If you don't take your shorts off, we can't pull the stick our of your ass.

Another day in Tualatin, another God-crazy politician trying to impose his beliefs on his denizens. Stars Cabaret, a dingy strip club, is moving into Tualatin. In Lake-O, they tried to block a new strip club. They failed. In Twally, they tried to block Stars' liquor license. They failed. Now they're trying to add an amendment to the state constitution to block strip clubs. They will fail.

Let's start with step one. The role of government is to cover needs and services of the people. They also have policing responsibilities, to keep people safe. That's why there are liquor licenses— bars have to be accountable for their patrons, ensuring that people are cut off at a certain point, minors aren't given (too much) booze, and no drunken brawls break out. That has NOTHING to do with looking at naked people. Blocking their liquor license is a perversion of their responsibilities and an abuse of power. That is not why they are given licensing authority, and the effort is clearly for the sole purpose of dissuading people "different from them" from doing what they want to do. It is the exact same thing, and I will fight you to the death on this, as preventing Jews from moving into your city because you don't like accountants. It's presumptuous, it's bigoted, and it's flat out fucking prejudiced.

Sidenote: So prejudiced, in fact, that this is how they're trying to include it into the state constitution—where the Constitution states that "no law shall be passed restraining... free expression," they want to add onto the end of it (this is verbatim) "nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or prohibit a local government from imposing... restrictions on the operations of nude dancing businesses."

Let me reiterate: Where the Constitution specifically states that the government shall not impose their beliefs on the people they represent, the city of Tualitin wants to add "except for when the government wants to impose their beliefs on the people they represent." Fucking assholes.

If I lost any of you on that comparison, let's come back for a second. I'm not saying that people who go to strip clubs do so for religious purposes (though some of them might). I'm saying that the only reason why someone would try to ban a strip club is because they have it in their fucked up little Christian heads that anyone who goes to nudey bars does so purely because they have an evil Satan voice in their heads telling them that women are to be used and subordinated, and that the patrons all fantasize about raping the girls as they dance. That is an absolute fucking insult, and borderline hate crime, against professional strippers. Just because you fucking churchies can't go five minutes talking to a little boy without ramming his dick in your mouth doesn't mean the rest of us have demons to expel.

People go to strip clubs purely for entertainment purposes. Believe it or not, it's not even sexual. Very few men (or women) get aroused when they go to a strip club. They just get tired of spending all day and night pretending that there's nothing to appreciate in the female form. It's one of the few things that crazy right-wing puritans and crazy left-wing liberals can agree on: people should be ashamed for having an interest in the female body. No, I don't want to get to know every girl that I want to see naked. Kind of like how I don't want my doctor to fix my car. They're two completely unrelated proficiencies.

So I get fucking tired of forcing my eyes up when a girl walks by. I get tired of people looking aghast at me when I check someone out and proclaim, "you're married!" Most of all, I get tired of dimwitted, bitchy women who spend 4 hours a day making themselves look good getting offended because I don't like their personalities any better now that they got a boob job. To have a place where you can walk in and look straight at a woman and think, "I want her to take her clothes off without me talking to her about her favorite movie," and lo and behold, off comes the top... well, I'd pay good money for that.

So would a lot of people. A lot of people who have no desire to associate with these women otherwise. I actually found out once in college that a stripper I'd seen a couple times went to school with me. She was actually incredibly nice, and I had some great conversations with her, but then I couldn't go to her strip club anymore because I'd feel guilty. It was too... intimate, once I knew her. So you see, I have no idea to get to know these women, let alone get intimate with them. The whole idea is that I can drop the 19th-century conventions that we're held to for one night and watch them do their thing. And you know what? The good ones enjoy it. They've worked hard on their bodies, and they get tired of having to hide them. They want to be able to just shove their implants in some guy's face and say "look at these, fucktard. You want them, don't you? You want these big titties? DON'T FUCKING TOUCH!" Then the guy thanks them and gives them a dollar.

Disgusted? Fucking deal with it.

These are people different from you. I don't fucking understand. People don't like fatty foods, so they want to close down McDonalds. People want to drive by themselves to work, so they want to shut down the bus. People like taking the bus, so they want to install toll bridges. How about we pretend that we're a country that allows you to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Hell, I remember there was a strip club in Idaho that was shut down because neighbors didn't "feel safe knowing it was there." Sharing a building with the strip club was a gun store and a head shop. What the fuck do you care what we do behind the big black door? Hell, even if you happened upon it by accident the bouncer wouldn't let you in.

Which brings me back to the politicians in Tualatin, who should all be fired. Here's the basic math: if your constituents really don't want a strip club nearby, they won't go to the strip club. They're really expensive anyway. If the strip club doesn't go out of business, it's because THE RESIDENTS OF TUALATIN WANT A FUCKING STRIP CLUB.

Don't worry, we deviants in Portland will not be making the drive down to the Twally to check out your nickel-and-dime pastie dancers. We've got clubs here that serve you a porterhouse while the stripper grinds the ketchup. We have peep shows where for five bucks you get to yell "stick your finger in it." We've got an old fuckhouse with heroine needles in the drywall that's being converted into a family restraunt, and—pay attention, now—part of their mission in remodeling is to retain the flavor of the original establishment. So no, you don't have to worry about a new strip club "attracting an undesirable element" into the city. All it will do is give the undesirable element something to do on Saturday night. And in exchange, they'll sleep in Sunday morning, instead of trying to pass legislation to shut down your church.

The History of Liberia

After Jim Crow laws were passed stating that no blacks were safe in the United States, even in free states, some of the founding fathers of the U.S. (most prominently Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner) decided that black Americans needed somewhere they could really feel safe if they were freed, so why not Africa? A team of Americans , including Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and Paul Cuffe, a Native American slave ship captain, secretly sent a ship to Africa, taking with them 33 African Americans and settled an unmapped city in West Africa called "Freetown." Over the next sixty years, slave ships going to pick up more slaves would secretly ship escaped or freed blacks back to Africa, slowly populating the secret civilization called the ACS (American Colonization Society) and helping them establish a shadow government in Africa. When the Civil War seemed inevitable in the late 1840s, many Southerners who had been part of the ACS movement started sending boats FULL of blacks over to Freeville.

When Great Britain discovered this secret colony, they made an attempt to annex it as part of the United Kingdom. They figured that the United States would be afraid to admit what they had been building and would abandon the colony, giving the UK prime coastal land in West Africa. Instead, the United States officially granted the ACS their independence and renamed them Liberia. Five states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Maryland, and the southern state of Virginia, who founded the ACS—all pitched in interest free loans to the Liberian government so they could fund an army. In nearly bankrupted the states, but they felt morally obliged to act.

In 1847, Liberia drafted their constitution and was founded as a free Republic. They renamed Freeville to "Monroeville," in honor of James Monroe, who had raised over $100,000 for the colony while he was sitting President of the United States. Though it's just as rife with conflict and war as any African country, it is still a sovereign nation, still in good standing with the Anglican world, and this year elected their first female President, in an election which was completely free of corruption, and are on their way to drafting a balanced budget.

So you tell me that American History isn't just as fascinating as European.

Blessed Economy

My wife is essentially a student—she's self-teaching so that she can get licensure to work in a specialized field, so as a result she isn't employed. In a good economy, that would be a problem. In the shitheap we live in now, though, my high-end-of-average paycheck ($1k every 2 weeks), we're doing quite well. We don't shop the good stores, but every time we see a liquidation sale, we march in with a fistful of bills and walk out sitting pretty. The missus has doubled her wardrobe, and I've been scooping up all the old games and software that people have been hawking, desperate for money. We've also gotten ourselves a new HDTV, one of those digital frame thingys, and we're moving into a much bigger and better apartment that (after incentives) will end up costing us hundreds less than where we're living now, since they're desperate to get tenants of any kind.

I feel guilty, to a certain degree. I really do feel like I'm profiting off of other people's mistakes. But then, isn't that how it should work? All those pretentious fucks I knew in college kept saying to me in their most condescending voices, "you're an idiot for renting an apartment. You're throwing your money away, not buying a house." Meanwhile, 80% of their house payments went to the bank, and the bank just blew the money on nothing, and then reneg'ed on their loan, and their house depreciated by more than they paid for it. That's not even considering all the money they spent on yard improvements, sewer lines, maintenance, and all the other stuff that's built in to a rental price, but they have to pay for themselves (which doesn't improve the value of their house).

All those fucktards kept chiding me for getting an English degree while they were out getting their MBAs. Then they got a lucrative job at Washington Mutual, while I devoted myself to being a big fish in a little pond, and now they're getting laid off because their company realized they provide no actual value to their employer, while my income has increased steadily and unwaveringly by 28% a year. And because I have practically no investments in high-risk stocks (all my money is in CDs and annuities), I haven't really lost any money in this economy. And once my wife does get her license, she'll be applying for jobs almost completely unopposed, because for all those snobby little assholes who were skating through med school with 'C' grades, their parents started questioning whether it was worth it paying 6 figures on an education that their kid clearly doesn't give a fuck about. So while the health industry itself is recession-proof, and riding a wave of support from a President who wants to amp up health care, there aren't any new doctors coming out of the college circuit, and the ones who are coming out don't know shit about the actual work, they just knew it was a high-paying enterprise. So as the hospitals try to keep costs down so they'll qualify for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy, they spend a lot more time looking at these alternative-certification doctors who really know their shit, and couldn't care less how much they spent on their education. As Keith Olbermann is fond of pointing out—the fact that he went to Cornell A&M just means he was paying $500 per class for his Cornell education instead of $3,000; the classes were all the same.

So you know what? I take it back. Fuck all you self-congratulatory blowhards. You were wrong—that's what happens when you get your life philosophy off the cover of Greedy Fucker magazine. I learned all my life lessons by living. You see, things make more sense when you find them by thinking things through.

P.S. See my new fiction blog, The New Republic, at http://web.me.com/bonwell.parker/The_New_Republic/Blog/Blog.html.

Teabagging countdown

Still think news is boring? You don't watch cable:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Next starting at 1:30—

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And, finally:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It is now that we can see the unforeseen consequences of Republicans not going to college. Otherwise, at least one of them would have known what "teabag" means.

Slick as a seal's ass

This concept that our economy is struggling because of bloated bureaucracies is absurd. I work for a bureaucracy, and I can assure you that they are a 100% solution-oriented operation. Let me give you an example.

Security is so restrictive here that they spend about $1000 every month just unlocking people's accounts. Mine, for instance, locks up as a precautionary measure every day at about 4:00 because my computer automatically handshakes with a third-party vendor that I have to use for my job, and my computer isn't 100% sure they aren't trying to steal our information. Additionally, since our Internet Explorer is two generations old, it's so slow I can't even do my job with it, so I use Safari, which my computer doesn't recognize, so it locks me out from time to time.

74% of calls to IT, evidently, are people who are locked out of their computer for some reason. So the company has just released a bulletin letting people know how to solve this cost-prohibitive issue. Their solution? Stop calling in to have your computer unlocked. See how simple that is? If nobody calls in, it doesn't cost them any money to fix it! What exactly we're supposed to do with a locked computer, of course, is our problem.