Green Energy Fails

You may recall a couple years ago that I showed you, dear readers, how to become filthy rich off of scamming people who believe in the Global Warming/Climate Change crapfest. As is the case with many of my schemes & plots, this was done tongue in cheek and drenched in snarky sarcasm. 

Sadly, though, there really was an awful lot of filthy luchre to be had by scamming the Obama Crowd and gobbling up money from the Succubus Package in phony “green” energy voodoo. They were handing out money….TAXPAYER money, pell-mell to all & sundry who claimed to be green. Billions were wasted, and I do mean literally wasted and pissed away, on companies, some of them not even American companies, who in many cases ended up BANKRUPT.

Financial woes and failures have been widespread, with vast amounts of cronyism and corruption and graft. The fact that some green energy companies are not under financial duress does not make the Feral Gubmint’s forays into venture capitalism a success. It simply means that our taxpayer dollars subsidized companies that should’ve found the financial support in the private market. However, few in the private market were willing to piss away billions for trains and windmills.

So far, at least 34 companies that were offered federal support from taxpayers are faltering — either having already gone bankrupt or heading for it and. laying off workers to stave off the inevitable. The following list includes only those companies that received federal money from the Obama Administration’s Department of Energy and other agencies. The amount of money indicated does not reflect how much was actually received or spent but rather how much was offered. The amount also does not include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which push the amount of money these companies have received from taxpayers even higher.

Prepare to choke back your own bile.

Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*

SpectraWatt ($500,000)*

Solyndra ($535 million)*

Beacon Power ($43 million)*

Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)

SunPower ($1.2 billion)

First Solar ($1.46 billion)

Babcock and Brown ($178 million)

EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*

Amonix ($5.9 million)

Fisker Automotive ($529 million)

Abound Solar ($400 million)*

A123 Systems ($279 million)*

Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*

Johnson Controls ($299 million)

Schneider Electric ($86 million)

Brightsource ($1.6 billion)

ECOtality ($126.2 million)

Raser Technologies ($33 million)*

Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*

Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*

Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*

Range Fuels ($80 million)*

Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*

Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*

Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*

GreenVolts ($500,000)

Vestas ($50 million)

LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)

Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*

Navistar ($39 million)

Satcon ($3 million)*

Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*

Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy. 

The National Renewable Energy Lab also received $200 million in stimulus funding, but it is a government laboratory, not a private firm.

This used to be a $100,000 Fisker electric speedster. It caught fire like a Chevy Volt. When you're a rich liberal, you burn cars to stay warm...

The 2009 Succubus Package set aside $80 billion to subsidize politically preferred energy projects. Since that time, 1,900 investigations have been opened to look into stimulus waste, fraud, and abuse (although not all are linked to the green-energy funds), and nearly 600 convictions have been made. Of that $80 billion in clean energy loans, grants, and tax credits, at least 10 percent has gone to companies that have since either gone bankrupt or are circling the drain.

Bear in mind, the Obama Administration has virtually shut down offshore oil drilling in US waters, while applauding Brazil doing it and telling them we’d be their biggest customers. In fact, we paid for them to do it, lending the Brazilians over 2 BILLION dollars to go drill their oil and then sell it to us. Some of that loan money paid for US drilling rigs to leave the Gulf of Mexico for Brazil rather than sit idle.

The same Administration said no to the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada, costing us a readily available oil supply and thousands of jobs. Canada will instead sell their oil to…who else? CHINA.

The same administration said it intended to bankrupt the coal industry and that your electricity costs would necessarily skyrocket. Gasoline costs twice what it did when Obama took office.

The same administration used billions in taxpayer funds to prop up Chrysler so that it could be sold to a foreign company, Fiat, after another foreign company, Daimler, bailed out and ran. Billions and billions more were used to prop up General Motors as they tout the miserable sales of the Chevy Volt, a car so expensive that the average median income of a Volt buyer is $170,000 per year, according to General Motors CEO Dan Akerson. That high income puts the Volt’s buyers in the top 7 percent of households, according to census data, and slightly above the rankings held by households with BMWs, Lexuses or Cadillacs.The average income of BMW buyers is nearly $170,000, according to a May 2010 article in Bloomberg Business Week. Cadillac buyers earn almost $130,000, and Lexus buyers take home an average of $141,000. Only Mercedes-Benz drivers earn more than Volt drivers, an average of $174,000 per year.

Ironic that rich liberals are the only buyers…but it’s okay to be rich if you’re a Leftist.

And to add insult to injury, the Feds already give you a $7500 tax rebate to buy a Volt, and are trying to increase it to $10,000. That mammoth subsidy would cost taxpayers $100 million each year if it is approved by Congress, presuming only 10,000 new-technology autos like the Volt or the Nissan Leaf are sold each year. But the administration wants to get 1 million new-tech autos on the road by 2015. The subsidy cost of that goal could reach $10 billion.

Where the hell is that money going to come from? Oh yeah…you & me.

Hope…Change….Fail…..you have two weeks to make up your minds, America. Recovery, or Hell in a Handbasket.

How to get filthy rich. Follow me to glory!

(note--this post goes hand in hand with the other recent Global Warming Scamfest post )


In today’s craptastic Obamaconomy™, free enterprise is frowned upon and capitalism is a cardinal sin. Until I can find a way to score my own bailout from Obie’s Secret Stash I’ll have to be anti-American and resort to the same entrepeneurial spirit that built this nation and stimulate my own personal slice of the global money market.

If you can’t beat ‘em, don’t join ‘em; change the rules and beat them at their own game, sayeth I.

Friends and dear readers, you now have a wondrous opportunity to join me in filthy lucre and jump on my bandwagon o’ wealth by being a licensed franchisee of The Lightning Man’s Carbon Credit Carnival!

If that Forrest Gump-meets-Jabba the Hutt slug Al Gore can get oodles of ducats from bilking corporations for billions in fake, made-up, contrived carbon offsets by planting trees under the Global Warming battle cry, why the hell can’t I?

I’ve started my own Climate Change Green Corporation, and gathered up ten 55-gallon drums (made from recycled plastic, of course) and filled them with acorns.

Yup, acorns.


Each acorn represents a tree. Once planted, each acorn will sprout into a sturdy oak to offset the evil emissions of industry and progress. I couldn’t determine how many acorns come in a gallon, but a helpful website I found sells gumballs at 850 a gallon, and acorns are about the same size.

Each drum holds 55 gallons of acorns, at approximately 850 acorns per gallon or 46,750 acorns per barrel. That’s nearly 50,000 trees worth of GREEN per barrel. According to some spurious math I read, it takes 36 maple trees to reduce a ton of CO2 a year, and only 6 pine trees. Dunno why. I’ll go with 20 acorns per ton of C02, since all this shit is made up anyways. So each barrel can offset almost 2400 tons of carbon, and the going rate of carbon credits averages about $20.00, so each barrel can sell for about $48,000.00. We’ll round that up to fifty large, based solely on the fact that the barrel is recycled and those morons love words like that. My ten barrels should sell for $500,000, minus costs…See here.


Recycled 55-gallon drums average 55 dollars apiece, so subtract your $550 for the drums. Acorns are free, but gathering them is a bitch. However, most homeless winos I know will do damn near anything for a couple 40-ouncers of Saint Ide’s malt liquor, so if you give them say, two 40’s per barrel, at $2.00 per bottle, you can get your acorns harvested for $40.00, maybe less if they’re on a bad DT jones for that ”mawlt ligga”. That’s even cheaper than using illegal aliens, unless you force them to either pick for free or you’ll call INS. (wait, no one fears INS; Nasty Pelosi says illegals have more rights than Americans anyways. Bitch.)

So for say, six hundred bucks investment, I’ll get you half a million. God, I love capitalism!

Y’know…I’m going about this the wrong way. In the true spirit of Jabba the Global Warming Scam Artist, we actually should be telling people that these are special Magic Acorns and that each tree will scrub 10 tons of carbon, and then we can sell the credits for $5000.00 each. That way your 500,000 acorns yields you 250 MILLION dollars! All for a few shitty beers and plastic barrels. And if you’re in a pinch, Lowe’s sells these 55-gallon green & red storage bins for 25 bucks, cutting your investment in half. If your cost is halved, does that not then double your profits? Holy crap, I’m a genius.



Are we 100% sure our acorns will become viable trees? No. But we can’t very well admit that most experts put the odds of an acorn maturing to treedom at 1 in 10,000. That would mean that we’d really only be selling like 50 carbon credit trees out of our half a million. We’re not lying; simply omitting the negativity.



Sure, we’re not planting an actual germinated & growing sapling. We deal in seeds, which may or may not reach maturity. The acorn may not germinate. It could be eaten by deer or squirrels (See? Hunters are GOOD. They help in the fight against Global Warming by killing those who eat baby trees before they’re even born!) Once it sprouts, a lawn mower could slice it to ribbons. It takes anywhere from 15 to 50 years before an oak reaches full growth & maturity so your return on investment as far as the miraculous instantaneous scrubbing away of evil CO2 isn’t so immediate after all.

All of these things can be overcome in your sales pitches to customers by deft avoidance, the use of clever snappy catch phrases like “Hope”, “Change”, “Let Me Be Clear”, or the ever popular “Yes We Can” (or “Si, podemos” when selling to our Hispanic brethren). If resistance to the sale is still met, counter it with “George Bush hates trees. Buying our carbon offsets is the greatest way to get back at Bush and his war-mongering, teabagging lackeys. ¡Vivé la Revolución!”. Then you just salute, say “Heil Obama!”, and the sale is yours.

Y’know why we can call them Magic Acorns and sell them for five grand a pop? Because we said so. We’re the self-proclaimed experts and industry leaders in what’s quickly become a 60 billion dollar a year business. There’s big money in Global Warming, dontcha’ know? So, what we say goes. How can we be so sure that each of our Miracle Trees will offset 10 tons of carbon? We can’t. It’s an arbitrary number we picked because it sounded good. The science behind all of this global warming and climate change and carbon credit green movement bullshit is dubious at best and outright fantasy at worst, so as long as it sounds good, let’s run with it.




Global Warming, my ass. The entire northeastern third of the nation is under a foot of snow from the second blizzard in a week’s time, with winter still officially a day away. That Man They Elected (I can’t even call him the President anymore, I’m so utterly disgusted) was more or less laughed at in Carbonhagen, and those who didn’t laugh were pissed off that he didn’t come groveling and apologizing and offering the New World Order more tribute money. Those fucksticks from the White House knelt beforee the Global Warming Altar with a bribe of $30 BILLION immediately in “emergency climate aid” to needy countries, and $100 BILLION dollars a year of American taxpayer money, and they wanted more. We’re trillions of dollars in the hole, and the idiots offer up billions more, and the greedy world whores wanted more from us. Well, piss off, World. Piss off, Green Movement. Piss off, dumb-asses of the Obama Administration.

Where the hell is this money coming from? There’s NO MONEY LEFT, you assclowns. You’ve pissed it all away on TARP and Cash for Clunkers and bailouts and buying GM and myriad other bullshit follies, and then flitted off to pick up your Nobel Prize, and then went back to the scene of the crime to what you thought would be a hero’s welcome. Instead, they turned on you. Instead of a couple hundred nations kissing your ass, you only struck deals with, what? Five?

How deliciously ironic that you had to fly home with your tail tucked and landed your precious personal taxi, Air Force One, in the middle of a blizzard. Happy Global Warming, asshole.


So, who’s with me? Who wants a franchise? I have plenty of crackheads and winos locally in my state’s 12.3% unemployment pool just itching to pick up acorns for cheap hooch. Why should the Democrats and the EnviroDouches be the only ones to profit from this goat rope?

The Global Warming ScamFest

If ever you wondered at the gullibility of the average human being, or even the sheer unadulterated stupid ignorance of people in the face of overwhelming information, look no further than what most call Global Warming, and the scam artists call Climate Change. It’s what I’ve taken to calling Climate Fuckery.

There’s currently a 12-day worldwide Festival of Weather-Related Bullshittery going on in Copenhagen, Denmark. Seemingly, we’re all supposed to call it Kooben-hoggin now, since the established pronunciation I grew up on (KO-pen-Hay-gun) has been usurped by the Left. Alleged experts, hand-wringers, and Chicken-Little-Sky-Is-Falling types are gathered in Carbonhagen at the behest of the United Nations to seemingly spend money and be a raving batch of hypocrites and self-righteous assholes.

This is the same United Nations that spent millions of dollars partially earmarked for relief aid to give some artsy dickhead free reign to squirt paint on the ceiling and call it a masterpiece.
See here.

The UN is already a colossal waste of money and is about as effective as a daddy-longlegs with all 8 legs yanked off, and here they are shitting away $125 million dollars in a mutual mental masturbation session geared towards making industrialized nations feel guilty for developing past the invention of fire and the wheel, and fleecing said nations for billions in aid (spelled g-r-a-f-t).

I find it hard to sympathize with shitheads who want me to drive a fucking toaster to work, yet came to Koobenhoggin in 120 private jets and are tooling around Denmark in over 1200 rented limos and other luxury rides. Delegates were seen driving up to the conclave in Beemers, Benzes, VoVos, and Jags, while the rented bus rolled about empty. I mean, who wants to ride the bus when you have every luxury car in Denmark (and more are being brought in from Germany and Sweden) at your disposal? France alone ordered 42 cars from the city’s largest limo rental agency, according to company spokesperson Majken Friss Jorgensen. And Jorgensen added that just five vehicles in the fleet will be hybrids, which are nearly impossible to procure in tax-heavy Denmark.

Ahhhh, gotta love assloads of taxes to pay for free healthcare, no?

The conference center hosting the meetings has set up four "climate kitchens" to cook healthy, organic meals for attendees, but they aren't coming cheap. Visitors ordering the regular meal will get finger sandwiches, a quiche, some cheese and dessert, but those going "deluxe" get a mini croissant, canapé with smoked salmon, mini pizzas, fancy cheese and some pineapple in chocolate — all for an estimated $40 a person.

These same Global Warming dickheads want to tax people on cow farts, claiming that bovine flatulence pollutes the air with methane clouds as they themselves visit the White House to dine on Wagyu beef. Sure, as if hand-fed cows from Kobe, Japan who get their balls massaged and listen to Yanni, don’t ever fart…

People are still buying into this bullshittery, even after hundreds of scientists, actual accredited climatologists, have debunked Global Warming as a myth. Within the past couple weeks, hundreds of emails surfaced from people within the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University (one of the movement’s breeding centers) that basically admit that it’s all a scam. Hell, just today it’s come to light that there exists a text that basically stated that screws developing nations in favor of letting rich nations do as they please. The text says it would allow rich nations to emit nearly twice as much carbon per capita as poor countries. That abandons the principle of the Kyoto protocol, which calls for the richer nations to take on the bulk of the burden. The document—thought to be the product of a group that includes the US, UK, and Denmark—also would weaken the UN's role in future climate change negotiations, and pretty much keeps poor nations poor and rich nations rich. Lovely.

The UN doesn’t want to be out-scammed, you see. They’ve been sucking money out of most of the civilized world for over sixty years, and now they’ve come up against a better scam operation. And, ladies & gentlemen, that better scam is Global Warming, and one of their revenue schemes is Carbon Credits/Offsets.

Ostensibly, to offset my release of greenhouse gases I’m beseeched to purchase carbon credits from some mysterious Al Gore-sponsored Carbon Credit Clearing House, or some such nonsense. I mean, I tried to look the shit up and got even more confused. I think some hippy is supposed to plant a tree or something for me. I dunno. I give them millions of dollars to offset a ton of emitted carbon dioxide, and after overhead and skimming, some unwashed granola-muncher in a woven hemp Baja poncho and Birkenstocks plants a tree? Okay.

Al Gore…that fat slug lives in a McMansion that uses more electricity to light than some small cities, and I’m supposed to give this asshole my money for trees? Who appointed him Keeper of the Forests?


The giant, steaming, open-faced shit sandwiches these people keep trying to feed us are incredible, with lie heaped upon lie, served with a dollop of half-truths to sweeten the turds. Gore himself prattles on about how all the glaciers in the world are melting and in doing so are tainting the world’s drinking water supplies.

How? I don’t get it. Maybe my lack of an Ivy League education has stunted me from figuring out how pure glacial water would taint anything. One source I looked at stated that glaciers contain about 75% of the world’s fresh water. I mean sure, animals walked on it and probably shat on it and before it froze it probably scrubbed the atmosphere before condensing, but wouldn’t any legit bottler filter & purify the water regardless of source? Then again, bottled water is a scam, too. Most of it is straight tap water; the same tap water the effete enviro-dicks say is bad for you. Bottled water bars have sprung up in all the hipster districts, from Paris to Los Angeles. Some fine hotels now offer the services of "water sommeliers" to advise diners on which water to drink with different courses. Douchebags.


Gore further rants that 40% of our ice has melted & the rest will be gone in a decade. Really? Hundreds of thousands of square miles of ice is gonna just evaporate inside of 10 years? Wow. Shit-fire! I better get Kevin Costner’s “Waterworld” boat ready for action, ‘cause we’s abouts to be submerged!

Recently Kevin Anderson, the director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change (a key player in the Climate Research Unit scandal), was quoted as saying that only 10% of humanity will survive global warming. I guess that’ll be the 10% who get rich off the 90% they scammed into destitution. Another alleged climate expert, Rajendra Pachauri, was quoted as saying that the Western Lifestyle is unsustainable.

Ahhh, there we go. There’s the crux of it. Everyone hates the fact that in the West, i.e.: America, you can drive where you want, when you want, and buy what you want, because we’re an industrialized, developed world leader, and everyone else wants us to ride donkeys and eat tree bark.

Even the BBC has lost its mind, reporting that: "Climate 'Is a Major Cause' of Conflict in Africa,” stating that "Climate has been a major driver of armed conflict in Africa, research shows - and future warming is likely to increase the number of deaths from war." Total bollocks!

Tell you what, Beebs…most of Africa has been trying to kill each since the first over-developed super-chimp named Australopithecus picked up a rock & bashed his neighbor in the grape, if for no other reason than the neighbor had something he wanted. As many as a million Rwandans have been killed in Hutu-vs.-Tutsi genocide, and that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with political ideology. The situation in the Congo, where up to four million have died in their never-ending series of civil wars, ethnic cleansings, and mass rapes, has nothing to do with whether or not it’s cold out and everything to do with gold, diamonds, and political corruption.


Grow up; occasionally a person will snap on a hot day & commit a violent act but people willingly & gleefully kill each other for power, wealth, and that all-time favorite, religion. Millions did not die in The Crusades over Climate Change. Millions did not die at the hands of Hitler because of the weather. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia didn’t execute a vast segment of their population over whether or not a glacier was melting. Mass graves all throughout Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia were not filled by folks not driving a hybrid. Global Warming didn’t fly planes into the World Trade Center.

Gold. Diamonds. Oil. Power. Religion. Greed. Corruption. Not the weather…

How can you say that, Steve? We have to stop Greenhouse Gases!!!!!

Yeah, sure. I’m all in favor of clean air and less industrial pollution. But let’s take a look at Greenhouse Gases, shall we? You Global Warming Fucksticks want to tax me on carbon dioxide and expect me to buy you off so you can plant a tree to offset my crimes? Dude, trees need carbon dioxide to make oxygen via photosynthesis, don’t they? I inhale their oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and they take my carbon dioxide and make oxygen. Circle of life, no? You fruitbags seem to forget that the most abundant of the greenhouse gases is…..water vapor. Yeah, plain old water vapor and ya’ll say it’ll kill us all….and all the while you want me to drive around in a car powered by a wee little hydrogen bottle….a hydrogen bottle that emits…say it with me now, kids….water vapor. That makes perfect sense.

But what about the polar bears? We have to save the polar bears!

Oh, yes…the polar bears. Every few weeks someone brings up the polar bears, whether it be to say the bears are all starving, or the bears are eating their babies, or the bears are drowning, or the bears are all already dead, or there’ll be bears killing and eating pedestrians in Central Park any second now due to a lack of food. People, wake up. Polar bears, and many other creatures, often kill their young, or the offspring of rivals. When a new male lion takes over a pride, it generally kills the cubs off to repopulate with his own seed. No one blames that on Global Warming. And I’m pretty damned sure that greenhouse gases didn’t cause my hamster to eat its babies when I was 7 years old. Last I read, the polar bear population was up almost 25% from their levels in the 1950’s. Pick a new animal to lie about, shitheads. You folks just keep perpetuating that image that polar bears are small & cute & cuddly, and they go sledding & drink Cokes with their babies at Christmas time. But polar bears are huge and vicious and have no qualms about eating you. Besides, fewer polar bears means more baby harp seals to club!


Isn’t it a bit ironic that we’ve got 2/3 of the country buried under a foot of snow, 2 weeks before winter officially arrives, and Al Gore’s over in Koobenhoggin charging idiots a thousand bucks apiece to get a picture taken with him in the Holy Name of Global Warming? But would we expect any less from the inventor of the Interwebz?

Stay tuned for my own Global Warming Solution, coming soon….


No more water vapor!

Tell me why....again

Once again, dear readers, as I do every couple few months or so, I need to ask why…

Why do illegal aliens get in-state tuition in California, but I can’t? Oh wait; I'm an American citizen. If you’re going to let illegal non-Americans get in-state tuition, then you better do away with out of state tuition for American citizens.

Why is it the city council of San Francisco is looking to stifle the First Amendment rights to free speech for a private citizen, namely talk-radio host Michael Savage? When illegal aliens in San Francisco said they were going to fast in a hunger strike until they got special treatment, Savage said that they could go ahead & starve. So now all the liberal assclowns on the Left Coast are calling for the government to censor the free speech of a private citizen that they don’t agree with, calling it Hate Speech.

Why are any government officials even paying attention to these aforementioned illegals and granting them rights and privileges reserved for CITIZENS instead of declaring them persona non grata and deporting them?

Why is it a hate crime for the College Republicans at San Francisco State University to stomp on paper copies of flags from terrorist organizations but any asshole can burn an actual American flag and be protected under free speech & freedom of expression? At a small anti-terrorism rally in October 2006, several members of the College Republicans stomped on pieces of paper they had painted to look like flags of the radical Islamic organizations Hezbollah and Hamas (both known terrorism sponsors), copying the designs from images on the Internet. They weren’t even REAL flags. A few days later, a Muslim student filed a complaint, on the grounds that the Arabic script on the Hezbollah and Hamas flags contained the word “Allah.” The university pressed charges, accusing the "blasphemers" of “incivility” and creating “a hostile environment.” Perhaps Muslims ought to have a beef with terrorists who put Allah’s name on their flags, not with people who stomp on paper copies of those flags.

Why is it that my buddy and “adopted” little brother Steve is on his third combat tour in Iraq in 5 years when we seem no closer to resolving that fucking goat rope than we were a couple thousand casualties ago? The ‘war” in Iraq has now lasted longer than our involvement in World War Two; enough is enough.

Why do we venerate Al Gore as the official spokes-doofus for the environment when he’s not even a fucking climatologist? He’s not even a meteorologist, nor even a geologist. His degree from Harvard was in GOVERNMENT, and he dropped out of law school (and divinity school) at Vanderbilt before becoming a career politician. Real climatologists and geologists have been saying for years that Gore’s Global Warming Apocalyptic Armageddon Psychobabble is a crock of shit full of more flaws than the Titanic, but people like Oprah think he’s gonna drive us all to a greener tomorrow in the back seat of a Prius Hybrid. Eat me.

Why is it that suicide rates in the Army are at the highest rate in 26 years? Why are America’s best & brightest & bravest taking their own lives in combat zones and back at home after returning from these combat zones, and why is PTSD swept under the rug like some dirty little secret? A country that forgets its veterans will itself be forgotten.

Why are all the touchy-feely types claiming that America’s government separated a mother & child after the illegal alien mother was sent back to Mexico and left her American-born child here in the States? No one forced her to leave him behind. That was HER choice, amigos. She could just as easily have taken her kid back with her to Tijuana. This, after she holed up in a church for the past year claiming religious sanctuary. Elvira Arellano, 32, arrived in Washington state illegally in 1997. She was deported to Mexico shortly afterward, but returned and moved to Illinois in 2000, taking a job cleaning planes at O’Hare International Airport. She was arrested in 2002 at O’Hare and convicted of working under a false Social Security number. She was to surrender to authorities last August but instead sought refuge at the church on Aug. 15, 2006. So……WHY are background checks at one of America’s biggest & busiest airports so lax that an illegal immigrant had a job cleaning airplanes there?

And why, when I can’t seem to drum up more than a mere handful of people who actually read what I write, is Dog The Bounty Hunter on top of the New York Times best-seller list? I have nothing against Duane Chapman; he seems like a decent fellow. But #1, and I can't get more than 15 readers? That’s just wrong.