In case you didn't know, the loss of 20,000 American jobs in April is actually good news. You see, economists had predicted 73,000 jobs would be lost last month, so thank God we dodged that bullet, right?!

In fact, the unemployment rate fell to 5.0% from 5.1% in March. Therefore, the unemployment rate is going down!! Surely, a .1% drop in the unemployment rate means America's determined locomotive is chugging toward the dawn of a new economic renaissance...right?

This week marked the world premiere of GasHole, a new documentary film (narrated by Peter Gallagher) about the history of oil prices and the future of alternative fuels.

Biofuel gossip has been everywhere in the news lately. Bolivian President, Evo Morales, condemned the use of valuable farming land for ethanol at the recent U.N. summit, and Roger Cohen pleaded for a moment of sanity, suggesting in his New York Times op-ed that it may be foolish to universally condemn biofuels.

Regardless of the outcome in Pennsylvania today, Barack Obama should begin to shift the focus of his attack from Hillary Clinton's fading star to John McCain's feisty Supernova.

Obama's people have downplayed the expectations for a victory in the PA race in an interview with The Washington Post, but this is an unwise strategy. This kind of speculation fuels the "horse race" gossip that the mainstream media thrives covering.

The media likes a rough and tumble, neck-to-neck race. They're used to it after eight years of covering Bush-Gore and then Bush-Kerry. Now, they've been covering Obama-Clinton for months, and their natural inclination is to turn everything into an 11th hour production.

Outside his audacity of hope, it could be Barack Obama's audacious scrutiny of religion that becomes his undoing.

Did I mention it's 2008? And yet we're still talking about God. Despite being so advanced and clever in all aspects of our existence, human beings are still talking about a bearded dude, who supposedly walked on water, and could cure people with one touch, but couldn't navigate his way off a cross.

Perhaps recognizing the benefits of leading a population fearful of an invisible daddy figure in the clouds, moderate politicians have always approached the issue of religion cautiously. After all, terrified people are easily led and fed all kinds of crazy bullshit. Why educate them and screw it all up?

For those of you who missed the drama because you have lives, and don’t haunt the internet like friendless ghosts, this week author and feminist, Erica Jong and Rolling Stone columnist, Matt Taibbi got into a huge mud fight on the celebutard watering hole, the Huffington Post.

In the name of full disclosure, I have to confess three things. The first confession I have to make is that I hate Erica Jong. This is something of a new revelation for me because I had never heard her name before this week. Erica’s Huffpost biography (which is intended to be a short blurb) extends for a page and a half as she breathlessly tries to convince us she’s worth the $13 her pretentious, pseudo-intellectual mob shelled out for her latest hardcover, Sappho’s Leap.

Horrifically violent and totally chaotic, China has become impossible for the world to ignore. Of course, that won't stop American athletes and tourists from attending the Olympic games, nor American advertisers from leaching millions of dollars from the international gathering of irregularly muscular pole vaulters and aquatic overachievers.

Americans possess the appropriate amount of outrage for the China crisis, but hoping for immediate results, they turn to the wrong change agents: politicians.

Politicians won't stop the 2008 Olympics.

Barack Obama has only managed to skillfully avoid mentioning anything regarding the Chinese.

Allow me to put on my mittens, take you by the hands, and treat you like a retarded consumer incapable of critical thinking...

Let me convince you that it's been a rough couple of months for Senator Clinton. You see, my precious, Mrs. Clinton first overstated the degree of danger she faced while visiting Bosnia in 1996. Now, she's been accused of fabricating a health care horror story.

What's that? You think politicians frequently misquote speeches, overstate their importance, and lie about reality? You think this isn't important?

Merriam-Webster gives the following definitions for the word "whore":

1: a woman who engages in sexual acts for money : prostitute; also : a promiscuous or immoral woman
2: a male who engages in sexual acts for money
3: a venal or unscrupulous person

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is a big fucking whore.

John McCain is an embarrassment of contradictions. He claims to be a man of the people, but has spent his life surrounding himself with only the finest pedigrees of elite, rich WASPS. He pretends to be a proponent of political reform when in fact he chronically dips into the lobbyist cookie jar. He sold his soul for the fringe, right vote. Once a strict, non-interventionist Conservative, McCain is now leading the campaign for Expansionist policies.

A corporation is a group of people, who gather together in order to perform a task otherwise too risky or too expensive for an individual to accomplish. Way back in the days of silly mustaches, entrepreneurs had to gain the government's permission to incorporate, and since governments are built and sustained on public finances, corporations were originally created to serve the public. Historically, citizens had a say in every aspect of corporations, including how large they grew, and how long they operated.

In the 19th century, businessmen changed the corporate model by successfully cutting the public out of the process. Andrew Carnegie formed his steel operation as a limited partnership, and John D. Rockefeller avoided consulting the pesky public by making Standard Oil a trust.

The Bush administration and its staff of flying monkeys are either unwilling or incapable of providing American citizens with basic services. Their main failures regard regulation, one of the foundational purposes of having a government in the first place. When the government goons DO decide to perform some kind of regulation, it's usually done to strictly benefit wealthy corporations. Free trade advocates claim this is regulation run amuck, but the bailout is merely a continuation of the selling out of America to the corporation. The act simply masquerades as government regulation, but the truth is that cronyism has infested Washington and Wall Street, alike, resulting in the government's desire to protect the wealth instead of the people.

This month on Wall Street, traders hyperventilated into paper bags, and ordinary citizens feigned understanding of terms like “securities trading” and “wealth management.” The long and short of it is clear: bad stuff is happening. The times are turbulent, and we’re all in a lot of trouble.

Bear Stearns (BSC) stock value collapsed so badly that the Fed had to rush JP Morgan in for a shotgun wedding. Uncle Bernanke married the two off before the world saw BSC for the cheap whore she really was. And I do mean CHEAP: On March 13th, BSC stock sold for $55.13 a piece. Just days later on March 16th, JP Morgan was throwing BSC stocks from the rooftops for $2 a share.

Tonight on his show, indignant liberal pundit, Keith Olbermann, plans on attacking Mrs. Clinton. In Keith's defense, the Clinton camp has offered America a smörgåsbord of divisive comments from supporters like crazy Geraldine Ferraro, who has confused the struggles of privileged white women with those of African-American men. Clinton also has Mark Penn in her camp, former PR-man for Blackwater, the private mercenary firm. So Keith has a lot of material to work with, and I'm sure hilarity will ensue.

The national media is quick to remind the American citizenry that their opinions don't matter.

Meanwhile, moments of democratic triumph go largely unreported. Take, for example, residents of California voting out all five members of a local planning group that had backed plans to allow Blackwater Worldwide to open a training camp in their area. Blackwater claims they hightailed it because of noise regulations and not the angry battle cries of the California residents, which is a lie. If the California residents had warmly embraced plans for the mercenary training facility, Blackwater's merry engineers would have rushed in overnight to start building. It was only the will of the people that prevented this from happening.

While reading about Prince Harry sashaying back from Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan, everyone?) after his three months of duty, I was reminded of a certain politician and his finely-groomed pack of Mormon sons.

If you get past the fact that apparently soldiers can bring their own hair gel to war, and have time to style their red manes into an intense trajectory of spikes, Harry looks like he tried his best to fit in, act mild and unimportant, and do his job. That's more than the Romneys can say.

The Democrats like to cast blame for why they continually lose elections. Karl Rove's dream of a permanent Republican majority, while eventually thwarted because of Bush fatigue, was only possible because the Democrats failed to form a compelling ideology for a globalized economy.

Definition through negation works in some preliminary stump speeches, but eventually voters want answers. It's not enough to be Not-Republicans. How, exactly, are Democrats different than Republicans? Spouting tired rhetoric about the New Deal and social welfare worked for a country teetering on the brink of Socialism during FDR's reign, but what now? How are the Fat Cats in the Democratic party different than the Fat Cats in the Republican wing?

America, the world's beacon of democracy - that shiny righteous city on the hill - has always claimed moral superiority to the war criminals of the past. America got this title because of two claims: we don't torture people and we give everyone the right of Habeas Corpus.

Well, toss #1 out the window. We do torture people. Of course, the CIA claims they only water boarded people when the country was in total chaos and everyone was absolutely terrified of another 9/11. Skeptics might say that's exactly when the CIA should have shown the MOST restraint - when the American citizenry was in a state of shock and needed to be calmed rather than prodded - but then that would hardly follow the government's systematic pattern of exploitation and fear-mongering.

Like some kind of Change-fueled locomotive, Barack "Bringin' the Hope" Obama has surged past his presidential competitor, Hillary Clinton, in the delegate count.

However, it seems like Hillary only grows stronger whenever she's knocked down. We need only think back to one wintry eve in New Hampshire when the lady Clinton was left behind, her campaign all but dead coming out of Iowa. She's out. Everyone thought it, and many pundits explicitly said it.

Well, they were wrong. It's hard to kill a Clinton campaign, and it's a grave miscalculation to underestimate one. When Hillary Clinton cried in New Hampshire, what happened was more than the media's unfair emphasis on gender roles and issues of "sensitivity." She became the underdog, and if there's one thing women don't like to see, it's two men bullying a woman. Suddenly, Hillary was the victim of the Establishment: two big, bad men, who were bossing her around.

I feel bad for Howard Dean. Really, I do. The man just has a politician's version of Tourette's syndrome. I'm sure when he said that he wanted to bring "the candidates together and make some kind of an arrangement" in order to create unity at the DNC, he didn't mean for it to sound like some kind of crazy conspiratorial Bilderberg Group meeting between hooded members of the Skulls and Bones society, consisting of Kennedys, Bushes, and the remaining decedents of Vlad the Impaler.

Oh, but Howie, it did sound a little strange.

I get his anxiety, though. With all these statewide 50/50 splits between Hillary and Barack, the Democrats are already acting like it's a presidential election! Never before in the history of the country have we acted so indecisive, so early. All Howie meant by his cryptic remarks is that we need a front-runner because what happens if -yikes- Hillary Clinton gets the nomination?

The best people to talk about politics with are comics. They’re humble folk because they make a living wowing herds of fat, drunk tourists with jokes that cross all social, racial, and gender boundaries. Ergo, they don’t try to throw big words around like so many PHD-carriers, which really is the Homosapien equivalent of monkeys hurling their own feces around their containment cages.

Comics speak simply and pepper their sentences with verbal ticks like “fuck”. They’re the first people to launch outrageous political theories without the talking head inclination of prefacing their ideologies with “According to Newsweek…” or “Abraham Lincoln once said…” Their opinions are their own, and so comics have this weird habit of saying exactly what they mean and not caring if you don’t agree with them. They don’t quote polls or bloggers, nor philosophers or poets. In fact, if you quoted poetry to a comic, they’d call you an asshole, or worse.

"I think we're not looking sufficiently at what is happening at the grassroots in the country. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently. Things do not start with governments."

-Grace Lee Boggs

When something horrifically awful happens, our first instinct as human beings is to create a narrative of what happened. Great disasters and sudden death beg a framework: what happened, who did it involve, when did it occur? How do we fix it? After September 11th, people were desperate for a story, which is probably why most of us bought a shoddy tale of WMDs, Saddam, and a little place called Iraq.

After the election on December 27th, all hell broke loose in Kenya. The chaos was because of the disputed victory of Mwai Kibaki over his political opponent, Raila Odinga of the Orange Democratic Party (ODP). It was like the 2000 Gore/Bush Florida debacle, if the RNC and DNC were armed with machetes and liberals actually possessed the discipline and drive to meet at rallying points on time.

In Kenya, horrible things happened, and are happening. Women are being raped. Babies are being killed and children are watching their families die. This sort of corrupt election aftermath is foreign to people in the United States. During Bush's inaugural drive to the White House, someone pelted his limousine with an egg, but no one launched a grenade into his convoy. Protesters booed Bush and his CIA bodyguards, but no one lit Laura Bush on fire.

Last night, two Dennis Kucinich supporters screamed during Jay Leno's Late Night Show. They rudely interrupted Jay's Bill Maher interview. The audience seemed confused, Bill and Jay seemed pissed.

In Bill's defense, the Loose Change crazies have been hounding him for years now, and periodically infiltrate his Real Time sound studio to shout their poorly synchronized slogans. So Bill's not that keen on people shouting crap at him, and he might have thought it was 9/11 conspiratorial nonsense. I'm assuming this because Bill Maher should know more than anyone the importance of free speech, and surely he doesn't believe the only people allowed to express their opinions are individuals with HBO talk shows.

I'm about to do something I hate doing. I'm going to preface my argument with a statement. I hate prefacing things because it feels like making excuses or buying a Get Out Of Jail Free card, but this needs to be said: I like Barack Obama.

Okay? I like him. I like everything about Barack Obama, even though I know little to nothing about him, which is problematic. But you know what? Fuck it. I like his talk, his walk, his family, and his speeches.

He's made me like a politician, a rare feat. Even more remarkable, he's done this by using the same word bank of commonplace rhetoric like "hope" and "change" that feel so stale when other hunchbacked politirats use them. Barack gets away with it because Barack has style, and he also appears to mean what he says. He really seems ready to charge the gates of the White House with his army of dreamers.