AMERICAN GAG

Hello PNN nation. What's in the news, you ask. Hell if I know. You probably know better than I do. Two stories did catch my eye however: one about the Rappin' Rovester, and the other about American Idol, Sanjaya. So let's go immediately to the PNN newsroom for these revealing stories.

Karl Rove, at the Radio-Television Correspondents Assn. Dinner, was asked by MC Brad Sherwood what he likes to do for fun. Rove said he liked "rippin' the tops off animals." Sherwood, in disbelief, asked again, and a frisky Rove repeated that he enjoys ripping the tops off animals, "blowin' their heads off," pumpin' his "air" shotgun to emphasize the point. I would have been okay with that, but then he said he was sober.

Then, to the horror of all present, MC Rove started doing The Monkey to some rap music. Now that was upsetting to watch! The group gag reflex was palpable.

I think it was then I got to thinking, wow, we have the top Bush political advisor rippin' the tops off small animals. We've got the Vice President rippin' the tops off small attorneys. And we've got the President rippin' the tops off small countries.

As a nation, we may be beyond impeachment. We may need to put the White House under FBI surveillance. Of course, Cheney's shooting victim, Harry Whittington, is a long time friend of shooter Karl Rove. Lawyer jokes aside, Harry needs to find new friends.

Speaking of rippin the tops off small animals, Congress is looking to peel back the scalp of the Bald Mole working out of the White House. Prosecutors will likely be filleting Rove for his outing of spy, Valerie Plame Wilson.

Elsewhere on the news, Howard Stern is making headlines. Both of him: the disgusting shock jock and wannabe birth father to the Anna Nicole Smith love child. I'm told they're different people, but if you draw long curly hair on Howard K. Stern the lawyer (I'm doing it right now), add the requisite bevy of big-bosomed women, and I defy you to tell them apart. It's clearly a case of multiple personalities. Both are soon to be billionaires, both leave people gagging, and both are skeevy. But one personality has shown to possess some redeeming features.

Howard Toilet-Mouth Stern has decided to go after the most disgusting show on television: American Idol. There may be hope for him yet. In a mockery of the popular show, Howard the Jock has advised all his listeners to vote for Sanjaya, the untalented and unlikely idol who has nonetheless survived by virtue of viewer votes. Week after week, so-called legitimate performers have been voted off the mind-numbingly idiotic show, which itself is banking billions.

All in all, the mirror of all this insanity reflects us. While tens of thousands die due to our strategic blunders, Americans go about their business enriching assholes to buy denial. While some Americans gag on American Idol, others gag on Howard Sterns' poison. Yes, I meant both of him. And we wonder why we're the clowns of world?

When this chapter in our history is written, it will need to be rewritten. My guess is, no one is going to voluntarily admit to being an American in the first decade of the 21st Century.

THE GRAVITY OF OUR SITUATION

Not long after discovering that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were figments of my imagination, it dawned on me that men created God in their own image and therefore, neither I, nor my Earth was the center of anything. Now, to add insult to injury, it turns out that the universe we observe when we point our instruments up into the night sky is merely a speck of residue and not the real universe at all-- this according to Richard Planek in his article, "Out There" in the NYTimes magazine section, Sunday.

No wonder we sin like drunken sailors.

It had been a universe made for dummies. We had the nearby clockwork universe of our solar system, held together by gravity: a force that Sir Isaac Newton admitted he just made up as he went along. Crazy stuff. After all, why the hell should distant objects tug on one another?

Then we had our Einsteinian universe working on vast scales, warping space into attractive but lethal potholes. Now objects were not so much pulled by gravity, as falling into depressions in space. In our relativistic existence, my watch ran slower when I rode my bicycle, which explained why the faster I rode home, the later I was for dinner.

And finally, to Einstein's chagrin, our basic building blocks turned out to inhabit a quantum universe of the very small, where universes popped into existence (and out, and in) in a never-ending roll of the dice. Good. Let's take snack.

Sure, we still didn't really know what gravity was, but hey, we could live with that. We could all just go on Atkins, and everything would be fine. But no. Then the cosmologists had to go and muck it all up.

Enter dark matter and dark energy. Not referring to the Bush/Cheney model, the dark entities came about because the universe was found to be rapidly expanding -- not contracting as predicted by the Big Bang model. Additionally, the flat spiral galaxies were not flying apart, centrifugally, as they should -- but rather, cocooned in some magic force that kept them intact.

Of course, the dark forces are dark only in the sense that no one has a clue as to what they are. Since they are not part the visible or electromagnetic universe, they're not only beyond anything we know, they may be beyond anything we know how to know. And there lies the rub. For the universe to be expanding at the observed rate, the stuff we dwell in and the stuff that dwells in us--the baryonic universe of protons, neutrons and elections--must be only 4% of the total.

It turns out that 74% is dark energy, 22% is dark matter, and just 4% is you, me, Osama bin Laden, and our whole sorry universe. It's as if our entire universe went down the drain with the World Trade Center, and everything we know of--George Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, the nine unemployed US prosecutors, the missing WMD, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, as well as all the other 10 to the 500th universes--is the soap scum left behind on the proverbial tub.

Though he didn't know about dark matter at the time, Einstein wished it away when he invoked his cosmological constant, a mathematical fudge factor that made his calculations work. I tried that on my SATs with poor results. Like Einstein's cosmic speed limit, light, the cosmological constant was a placeholder for something real. Unlike George Bush, Einstein had cheated and gotten away with it.

But dark matter was followed by dark energy, and as cosmologists like to say, you only get to invoke the tooth fairy once. Is dark energy a separate entity, or just an aspect of gravity? Could gravity behave differently at great distances? Could it be that gravity lies at the interface of the very large and the very small? Mr. and Ms. Soap Scum may never know. And it doesn't really matter. Not to be a negative Pissy Pauli, but we are completely irrelevant anyway.

Well screw you, cosmologists. Just leave us hanging in our hyper-Copernican existence, you creeps. No wonder people are switching back to Creationism.

When I was a kid, an older cousin of mine insisted I count the stars in the dark Vermont sky. I lost count at 1,733, I recall, and when I went to start over, all the damn stars had moved. So had my wallet. Had I only heeded the poem left on the walls of his cottage by our Great Uncle Ben in 1928. Appropriately it went:

There was an astronomer guy
Who spotted a star in the sky
So he like an ass
Kept his gaze to the glass
Til the telescope grew to his eye.

BREAKING NEWS

If any individual should be held accountable for unleashing George W. Bush on the world, it would have to be former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich. As it turns out, while leading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he was off enjoying an extramarital affair of his own. That Newt could find the time to impeach the president while servicing both his wife and mistress, approaches Medal of Honor territory.

In an interview with Jame Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, Gingrich acknowledged enjoying chuckle monkey love with a woman other than his wife while presiding over the removal of the Leader of the Free World.

Gringrich told Dobson, ''There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards. But a finer Republican, you'll never meet.''

Insisting his pursuit of Clinton's infidelity was not hypocrisy, Gringrich concluded:

''The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge. I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials.''

Gingrich's steadfast pursuit of President Clinton while pleasuring two women will go down in the annals of history as one of the most selfless acts of lust ever bestowed on a free people. After all, had Gingrich chosen not to judge his fellow sinner, the 100,000 dead from Bush's war might have lived long enough to soil the world with adulterous acts of their own.

OZONE MANIC

Despite his prodigious size, Al Gore can walk on water--or so I believed. He has all the qualities one could ask for in a leader: genius, judgement, humility, and social consciousness. As an elected senator, vice president, and president, Al has always appealed to our better angels. So why is he so hell bent on destroying the environment?

If you ask yourself what emits 377,000 lbs. of ozone -depleting greenhouse gasses annually, 20 times the national average and the equivalent of 20 Hummers humming around the clock, the answer crushes you like an anvil on Wylie Coyote. It's the Gore homestead in Tennessee, this according to Gregg Easterbrook, a fellow of the Brookings Institution, author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, and author of today's NYTimes Op-Ed piece, "Al Gore's Outsourcing Solution."

The Gore camp will argue that our elected, but never-seated president pays extra for wind power and buys carbon credits to the tune of $1,247.50, rounded to the nearest dime, to offset his voracious energy appetite. Carbon credits, you'll recall, are used to invest in technologies that, in theory, reduce pollutants equal to one's overproduction. Credits can also be purchased from under-polluting entities in a zero-net-sum game.

But, like Wylie Coyote, have we all gone Looney Tunes? When it comes to pollution, zero-net-gain, means zero-net-loss. Environmentally, this is not a wash. Only a drastic reduction in carbon emissions will forestall cataclysmic climate change.

It's hard to imagine how Al's $1,247.50 will negate his negative impact on the environment. It is estimated that it would require planting 40,000 trees to counter the harmful effects of Al's abode. That's a lot of raking.

Can we buy our way out of destroying our Gossamer-thin atmosphere, or must we make some lifestyle choices? And who better to lead the way, than our nation's greatest environmental proponent?

I'm willing to make exceptions. If Al would like to take 365 plane flights a year to environmental speaking engagements, that's pollution well spent. But when one's house is measured in acres, it hard to seize the high ground.

That Al's tireless crusade to build awareness of the environment has achieved far more than one man's waste should go without saying. But to ask others to downsize -- to progress through reverse growth -- one must lead by example.

PNN is not asking Al to live in a FEMA trailer--just a reasonably sized home. If Al insists on a larger house, I know of a white one on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that desperately needs a leader.

ANN THE MAN

Not that there's anything wrong with it, but is Ann Coulter a man? You look at her and something doesn't seem quite right. Something doesn't add up. You're thinking, what must I do to make sense of this face?

I'm looking at a picture of Ann in Time magazine. Turning Ann Coulter's head sideways and upside down does nothing to change your uneasy feeling. Conversely, turning your own head sideways and upside down does nothing, especially if you've already inverted her photo. That nebulous hold on femininity, that sexual ambiguity--if indeed that's what it is--just won't go away.

What kind of filter must I apply--what bias must I relinquish in order to make sense of Ann's face? What is that face behind the face? You squint. You meditate. You know there's an answer, and you will wait 'til hell freezes over to learn her secret.

Then, suddenly, the true image emerges. Beneath the eye shadow, behind the makeup, the chin announces itself, followed by the cheek lines, the hook of the nose, the crows feet, the ever-so-slight midnight shadow. Then you pan down to the hands. Despite years of expensive lotions, the lines of the hands, the crook of the thumb, all point to one thing, and you say to yourself, OMG. She's a man.

Satisfied you've cracked the code, then you must ask yourself: Well, if he's not Ann Coulter, then who is he?

We're looking here for an ultra-Conservative man, on the thin side, with piercing, if not bulging eyes, blonde hair, and a nasty streak. Possibly someone who has a vendetta against John Edwards. And just to complicate things, he probably faked his own death in order to take on his new persona. After all, if he were still alive, someone would declare him missing.

So we're looking for a "deceased" man, with decent legs, who would look reasonably good in a tight cashmere sweater. He would have to tend towards the repugnant, crave attention, and slip through the cracks of the powerful. Literally.

I'm racking my brain, and I just can't come up with it. Ted Kaczynski, though anti-government like Bush, is in jail. D.B. Cooper, if he survived jumping from the airliner, would be too old. The Lindbergh baby? No, Ann is someone else. A younger neo-Nazi, Mary Matalin look-alike, perhaps -- manly for a woman, but faggy for a man.

I've got to go here. My mind is just swimming, but I must make a living. I need to turn this over to my readers. What blonde man, thought to have died in his 30's or 40's, is running around making fool of himself under the name of Ann Coulter?

LIBBY'S BRAIN

Scooter Libby's "Alzheimer's Defense" trial ended yesterday in conviction. Jurors decided the celebrated lawyer and Cheney chief of staff had a good enough memory to remember the pardon in his hip pocket--the Get Out of Jail Free card he was offered in exchange for taking one for the Bush team--and therefore should have remembered the conversations he had with reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, when he leaked the identity of covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson.

On appeal, Libby plans to use his non-existent conversation with Tim Russert of NBC news to prove his memory loss was real.

Though federal guidelines would suggest Libby faces 1-3 behind bars, his grin leaving the courtroom suggested he also recalled "Bush's Brain" Karl Rove's White House game strategy: to call for a new trial and failing that, drag out the appeals process over the next 22 months, when Bush can hightail it out of Washington and pardon him.

Cheney's brain, enraged over Ambassador Wilson's outing of the Bush team's bogus war claims, had scribbled in the margins of the NYTimes/Wilson expose that the way to get Wilson was through his undercover wife. From there, Cheney went on the attack, leading to the most serious crimes committed by high government officials since the Nixon Era.

But as Cheney's chief of staff's Alzheimer's issues surfaced, God frantically pointed at the Vice President's brain by planting a blood clot in his leg. Rarely had God, a better shot than the vice president, gotten so physically involved in a pending case.

Back in 2003, George Bush's actual brain insisted that anyone in his administration convicted of leaking classified information would be treated harshly. In keeping, Libby's pardon will be good only until Alzheimer's robs his memory of those who set him up.

The lesson here for the nation's school children is the "No Witness Left Behind" principle. With Libby's onset Alzheimer's, and the Vice President's onset leg clot, Karl Rove's wife is quietly beefing up her husband's life insurance policy. Her greatest fear is that he'll be sent to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bush's Roach Motel, where the president's wounded check in, but never check out.

Lost forever in the deception is the serious crime, committed by Libby puppeteers Cheney, Rove, and Bush, of outing spy Valerie Plame Wilson in order to silence her husband, Iraqi war critic, Ambassador Joe Wilson. The bogus war that resulted has cost over a half-trillion dollars, and over a hundred thousand lives.

Elsewhere in the news, NASA is canceling its Killer Asteroid program, citing lack of funds. NASA says finding 90% of the Earth-crossing asteroids and destroying them would cost $1 billion dollars, or about 3 days worth of the Iraqi War -- money it simply does not have. Asteroids capable of ending life on Earth hit every 500,000 years or so, with the last impact occurring in 498,000 BC.

CIVIL WRONGS

Commemorating the Selma civil rights march to Montgomery Alabama, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton held hands Sunday with only six degrees of separation--in the form of security personnel disguised as event organizers.

Barack told cheering crowds that the electricity of that moment 42 years ago, when brave Black demonstrators were beaten by white police, ignited the spark between his White Kansan mother and Black Kenyan father that produced the Baby Barack.

Not to be out-ordained, Hillary told the crowd that both Jesus and Barack were born years before the historic civil rights march, and that neither was conceived immaculately. She went on to reminisce about the time she and her minister drove to Chicago to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak.

Across the way and above the fray, Barack reminded the audience that Hillary was actually a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964, supporting Sen. Barry Goldwater in his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

It may have been then that Hillary whipped out the Baltimore Sun article exposing Barack's maternal relatives as slave owners as recently as seven generations ago. Mrs. Clinton admitted that the slave holder was Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather, but that Barack was close with him. Hillary also reminded the audience that Obama, like Osama, attended Jihadist madrases in his elementary school years.

Later, speaking before a mostly Black crowd at a local college, Barack urged that politicians rise above political pettiness, and insinuated that white honky Hillary's eyebrows would be conjoined if not for electrolysis.

Not to be cosmetically Swiftboated, Hillary pointed out that Barack was not only half white, but that he was speaking at the George Wallace Segregationist Community College. Then, her voice rising, Hillary pulled out all the stops:

"The civil rights march is not over yet. Poverty and growing inequality matter. Health Care Matters. The soggy, White water people of the Gulf Coast matter. Our soldiers matter. Our future matters. My future matters. And if I knew now, what I'd know then, I would never have squandered Bill's speaking engagement fortune."

Barack, too, summed up the historic moment. "I know if cousin Pookie would vote, if brother Jethro would get his lazy ass off the couch and stop watching Sports-Center, and go register some folks, and go to the polls, we'd have a different kind of politics." Then, with the crowd in a frenzy, Obama commanded, "Kick off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes."

Like commencement at West Point, thousands of slippers suddenly filled the air. As if emerging from a nightmare, the crowd noticed for the first time that, in the excitement of the moment, they had forgotten to put on their street clothes.

The Republicans, for the most part, were staying out of it, at least until The New York Times reported that Rudy Giuliani's relatives were all squeegee people working West Side Highway windshields for the past three generations--until spray paint became available.

Giuliani, taking offense, pointed out that one person's graffiti was another person's masterpiece, and said he had actually come from a long line of starving artists who just happened to pioneer the "on-street" car care industry.

Giuliani then pointed out that had Bill Clinton been tougher on the terrorists, the former NYC mayor would not have been forced to shamelessly grandstand on the country's greatest disaster for personal gain.

And Bill Clinton, on the scene not to support his wife, but to be inducted into the National Voting Rights Hall of Fame, hugged his admirers, some of whom were wearing Obama buttons. Asked if she was bothered by Bill's equal opportunity affections, Hillary said that, like Tammy Wynette, she had long since given up controlling who Bill embraced.

MY PERSONAL MARK TWAIN

Every ounce of my maturity surfaced by the age of eight. The only problem is, I wasn't happy with my maturity level in 1957, and now I've all but given up hope of ever leaving that high-water mark: my personal Mark Twain. Even my 14-year old daughter has moved on, responding to my observations with, "Isn't that a little silly, dad?"

Gone are the days of "Wear Food," sitting around the dinner table with apricot ears, making olive trebuchets out of eating utensils. The world has grown up around me, leaving me behind. So why is it that Barack Obama, and now John McCain, feel they must apologize for what would seem all but obvious to a child: that 3,100 dead Americans in Iraq is an unimaginable waste?

Call me immature -- out of my depth, but I can't fathom why those 3,100 soldiers and 23,000 seriously injured (not to mention the 100,000 plus Iraqis who have perished), weren't a colossal waste. And who is more qualified than John McCain, who rotted in a Viet-Cong prisoner of war dungeon, in that other useless war, to know the meaning of "waste?"

To call it a "waste" may be the understatement of the year. With the underhanded run-up to the Iraq war, murder would be closer to the truth.

And why must we dance around protecting the troops' feelings -- but not their lives? It's as if questioning the war effort will catastrophically unravel the mystique of the soldier. That somehow, messing with their minds will affect their ability to kill on command, without question, when we really do need them: that somehow this sacred pact we have with our warriors will shatter the moment we reconsider their marching orders.

Of the military mystique, Mark Twain wrote:

"To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, 'Our country, right or wrong,' and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation. All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. Before I had chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away."

I certainly would want to be properly introduced to the person George Bush wants me to kill. But then, people much more mature than me go to great depths to protect this sacred zone of military mystique, where logic, reason and morality are barred at the door. In my immaturity, it almost seems that our last two extended military adventures have gone quantum: vanishing the moment they're exposed to the light of day.

Immaturity may be the only way to escape the mature world -- to safely float above our bottom-most instincts. Mashed potatoes cascading from the ears is much funnier than the spilled brains of a dead child-soldier on my TV screen this morning. Young children and I need a sizeable buffer between us and the mature thinking of Junior and his Number Two Dick-head. The more we honor their dead, the more dead they honor us with.