About every few days, I get to read some sob story about the children of illegal immigrants in the newspaper and the cruel irony of working hard to excel in school only to learn that going to a university is not an option because of their status. When you find these articles, look for the words "tearful" and "fearful" as well as the worn phrase "better life" to appear.

Boo fucking hoo.

Despite that, I am not insensitive to the plight of children whose parents brought them to this country. The children are usually the last to know and always the victims of their parents' decisions, no matter how noble-sounding and what not. But I often wonder, does it ever dawn on the parents' minds that their actions have long-standing repercussions? That their children are going to school in this country and will not be eligible to attend a college precisely because they're not legal citizens?

Instead of examining that, we get profile after profile of a hapless student in 2,000-plus word essay about the unfairness of it all, as if it's supposed to augment (white) guilt about just how tough it is to be an immigrant. Excuse me, but while there will always be immigrants fleeing one country for another and wanting a better life, the fact is that they are here illegally. If they are here and send money back home, I wonder if it dawns on anyone to start the long process of applying to come here legally.

Now as for employers who are throwing up their hands and saying, "We didn't know some of our workers are illegal!" give me a fucking break. Do you normally recruit new employees from a street corner or parking lot where dozens are standing around at the crack of dawn? The cry of ignorance from companies is just too much: ever heard of payroll? Do you not run into a problem when submitting a social security number, or is that the trick? You don't submit any numbers and therefore you don't pay any taxes/health insurance on an employee and then act like a victim when it comes to bite you on your ass? Employers hire illiegal immigrants because they're cheap labor and don't want to pay full-price, so to speak. I often think it's less an issue that Americans "don't want to do the work" and more a strategy to increase the bottom line and reduce the overhead in employee wages and attendant taxes.

And don't get me started on our elected piggies, who will stand tall and talk about the need for immigration reform, only to pack the current immigration bill with amendments that none of them reads and quickly passes. If you can't have politicians who will read the fine print, then how they hell are they going to address the problem?

Perhaps they should hire some proofreaders from Mexico. They'll work for low wages, right?

I was dreamin' when I wrote this, so forgive me if I repeat myself.

We've turned a corner. We've turned a corner. Democracy is on the way. The insurgency is in its death throes. They're desperate. Democracy will now blossom across the Middle East.

The first real government since evil dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled has been formed in Iraq. So that makes it the first real elected government in decades, if I'm not mistaken. No small achievement given the circumstances: a war and tens of thousands of deaths to bring about a rickety, squabbling group of men who don't trust each other to lead a country that constantly on the brink of civil war, but never quite getting there because that would be bad PR.

Right on cue, the phony "turn the corner" speeches were made from Bush on down. British Prime Minister Tony Blair hops on a plane to Iraq to smile and look supportive and talk about withdrawing British troops. Like we're all about to pack up and go home now that the darkies have their own government. As if all the problems we created in Iraq are about to disappear and a free market society (blessed by the Christian god) is about to debut in Iraq and soon everyone will be rich.

It's more smoke and mirrors, folks. The true test of this government will be in the security situation, period. There is no other litmus test that can be acceptable to the Iraqi people.

Of course, for the mindless fucks in the media, turning yet another historic corner is proof enough that everything is A-OK in our Iraqi Expedition.

Is it me, or am I the only one who links General Michael Hayden resembles actor Kurtwood Smith on that crappy, thank-Allah-it's-finally- over show "That 70s Show"?

So this is how you play politics when you're a Republican: a minor, inconvenient controversy erupts over collecting a few million phone calls of Americans without a warrant, and to deflect the outrage, you "frame the debate" by insisting that you (and your agency) needs to put said controversy behind you and learn from it.

It's sounds so harmless, so aw-shucks. It's like confronting a teenager after you know he's banged your car up because he took it out for a spin without your consent, and he keeps telling you, "Dad, we need to get past this and hook onto the real issue." From what I can tell, no parent would allow that sentence to get completed because we're talking about "taking responsbility for your actions," which is what holier-than-thou Republicans incessantly exhort to the rest of us.

Of course, except, if it's them.

But while we're on the subject of domestic spying, I would like one of our elected piggies (who are so enamored of private, warantless information collection) to tell us the number of slobbering, hook-nosed evildoers they've stuck into Guant#aacute;namo as a direct result of all of this. Listen very carefully to how staunch defenders of warantless spying use their words: prevention of terror, American safety and security. You can never get enough mileage out of 9/11, proving thermodynamics wrong: there is such a thing as a perpetual motion machine.

I suppose the sun also rises each day because we have this spying program in place, right?

USA Today breaks a story about how the NSA's domestic spy program is much larger than revealed, what with all but one phone company forking over records by the bucketfull. But the bigger story: no one gives a shit.

For my part, I keep being shocked and needing to stop what I'm doing and pick up my jaw from the floor. Americans don't appear to be concerned (by an almost two-thirds) that they're being spied upon. Of course, they all subscribe to the "I have nothing to hide" thinking disorder that convinces them they would never be the subject of any spying, or on a no-flight list at the airport. So they're content to believe that it's happening to everyone else, not them.

Mindless fucks. I hope you're all being spied on.

It's even funnier when we consider this spying in light of how we perceive other countries, particularly countries in the Third World (also known as Those Run by Darkies). Or even more, think about all the propaganda of how we described the society of the Soviet Union and still Communist China. We just sneer at the lack of civil liberties and shake our heads in abject pity that these poor people live with such an oppressive government that watches every move its citizens make. We hold ourselves superior and cling to our "we're a democracy" delusional speech to pat ourselves on the back and head off to the mall in our hulking gas guzzler.

There's no difference folks, none at all. I would be a mindless fuck myself if I believed that no government refrained from domestic surveillance. I know that and I accept it. But the American government is not run by benevolent guardians. This Administration has the worst track record of any in recent memory; lies, war, terrorism, spying and by the way, we still haven't caught the Anthrax Killer yet. Remember him? All of this spying bullshit is just one more layer on the cake, but Americans don't really care about their freedoms at all. Or they rather maintain the fiction that It Can't Happen Here, something I (and better minds) have been yelling about for the past several years.

Not that the other mindless fucks in the media would care to point this out. They just casually report on this like it's no big deal, and I'm sure that's good news for the Republicans, who have thrived in this situation like fungus in a warm, sweaty sock. Americans have not held this Administration to one fucking standard, and guess what? They're unlikely to do so in the future, so I might as well predict this for the mid-term elections: they'll produce little in the way of Democrats regaining control of some part of Congress.

Always remember this, dear reader: people would rather be duped than think straight. They will always vote against their better interests. It's just making them think otherwise that is the trick.

Let's face it: Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker of 9/11, is insane. And not insane in the diabolical sense of the word, but just vanilla insane. Asshole insane. A real piece of shit.

We've tried and convicted him as a proxy agent for the attacks of 9/11. Not for a moment did I believe this bragging sack of shit had anything to do with planning those attacks (remember, he was in jail on that day), and he's clearly overstated his importance and knowledge. While it might make for an interesting thriller, it's difficult to accept the notion that this one person held the key to stopping those attacks. His trial is supposed to be a corrective measure for the stunning failure of American intelligence agencies and the White House itself. Not convinced.

But don't think for a second that I'm defending him. I'm actually glad that the jury didn't sentence him to death, because now, for the rest of his soon-to-be-forgotten life, he gets to sit in a little cell with his little dick and go nowhere. In true asshole fashion, he's openly mocked the pain of the 9/11 survivors' families and declare, "America, you've lost," when hearing that his life would be spared.

But it's that misplaced arrogance that will actually do him in. The jury denied him what he most craved: to die as a martyr. It's a common thing among assholes like Moussaoui to keep talking about how much they want to die a martyr—from the comfort and safety of a jail cell. If he was so committed to the cause, he would have done everything he could to participate in that day of mass murder, undoubtedly jacking off as a plane approached its target.

But that did not pass, and neither will this sad loser's memory remained etched in the national consciousness. Let him rot in his little cell, and in the words of Abu Bakr to his enemies, may Moussaoui suck the clit of his mother in hell.