Commission gave us all new legislative and congressional maps that are, to be fair, more competitive than the ones we’ve been working with the last 10 years. All in all, 2011 was a pretty good year for Democrats.

The problem with this fact is that aside from the state party’s heavy involvement in the redistricting process, everything else came from outside the local party. Citizens for Better Arizona brought down Pearce—though they did have aid from various labor groups, non-profits and an eager local press that staged a five-week media blitz of the Pearce campaign’s dirty tricks. What CBA didn’t have, however, was support from the Arizona Democratic Party. As for the toughest sheriff in white America? Well, Sheriff Joe’s woes stem from federal investigations and reportage, not pressure from the ADP, even if it did pile on after the fact.

Then there’s the redistricting process. While more competitive districts is a good thing, and certainly the party had a hand in the passage of the maps currently being reviewed by the Department of Justice, the simple fact is that three competitive congressional districts (out of nine) and six competitive legislative ones (out of 30) is in no way a “victory” for a state where a third of the people are registered Democrat, a third Republican, and a third independent. To be honest, the only people for whom the new maps are a victory are those with enough money to buy elections because instead of spreading their wealth amongst nine congressional districts, they can more effectively control our state’s politics by spending their money in only three.

It’s a win-win for the corporate citizen in the market for a political puppet on the cheap. I believe it’s called Citizens United, and you can consider it “occupied.”*

Still, the one reason people voted for Cherny was because they believed that due to his national ties he could raise more money than could Glassman—after all, he did raise a good deal of money for his own campaign to be the state’s Treasurer in 2010. Sadly, it is in fundraising where Cherny’s failures are the most troubling.

According to the campaign finance report the ADP filed Monday, the party raised just over $322,000 in 2011. That sum is less than half of what Cherny raised for his personal 2010 campaign, and it clocks in as the lowest amount the party has raised going into an election year since 1999 (when the party raised $243,000). If you subtract inflation from that equation and dig through your couches for change, the party just might be able to supersize its meal at McDonald’s.

By a way of comparison, in 2009—going into 2010’s election year—the ADP raised $728,000. Into 2007? $1,277,000. 2005? $1,922,000. In the end, once you deduct the party’s expenditures for 2011, Cherny announced his exit from the party leadership the exact day he announced the ADP was left with an operating budget of $1,783.03.

When you subtract the money it cost to have someone write Cherny’s resignation letter, he left the Democratic Party with just enough funds to cover the tab for electricity and pizza the next time Organizing for America uses the ADP’s Phoenix office for a “house party”.

And if you’re looking for an analogy to go along with those figures, I’d encourage you to work towards something starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Doing so won’t make you “king of the world,” but it will place you right on the money.

To be fair, there are many explanations for why Cherny couldn’t raise more money. For starters, the controversial nature of his election split the party dramatically. That alone dampened his prospects of raising funds. Plus, with the Pearce recall underway, local dollars from liberals were otherwise spoken for. Most important, though, is the money that comes from national and international groups, most of which weren’t impressed by Cherny’s Alfalfa meets Opie demeanor.

Plus, those groups understand something the average Arizona Democrat doesn’t: Andrie Cherny is not a Democrat.

Don’t get me wrong: he’s a registered Democrat, and it’s likely he’ll run as one in the Democratic primary for the newly created Congressional District 9 (as has been reported by KPNX-TV). But Cherny is also an original member of the No Labels organization, a group of Republicans, Democrats and independents dedicated to the cause of removing partisanship from politics.

And while that may sound noble on the surface, you do have to wonder just how loudly or proudly Cherny can advocate the beliefs holding his party together while maintaining his commitment to middle-of-the-road non-partisanship.

Still Cherny’s milk-toast approach to Democratic principles are part of the reason more Arizonans registered as independents last year than as Democrats. Sadly, it also explains how extremists like Russell Pearce have been able to turn a state created on Valentine’s Day into a border-to-border hate parade. And, yeah, it also goes a long way towards explaining how a veritable stud at fundraising like Cherny proved to be the worst fundraiser in the history of the ADP.

On the bright side though, you now know how it feels to be Punk’d.

But don’t let yourself be Punk’d again. Cherny will shortly announce that he’s running for Congress in Congressional District 9, giving thousands of Democrats yet another chance to not vote for him. This is unfortunate because two of Arizona’s most influential liberals, David Schapira and Kyrsten Sinema, have already committed to that race.

Regardless of how the election turns out, Arizona will lose one if not two of its most important Democrats for at least one political cycle. And Cherny is capitalizing on the Sinema-Schapira showdown, betting that his ability to raise money—his real ability to raise money—will place himself in the same position Eddie Basha found himself in 1994.

In 1994, two prominent Democratic politicians ran for governor of Arizona: Terry Goddard and Paul Johnson. These two wildly superior candidates, however, essentially cancelled out each others’ votes, allowing the less qualified Basha to win the primary (and to get trounced by a man named Fife in the general election). Cherny is betting that history will repeat itself and that more informed Democrats will neutralize the Sinema-Schapira vote. Then, he can no-label his ass into a congressional seat.

But you have a chance to stop him—and his state leaders/handlers—in their tracks. You can demand that Cherny be honest with Arizonans once and for all and run as an independent. Running as a Democrat would not only be dishonest on Cherny’s part, it would also be an admission that he’s not really up for the job (because really, if he was acting as a Democrat in the past year, how do you explain his results?).

More importantly, Democrats now have another chance to elect their party’s leader. My advice? Don’t listen to colleagues with skin in a game they likely haven’t invited you to play. Vote for someone who is truly a Democrat, someone who will fight for what you believe in, even if it’s not popular.

Because in the end you’re better off with someone who loses an election fighting the right and just fight than finding yourself on the losing end of a victory for someone working against your best interests.

And if you supported Cherny last January, that’s exactly where you’re finding yourself today.

Just saying.

* A recent USA Today story reports that only 53 of our nation’s 435 Congressional districts are competitive. As horrifying as that news is, our new-born corporate citizens couldn’t be happier. It’s far easier and cheaper to control elections—and the nation—when you only have to worry about 53 of them. Using money to push the nation to the right or left or into a virtual cat’s eye has never been easier.

And today, after forty years of Republicans fulfilling their prophecies by slashing school budgets, banning or censoring courses of study, and crippling teachers with an encyclopedia of restrictions to follow and hoops to jump through, public schools are finally living up to the dystopian visions talk radio has been warning us about ever since the 60s demonstrated just how powerful a political force young people can be when educated.

Never content with simply destroying a vital public institution, Republicans are now increasingly turning to the school system they’ve gutted to gain personal profit and self-advancement. Which brings me to Arizona State Legislators Rich Crandall and Terri Proud: both recently introduced legislation that will adversely affect public schools if passed into law.

Proud’s proposed bills—HBs 2563 and 2473—would allow schools to offer the Bible as an elective, as opposed to just the inescapably pervasive cultural doctrine it currently is. Crandall’s bill–SB 1061—would allow schools to opt out of the National School Lunch Program, which requires schools to offer free lunches for poor and needy children. The bill, in part, reads: “Whereas it is necessary to let the poor eat cake, their children aren’t eating shit.”

On the surface, Crandall’s bill is the more patently self-serving one, as the “distinguished” gentlemen has financial ties to two different companies that provide nutritional services and menus to public schools (and does so in over 14 states). By removing federal guidelines on school lunches, though, Crandall will more easily be able to line up contracts with local schools for his businesses, thus increasing his personal bottom line. And while this fact points to a clear conflict of interest for Crandall, he’s merely keeping to a long-standing Republican tradition of campaigning on the virtues of free market capitalism, only to, once elected, use their governing power to legislate themselves a rewarding competitive advantage.

To Crandall’s credit, he does have legitimate concerns about the Federal mandates schools must follow. For starters, the Dept. of Agriculture is currently revising regulations for the lunch program. According to Crandall, new mandates—such as providing fresh fruits with breakfast—“could prove burdensome.” Of course, I’m not certain whether he means it would be burdensome for the schools or for the kids who have lived off processed foods so long that fresh fruit will likely cause their digestive tracts to clamp down tighter than a well-oiled bear trap.

Crandall dismisses the notion that many students living in poverty will end up losing the one decent meal they get each day, saying he has “complete confidence the local school board’s going to take care” of hungry children, which is odd considering he doesn’t trust schools to do anything else properly. Still, Crandall says most schools will likely stick with the Federal program or create ones of their own.

Some of the schools that have a small percentage of eligible students, he concedes, will opt out of the program. In those cases, that small percentage of poor kids lucky enough to be going to school with a bunch of upper middle class and wealthy kids (and getting the better education that comes with greater property tax revenues) have a simple choice: go to another, lesser school and eat, or fight through a little scurvy to get a better education.

I believe they call that school choice.

Aside from allowing Crandall to bolster his businesses’ financial reports, he’ll also get brownie points from the extremist, Christian fringe of his party which views public education as the greatest obstacle to good parenting—and, as I’ve said elsewhere, I completely understand why, if you’re a Christian, you don’t want your children going to school and learning about the world you’ve lied to them about.

Seriously, I understand, and that’s exactly why it’s so important that your children be well educated. In the end, parents are only stuck with their kids for 18 years, whereas society is on the hook until they die. Frankly, society has a greater stake in a child’s well-being than does any parent. So, if you want to raise your kids to be fanatics, go ahead; but the second they walk outside the front door I feel it’s my social obligation to bombard them with Nietzsche quotes, historical and scientific facts, and copies of the The Communist Manifesto.

And, yeah, if need be, a free lunch.

Call me a crazy liberal if you will, but I don’t think children should suffer because their parents are bad capitalists. It’s something I learned in a famous book that suggested children shouldn’t wear the sins of their fathers. Look it up.

And with that said, you might be wondering what Christianity has to do with school lunches. You know, aside from the fact that it drives conservative Christians nuts that their tax dollars are being used to fund places that challenge blind faith with reason, not to mention Republicans’ general disgust at the idea of their taxes being spent on children other than their own.

The truth is the school lunch hour has become the Christian right’s secret weapon in spreading the word of God throughout high school campuses. Though they’ve lost fights to get prayer in school and to have intelligent design “taught” alongside evolution, Christians have been wildly successful at turning school lunch hours into come-to-Jesus moments. Through various “social clubs” that meet in class rooms, most high schools offer lunch-time prayer circles led by faculty members. So, instead of hanging out with friends, catching up on their homework, or playing ball during lunch, students can get their Jesus on with an adult whose credentials in mathematics undoubtedly qualify him or her to answer the headier theological questions young people spend so much time thinking about.

And in case you were an Arizona student and were never taught to read between the lines, these prayer clubs are really just faith-based alternatives to sex education in which your kids’ band instructor teaches them that abstinence is a virtue, lust is a sin, and homosexuality is a ticket to hell.

Still, I suppose these “clubs” are a good thing, as they’ll give poor children something to do instead of going to the cafeteria to eat. Plus, they can use the prayer time to thank Jesus for the meal he didn’t provide.

Now, in case your child’s school doesn’t offer lunch-time sermons, Rep. Proud’s recent legislative offerings have got your back. If her bills pass, they will effectively create a loop-hole in the separation of church in state that has kept prayer from school. So, instead of your child learning productive skills in wood shop or developing a greater understanding of people in sociology, they can elect to study the one and only subject repeatedly taught for free, by millions, some of which will even come to your door uninvited to do so.

Seriously, the Bible is the most taught subject in all of America. Parents teach it, churches teach it, the media teach it, athletes preach it, and you can even learn about the Bible by standing behind people waiting in line at the grocery store. Considering this, do high school kids really need another venue for learning about the Bible? For the record, that’s a rhetorical question meant for those who believe it would be a good use of public funds to provide students with instructional courses on breathing.

According to Proud, though, courses in the Bible do have an important educational role aside from further indoctrinating students into the dogma they were born into. She believes the course would allow teachers to demonstrate the Bible’s cultural impact via the references made to it in countless works of art and literature, most of which are now illegal to teach in Arizona.

“This is such an essential foundation for our kids’ knowledge,” Proud argues because, “we are so engulfed in [the Bible].”

On this point, I couldn’t agree with Proud more: we are engulfed with it, so instead of pissing into the ocean how about you throw our kids a life raft?

Besides, the suggestion that the Bible will be taught simply as an influence on art is duplicitous. Any real academic discussion of a Biblical reference will require a detailed explication of the passage being alluded to. In the end, this course is little more than Bible study and a firmly flipped middle finger to those disturbed by Arizona’s recent banishment of Mexican-American studies in Arizona schools.

But Proud has good reasons for proposing this legislation. No, she’s not just being a good Christian, nor is she particularly concerned with quality education. The truth is, she’s a first-term legislator who recently got redistricted into a more competitive legislative district (and in 2010 she narrowly won by 2 percent of the vote). As Proud is a first-term Representative with little to run on besides her Republican credentials, and as Americans are increasingly angry at Republicans for their obstinate refusal to do anything to help America if it helped President Obama at the same time, she needs something to campaign on. Policy? Vision? Leadership?

Nope, Proud is choosing to travel down the well-worn path of Christian acceptionalism. Doing so won’t improve education in the slightest, and it likely won’t get her reelected later this November. But it will allow her and the Christian right to throw one more stone at the 21st century they’re so desperate to prevent from happening.

Chalk these bills up as a few more battlefields in the Christian right’s war against enlightenment. Honestly, it’s a hopeless battle, because though Crandall might score some cash if his bill passes and Proud will certainly gain some votes simply for proposing hers, the reality is some things can’t be taught in school.

And if there is any lesson our current world teaches us, it’s that if there is a God he clearly doesn’t care. And if there’s a second lesson, it’s that Republican candidates for office are shameless whores that loudly pray to God while only serving themselves.

Class dismissed.

Needless to say, since my nation hands over the keys to nuclear missiles to whoever has the most impressive chugging credentials, I tend to approach upcoming elections with the same kind of dread a lifelong smoker feels while waiting for the results of a chest X-Ray.

This year, though, I’m not afraid. Not because I’m 100 percent confident that Obama will handedly win his bid for a second term—though I am. No, I’m not afraid because I am frankly too bedazzled by the absurdist spectacle the GOP Primaries have become to care about their impact on America’s future.

Seriously, this crop of GOP candidates is comically bad in ways so historical they are actually achieving a level of sublimity. It’s a rare and creepy kind of beauty only found in Ed Wood films and rubenesque hookers, and I’m sure it’ll give us all something to look back fondly on in a few years when said candidates reduce America to a pile of rubble.

Just consider the events of today alone: Rick Perry, who said God asked him to run for president, dropped out of the race, proving that along with being a weak candidate he’s also a crappy Christian; Mitt Romney spent the day not answering questions about the taxes he doesn’t pay; Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife revealed that while the former Speaker of the House likes his borders closed, he prefers his marriages open; Rick Santorum was named the official winner of the Iowa Caucus nearly two weeks after America Googled an end to his campaign; and Ron Paul spun straw into gold in exchange for a young woman’s first born.

All of that in only one day, and it’s not even February. At this rate, by the time November rolls around we’re likely going to discover that Newt has a sex tape, that Romney learned how to store his pets while traveling by watching National Lampoon’s Vacation, and that Ron Paul has actually been dead for several years.

Still, the real political news this year will continue to be the role Super PACs are having in the first presidential campaign since Citizens United gave birth to citizens incorporated. While we all knew the advent of Super PACs would lead to millions—if not billions—of dollars being dumped anonymously into attack ads, what we perhaps didn’t expect was the emergence of The Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC.

In case you don’t know, the host of the Stephen Colbert Report started a Super PAC earlier this year in order to raise money to impact politics in his own, sarcastic way (such as attempting to buy the naming rights of the South Carolina GOP Primary as well as running a series of ads asking people to vote for a candidate who is no longer in the race but still on the ballot as a way of actually voting for Colbert).

Colbert recently signed the Super PAC over to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, and the two comedians appear intent on using this new, powerful political organization to make as big a mockery of the American electoral process as they can.

Amusing as Stewart and Colbert’s Super Pac is, it’s also a sad testament to how broken American democracy truly has become. Stewart, who regularly shows up in polls as America’s most trusted name in news while simultaneously hosting a fake news show, and Colbert, who clearly is relishing the comedic possibilities of a legitimate though tongue-in-cheek run for president, have both become major players in our nation’s political discussions.

They’ve been credited with the passage of numerous bills in Congress and last year staged a political rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that drew a crowd of nearly 300,000 people. That’s more than three times the crowd that showed up at the rally Stewart and Colbert were spoofing—the Restoring Honor rally hosted by former Fox News personality and current nobody Glenn Beck. The fact that the spoof outdrew the original, “honest” attempt at a political rally should not be a surprise, though.

The jester has always had a role in politics, sniping from the side and lampooning the process as a whole. But today, jesters are not just the voice of reason: in many cases, they’re the ones directing our political discussions from the get go. Say what you will, but rodeo clowns like Rush Limbaugh who are simply reading a script they clearly don’t believe and caricatures like Colbert are having a greater influence on the average American’s beliefs than are President Obama, Speaker of the House John Boehner, or any of the current Republican candidates for president.

This is a new phenomenon in our nation’s history. Oh sure, late night comedians have always garnered the admiration and love of millions, but in the past when people wanted political direction and leadership, they turned towards their elected officials, community organizers or religious leader: not Johnny Carson.

Not that politics has ever been dignified or pretty, but what we’re seeing today is a political system so broken and corrupt, so polluted with theatrics, money and borderline sociopaths, intelligent people can no longer take the system seriously or view the politicians as legitimate servants to our nation’s best interests. Our democracy has become a theatrical performance, and we readily acknowledge that the politicians are mere actors sticking to a script their handlers have written for them.

We’re a sophisticated society, and suspending our disbelief long enough to be moved emotionally or intellectually by a candidate’s rhetoric is no longer possible. We know it’s a farce, and millions of Americans echo this truth everyday. But unless you have the ability to start your own Super PAC, it’s a farce you still have to play along with—because if the candidate starring as the politician who’ll generally vote the way you would loses, you lose. And vice versa. So, we volunteer, we donate our money, and we vote.

We go through the motions: we keep skipping down that yellow brick road knowing all along that not only is there no Wizard, there’s also no Oz.

So is it any surprise that we turn to entertainers for political insight and guidance? After all, it’s in people like Stewart and Colbert, Limbaugh and Beck, that we find the political catharsis we no longer can achieve through our elected officials, and it’s in laughing at the growing absurdities of our democracy that we can learn to accept, even grow comfortable with, our necessary participation in a play we didn’t write, don’t want to watch, and stopped believing in years ago.

But that’s the American political system, and it’s worked for over 200 years. Still, how much longer can we reasonably continue looking at it as a system through which justice, security and social progress can be achieved when it increasingly feels less like a democracy and more like a ticking bomb whose eruption is inevitable? That’s a difficult question to answer, and until someone does the only thing a sane person can do in the meantime is sit back, shrug their shoulders and laugh hysterically like Slim Pickens riding that missile at the end of Dr. Strangelove.

Yee-haw?

At a campaign stop shortly after the Iowa Caucus, Santorum implied that allowing gay couples to marry would be similar to legalizing polygamy—a stupid argument sure, but one that allowed him to rile up his base’s fear of gays and Mormons at the same time. While speaking at a private school the following day, he again teed of on the LGBT community, suggesting a child with gay parents would be better off with heterosexual parents even if the father was in prison. That’s silly, of course, because once that dude gets to prison, he’s gay whether he likes it or not.

Surprisingly, New Hampshire voters weren’t moved by Santorum’s attempts to defend the sanctity of marriage. Receiving only 9.4 percent of the vote, his fifth-place finish strongly indicates that even Republican voters understand A., how to Google, and B., that social issues should not be a major focus of a nation at war and in the midst of a prolonged recession. Still, Santorum’s homophobic trek across America got me thinking about the importance of family and, more importantly, who and what would make the best parent.

Generally, I’m the last person you’d want to turn to for advice on raising children. For starters, I have no children of my own, so my opinion—which is blissfully unencumbered by the emotional attachments and damage that cause most parents to make so many retarded decisions—is a largely uninformed one. Plus, I don’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about the well-fare of children. Don’t misunderstand: it’s not that I dislike kids; it’s that I dislike them so much I occasionally wish I were a woman just so I could abort a few of them.

What can I say: I’m a bastard. But that brings me to my point.

I’m legally a bastard. Born out of wedlock, my birth certificate doesn’t even list a father, nor have I ever met the man or spent a dime of the child support he never paid. It never mattered to me, but the notion that a father in the pen was better than one in a chartreuse blazer got me wondering how deadbeat dads fit into Santorum’s rubric for parental efficacy.

As far as I know, my biological dad never spent time in jail or in the arms of another man. So kudos to pops, but based on his firm belief that fatherless homes lead to increased criminal activity and drug use amongst children, Santorum would undoubtedly say my absentee father was worse than one in prison (regardless of the nature of the crime involved). But would Santorum be willing to concede that a gay parent was better than no parent at all? That there might be some cases where having a gay person at home, paying the bills and taking care of a child is better than a kid raising him or herself?

Because in most situations where a gay couple has a child, the child is adopted. In fact, recent numbers suggest that over four percent of all adopted children are adopted by gay couples, and that represents over 200,000 children who, according to Santorum, would be better off getting bounced from one foster home to the next than being raised by two gay people who truly want to be parents.

And a person who truly wants to be a parent is probably better than one who simply happens to be one.

In my own life, I was lucky because my mother was an amazingly loving woman. But as amazing as she was, she was also brutally honest and stricken with a mean streak, which meant she really got a kick out of letting me know how much of an accident I was (particularly around Christmas when I was hinting at what I’d like to see under the tree).

Not only was I not planned for, I was conceived in Phoenix, AZ, in August. If you’ve ever been to Phoenix in August, you know that the only thing you want to do less in such oppressive heat than have sex is to die first, then have sex. Seriously, on most summer days in Phoenix, I’d rather be waterboarded than have sex*.

So, did my parents love each other? Did they want to build a life together? Were they swept away on waves of romance and poetic sentiment? Hell no, it was so hot and sweaty they smelled like livestock, but they were too horned up to care. And nine months later, in May of 1973, my unwed mother gave birth to a byproduct of pure, unadulterated lust.

And the way I see it, though that makes me a bastard it also makes me an honest baby. Planned for? No. But I’m the result of two people earnestly digging what each other had to offer, and even though Santorum’s God may frown upon the procreant urge, I’d rather be the product of lust than a Hallmark baby.

And statistically speaking, most of you reading this are Hallmark babies.

Let me explain: If you, like damn near everyone I know, were born between the middle of August and the middle of November, you were conceived in the midst of a hurricane of consumer-driven special occasions we call the holiday season. Whether it’s Halloween and the taboo costumes that come with it, New Year’s Eve and its mandatory and drunken kiss at midnight, or Valentine’s Day and its guarantee of either a sexual hookup or a relationship-destroying fight, the holiday season is a time when colder temperatures, excessive booze, and consumer-driven festiveness come together to form an environment in which it is nearly impossible to not conceive a child. Hell, it’s so easy to get pregnant during the Christmas season, some people get knocked up without even having sex.

Or at least that’s what the Bible says.

This is not to say your parents didn’t love each other, or that they weren’t even all that worked up over one another when you were conceived. But let’s face it: it’s easy to feel more amorous toward your significant other when you spend Christmas morning showing off your new two-carat diamond ring or setting up a bitching 55-inch TV.

That doesn’t mean I’m better than someone born between August and November, just that my parents had to overcome a rather inhospitable environment to conceive me, whereas a Hallmark baby pretty much spontaneously combusted in his/her mother’s womb.

But regardless of how a child comes into being, what matters is how the parent treats and cares for the child, not just today but forever, as a child is a lifelong commitment that will test you, try you, and depend upon you far beyond the age of 18.

Can a gay couple pass those tests better than a straight one? There’s no way to know for certain. One thing we do know though is that a gay couple raising a child—whether it’s adopted or the outcome of surrogacy—had to pass more tests, endure more trials, and fight harder to bring a child into their lives than Rick Santorum ever had to with all seven of his children combined. The same is true for my mother, and, frankly, for most parents.

To be fair, a gay couple’s willingness to put so much effort into parenting before they even have a child is not a guarantee that they will be good parents, but there’s no question that they’ve done more to prove that they’re deserving of the responsibility than most parents ever do.

*This is a complete falsehood that in no way, shape or form should prevent you from having sex with me in the summer.

Don’t get me wrong: I respect the hell out of what the guy has accomplished. In the NFL, Tebow is the ultimate underdog, a wild card whose heart outpaces his talents, the gridiron’s version of Rocky Balboa. And we all love Rocky. Hell, Rocky—much like Tebow—sucked ass for most of his fights only to come back in the last few rounds to beat the holy crap out of commies like Ivan Drago. Plus, he scored one for Jesus when he punched the hell out of that Muslim Clubber Lang.

Okay, to be fair, I’m not certain Clubber was Muslim, but he did say a lot of shitty things about white people and their wives. He also killed Mickey, a totally innocent bystander which, according to my Christian friends, makes him a Muslim.

Either way, Tebow is becoming a threat to our national security. Now, personally, I never cared for Tebow. To begin with, he played for the Florida Gators, so the only way he could suck more than he already does is if he stars in the next Twilight “film”. Plus, he’s indirectly responsible for the photo-snapping phenomenon known as Tebowing, the popularity of which makes me hope the Mayans are right about 2012 being the end of humanity, as we’ve clearly exhausted our usefulness.

And I haven’t even touched on that other little thing about Tebow that annoys so many. And no, I’m not talking about the circumcisions he performs on infants of the third world.

Just in case you don’t know, Tebow once famously used his vacation time to travel to the Philippines to help circumcise infants. And while this is a noble act that has been justly praised by many, you have to admit it reeks of a certain Catholic Priest-like creepiness. Think about it: a young man practicing a faith-based celibacy traveling half-way around the world to tip-snip Filipino penis?

Am I suggesting that Tebow is attracted to young boys? Absolutely not. But you have to admit he’s following the traditional recipe to a tee.

Draw your own conclusions, but as far as I’m concerned a guy who’s never used his own dick has no business renovating someone else’s. It’s like a vegan telling me how to cook steak. Seriously, go screw.

Or, if you’re Timmy “Christ Much” Tebow, don’t.

Though Tebow’s ability to simultaneously prove his critics and his fans right by being both an embarrassingly awful quarterback and a consummate winner at the same time has made him a polarizing sports figure, it’s his religiosity that has garnered the most attention. During the NFL’s regular season, however, I didn’t pay much attention to the man’s beliefs.

You see, as much as I love football, I’m also the type of guy who loves it when the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. For this reason, I enjoyed watching the analysts scratch their heads in disbelief every time Tebow mounted a come-from-behind victory. Plus, whenever Tebow threw a winning touchdown pass the camera crews made sure to give us a good close-up of John Elway on the sideline, looking less like a man watching his team win a game and more like a person viewing 2 Girls 1 Cup for the first time. No shit, Elway’s befuddled facial expressions were far more entertaining than anything the Broncos did on the field this season.

It was fun watching Tebow derail the modern game of football, completely dismissing decades of gridiron truisms. The religious thing annoyed quite a few, but I simply found it amusing that so many were beginning to attribute “Tebow time” to divine intervention.

That is, I found it amusing during the regular season, but yesterday’s victory over the Steelers was a playoff game: it mattered. All the proselytizing I found so harmless a month ago suddenly became a serious issue. Tebow’s sermons are different than the ones most athletes give when they thank their maker for allowing them to win the game, because those shout outs to Jesus generally come in the post-game interviews when I am either A., no longer watching, or B., too drunk to care.

But with Tebow, you can’t escape his beliefs. He’s praying after each pass, pointing to the Heavens after each converted first down, and kneeling in prayer whenever his team scores. In fact, unlike other athletes, Tebow is presumptuous enough to thank Jesus before the game even starts. Still, Tebow’s on-field tributes are nothing compared to the announcers, who must be getting paid by some evangelical order because they reference the hamstrung quarterback’s beliefs more than they reference whichever soul-sucking corporation is sponsoring that particular broadcast.

Football is played on Sunday because God wanted us all to have a choice: go to church or watch football. It’s called free will, and through the exercise of it we each develop our own personal relationship with the divine. It’s part of God’s master plan—a plan which Tebow is seriously fucking with.

Still, as annoying as Tebow is, he is not the real threat. No, the real threat lies within the people who see him as far more than a football player. I refer, of course, to conservative American Christians, a collection of people who rigidly follow the teachings of a book they’ve never read.

Let’s face it, Christianity is a religion based solely on faith. Without any substantiating empirical evidence whatsoever, Christians not only believe in some pretty fanciful things, but they actually will use those beliefs to dictate how they live. Well, in most cases, not how they live but rather how others should.

People like Pat Robertson can predict the end of the world, and based on faith alone millions of people will keep trusting his every word—even when the world doesn’t end. They’ll vote against their best interests to elect someone who claims to share their faith, they’ll vote to oppress the rights of those who don’t fit into their faith, and—occasionally—they’ll kill people who won’t abide by their faith.

All this, they do with no concrete evidence to support their beliefs. Imagine then what they could be capable of if they actually had proof of the existence of a higher power? And say what you will, if the Broncos and Tebow beat the Patriots next weekend, even your staunchest atheist is going to have a hard time passing that off as pure chance.

Besides, this particular match-up could speak to an even greater and more imminent threat to life as we know it. I mean, hear we have Timmy Trinity riding into town with his white stallion to face off against the New England Patriots and Tom Brady who is, let’s face it, the fucking devil.

While this showdown may not exactly parallel the events foretold in the Book of Revelations, when has that ever stopped a Christian from leaping to some completely asinine conclusions?

Regardless of what happens next weekend—either reality sets in and the Patriots steamroll the Broncos, or, I don’t know, Tebow wins the game on a last-second Hail Mary that triggers the fiery apocalypse Pat Robertson’s been warning us about all these years—I expect the Christian nation to come away from the game with a renewed passion. Because if Tebow loses and eventually flunks out of the league, they will have a new martyr, crucified for his beliefs; if he wins, they will have the second coming or, at the very least, proof of the miraculous.

Win or lose, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of us, most of whom just want to watch a good football game without mellowing our buzz with thoughts of God’s final judgment. But since there’s no way to stop the game from happening, I have no choice but to root for the Patriots—even though doing so has caused something inside me to die.

The Patriots need to win, and not just to stave off the end of time. Nor do they need to win to stop Tebow’s miraculous run—though, if he leads the Broncos to the big game in February, they might as well start calling it the Jesus Bowl and replace the half-time show with a liturgy, because I’ll officially be over this whole football thing.

No the Patriots need to win for football’s sake. Winning with gimmicks, trick plays and college-style offenses is okay in the regular season. But in the playoffs, it’s the best against the best, and the best embody the combination of talent, heart and a scientific mastery of the craft. And if the best football teams can be beaten by a gimmicky quarterback who passes with less accuracy than I piss with when drunk, then the sport I love will no longer be worth watching.

Thankfully, that’s not how the movie of Sheriff Joe’s life will end.

And if you think for one second that Sheriff Joe doesn’t think his life story is destined for the silver screen, you just haven’t been paying attention. As a native of Arizona, I’ve been watching the self-proclaimed “toughest Sheriff in America” clown it up for the cameras for nearly 20 years. In fact, while Sheriff Joe has done little to improve law enforcement practices during his tenure, he has been wildly successful at implementing practices and policies that garner tons of national press, regardless of how impotent those policies and practices have actually been. He’s built a tent city, made inmates wear pink underwear, brought back chain gangs, and enlisted NASCAR fans into a Sheriff’s Posse to assist local police in various harassment sweeps.

And then there’s the tough talk.

Sheriff Joe doesn’t seem capable of having a conversation without, in one fashion or another, pointing at himself and loudly declaring his machoness. Seriously, his press conferences feel less like addresses from a dignified public official and more like post-bout monologues at Wrestlemania. He’s so self-aggrandizing that whenever I see him on TV, I keep expecting him to rip open his shirt, flex his guns and snap into a Slim Jim.

In fact, if Joe could come up with a proper finishing move, he could have quite a future on Monday Night Raw. (Though Joe, should you happen to read this, when developing a finishing move I’d encourage something a tad less lethal than the move your boys put on Marty Atencio.)

Regardless of what he’s talking about—his crime sweeps, the Cardinals’ run to the Super Bowl, the weather—Sheriff Joe always sounds pissed off and ready to reach out and slap whoever he’s talking to. And the press has eaten it up for nearly 20 years.

Like him or hate him, you have to admit that Sheriff Joe is a larger-than-life caricature, a living, breathing Yosemite Sam who’s rooted and tooted his way into the American pop landscape. And since I’ve been watching the Sheriff Joe show for 20 painful years, I expect—and believe I’m entitled to—a good and proper finale. None of the unresolved “what-the-fucks” The Sopranos left us with when it simply faded to black. And I’ll be damned if he tries to pull some “it was all just a dream” nonsense. No, after what the people of Arizona have had to endure the past two decades, Sheriff Joe owes us an ending on the scale of The Sixth Sense or, dare I say, The Lord of the Rings—though hopefully without all the overly eroticized Hobbit hugs.

So far, it looks like Joe intends on delivering. His announcement that he’ll run for a sixth term is a clear statement that he’s not about to back down just yet; that means we might actually get an ending befitting the man’s oafish legacy. Now, to be clear, when I say ending I am not referring to the election itself.

Sure, November’s election could well spell the end of Arpaio’s political career. While he has won his previous elections with comfortable margins, a lot has changed since he beat Dan Saban in 2008 with 55% of the popular vote (a 13% margin of victory). Arpaio has taken a lot of hits to his image the past four years, and the controversies seem to keep piling up. Plus, his traditional rivals—the Democrats—discovered in last year’s recall of Russell Pearce how to beat polarizing figures like Arpaio: i.e., in Arizona, it takes a Republican to beat a Republican.

That’s a sad indictment of Democratic politicians in the state, who along with failing to sell democratic ideas to voters have also done a fairly piss poor job of selling voters on the Republican values Democrats adopt while campaigning. Still, in last year’s recall Democrats finally accepted the fact that, no matter how obnoxious, racist or unethical the Republican candidate is, he or she is still oddly more appealing to the Arizona voter than a Democrat. So running a Republican—or a Republican like Mike Stauffer who is running as an Independent to avoid a primary—against Arpaio, while ensuring no Democrats get in the race, might well be enough to oust the toughest sheriff in America.

Though I wouldn’t put anything past the Arizona voter. As big a dick as Arpaio is, it’s the Arizona voter that’s been the Viagra allowing good old Joe to shove his snake eye up our collective asses each and every day for the last 19 years. Plus, with a potential second term for President Obama scaring the racists out of their sheets and into the voting booths en masse this November, playing the bigot might work better for Arpaio in 2012 than it did for Pearce in 2011.

Win or lose, November’s election won’t be the end of Arpaio. Hell, if he does lose he’ll likely just show up on the next season of Celebrity Apprentice or Dancing with the Stars—where he’ll yell at us all from a bigger stage than he’s ever been on.

That said, I won’t lie and say I’m not looking forward to watching the campaign unfold. At nearly 80 years old, Arpaio has shown some real signs of aging as of late. And, though I’m not sure what it says about me as a human, I love the idea of Sheriff Joe wrestling to spit out some tough-as-nails rhetoric while simultaneously battling a mini-stroke and/or dumping a deuce into the pair of pink Depends he’s undoubtedly wearing these days. Besides, there’s always a chance that while campaigning Sheriff Joe and that dude from the karate movies (no, not Chuck Norris, but the fat one with the pony tail) will roll through you neighborhood in a tank. And that’s just fun for the whole family.

But it won’t be a proper ending to the movie about Sheriff Joe’s life. No, since he’s been sheriff, Apaio has played to the lore of the wild west, modeling himself as a postmodern version of the gunslinger. Where better, after all, to craft such a persona than in Arizona, home of the OK Corral and Tombstone? For though the wild west may well be dead, its mystique is a ghost more present in the limestone flats between Phoenix and Nogales than anywhere else in the nation. And from the mythos of the wild west Arpaio has drawn the image of himself: the gun-toting anachronism, both the villain and the saint, the modern day Wyatt Earp whose legend will live well beyond the man.

No, there’s only one way for that movie to end: in a blaze of bullets and bravado.

So good luck in your reelection bid, Joe, but do me one favor. When the Feds finally determine the timing matches their political ends and they roll the black vans up to the Sheriff’s Office to slap the handcuffs on you, don’t let them take you alive. Wyatt Earp wouldn’t. Neither would Billy the Kid, Jesse James or Doc Holliday. Nope, all those men would rally the troops, hunker down in some cabin, and grab their guns.

And Joe, you have a tank and hundreds of idiotic posse members who are likely dumb enough to stick with you until the end. And whether that end comes at the hands of a Federal agent or from a Waco-like eruption of flames, it won’t matter. Hell, I’ll even accept you pulling a warden from Shawshank Redemption and painting the MCSO’s walls with your last two cents.

That may seem harsh, but it’s the only proper way for the movie of Sheriff Joe’s life to end—I mean, if he’s going to stay true to his character, he’s essentially painted himself into a corner. Anything less than a fiery shoot out with the federal government, and he can pretty much forget about the Sheriff Joe Show making it to the big screens. Retiring and living out his days in anonymity or getting thrown in jail for a few years before quietly dying in his sleep? Come on, that would be a shitty ass ending, even for a made-for-television movie.

That’s why I’ve got my fingers crossed for an ending that would make Wyatt Earp proud. Only time will tell whether Arpaio truly is the “toughest sheriff in America,” or if he is simply a man, a public servant who read far too much into his press clippings, abused his authority, and eventually will be humbled by the consequences of his actions.

The man will get his day in court or perhaps a quiet retirement, but for the legend there is only one way to go. And based on today’s announcement, it appears Sheriff Joe is—for the time being—still vying for the perfect Hollywood ending.

Don’t worry though, as you’re not alone. Across the nation, millions of Americans wheezed their way into the new year horrified by how they looked, ashamed of their addictions, and, if they’re anything like me, wondering exactly how long they’ve been sleeping next to the ice bin at 7-11. Still, it’s a new year, and that means we’re all blessed with 12 complete months with which to dodge turning things around.

And that leads us to the New Year’s resolution, which for all intents and purposes is the one-night stand of the self-improvement world. Exciting and fun while they last, full of promise and hope, we all know that by this time next week when you think of your resolutions you’re going to feel a little empty, a little guilty, perhaps even a bit dirty. That’s because in just a few days that promise you made yourself about losing weight, quitting smoking, or doing one good deed each day will be as foreign to you as was the stranger you woke up next to on St. Patty’s day.

There are numerous theories as to why we can’t stick to our resolutions. Some believe we are too strict in our prohibitions. Others say we make unrealistic goals, like losing twenty pounds a month or creating an exercise regimen that has you working out more times a week than you did all of last year. But those are both pandering rationalizations designed to make us feel better about failing. The truth is, we don’t stick to our resolutions because we’re fat, lazy bastards with no will power.

Seriously, if you had the grit and self confidence required to keep your resolutions, you wouldn’t need an artificial starting date like a new year to do so. You would have addressed any personal issues you saw as detrimental years ago. To be blunt, if there are things about yourself that you don’t like, get used to them because if you haven’t addressed them by now you never will.

Still, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make resolutions. But when doing so, keep in mind why we make resolutions: we want to feel better about who and what we are. But feeling better and being better are two different things.

With that in mind, don’t worry about being a better person, a more attractive person or a wealthier one. Shoot for any of those goals, and you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Instead of aiming high, you should aim low. And by low, I mean setting goals so easily achievable there’s no way you can fuck it up.

For example, last year I wanted to do something to help the environment and reduce my carbon footprint. Sure, I could have resolved to recycle as much as possible, to only purchase products from eco-friendly companies, and to turn the lights off when leaving a room. But I didn’t make any of those resolutions because, aside from being inconvenient as hell, all three of those things require a lot of diligence. And while I love the world, I’m not sure I love it that much.

Still, I wanted to do my part, which is why I resolved to conserve water by not washing my car. And as tough as that may sound to all of you, it’s been over 13 months since my car has a seen a hose. Yeah, my little Civic looks like a giant bottle of Yoo-Hoo, and inside it kind of smells like a taco from Jack in the Box and a homeless man had a child and then dumped it in an ashtray.

I won’t lie, it’s fucking disgusting. But, that’s the sacrifice I’m willing to make for the world. I should stress that I’m only willing to make that sacrifice because it didn’t take an ounce of effort on my part to do so. Hell, not washing my car actually saved me a lot of time, energy and money—and that allowed me to address another of last year’s resolution.

You see, at the end of 2010, I had put on a little bit of weight. And by a little, I mean something in the neighborhood of a fourth-grader. Clearly, I had to address the issue, but exercising and eating fewer processed foods weren’t options I could live with. That’s why, instead of trying to lose weight, I resolved to buy bigger clothes. Pants, shirts, underwear: the whole shebang.

Keeping this resolution was unbelievably easy, plus it had some rather surprising and positive side effects. For starters, regardless of how fat you are, when you wear baggy clothes people tend to think that you’ve lost a lot of weight. “Dang Mike,” people would say, “those pants are really loose. How much weight have you lost?” Seriously, I heard this all the time. The strange thing was, since people thought I was losing weight, I actually started feeling thinner and more attractive.

No kidding; it was a real ego boost.

Unfortunately it turns out that, much like a goldfish will grow to the size of its pond, a human being will actually grow to the size of their clothing—what can you do, biology’s a bitch. Needless to say, within a few months my once-baggy clothing began to fit quite nicely, thank you. The cool thing about this was, when you go from wearing baggy clothing to wearing shit that actually fits, you’re going to look better no matter how freakishly obese you are. So once again, I found people complimenting my looks.

I’m telling you, it’s a total slacker’s win-win. I didn’t have to wake up with sore, aching muscles from exercising, nor did I once pass on a trip through the drive-thru because I was counting calories. But I still felt thinner, more attractive, more desirable. I felt better.

And so can you.

But if you’re still a non believer, consider one of the primary staples of daytime talk shows: the obese whore who thinks she’s beautiful (and yes Mr. I-Don’t-Watch-Daytime-TV, you know who I’m talking about). She somehow manages to trundle all 400 pounds of her ass up on stage. She’s dressed in what would likely be a muumuu on a normal person but on her it’s a mini-skirt. The tops of her thighs have drooped down over her calves like a freaky flesh sock, and you can’t tell exactly how many boobs she has.

Yeah, you know who I’m talking about, just like you know the first thing she’s going to say once she stops waving her hand and snapping her fingers.

“Honey, I look good.”

Of course, that’s just retarded. She doesn’t look good: she looks like she should either be released back into the wild or strangled to death by Princess Leah. But how she looks is not what matters. What matters is how she feels, and she feels sexy.

Now, be honest with yourself: when was the last time you truly felt sexy? Seriously, do you think you have ever felt as sexy as that bloated beast from the Springer show feels? And can you imagine what you would be capable of, what you could accomplish, if you had that kind of self esteem, delusional though it may be?

Take my advice, folks, and make resolutions you can accomplish. Resolutions that will make you feel better. Screw being a better version of you. When you’re on your deathbed, those six-pack abs won’t mean shit to you, but you’ll regret the hell out of the time you could have spent with your loved ones if you hadn’t been at the gym doing crunches. As for improving the world? If you had that in you, you’d already be doing that. And since you don’t, is it really wise to rub your nose in your own shortcomings the next few months as you’re repeatedly reminded of just how miserably you’ve failed at your resolutions?

No. That’s why if you love to smoke, you should resolve to smoke more. Think donuts are great? Make 2012 the year in which you eat more donuts than vegetables. If getting bombed out of your mind makes you happy, resolve to shock and awe your brain with enough booze to slip an entire frat house into a coma. And if you like whoring around, give me a call sometime.

Of course, such resolutions will not improve who you are or fatten your bank account, but if you accomplish them I guarantee you they will lead to a happier, more fulfilling 2012.

That said, anything beyond 2012 is really dependent upon your doctor, so good luck with that and happy New Year.

I didn’t come down with Arizona by sharing a needle or through unsafe sexual practices. I didn’t eat a tainted cantaloupe, or discover it at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Nope, I was born with it. I lost the natal lottery in a Phoenix-based county hospital back in 1973. Still, I’m 38-years-old today, and I’m proud to say that Arizona hasn’t killed me yet.

But I’ll be damned if it isn’t trying.

Between the summers—which never actually end but simply fade for a few days only to jump up out of nowhere like a monster in a horror movie—and the politicians—who never really govern but simply spend their per diem while curb-stomping voters’ rights with legislation so sadistic it could star in the next sequel to Saw—Arizona can wreak havoc on a person’s nervous system.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just consider the recent actions of Governor Jan Brewer and the State Senate, which earlier tonight impeached Colleen Mathis, who was the Chair of the Independent Redistricting Commission. The Republican-controlled Senate removed Chairwoman Mathis on the premise that the district maps the commission drew somehow unfairly, and in violation of the Constitution, favored Democrats.

Yeah, and Evander Holyfield’s ear was totally taunting Mike Tyson’s teeth.

The fact is that a little over a third of Arizona voters are registered Republican, but Mathis’ “highly partisan” commission drew maps that flat-out guarantee the GOP will control the State House and Senate for the next 10 years, while also guaranteeing that Republicans will, before a single vote is cast, win at least four of Arizona’s nine congressional districts.

Based on the commission’s maps, if you’re a Democrat or a moderate to left-leaning Independent, the only hope Mathis’ “gerrymandering” offered you for the next ten years is that Democrats might manage to win every possible “open” election and, in doing so, create a legislative cat’s eye. You know, not a good government, or a productive government, but rather a gridlocked one (which, admittedly, would be an improvement).

So unless liberals are completely masochistic or they seriously suck at gerrymandering, the suggestion that these maps benefit Democrats is so absurd that Albert Camus has come back from the dead to write a play about it.

Sadly, as the Independent Redistricting Commission was created by Proposition 106, which voters overwhelming supported in hopes of removing politicians from the district-drawing process, Governor Brewer didn’t just impeach Mathis, she also impeached the will of the voters.

But in Brewer’s defense, at least she can now claim to have accomplished something since she became governor. I mean, she hasn’t created jobs or sparked the economy (and no smartass, reducing it to ashes doesn’t count as a “spark”). She’s also failed to improve education, or even fund it for that matter (for the record, since she took office three years ago, state taxes allocated to public education have been reduced from 60 percent of the annual budget to just over 30 percent). And then there’s her approach to health care which…

Well, let’s just say that since so many have been denied coverage by AHCCCS, the number of people in need of medical treatment has “diminished.” But on the plus side, if you own a funeral parlor it’s all good.

Still, Brewer has some fans simply because she signed last year’s SB 1070 (a.k.a., KKK). Even that action, however, is misleading. Brewer didn’t write the bill, or lobby for it or even openly support it. And when the bill landed on her desk, she spent four days doing nothing but deciding what to do with SB 1070, just like she has spent the last three years deliberating what to do with the economy and education while doing absolutely nothing, just like she spent 14 very telling seconds in a debate last year trying to jump-start her brain into speaking, while saying nothing.

But that’s Jan Brewer in a nut shell. A woman solely defined by painfully long periods of inactivity, punctuated by short, imbecilic bursts of political Tourette’s.

The truth is, if you cracked open Brewer’s skull you’d likely discover that the Grand Canyon is only the second biggest hole in the state. In fact, if we changed the name of her book from Scorpions for Breakfast to Shit for Brains no one would bat an eye, not even Jan—at least not for a good minute or two, anyway.

But you can’t blame Brewer. Sure, our governor is currently wiping the shit she just fisted out of Arizona voters off her elbow, but it’s not her fault.

You see, she’s come down with a debilitating case of Arizona, and she’s not alone. From Senate President Russell Pearce—whose approach to our current financial crisis was to author the Birther bill and demand more guns on college campuses—to Sheriff Joe Arpaio—who believes that tent cities can save tax payers the millions of dollars he can’t recall wasting—to State Senator Andy Biggs who believes the only way to safeguard Democracy is to dismantle the commission Arizonans voted into existence because they didn’t trust politicians to draw district maps.

Oh, and if you’re unemployed? Yeah, you’ve got a case of Arizona. If you’ve recently foreclosed on a home or filed for bankruptcy, chances are you’ve come down with Arizona. If you’re currently a student in Arizona’s public education system, congratulations on making it this far into the essay—you’ve yet to show signs of Arizona, but give it time.

Finally, if your name is Mark Price, you came down with a fatal case of Arizona.

That’s because Price died last year when the state of Arizona denied his bone marrow transplant. You see, the powers that be decided that rather than saving a life, they’d prefer to save the state’s $200 million surplus for a rainy day.

And if you don’t realize that this is our rainy day, you’re in the advanced stages of the disease. If you don’t get treatment soon, you’ll end up fancying flag-emblazoned T-shirts, complaining that people don’t speak English while at the same time refusing to fund the schools that teach it, and voting for politicians that prove, time and time again, that your vote is the last thing they care about.

As for me? I’m in the middle stages of the disease, and thanks to tonight’s Special Senate Session flare-up, it looks like I’ll have to wait at least 10 years for Arizona to go into remission.

Until then, perhaps we should change the state’s motto to: Welcome to Arizona—have you considered suicide?

And as well know, God created Adam and Eve, not Skipper and Flipper.

While this line of reasoning confounds many, the fact is it’s a very simple “X leads to Y” cause and effect argument, wherein gay people cause stupid people to say some really retarded shit.

A strange irony to this line of dogma, however, is that while gays and lesbians are still denied the right to marry, a lawsuit filed last week could end up giving those who like banging fish* a constitutional thumbs up.

The lawsuit in question has nothing to do with bestiality, at least not directly. Instead, it has to do with Sea World, orca whales and—as you’ve likely already surmised—slavery.

You see the suit, which was filed Wednesday by People for the Ethical Treatment of Appetizers (PETA), argues that Sea World has violated the constitutional rights of orca whales. In particular, PETA hopes to convince courts that Sea World is guilty of slavery.

PETA points to the 13th Amendment, which both abolished slavery and limited indentured servitude—largely to cases involving adjustable rate mortgages, student loans and Nike-owned sweat shops.

According to PETA, Sea World’s forced captivity of killer whales constitutes as slavery. The case relies solely on the fact that the 13th Amendment doesn’t use the words “people” or “person” to qualify who and what this constitutional protection extends to. Now, if you’re not familiar with the 13th Amendment (and let’s face it, you’re not), it reads as follows:

Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3: Free Willy.

The language of this amendment proves two things: first, that while the constitution has stood the test of time, it can’t survive Microsoft Word’s grammar check; and second, whales are people too.

Because based on language alone, Shamu represents a “party” that has not “been duly convicted” of a crime—even if the court of public opinion finds him to be guilty of “awwww.”

Some of you porpoise-hating luddites out there might think PETA’s argument is insane and has no chance in the courts, but that’s because you haven’t been paying close enough attention to our courts as of late. No shit, based on recent legal precedent, the only things not technically protected by the constitution are people protesting in an inconvenient and poorly marketed manner, “terror” suspects, and vaginas.

In fact, as recently as last year, incorporated businesses were granted constitutional rights by the SCOTUS—which is both text-speak for the Supreme Court and one of the most obnoxious, douche-bag identifying acronyms in history. Seriously, you lazy-ass Twidiots, SCOTUS sounds like a reference to the human taint** not one to the most esteemed court in the nation.

Though, to be fair, “taint” is a pretty apt description of Clarence Thomas.

In any case, there are far better terms with which to label the Supreme Court, particularly since it decided that corporate bribes to politicians were protected as “free speech.” For instance: Shareholders in Goldman Sachs.

Either way, as our courts appear intent on replacing our system of checks and balances with one that declares might is right, while at the same time reducing our constitution to a hand gun, I’d suggest you get used to respecting the rights of the animal kingdom.

Frankly, it’s about time we all did. Personally, I’m a huge supporter of the rights of animals, not to mention their salty, savory tastes (I’m looking at you, Mr. Bovine). And that’s the point really. I mean, what’s the benefit in being a United States citizen like Bank of America, GE or Wal-Mart if you can’t gleefully cannibalize your fellow Americans?

That said, I want to be the first to welcome all the killer whales to the American family. And now that you are a person, Sea World can continue fucking you without upsetting the Christian right with the “unnatural nature” of it all.

Regardless of how the court case turns out, I want to be the first to thank PETA for reminding us all that the rights of animals can always be balanced with the wrongs of our courts.

Oh, and that Clarence Thomas is a total SCOTUS. #Longjohnsilver.

*For the record, I know that dolphins and whales are mammals, not fish, and if that’s been bugging you for the last 720 words, you’re probably too busy counting exactly how many words are actually in this article to ever make it to the end of this sentence.

**The “human taint” is the area on the body between the genitalia and the anus. Thus, a proper usage of SCOTUS would be as follows: “I was wiping my ass and noticed that my SCOTUS was itchy as hell. #Foundacheesedoodle.”

Not only would that fit well within Twitter’s ADHD-inducing character limit, it’s also far more interesting than anything anyone has ever Tweeted.