The Lawsnit

Sometimes it just seems like everything goes wrong at once--your credit card gets hacked, you get into a fender-bender, your kid busts out of Juvey, all in the same week--and it must seem like that to President Obama now, too. Not only is he required to share the world stage with a Russian maniac who can't be counted on to stay on script; not only is he responsible for unrest in the Middle East among players who still can't get along even after having had a thousand years to think about it; not only is he on the hook for thousands of damp children crossing the border, but now he's getting sued. Crap. No one likes to get sued.

He's getting sued by John Boehner for going off on his own and accomplishing something without checking with Congress first. John Boehner believes that the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial bodies should be equivalent in power, and so if the legislative body isn't doing anything, the executive shouldn't be doing anything either. It's a sound argument, although it might not stand up to the defense witness, John Boehner, who also accuses Obama of napping on the job. All told, it's a little confusing what the complaint is, although uppityness may be a factor.

Specifically, what John Boehner is accusing Obama of is going off on his own and trying to delay implementation of a part of the Affordable Care Act that John Boehner does not like, because thwarting the Affordable Care Act is Congress's business, not the President's.

I'm sympathetic. I didn't know anything about lawsuits when I was little, but there were things that struck me as unfair. I didn't have that many responsibilities--pick up after myself, set the table, and wash the dishes every night. I was marginally okay with the first two but really didn't care for dishwashing. What was the point? I'd just have to do it all over again the next night. I didn't have a lot of options. Whining was out of the question. Whining was never once rewarded in our house. But it didn't occur to me to sue.

I know just the argument I'd use, too: "but I don't want to." It's airtight. But having the best argument does not always get you a win in court, as the Judicial Branch has recently demonstrated. My parents were in the business of producing civilized children and would no doubt bring up something about the social compact. I'd counter with the point that I was the baby, and expected to be provided for in every way. And that dishwashing was a direct threat to my right to do whatever it was I wanted to do instead, even if that was "nothing," which it usually was. John Boehner would understand.

Well, it turns out that presidents have been sued before. Nixon was sued; Reagan and Clinton were sued. John Kennedy was sued by a Mississippi state senator after he received injuries in an auto accident that left him unable to ride his donkey. He won, too.

So there's some good precedent for John Boehner and his friends. If they too want to sue for the right to sit on their asses, they've got a shot.

Threats To The Afflusphere

There's only so much oil. Experts put the supply as lasting at most a few more decades. Given this diminishing time-frame, there is great concern in certain quarters that production might be shut down before all the money is drilled out. In light of this danger, entities are working day and night to prevent a catastrophe.

The world of obscene profit mining suffered a crushing, but not fatal, blow when the Deepwater Horizon blew up, in spite of the application of wishful thinking, falsified data and cabinet-level support, for which no expense had been spared.

The disaster was initially feared to be a threat to the money-extraction environment, but just as engineers had predicted, the passage of time and the proliferation of attention-eating bacterial microbes like American Idol and the gay-marriage debate has scrubbed the public memory nearly clean of soiled pelicans and shoreline fudge.

Industry analysts also credit the side well that was drilled into Fox News to relieve the overwhelming pressure from the accumulation of facts elsewhere. Containment booms strategically placed around the E.P.A. have also been effective at stemming the flow of reliable information.

More threats loom, however, and work must be done on a number of fronts to assure maximum cash removal. In particular an explosion of climate scientists threatens to overwhelm the afflusphere and officials have initiated mitigation efforts, which have already begun to bear fruit. A number of random people with science degrees have been purchased, fortified with a squadron of astrologers and phrenologists and people whose first name is "Doctor," and together these have made many important discoveries. Atolls in the Pacific that are disappearing beneath the rising ocean have been demonstrated instead to be sinking due to obesity among their citizens. Reports on glaciers have been patched up by simply replacing the phrase "shrinking dramatically" with "might possibly have put on a few pounds." In a startling development, prominent climatologists have been videotaped picking and, in some cases, flicking.

The improved information has been disseminated successfully using the internet and chain e-mail as a dispersant and is now thought to be so effective at maintaining the health of the afflusphere that Rep. John Boehner has, by himself, been able to counter the combined efforts of 1.3 billion climate scientists by saying "nuh-uh."

Asked if he had encountered any moral issues vis-a-vis the untrammeled drilling of cash in the face of catastrophic environmental damage, an oil industry spokesman explained, "no, it never comes up. Morals and money do not occur in the same strata."

The small remainder of privately-held money that has not washed up on foreign shores has now been shown to be protected from taxation even in a political environment previously thought hostile, via an as-yet unidentified mechanism. "Some things even we can't explain," said a delighted congressman, speaking off the record. "We just thank God."

Contacted for this story, God said only "Jeez. Are you all still here?"

A Bright Idea

Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), most recently in the news for apologizing to BP, is mounting a stiff defense of the traditional incandescent light bulb, which is under attack by government regulators who want to replace it with what he derisively calls "the little squiggly ones." This description is an ad hominem attack against compact fluorescent bulbs. Ad hominem attacks are those in which some aspect of a person (or, in this case, light bulb) is impugned that is irrelevant to the argument in question, such as, for instance, if I said Mr. Barton's ideas were stupid because he is a big pink squinting blob of useless protoplasm. The fact that he is a big pink squinting blob of useless protoplasm has nothing to do with why his ideas are stupid.

Rep. Barton says he found regular light bulbs at Walmart for under two bucks a four-pack, whereas it set him back nearly ten bucks for a single CFL bulb. "If you're mainstream America," he said, "that's not a very good deal." He said this because, as a Republican of means, he does all his shopping at Walmart, and also he wants to fight for the little guys, inasmuch as all their jobs got sent to China. By Walmart. Rep. Barton would like market forces to determine the choices of mainstream America.

I would too. I'd like them to be the kind of market forces in which you had to pay what things really cost. If we cut down the forest primeval for toilet paper, the cost of restoring the atmosphere and the water quality to its previous condition should be factored in each roll. Our food should include the cost of restoring the dead zones in the ocean caused by fertilizer run-off. Coal should include the price of putting the mountaintop back. Unfortunately, the capitalism Rep. Barton is so fond of is what used to be known as "pillaging." We go in and haul out all the fish 'til there ain't no more, and then we move on and tell the fishermen to go shop at Walmart. We haul out the coal, and the copper, and the trees, 'til there ain't no more, and then we move on and fight for the rights of whichever miners and loggers are surviving to buy cheap light bulbs at Walmart. A very few people make a bunch of money under this system, and those are the people whose rights Mr. Barton is most interested in. Don't look for them in Walmart.

If the cost of an incandescent light bulb, which is an inefficient user of energy, also included the cost of bringing out planet back from our wasteful and destructive ways, you can bet the squiggly bulbs would hold their own in the market just fine, and maybe a lot of unoccupied American rooms would not be lit up all the time. That's a fact.

Rep. Barton and his pal Rep. Boehner (R-Ohio), global-warming deniers both, do not care much about facts, or the whiny concerns of the mother planet, which, after all, has been here their entire lives. They're figuring that once the scientists they keep insulting get over their snit, they can find us a new planet to trash. Climate science is threatening their wrinkly bottom lines, so they're combating the science with lies. I have given up believing that the truth will sway any of these pirates, but it only recently occurred to me that you can't fight lies with the truth. You need more lies.

So please help me get the news out, people. Word on the street is that a paste made out of the ground-up testicles of Representatives Barton and Boehner will increase sexual potency. It's not true, of course. There's no use for them at all.

We're Toast

May 1, 2010. 2.2 billion of the world's top climate scientists today concluded their convention by signing a statement that global warming is a largely man-made phenomenon and a dire threat to the viability of the planet, and urged immediate action on the part of the nations of the world to combat it.

May 10, 2010. President Barack Obama held a press conference announcing a major new initiative to reduce atmospheric carbon. He outlined goals and targets and directed the houses of Congress to work together to achieve them.

May 11, 2010. House minority leader John Boehner (Republican-Ohio) held a press conference backed by an American flag, a Don't Tread On Me flag, three disgruntled archaeologists and an oil executive with a backyard weather station. He stated his opposition to all efforts to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and put forth a new plan calling for increased investment in air-conditioning for the next twenty years to tide us over until the oil runs out.

June 18, 2010. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was revealed to have written, in a private email to a friend, that Rep. Boehner "is a total doodoo-head."

June 19, 2010. Rep. John Boehner, speaking to commentator Sean Hannity (Republican-Fox), retorted that Rahm Emanuel was a doodoo-head. "No, YOU," he explained.

June 20, 2010. Sarah Palin, posting on her Facebook page, demanded that Emanuel be fired and then waterboarded for "insulting the crappo-cranially challenged community."

June 22, 2010. Katie Couric, in an interview with Sarah Palin, asked for a clarification. "So are you saying it is offensive to call a Republican a doodoo-head, but not offensive to call a Democrat a doodoo-head?" Ms. Palin, chuckling, explained that Democrats actually are doodoo-heads, which makes it funny. "But--" Couric began, at which point Palin struck a pose and said "Talk to the hand," immediately regretting it.

August 3, 2010. House Democrats easily passed a bill requiring carbon levels to be reduced to pre-1918 levels by 2015.

December 22, 2010. The bipartisan Senate Committee On Global Warming Posturing, after months of negotiation behind closed doors, produced a draft suggesting that new vehicles be required to come equipped with cloth grocery bags and a pre-programmed set of GPS directions to the nearest recycling center. Progress on the bill was halted when Senator Ben Nelson (Democrat-Nebraska) withheld his approval until the Senate agreed to include funding for the Ben Nelson Recreational Center For The Crappo-Cranially Challenged outside Wahoo.

January 4, 2011. Progress on Obama's Cool Beans Initiative was stalled today when Senator Robert Casey (Democrat-Pennsylvania) proposed an amendment specifically prohibiting any federal funding of weatherization projects at abortion clinics.

January 5, 2011. Senator Diana DeGette (Democrat-Colorado), rising to speak on the subject of the Casey Amendment, exploded on the floor of the Senate, shutting down all activity until the seats could be wiped down.

January 23, 2011. Senator Joe Lieberman (Nincompoop-Connecticut) refused to vote for the draft bill in its current form. "Weh, weh, weh," he reasoned in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning. "Bluh, bluh," he later clarified.

February 12, 2011. Without enough votes to counter an expected Republican snitfest, the Senate tabled a vote on the proposed climate legislation and moved to reconcile bills with the House version. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) noted areas of overlap that could lead to a compromise, suggesting that, for instance, in place of "increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards to 98 mpg," they might require that new vehicles, starting in 2025, be painted an attractive shade of green. Clutching talking-points memos, House Republicans fanned out across the nation, thundering identically that this would be a blow to Americans' freedom.

February 15, 2011. Tea Party activists stormed town halls across the Midwest shaking Matchbox cars in rainbow colors. Speaking from a personal flotation device north of the Bering Strait where

he had gone for a week of fishing, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Republican-Virginia) called for a do-over. "Realistically, the only thing we can do now is start from scratch," he intoned, smoothly reeling in a trophy marlin.