GateHouse — Last week a Washington Post poll revealed that the United States Congress currently enjoys a nationwide approval rating of 9%. That is nine percent, as in one integer, as in Very Close To Zero, as in if you asked “Do you approve of the job Congress is doing?” to a group of zinfandel-sipping monkeys with typewriters in a warehouse in Des Moines, they would all say “Dear God no not at all are you NUTS?,” because monkeys are actually pretty smart.
Needless to say this 9% statistic is shocking, mostly because I would have guessed somewhere between 9 to 40 percentage points lower. NINE percent approval? Are you sure you didn’t mean nine people? Where do you thumbs-up smiley-faced keep-up-the-good-work types LIVE I wonder? Do you live in Congress? Are you all Boehners? Do you know what the Gallup people meant by “Congress?” Do you think they meant “Con-Air?” Do you think you were approving of Nicolas Cage? Because if so that’s still a dismayingly high number.
Pictured: Basically what all Scientists look like.
GateHouse — So, just to straighten this out, just to quell the controversy, there’s a new study that says watching TV is a drain on your lifeforce somehow? WELL THANKS FOR KEEPING ME CURRENT, SCIENCE. What’s next on the list? Is it teleporting? I hope it’s teleporting.
To jump back to before the previous paragraph (yes, I have solved COLUMN TIME TRAVEL), a recent study published in Australia revealed that watching too much TV increases your chance of dying early from health problems. It also apparently reveals that science is out of things to study. No no, guys, thanks, since we’ve got all of our other problems so skillfully figured out, I guess it’s OK for you to start going back to the mid 1950s to CHECK YOUR WORK. It’s a good thing our Future Republican President is planning to make sure all your textbooks are flamethrowered.
See, people, this is why Brave Patriots like Rick Perry and the additional 400 GOP presidential candidates are so wisely poking holes in Science things like “evolution” and “global warming” and “Avogadro’s number” and “the atomic weight of cobalt” (the “Periodic Table” will tell you that it’s 58.933, but that’s just a theory that’s out there): Not because Science is filling our children’s precious spongebrains with facts and empirically proven evidence instead of merely our own desperately held belief structures, because it’s MOSTLY REHASHING THINGS WE KNEW ALREADY. Last week saw another round of stories about how eating processed meats made from the feet of animals you would hit with a subway train if you could might not be so good for the ol’ Heart. WELL THANKS A HEAP, SCIENCE. I suppose next you’re going to report some bungling nonsense about how easy access to “guns” increases “the rates of violence in America.” Science is such a loser.
You can talk all day long about their ghoulish caloric content, you can walk me line-by-line through the roster of vitamins and minerals they don’t contain, you can provide me with photographic proof of the dog-meat which is smooshed into a grey paste in Cambodia and shipped via donkey, unsupervised ocean liner and nonrefrigerated truck to an outdoor McProcessingfacility/wastewater plant/shooting range in North Carolina, and I will not care because I like McRibs. Someone please rip this out of the newspaper, or three-finger-swipe-left on the iPad or whatever you do to save things, and bring it to my funeral, which will take place in about eight weeks, so everyone can enjoy a good long laugh before the luau. (Note: My funeral is going to be awesome.)
Otherwise, and occasional McGriddle aside (I AM BUT A MAN) I try not eat at McDonald’s. Not for any militant reason I’m gonna tweet about 12 times a day — I just don’t. And for the most part, neither does Little Man — though that’s not always easy to do, because at some point it’s 7:45 p.m. and we haven’t had dinner and the idea of crafting an organic, multi-course Meal out of locally raised and humanely caught fish loses by about a billion to the idea that I can sate my moody and undernourished child immediately, through nuggets.
We can’t boast a 100 percent success rate, but we try hard. In this regard (and few others) I’m likeMichelle Obama, who despite Republican objections to her existence/face, has for years promoted healthy eating and living among Our Nation’s Youth.
Pictured: Boehner and, I don't know, Cantor? Harry Reid?
GateHouse — Good morning, America! Or at least the small percentage of you who have successfully avoided the impulse to beat yourself silly every morning with a box of Lucky Charms (or whatever kind of cereal box is most damaging, it’s up to you, although I find the purple stars pretty hurtful).
I have found myself drawn to the Debt Ceiling Negotia — well, Negotiations is an incorrect word, because it indicates on some level the involvement of adult humans, so let’s go with Pathetic Caterwauling By People Who Sound Like Ralph Wiggum — for the same reason that I was once drawn to pro wrestling: Because I like listening to silly cartoonpeople in costumes read from goofy scripts in an attempt to emanate impressions of grave importance.
Also, I like my house, and with Sunday’s deal/compromise/fiesta of Democrat giveaways I’m glad to know that in theory I can keep it through September, or until my mortgage is sold to China or Cobra or the evil Thundercats or whoever. Wait, were there bad Thundercats? I can’t remember now. If there were bad Thundercats, someone please email about them, in the precious last few days before your Internet bill jumps to $450/mo and you pay it directly to a Koch Brother. .
Tatooine = Preferable to America this week, for two reasons: 1. Vaporators. 2. Droid sales.
GateHouse— As a licensed Reformed Humor Professional — having graduated from a monthslong Comedy Immersion Program led at a secluded Wisconsin camp by Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who helpfully compelled me to Pray The Grim Away (incidentally, it’s basically just 12-hour “Growing Pains” rerun marathons, save your money) — I can confirm that it’s currently too blank-wording hot to be funny. Go ahead and fill in your own expletive there; the newspaper has rules about such things, though I’m guessing that most editors are too sweaty to care. (If you are having trouble finding just the right bad word, go outside in a pair of sweatpants and jog to the end of the block. By the time you return you will have thought of dozens.)
There is hot, and then there is slap-your-belly-and-run-to-your-mama hot. I don’t want to turn this into a game of Heat Dome Story Trumping, but I live in South Carolina, where we routinely enjoy the kind of heat that makes grown conservatives go running to the government for Oscillating Fan handouts, the kind of heat where you go to get the mail and then stop on your way back to hallucinate.
Within 12 seconds of going outside in South Carolina your clothes grow damp and heavy enough to make you feel like you’re wearing a used beach towel. I recently saw a Facebook experiment in which some a friend’s kids tried to literally fry an egg on the sidewalk, a plan that unfortunately foiled when the sidewalk liquefied. On the plus side, when it’s this hot, you feel less weird having your morning margarita at work.
GateHouse — BARACK OBAMA HAS FAILED, according to basically everyone whose cocktail money depends on squealing like a monkeyperson on television about how everyone currently in office has failed, preferably on a show that’s on loud enough to prevent you from having to talk during dinner.
This is to be expected, as it’s been like 12 years since Obama murderated Osama bin Laden, and the question America wants answered is WHAT HAVE YOU EXECUTED FOR US LATELY? Oh, I guess we’re just all supposed to sit around and WAIT for Decepticon attacks? Why hasn’t he taken care of errrmm whatever the villain in the “Green Lantern” movie is supposed to be? Seriously, someone tell me, because that looks like a very silly video game for children.
Anyway, the news is so bad for Obama right now that he’s currently losing to a giant gaping yawning abyss of hopelessness. As most Republican voters wouldn’t be caught dead stepping one half-inch off the Party Line lest they be laser-fried alive by Michelle Bachmann’s avada-kedavra-powered deathray eyebeams, and full well knowing that their field currently resembles the undercard at a regional professional wrestling exhibition held on a Tuesday night at the high school gymnasium, a Gallup poll last week showed the troubled president down by 5 points to the generic opponent “A Republican,” which is funny for those of us in the writin’ business and officially tragic for those of you who HAVE OFFICIALLY SPENT A FAT CHUNK OF MONEY CAMPAIGNING ALREADY.
The poll showed 44 percent of respondents saying they’d vote for a blank space and 39 percent for Obama, with an unconscionable 18 percent saying they had “no opinion.” Maybe they’re waiting for a yearlong miserable economy, some clarification on social issues or the extermination of the world’s most hated bearded guy before getting around to brainstorming.
.
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I love this idea, like Obama loses in 2012 and they just randomly draw some white dude in a televised lottery between the monologue and first sketch on “SNL” and introduce him on Inauguration Day: “Ladies and gentlemen, please congratulate President Glen Jenkins, unemployed former used-car-lot assistant manager from Dublin, Ga! Where’s Glen? Is he here? Wave, Glen!”
(Incidentally, replace “A Republican” with An Actual Republican, and suddenly, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Obama beats Romney 49-43. The state of politics in 2011: EVERYBODY IS LOSING TO NOBODY.)
So instead, I have a much better idea: With the GOP field making up for in volume what it lacks in pleasantness and electability, the way to go is clear: Create one, monstrous, all-powerful, Devastator-like SUPERPUBLICAN from the few appealing parts of each of the 250 embarrassing candidates, attach them to a faceless simulacrum floating in a tank full of saltwater in a secret evil underwater lab and give birth to a perfect cloneperson, Kid R if you will, who will not wake up sucking a lemon, as that is sort of gay.
Republican Serpentor will be perfect: He will have the fierce tenacity of Newt Gingrich, without the jewelry bill and wife-abandonment but with a campaign staff, which will help. He will have the single-minded focus of Michelle Bachmann, without the need to drink cord blood to survive. He will have the smooth, approachable, presidential-looking appeal of Mitt Romney, but without the weird religion that those nice “South Park” boys did the play about or the 800-lb. weight of a healthcare plan hanging off his hair. He will have well pretty much nothing from Tim Pawlenty. He will have the business acumen of Herman Cain, but without having to be identified as a “pizza magnate,” and not even one from a company anyone knows. And he will have Sarah Palin’s kingmaker powers and ability to make news with his every proclamation, bus tour or tweet, but with the ability to recall American history and go 10 minutes without being on a reality show. Also he’ll have Storm Shadow’s ninja powers.
GateHouse — There isn’t much glory in being a newspaper copy editor and/or page designer these days. The hours are miserable: You almost always work nights, clocking in at 3 or 4 p.m. and blinkingly re-emerging into the real world around midnight to do your grocery shopping or coping-mechanism drinking — and that’s only if you’re one of the deliriously lucky schmucks who works only on one section and that section is not sports, where you sit alone in a desolate newsroom, accompanied only by the disembodied whirrrrr of deserted aging computers, waiting for the close of a crucial June game involving the Arizona Diamondbacks. If you misplace a comma, or leave a participle dangling someplace it shouldn’t be dangling, someone with a fierce, weirdly passionate grip on the thrilling world of grammar will send you a snarky email, grump about you publicly and probably invent a nickname that’ll stick with you for years. And even if all your modifiers are situated in their appropriate latitudes, chances are solid that you’ll soon see your pay cut, be furloughed or impolitely directed to relocate to a centralized editing mothership in a town the newspaper isn’t in. To enjoy these honors you’re paid almost enough to, if the markets hold, retire at the age of Yoda.
And yet, peopledo this job! People sign up to do this job, and people go into stomach-churning volumes of student loan debt to do this job! And that is because they are a singular kind of person, a dark kind of person, the kind of person who takes a position for criminally low pay because there might be, on a ghostly, distant evening in the future, a chance that they’ll spend their days writing Weiner headlines for money, and nothing can take that away from them.
Now, if there’s anything left to be done with this Weiner thing I can’t think of it, except of course for that clause. I just don’t know how many other ways to handle this Weiner business, and yes, promise, really done now. Which is good, because I can’t imagine what else anyone could possibly squeeze out of Weiner.
It's weird to think this guy would be bad at running a state, somehow
GateHouse — First of all, let me say that I fully support anything that outlaws dodgeball in any form. Yeah, you heard me, The Years 1987-1989, and you too, Delayed Onset Of Puberty.
Second of all, let me say that my son fully supports anything that outlaws freeze tag. The boy has been voicing his irrationally bilious, near-Gingrichian objection to freeze tag for months, on the admittedly understandable basis that freeze tag, unlike regular tag, does not offer a Base, the primal first-grade safety net that grants utter invincibility to anyone who is, say, touching the monkey bars. From the bits of his argument I can glean in between his instructions for me to buy him things, the regular tag-vs.-freeze tag debate has been POLARIZING first-grade recess for months.
Happily for everyone, I have a solution: We are probably moving to New York State, where freeze tag and dodgeball were nearly outlawed by The Large And Overbearing Government, probably because children never played it in Kenya.
Styrofoam cups, which Republicans approve of more than Natalie Portman.
GateHouse — If you should happen to find yourself enjoying a twilight stroll this spring, if you should be out soaking up the blood-warming sunshine, breezes and birdsongs and thinking there might just be some hope left in this wacky world after all, look up the story about Republicans, Capitol Hill and styrofoam cups. If you are anything like me, which you’re not, because you’re probably not crying inconsolably, it’ll send you into instant depression and a degenerative terror spiral that will culminate with your packing your valuables into a tied-up handkerchief, slinging it over your back and vanishing forever into the frozen Canadian wilderness where, with any luck, you will be mauled by a bear.
Let me hop back a step: Most clear-brained Americans, and by that I mean anyone who has never appeared on TV identified by the word “Commentator” or (ED.: PLEASE INSERT SHEEN THING HERE, THANKS) would agree that in a rational universe there can, and should, be debate about a kamikaze budget. There should be debate about the appropriate and wise way to proceed with health care reform. Apparently there can be debate about how much health care the school teachers in Wisconsin should get which is OK but you know what, whatever, debate is good, right?
There is no longer debate about Styrofoam; the matter, much like the hazards of smoking and the mathematical whole of that rap-metal movement of the early 2000s, has been settled, at least by anyone who doesn’t spend a good deal of time commenting on message boards in the dark. Styrofoam is petroleum-based and if it was brought over by the Pilgrims it might have broken down by now. No one likes Styrofoam, there are only people who disapprove of it by varying degrees, ranging from “Gravely Concerned 23-Year-Old Whose Parents Are Buying Her A Volt” to “It’s A Cup, I’ll Use This One Instead, And Why Are We Still Talking About This Again?”
And yet it’s in the news again, because after a lengthy, yearslong and complicated debate over matters of environmental concerns, political posturing and oh for God’s sake Republicans are being children about it.
Yeah, take that love to the CBO with those budget forms, you chirpy red granola bar
GateHouse — Big losers in the budget passed by the House of Representatives: Ira Glass, people who have yet to realize the dream of having Carl Kasell’s voice on their home answering machine, people who hate eating hairball-and-sawdust-contaminated hot dogs, women, Elmo. Actually those last two may be redundant, as I’ve never been able to satisfactorily determine the gender of Elmo (despite its name, which can be either a boy or girl name in his Kenyan birthplace), but it doesn’t matter, as funding to research the gender of Elmo has also been cut.
Welcome to month one of Budget Nightmare Hellscape Awful Craptacular Hatefest, only the very beginning of almost certainly intolerable decades-long hypocrisy slog in which everyone will light torches and carry pitchforks and light pitch-torches (the latest new thing in angry mob chic, Kanye blogged about them even) about how important it is to cut the budget, and then light torches and carry pitchforks and light pitch-torches when things they like start getting cut from the budget.
Indeed, many Americans, having failed after the last election to see an instant, glorious and revelatory increase in their quality of life, have made a Drastic Change, which will remain firmly in place precisely until the next election cycle, in which people will very likely fail to see an instant, glorious and revelatory increase in their quality of life, and make a Drastic Change. This will continue to go on for time immemorial, until hopefully, Earth is hit by an asteroid, which we won’t know is coming, as asteroid-looking-for funding has been cut by the House.
The budget is a slashfest of non-defense discretionary spending, which is pronounced “the part that isn’t Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security or the military,” so it’s a little like carrying a $79,000 credit card bill but being really serious about maximizing the Red Lobster gift certificate. Luckily, many of the of the most visible targets are all Muppets, like Snuffleupagus and Big Bird and Jim Lehrer, as the House budget zeroes out funding from those controversial Juan Williams-firers at NPR, PBS, and other stations that occasionally contain programming that doesn’t involve something like Bret Michaels crossing a rope bridge over a pond of flaming crocodile, which I’ve just realized I’ve written like it’s a bad thing.
Writer/editor at Nickelodeon's Nickmom.com, syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, music journalist and speedily graying dad based on the coast of Carolina. Bio/Clips.
second! and not in his usual creepy old-man-at-the-park way RT @jefito The new @GalacticFunk LP makes me want to jump up and down and yell. 9 hours ago
GateHouse — Last week a Washington Post poll revealed that the United States Congress currently enjoys a nationwide approval rating of 9%. That is nine percent, as in one integer, as in Very Close To Zero, as in if you asked “Do you approve of the job Congress is doing?” to a group of zinfandel-sipping monkeys with typewriters in a warehouse in Des Moines, they would all say “Dear God no not at all are you NUTS?,” because monkeys are actually pretty smart.
