Okay, so it’s Monday and let’s review the weekend:

The U.S. House of Representatives finally acknowledged over 40 years of urgent warnings – sorta – and passed a piece of legislation intended to limit – sorta – suffocating black smoke from tailpipes and smoke stacks.

The USA national futbol team dang near beat the legendary Brazilian futbol team to dang near win an international tournament dreamed up just to give Brazil another trophy, which left most Americans saying, ”whut?“

Michael Jackson remains dead despite efforts of the Jackson Family to deny this simple fact. Jacko was joined in death by some dude who became famous – sorta – by hawking some alleged cleaning product on the TeeVee Box and thus blew a gaping hole in the long-standing theory which suggests celebrity deaths come in sets of threes, except only in this bizarre world does one attain the rank of ”celebrity“ by hawking some alleged cleaning product on the TeeVee Box. So much for, ”Fame…I’m gonna live forever.“

But the big news of the weekend comes from some little po-dunk alleged church in Kentucky which on Sunday – the Christian Shabbot – held a big rally and invited folks to bring their favorite guns with which they might worship the Baby Jesus because the Baby Jesus was, if nothing else, all about totin’ guns and showin’ the world how insecure he was about his manhood.

According to press reports, about 200 people showed up – guns on their hips – to hear the alleged preacher read from the Gospel According to Charlton Heston, New Revisionist Version.

"We love God, we love our country," said the preacher. "Without a belief in God, without a belief even in firearms, I don't believe this country would be here the way it is today.“ (Highest death rate by guns in the world.)

He went on to point out Amurkins can’t be expected to defend their First Amendment right to practice religion as they want to screw it up without also defending their Second Amendment right to bear their arms and shoot anybody who dares to disagree with ‘em. It’s the Amurkin way!

He said the Baby Jesus was absolutely right when he talked about how blessed are the piecemakers ‘cause you can only have piece if you’re carryin’ a piece that’ll blow a hole through the middle of a moose and how ever’body knows the only decent response to your enemy is to shoot ‘em.

Following the sermon, the congregation celebrated the Eucharist with bullet-shaped waivers substituted for the Body of Christ.

Back in Washington, the House of Representatives barely passed a climate change bill over the strenuous objections of nearly all Republicans and several Democrats who say they like the climate just the way it is and don’t want to change it.

Besides, they say, it could also limit their own excretion of hot air.

House GOP Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he’s personally like to see the climate get warmer because it will be easier to maintain his Ohio tan. In a mature and statesman-like approach, he told The Hill newspaper he wanted the Amurkin people to know the climate change bill is – and we’re quoting here – ”a pile of shit.“ Nice.

It’s only onward and upward from here, friends and neighbors. As the immortal philosopher, Billy Mays, once said in a most grammatically exquisite way, ”You have woken up the sleeping giant. I’ll have a pitch-off with you any time, Vince.“

Wait…what? Michael Jackson was 50????

Are we sure about this? 50 years old? Michael Jackson? 50?

“Wow, that’s old,” said my soon-to-be-18-year-old who was as devastated by the news as many of the rest of us where at the news of Elvis or John Lennon. “No offense, Dad.”

None taken.

What a day of death news is was, yesterday. First, word that iconic nipple poster Farrah – oh, sweet Farrah – lost her brave battle with cancer and, then, Michael.

But let’s be honest. No one could be happier with the day’s events than Discredited-GOP-Holier-than-thou-Smugmerchant and Soon-to-be-Ex-Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford.

“Yes,” he must have said in his quiet desperation. “Get me OFF the front dang pages! Maybe I’ll slide back on down to Argentina for a little more pampasnooky while no one is looking.”

Okay, so my question is this: how does one uptight, butt-ugly southern governor with big ears get to do the horizontal lambada with some hot Argentinean babe with great tan lines? Huh! Just exactly HOW does that happen? Please, moan for me Argentina?

Oh, well, you see, radio clown and carnival barker Douche Limpbranch has the answer. (As we knew he would.)

Limpbranch explains it this way: Sanford and Sins came about because President Obama is destroying this country. That’s right. He said that.

After losing his valiant battle against federal stimulus money intended to help the poor and suffering of South Carolina – and failing to find the keys to Fort Sumter – Sanford was so distraught by the direction in which the President is taking this country – you know, somehow out of the muck and mire left by GWBush – he just threw up his hands and said, “What the hell? I’m going to cruise South America and score some hot Latin babe. Get a little stimulus of my own.”

Seriously, that’s Limpbranch’s explanation for why, in El Douche’s words, Sanford committed, “self-inflicted political suicide.” See, Mark-0? If you paid for it in the D.R. like Douche does you wouldn’t have this problem, except of course when Customs confiscates your Viagra.

Had he actually been hiking naked on the Appalachian Trail like his lying staff said he was, Limpbranch would have no doubt come up with some excuse like, “Well, he just couldn’t get enough pig squealin’.”

Give it up, Douche. Absolutely no one is paying attention anymore to any of that clap-trap you been dishin’ out for way too long. You make a good laugh-riot, though.

Meanwhile, the nation being completely distracted by sex and celebrity death and celebrity death sex, the Congress of the United States trudges ever on toward passing some of the most meaningful legislation of our time: health care and climate change.

It remains to be seen, of course, if those measures actually help us or hurt us in the end.

But one can only imagine, elected officials’ extra-curricular hijinks aside, it is in the end we will no doubt feel it.

As the great philosopher, Jacko, once said, “No one wants to be defeated, showin’ how funky and strong is your fight. It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or who’s right: just beat it.”

It was the weekend he didn't play golf.

“Governor, Governor! Welcome back to Columbia. Can you tell us where you've been?”

“No, I don't wanna talk about it.”

“But Governor, you've been missing for four days. No one knew where you were. Don't you owe us some kind of explanation?”

“Okay, okay…I just wanted a little time off, see? I wanted to see the country just like the first explorers saw it. Machines are gonna fail. The system's gonna fail. They gonna make me take that Hussein Osama federal stimulus money. I wanted to beat the river.”

“Governor, what the hell are you talkin' ‘bout?”

“I found out you never beat the river, chubby.”

“Governor, are you okay? You seem kinda dazed. What's that on your pants?”

“All I really wanted was to see the Lester Maddox Museum over in Atlanta. That's all…and, then, the canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River. That's all…just to see the country like the first explorers saw it…just a canoe trip down to Aintry…

“They said this river don't go to Aintry…I'd dun taken a wrong turn…

“…I tol' ‘em, I said, ‘I don't care if you got a still up here. I don't care if you're makin' whiskey…I tol’ ‘em I'd even buy some whisky off ‘em…

“…I tol’ ‘em I didn't want their stimulus money. I'd buy some whiskey off ‘em. They said I had a purty mouth…and that's when I heard the banjo music.”

“Governor, why don't you sit down for a minute. Relax, we'll get you some breakfast, some eggs and bacon.”

“Don't say bacon…oh God, don't say pig…squeal like a pig…oh Lordy, poor Bobby.”

“Governor! Snap out of it. Who's Bobby?”

“Bobby? Bobby didn't want the stimulus money, neither. We just wanted to see the country like the first explorers had seen it. But we took a wrong turn…

“…they made Bobby squeal like a pig! Oh Lord have mercy!”

“Oh, Governor, why could you have just got caught buyin' prostitutes like that Eliot Spitzer fella up in New York?”

WAIT!!...LATE BREAKING…THIS JUST IN: The State, South Carolina's leading newspaper, reports this morning its reporters met Gov. Sanford at the Atlanta airport as his commercial flight arrived from…wait for it…wait for it…BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA!!

What? The governor was in Argentina? Not hiking the Appalachian Trail on National Naked Hiking Day with the rest of the naked hippies? What? Wait…was Rush Limbaugh with him? Are we sure it was Argentina, not the Dominican Republic?

WTF, dude? This story just gets curiouser and curiouser. Governor, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.

As the great immortal philosopher, Robbie Robertson, once wrote: “The night they drove ol' Dixie down; And the people were singin”. They went, ‘na, na, na, nah’.”

Ah, yes, summer has arrived. Did you stay up late last night to see the sun go down? Did you get up early this morning to see the sun come up?

Here's the bad news: it'll only start getting darker quicker in the days to come.

No, wait, that's a "glass half empty" approach to life. Heck fire, its summer: live it up!!

There IS good news out there – even amid the old, fat, white guys' silly claims of reverse discrimination because a Latin woman has been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Wall Street-Insurance Industry-Wingnut hysteria that we might actually one day see an equitable redistribution of medical care and neo-con fears their dreaded favorite might have been re-elected president of Iran through vote fraud.

The State of Missouri got clever recently and found a way to smack down neo-Nazis in a nice way.

According to the New York Times, The Missouri Department of Transportation renamed a stretch of highway after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a legendary figure who as a young man fled Nazi Germany for America where he became not only a prominent theologian but also champion of civil rights in the 1960s.

That's all well and good – and long overdue – but the highway naming didn't sit well with the Springfield Unit of the National Socialist Movement.

Regardless of what you might have heard over the past couple of weeks from wingnut pundits about Nazis being left-wing, the National Socialist Movement is a nationwide neo-Nazi group dedicated to reforming Amurka into a nation of "only pure white blood." According to the group's website, they don't particularly care for Jews or gay people or Latin folks or any "non-whites," and therefore demand "all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force."

Yea, that's sweet.

It seems these peace-loving, open-minded folks in the Springfield Unit of the National Socialist Movement felt called to public service about a year ago and offered through the Missouri Adopt-A-Road program to pick up litter along a half-mile stretch of highway. The group was duly given a sign or two assigning them credit for clearing roadway shoulders of empty PBR cans and discarded Klan rally leaflets and such.

So, here, the State of Missouri found itself rather embarrassed – one would hope – that civic-minded folks were out there clearing litter while also carrying signs on which read slogans such as "Death to Gay Smoochies" and other stuff.

But Missouri State Representative Sara Lampe had a better idea. She's the lawmaker who introduced a bill to rename the highway after Rabbi Heschel.

So it was that last Saturday the neo-Nazis found themselves cleaning up litter along the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway.

Needless to say, the goose-steppers were not very happy about the situation.

"I think it's childish," is what the group's spokeswoman told the New York Times in a wonderfully ironic statement. "If they want to have Nazis out there stomping on a Jewish-named highway that's their choice."

It remains to be seen if the highway will continue to remain relatively free of litter – for at least a few hours every six months or so – or if the neo-Nazis will simply lose interest altogether in civic involvement.

But you gotta love the clever approach to governance, at least in this instance in Missouri.

Maybe President Obama should pick up on the tact and rename the health care reform effort, the BlueCross/BlueShield-Aetna-Heavy-Political-Contributions" Health Care Reform Act. Okay, just a thought.

The chanting crowd suddenly fell silent as the moment of anticipation arrived. Would he say what everyone demanded?

"WE MUST RIGHT THE WRONGS!" someone pierced the silence. "WE DEMAND JUSTICE!"

But would he cave to the pressure of the crowd?

"I'm sorry. I apologize," said a voice over the speakers.

"Whew, I'm glad we got THAT resolved," someone shouted.

Finally, we can go back to our lives.

What? Had Ayatollah Khamenei capitulated? Would indeed the voice of the people be heard and recognized?

No, little broomstick cowboys (and girls). It wasn't a resolution to the election debacle in Iran.

It was outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York. David Letterman apologized for offending Sarah Palin with some wise-ass crack about A-Rod.

Did you think Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council was going to change its mind? Oh, heck no.

"We had a good election," Khamenei said today in Teheran. "It was cool. How the heck could we rig an election by 11 million votes?"

Okay, then. No problem.

And speaking of elections and opinion polls and stuff like that, it's a good thing back here in the peaceful, tranquil democratic republic of Amurka those defeated in our most recent elections – back about eight months ago – are taking their defeat in stride and working with the election winners to resolve the immense problems facing our society.

Basking in the glow of recent public opinion surveys which showed President Obama's approval rating on economic matters had slipped from 60 percent in April to only 52 percent now, the mass media announced an end to the Obama honeymoon. Someone shouted, "The emperor has no clothes!!"

But the naked truth reveals ain't nobody really happy. The New York Times-CBS poll suggested only 28 percent of those polled hold a favorably view of the Republican Party while 57 percent said they like the Democrats. Over in the Wall Street Journal-NBC poll only 25 percent like the GOP while 45 percent like the donkeys.

Taking this information to heart and to show their passion for one of Amurka's greatest living institutions, members of Congress took to the ball yard Wednesday night for the annual congressional baseball game. In a stunning upset and reversal of recent years, the Democrats actually beat the Republicans! Now we know what the intense 50-state strategy was really all about!

In their defeat, Republicans called for a smaller strike zone for the middle of the line up and bigger bats!

And to further exhibit their sportsmanship, cooperation, desire for good government and overwhelming concern for the welfare of the people, GOP leaders in the House yesterday did something never attempted or accomplished: they ground business to a complete and utter shutdown.

By calling for a record 52 roll call votes on the floor of the House, the Republican congressional members stalled the people's affairs to show, by golly, they have truly become the party of "no."

It's almost comical to see the staunchly anti-union GOP employ a time-honored union tactic: a work stoppage.

As the great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, "If you don't know where you're going you might end up somewhere else!" (Thanks, Tammie.)

The images have been broadcast around the world: angry people taking to the street, shouting for investigations and resignations and better comedy!

What? Wait…oh, sorry…got confused…THAT was a teabagger rally outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre demanding David Letterman don a bear suit and be given a five minute head start before Sarah Palin came after him in a helicopter.

And speaking of those fun-loving, sexed-up Republicans, it appears Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada, maybe be demoted back to Seaman Second-Class after admitting to swabbing the decks with a campaign staffer – a female – who was married to Senate aide – a male. According to scuttlebutt, Ensign admitted the affair in a series of semaphore messages after the male staffer started hinting he wanted some extra seafood rations to keep quiet.

According to Politico, Ensign said the affair – with a female, close to his own age, shocking by Republican standards – came about because of the closeness of their relationship during his re-election campaign in 2007 and 2008. That "closeness," Ensign said, "put me in situations which led to my inappropriate behavior."

Yea, like the hot tub and the shower.

Ensign was starting to figure in the 2012 Republican presidential race. He was among the loudest critics of fellow Senator Larry Craig, former R-Idaho, after Craig was caught trying to get a little in the men's room of Minneapolis airport.

All this reminds me of an old joke: Know why Baptists never make love standing up? They don't want anyone to think they're dancing.

And speaking of erect…um…elections, Iranians continue to pour into the streets for the fifth day in protest of the clearly well-run and accurately counted presidential results announced over the weekend in which despised incumbent Iranian President Ametaldinnerjacket trounced leading opponent Mir Hossein Moussavi by a whopping 62 percent despite overwhelming evidence the entire country voted for Moussavi.

It's not funny, of course, people are being killed and the Iranian government appears to be sending troops and the dreaded secret police and Republican Guard (no relation to US minority party) to crack down on these freedom-loving democrats (small "d," no relation to US majority party).

While the government is attempting to shut down all forms of communication, the most amazing thing is happening. If continued riots lead to the fall of the current Iranian government it will happen largely due to communication through Twitter, which in the world of mass media is so small and yet so large it cannot be contained by mere state apparatus.

For those of you so dreadfully UNCOOL as to not yet be counted among the millions of Twitteratti, Twitter is most succinctly described as a free mini-blogging medium in which Twitterers (Twits) send out messages limited to 140 characters. (If you live under a rock and don't know what blogging is, please do not read any further and what are you doing here in the first place?)

While the Iranian government is seizing satellite dishes, putting reporters under house arrest, shutting down websites (all because the election was so clearly free and fair), they just can't quite seem to round up everyone with a cell phone capable of sending out 140-character Farsi messages. The Tweets - things like: "Oh crap, here comes that guy with a stick again" – are being sent around the world and relayed by other Twits.

The result is everyone knows what's going on despite the government's best efforts to keep a lid on it. Forget the next revolution taking place on television. It may well take place in a series of 140-character messages.

And if 140-character messages can bring down a government why do we continue to spend countless hours sitting around a table in boring meetings rehashing the same thing over and over again? Not cool.

But, speaking of cool, you gotta catch the video of President Obama coolly and calming smashing an annoying fly during an interview on the TeeVee Box.

Slowly, slowly…SMACK! Like some kind of killer automatron! Hey, wait a minute, maybe the wingers are on to something.

Latest Tweet from Ametaldinnerjacket: "Luvin' Russia, think I'll stay here a while."

Sure the Lakers can win the NBA Championship is five games but does anybody, ever win a REAL election with 62 percent of the vote?

Why that's just nearly as improbably as President Obama persuading the American Medical Association to give up doctor big bucks and agree to actually practice medicine inside a sane fee structure!

The big news over the weekend was, of course, the Iranian elections where after apparently overwhelming and unprecedented public support and enthusiasm for his opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi, Iranian President Mahoud Adinnerjacket declared himself the winner with 62 percent of the vote.

Not even the Bushies believed they could pull off that kind of a fraud. They were at least smart enough to go for plausible figures.You gotta give Adinnerjacket and the hard-line Mullahs props for cojones, though. (No, not really.) Maybe they know they're the real favorite of American neo-cons who just can't imagine life without a right-wing Iran at which they can throw rhetorical stones (and real nukes if they had half a chance).

So, now, today, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced his Guardian Council, the ultimate voice in Iranian affairs, will investigate charges of vote fraud.

Yea, right, and we had hopes the U.S Supreme Court would do the right thing in 2000.

Protestors continue to the fill the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities and police and army forces are threatening to shoot on sight. Reporters have been arrested, others have gone missing. Anybody remember 1979?

Can't help but wonder if they used butterfly ballots in Iran. And there is absolutely no truth to the rumor Katherine Harris was seen recently in Islamabad.

Gotta give props, too, to the L.A. Lakers who stormed back from a loss in ONE GAME to beat the Orlando Magics in game five and claim the NBA title. The championship series turned out to be kinda Mickey Mouse and Orlando ended up looking a little Goofy.

Said Kobe Bryant after winning the trophy, "There was a game four?"

It just goes to show you sports teams should never – EVER – be known by singular nicknames (beloved Miami Heaters not withstanding).

The big news on the American political scene today will be President Obama's trip to Chicago to address the annual convention of the American Medical Association.

He will plead with them to drop their resistance to including a publicly financed option in any medical care reform coming out of Washington. Reception to this plea is expected to be similar to the reception expected when Ayatollah Khamenei announces in a few days the Iranian elections were indeed fair and free.

The AMA doesn't like the idea of publicly financed health care choices because, well, some of the richest docs may not like the idea of giving up fee-based services where they can charge exorbitant rates for unnecessary procedures not even understood by patients.

Not all docs feel this way, of course. There are plenty – maybe even the majority of doctors in America – who would simply like to practice medicine, do the best for their patients and maybe even save lives and improve health care. But those docs don't control the AMA.

As the immoral philosopher and fictional governor of an unnamed western state, Gov. William J. LaPetomane, once said, "We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!"