First Impression: Sara Palin is Bush with breasts. Hot, supple breasts. I am convinced they were both created in the same pod: same silver tongue, same pandering to the simple folk majority, same pig-headed blindness to fact.

Second Impression: McCain/Palin is going to win. Easy. Why? Because there are more simple-minded adult-children in America than rational people who can think about the future. Did Palin actually imply that her ticket was THE VOICE FOR CHANGE? If you believe that, please punch yourself in the face until you lack the ability to vote this November.

In this edition of Manchild Drink Beer, we bring you exclusive footage of the Exxon shareholder’s conference. Check out this q & a session of the meeting, as Rex Tillerson CEO of Exxon, responds to their shareholder’s questions.

Fight the Smears (.com) is a website dedicated to removing the smear campaigning used on the internet against Barack Obama. The site attempts to dispel rumors such as Obama being a Muslim, or that his books contain inappropriate race remarks. With the amount of crap that is usually tossed around between candidates and their minions this time of the year, hopefully this will shed a little bit of light on the issue.

In other political news, check out a video we recently put up of our good friend Dubbya Bush’s address at the White House. Enjoi.

Me? Like everyone else who filed paper returns instead of online and has a social security number ending in 39 and above, I’m still waiting form my mad money….money which I plan on investing in Eastern European economy. But if you want to find out how others are helping to, uh, rebuild our economy, check out HowISpentMyStimulus.com.

[The following submission was penned by Synthesis Weekly columnist Julia Murphy. She can be reached at ninjatreehugger@gmail.com]

Addiction, The Economy and Environmentalism

What does Rehab have to do with sustainability? It’s like a personalized Superfund site. We don’t have any money in the not-so-Superfund, either, just like we don’t have funding for rehabs.
If you’re a wanton garbagehead, something probably will fall apart to the point where you at least end up with a DUI. And that, my friends, is a long hard row to hoe, costing you an ass-pile of money and the humiliation of DrunkSchool. I’m not talking about some Jäger in your Kleen Kanteen in that boring evening class. You know what I mean. Money or time is what you’ll be out, and probably both.
Economy: Ever seen Rich’s crew on Saturdays and Sundays? Skulking, chastened youths and insouciant fun-loving criminals alike, sweeping up the cigarette butts of the previous night’s revelers? How much money would the City of Chico have to pay fools to do that work? [Ed note: Rich's Crew is a local organization where those arrested for misdemeanors like Drunk In Public, Minor In Possession, etc, clean the streets of Chico weekend mornings.]
How much do people make in California prisons? Well, from www.pia.ca.gov:
“Court-ordered restitution/fines are deducted from the wages earned by CALPIA inmates and are transferred to the Crime Victims’ Restitution Fund. CALPIA inmates receive wages between $.30 to $.95 per hour, before deductions.”
Companies get a 10 percent discount on taxes for using prison labor — plus, they get to put that awesome “Made in the USA” tag on their product! Yay!
Good for PIA for creating a reparations fund (speaking of which, when are black Americans to get theirs?) — but I bet they don’t exempt the prisoners who committed “victimless” crimes.
How many people are in jail on drug charges?
“Drug arrests have more than tripled in the last 25 years, totaling a record 1.8 million arrests in 2005. Drug offenders in prisons and jails have increased 1100 percent since 1980. Nearly a half-million (493,800) persons are in state or federal prison or local jail for a drug offense, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980. Nearly 6 in 10 persons in prison for a drug offense have no history of violence or high-level drug selling activity.”
Please — I mean it — check this Web site out: www.november.org/graphs. It’s extensive.
“In 1985, our incarceration rate was 313 per 100,000 population. As of December 2006 it was 751 per 100,000. The largest single factor contributing to this imprisonment wave is a ten-fold rise in drug convictions.”

More after the jump. (more…)

[The following article, written by Bob Howard for Synthesis Weekly, was originally published in the print version of Synthesis on Monday, May 19th, 2008. He can be reached at bob@madbob.com]

Keep on Drinking
By Bob Howard

“Be it destiny or free will, there are those amongst us who might do the rest of society a favor by staying on the couch, taking bong rips and playing the latest version of Grand Theft Auto.”

A Long History of Stupid: I’ve just started reading a biography of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and as a result, I’m learning quite a lot about the history of this country and the tradition of our government cracking down on dissent. This latest episode of our history is far from the first time the Bill of Rights has been superseded and suspended in the name of “security.” I have yet to grasp the logic of suspending freedoms to ensure security when I thought that the whole thing we are trying to secure in the first place is freedom; but I digress.
Anyway, here are some interesting factoids I’ve picked up thus far: Remember when in protest of the French dissent against the “War on Terror” our Congress made the brilliant move of re-naming French Fries “Freedom Fries?” Seems like a pretty creative manifestation of nationalistic stupidity, right? Wrong. During World War I, our Congress re-named Sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage.” Our current stupidity isn’t even original! How do you like that?

Think the threat of terrorism is a new thing? Wrong. Just prior to and then after World War I, the Red Scare developed. Anarchists and Communists were on the rise and there were actually a series of letter bombs and bomb attacks that riddled the nation’s capitol and industrial power figures.
These attacks lead to a complete abridgment of the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights. Anyone suspected of being a communist, a socialist, or a sympathizer — essentially any Russian factory worker — was rounded up in mass arrests and many were unceremoniously deported so quickly that there wasn’t even time for an appeal.

More heartwarming thoughts after the jump. (more…)