ARCATA IS COOL

Remember how bad things became under the Contract With America? Well, it's worse now.

America was forced to give the burgeoning police state a chance - and what did America get in return? 9/11. The result? An excuse for yet MORE police state tyranny - which will do little good the next time Bush decides not to warn the public about a terrorist attack, which the government will then use as a pretext for still more fascism, thus continuing the cycle.

If things continue at this rate, America will be like the Taliban's Afghanistan by the end of the decade. Mark our words.

And when we've said "mark our words", our pessimistic prediction has always come true. So let's say it again: Mark our words.

But one small city has taken a bold step to restore some sanity to this once-great nation. In Arcata, CA - a Newport-sized burg in the state's forgotten northwest corner - City Council has passed a new ordinance making it a crime to cooperate with the feds' misnamed Patriot Act. The new law slaps a $57 fine on any city department head who complies with arrests or investigations under the Patriot Act's zealous auspices.

Over 100 other cities and states throughout the U.S. of A. have passed resolutions to condemn the Patriot Act - but in Arcata they walk the talk! It's a victory for personal freedom, political liberty, and local autonomy - things Dumpya hates.

But the Bush dictatorship's Attorney General (and right-wing fartpipe) John Ashcroft still doesn't get the message and wants to expand the Idiot Act to allow the government to detain even more suspects without convicting them of a crime. Already, of about 800 foreigners detained under the Patriot Act, only one has even been charged with a serious offense. Many of those not charged were detained for 8 months and abused. In another display of Patriot Act fascism, a self-described anarchist in Los Angeles was raided by 25 heavily armed FBI and Secret Service agents solely because the government disagreed with the opinions on his web page. His computer equipment and political literature were robbed from him. After he appeared in New York City to protest the World Economic Summit, the FBI hauled him to a maximum security federal prison on bogus charges.

Early this year the Center for Public Integrity blew the lid off the Bush regime's "confidential" Domestic Security Enhancement Act - a proposed law to revoke the U.S. citizenship of Americans who support the lawful activities of organizations the government disagrees with, thus subjecting them to deportation. Where would they be deported to? After all, we're not talking about foreign nationals here, but American-born citizens. Well, the law would empower the Attorney General to ship dissidents to "any country or region regardless of whether the country or region has a government."

Don't dismiss illegal stormtrooper raids and arbitrary detentions as things that only happen to other folks. You could be next. After being jailed on a bogus charge over publishing The Last Word during the Contract With America's bloodbath against dissent, we know.

Cities in our area can help reverse this trend by following Arcata's bold footsteps and passing their own laws against enforcing the Patriot Act.

I FIGHT THE COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY AND THE COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY ALWAYS WINS

History is already discrediting Bush's illegal war against Iraq, as the U.S. government admits it lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and as the "coalition" occupation terrorizes Baghdad and withholds electricity and food from the city's residents.

As the U.S.-led forces - which anointed themselves as the Coalition Provisional Authoirity - continue their reign of martial law in Iraq, they have written a "code of conduct" for Iraqi media to censor anything they deem anti-American or otherwise disagree with.

You think we're kidding, don't you? After Shrubby spent all those months pounding his podium about how the war would result in a democratic Iraq, there's no way the American government would impose its own censorship policies on Iraqi news media, right?

Considering how the American government controls American news media - by subsidizing conglomerates to parrot federal propaganda and now by more direct censorship - this shouldn't be too surprising, unless you've been asleep for the past few years and expect not to wake up in America you don't recognize.

The editor of a new Iraqi daily accurately observed, "They plan to set up a committee and some jerks will be on it."

The Coalition Provisional Authority's Mike Furlong deserves a Doublespeak Award for this two-cornered statement: "There's no room for hateful and destabilizing messages that will destroy the emerging Iraqi democracy."

Huh?

The very idea of a democracy is that there's room for "destabilizing" opinions. "Destabilizing" is just a word the Far Right is throwing around to label anything that runs afoul of their party line.

As part of the new "media law", dissident publications could be shut down.

Because Iraq is under American occupation, American forces should follow the Bill of Rights there even though it's a foreign country. But since the Coalition Provisional Authority doesn't understand the First Amendment, why should we expect them to understand the Second Amendment? Occupation forces planned to provide Iraqis with less than a month to turn in all guns that they owned - or face criminal charges at the hands of the U.S. The weapons would have then become the property of a new Iraqi government installed by the U.S.-led "coalition".

The NRA should take note of this in case they possess any mistaken notions about Bush being friendly to gun ownership rights.

Yeah, I know. It's not America where all this happened. But the U.S. government is the main occupying force and thus should be bound by U.S. laws. More importantly, the Bush regime's disregard for the First and Second amendments in this story speaks volumes about how it would treat Americans at home if it thought it could get away with it.

And don't spout any excuses about how Iraq is a special situation that calls for special measures. At the very least, freedom of political speech is recognized by human rights groups as a fundamental right that people possess regardless of what country they live in. Nations around the world signed on to this principle a half-century ago.

By sacrificing freedom in the name of security one quickly finds themselves with neither. This has been proven throughout history.

(As we were writing this article, the news story came out revealing that a group of U.S. soldiers forced oral sex on an Iraqi woman - adding to a long list of "coalition" atrocities that has grown in the past 3 months.)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

To The Editor Of The Last Word:

you are a total ass clown. apparently you smoke to much weed. you aren't funny and all you do is piss people off I think you need to disappear. no wonder you were kick out of schools and all that stuff. hi i'm bandit6 and i'm a total fucking idiot. don't let the door hit you were the lord split you

To The Editor Of The Last Word:

Dickhead.

MONTHLY MORON MOTORIST

Bad driving season is here!

As the weather gets warmer, we always find a chance to get out more and encounter some candidates for Monthly Moron Motorist!

The so-called winner for May is the driver of a gray taxi that traveled northeast on Fairfield in the Belv and then pulled into a crosswalk at the junction with an intersecting street and idled there for minutes on end, blocking the road.

Does that bip or what?

Or does it pib?

Or does it shit in a Sanka can?

(Also, why is it that if you stand on the sidewalk and yell the word "taxi!" that no cab ever shows up like it does on TV? We'll try it right now. Taxi! Taxi! See? No taxi!)

POT GURU FREED! YAY!

Following a hearing at a federal court in San Francisco, Ed Rosenthal - the "Guru of Ganja" - walked free after being sentenced to only one day in prison for growing medical marijuana.

Under the crazed federal laws he could have been sentenced to a ruinous 60 years in the paholkey. But prosecutors were slapped silly when he was presented with only one day behind bars - a sentence that he was credited with as time already served. He was also fined $1,300, but that's a much lighter punishment than what the so-called Department of Justice sought.

He shouldn't have even been charged in the first place, since California is one of several states - along with Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, Colorado, and Maine - that allows marijuana for medical purposes. The California law to permit medical marijuana was even approved by voters - in NINETEEN NINETY-FUCKING-SIX, no less! (Even when America's political system was mostly buried under the Contract With America's rubble, medical marijuana STILL won resounding public approval.)

In other words, he was entirely within the law!

Even if it is a crime to help the seriously ill, does it really warrant 60 years in prison? The horrors that characterize America's penal facilities are the topic of much criticism even when suffered by the most violent criminals - who usually serve much shorter sentences. The average murderer is imprisoned for only a few years. In these topsy-turvy times, with the de facto legalization of child molestation, as we can see from the case of the priest in Ohio who completely avoided jail despite pleading guilty to such a crime, disgusting pedophiles often don't have to do time at all. In fact, officials in some conservative locales (including Northern Kentucky) will go out of their way to protect child molesters and other abusers.

It's enough to make you want to nail your own eyelids to the window sill and bleed to death so you don't have to read about it anymore.

Nonetheless, it is fortunate that in the California case the War on Drugs politburo didn't get to enjoy watching a lengthy prison sentence being imposed on someone they thought was guilty of one of their many thought crimes. This now-rare victory for the forces of freedom should be savored like a good viaduct shit.

CEREAL KILLER

The Peppermill hotel and casino in West Wendover, NV, uses an electronic card as the room key for its guests, and it features a hilarious photo of a woman with a moronic smirk on her face. A Samsung CD burner was sold in a box bearing photos that are perhaps even more absurd, one of which appeared to be a person biting someone's ear off.

Recently we found a drawing at www.theimaginaryworld.com that is just as funny. As you'll see, it includes the magic substance: good ol' vitamin G! Also known as Singapore contraband! But even if your favorite pink chewy candy was not so hilarious just by the very fact that it was invented at all, this would STILL be an UPROARIOUS illustration (see picture at right)!

What makes this picture - which appeared on the back of a Cocoa Puffs cereal box circa 1983 - such a guffaw causer?

Lots of things!

Who does the pair of hands unwrapping the morsel of Super Bubble belong to? They don't appear to be those of either one of the kids pictured in the drawing, because of their strange position. They look like some phantom set of hands from a person hiding on the ground. Since we know the hands aren't those of the girl on the left with the outdated hairstyle, why does she appear at all? She doesn't seem to be chewing bubble gum, but rather has this toothy Peppermill-like grin on her face, as if she's not really doing anything constructive.

And is that supposed to be Big Boy over on the right?! Why is he holding his hand up under his face? It looks like he's about to pull his inflated gum out of his mouth and stick it in the girl's hair.

Sonny the Cocoa Puffs Bird is stabbing his finger in the air and aimlessly babbling as usual. Oh, and let's not forget the text. "Great bubbles all day!"? Like you chew gum while eating supper?

Who's gonna buy the cereal just because it includes free bubble gum? You can drive down to Kroger and buy bubble gum without having to spend all that money on cereal that tastes like cardboard. It's not like a Diving Tony that could only be found in a Frosted Flakes box.

I bet Sonny the Cocoa Puffs Bird's shit stinks from eating all those Cocoa Puffs!

We'd hate to use too many pictures from the same source, but there's an EVEN FUNNIER cereal box picture at that same web page - and this one has absolutely nothing to do with bubble gum (see picture at left)!

Isn't that positively the most RIDICULOUS thing you've ever seen in your life?!

I remember the Honey-Comb box, but the absurdity of a person in a goofy hat measuring a piece of cereal never sank in back when I was 10 years old. Like it really matters how big each piece is? Who eats just one piece of cereal?

Around the time I started high school I found I could no longer eat cereal with milk, as it sent me gagging. I believe part of this is because of a disgusting Honey-Comb commercial from the '80s. Another factor was the fact that Pac-Man cereal tasted like shit mixed with Clorox, leading me to wonder why anyone would buy the damn stuff when all they had to do to enjoy the taste was take a dump in their underpants and remove them from the washing machine halfway through being bleached.

Probably the main reason I couldn't devour cereal anymore was that I had to get up at 5 AM each morning because the school bus took 2 hours to go 8 miles to school.

KINGS ISLAND STARTS FIGHT WITH CUSTOMER

Things are becoming poopier every single day.

Kings Island has become a towering laughingstock that defeats the supposed purpose of why amusement parks exist. The only thing amusing about this amusement park is that its bandwagon arrogance in the face of an international crisis has cost it perhaps thousands of visitors.

When that crumbling waste of space known as Kings Island opened for the 2003 season in April, it bragged that it added walk-through metal detectors for patrons at the front gate and at the WaterWorks section. In true dogfucker fashion, Kings Island's excuse for snooping underneath customers' underwear is...

You guessed it!

It's the new catch-all excuse: According to the right-wing morons of Kings Island, metal detectors at the abusement park somehow prevent OTHER right-wing morons from crashing a plane into the park.

Like you believe that?

Think of how absurd this sounds: Some terrorist walks into an airport and and then thinks, Uh-oh, I better not crash into Kings Island...Their metal detector will stop the plane from crashing there.

Isn't that the silliest thing you've ever heard?

Of course it is! Especially since one of the other parks owned by the money-grubbing Paramount had metal detectors even before 9/11. If not for 9/11, Kings Island would use some other excuse. (The Far Right is laughing to themselves about 9/11 right now because it gives them a pretext to stick their snouts where they don't belong.)

Kings Island went 30 years without a metal detector, and it didn't exactly get blown off the face of the planet.

Don't people go to Kings Island to (gasp!) HAVE FUN?! Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of going to Kings Island for people to have to tolerate this shit?

Like us, one visitor thought so.

On the very day of the park's April reopening, Kings Island started a violent confrontation with a 50-year-old man over a small pocketknife. The park went crying to the police about it and monopolized the cops' resources for over an hour.

Since Kings Island treats its customers like shit, try to avoid wasting your hard-earned money visiting this abusement park.