Comey Testimony Will Be Must-See TV; Groups Try To Discredit Him, Though

Oh, joy! Another train wreck. Donald Trump
says he's going to live tweet the Comey hearings.

You know Donald Trump and his minions are extremely frightened by former FBI Director James Comey's expected Thursday testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

If the Trumpsters had little to worry about, they'd let him testify without comment safe in the knowledge they did anything wrong, so there would be no awful bombshells or worse.

We have no idea whether Comey will drop any of these bombshells and  make Trump's already crippled, incompetent and deranged presidency any worse with new revelations of how the Trump campaign did or did not collude with the Russians.

The signs are, though, they are scared shitless. That's because Trump's tried and true attempts at defanging his "enemies" is to erode their credibility. Whether these attempts to do so will involve any truth telling or not remains to be seen.

I'm not counting on the truth, though.

Trump has reportedly said he will live tweet the Comey hearings, which will be an interesting side show. I'm sure anything that Comey says that The Donald doesn't like will be met with the usual fact-free responses and charges that will make Trump look dumber than he already is, except of course to his shrinking core base of true believers.

Donald Trump always gets in trouble with his tweets. He thinks the tweets help him get his message out, but they just destroy his credibility, as if the credility could be ruined any further.

Just this week, Trump has made a diplomatic crisis worse among several Mideastern countries by sending inflammatory tweets that are completely at odds with what his foreign policy team has been doing.

He's undermined his efforts to overturn his wannabe ban on Muslim countries in the courts with tweets that totally undermine his legal case.

And Trump picked a completely unnecessary fight with the mayor of London, England after last weekend's terrorist attack there, instead of just sending his condolences and moving on.

As the Guardian editorialized:

"How long can we keep watching this endless car crash that is Donald Trump's presidency? The world has pressing problems to solve, from climate change to global terrorism, but instead of contributing resources and wisdom from the United States, Trump relentlessly gets in the way of solutions and exacerbates problems, all the while turning our shared tragedies into his own spectacles."

And he's got helpers, and his tiny group of fans will "help' Trump during Thursday's Comey hearings.

The Associated Press is reporting a group called the Great America Alliance will air television ads Thursday calling Comey, as Trump did, a "showboat" who "put politics over protecting America" even as "terror attacks were on the rise."

Sure, you can debate Comey's past job performance, but a substance-free negative ad in Trump's behalf proves he never stopped campaigning. He'll never be a real president.

As the president drags the United States and the rest of the world down with it, we still have too many Congressional Republican who will stand by Trump in the off-chance of getting their small, cruel agendas made into law.

That's where the real blame is. Too many members of the GOP have elevated their careers over the national interest.

And that's even more narcisstic than even Trump's enormous ego.

Flint Water Crisis: City Threatens To Evictions Of People Who Wouldn't Pay For Undrinkable Water

The water has been undrinkable in
Flint, Michigan for three years now,
but people there are being told to pay
their water bills, or else.

For years now, Flint, Michigan has been struggling with a water crisis, in which people unwittingly drank water highly contaminated with lead. 

The water crisis was caused by a series of boneheaded moves by state officials, who wanted to prove their "conservative" cost saving ways by switching water systems to something cheap and unsafe.

Who cares if a bunch of kids get sick if the move proves your conservative GOP credentials, right?

While Flint has been slowly working on a fix for this problem, the city also did something horrible, but again, state GOP officials have culpability here too:

The city is threatening to foreclose on and evict up to 8,000 residents because they refused to pay their water bills. Why pay for something you can't use and is unsafe, right?

According to NBC 25 in Flint:

"City leaders say they are in a bind and need the cash.

'We have to have revenue coming in, so we can't give people revenue, I mean excuse me, give people water at the tap and not get revenue coming in to pay those bills,' said Al Mooney, City of Flint Treasury Department."

If people do not pay up by May 19, their water bills go to the tax department, which starts the process of putting properties up for tax sales, and eventual foreclosures."

Got that? Pay for something dangerous and pay for a service that was not provided or lose your homes. Ain't America great?

The state of Michigan had been offering credits up until February, when the state decided the water was fine in Flint now, so everything's totally back to normal.

Except it isn't, of course.

Thousands of homes still have aging pipes that put people at risk for lead poisoning and those pipes have to be replaced. Expensive job for sure.

Few of the residents who received the tax liens expected them, and people have little time to save money to pay the bills or prepare for the notices. If people don't pay within nine months, they risk losing their homes.

Some politicians are still on Flint residents' side. "Flint families should not have to pay for water that they still cannot drink, and they certainly should not lose their homes over the ongoing water crisis that was caused by the callous decisions of state government," said Rep. Daniel Kildee in a written statement.

But, corrupt people who poison the citizenry have got to get their money from somewhere. Let's just soak people they've victimized even more, I guess.

Now The Darker Theory Of What's Going On With Trump And His Minions

Is Donald Trump willing to go so far as to become a dictator
and throw out centuries of American Constitutional democracy.
Those fears could well be overblown but you never know with the Orange One

Yesterday, I cheered all those spontaneous protests against President Trump's executive order regarding Muslims entering the country and all that.

In addition to being immoral and possibly unconstitutional, I complained about how poorly thought out and stupid the implementation of it was.

That's still more than possible. Chances are, it's the simple reality. Trump and his minions are just stupid.

However I have a much darker and scarier theory.

Before I explain it to you, I get it the dark theory I'll describe could be quite farfetched. I'm also stringing together a bunch of facts to put the theory together. These facts could be unrelated or tenuously related, I'm not 100 percent sure.

Plus, it's possible I've been watching too many gloomy conspiratorial movies.

But, and this is a BIG but, everything I'm seeing is straight from the white supremecist and authoritarian handbook followed by megalomaniac wannabe dictators. Everything that's been going on in the past few days could be a grand plan. And a very dangerous one at that.

Given the white supremicists and wannabe dictators suddenly running the country, what I'm about to lay out feels frighteningly plausible. So here goes:

The sudden Trump executive order to block people coming from certain Muslim countries and to block Syrian refugees, among other things, caused chaos at the nation's airports as many people found themselves suddenly detained.

Even the State Department and Congressional leaders, including top Republicans, were blindsided.

The conventional wisdom, one that I adhere to, or at least wish for, was that everything was poorly thought out and executed, so it made a bigger logistical mess than you would have expected from a competent president.

But is Trump trying to create a white supremist dictatorship out of the United States? Or, slightly more likely, is Trump a dumb patsy being used by the likes of his Svengali, Steve Bannon and his crew of potential neo Nazis doing this?

The airport chaos with the Trump executive order naturally created a LOT of news media attention, and a lot of protest, which created even more media attention.

Was this situation intended?

Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Jones wonders about this.

Like me, Jones admits the confusion and chaos could well have been just incompetence.  But he says there might be something else to it, and I find his argument intriguing.

He noted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not want to apply the ban to people with lawful permanent residence, Trump and his chief poobah, Steve Bannon, overruled them. To the unfamiliar, these are people who have green cards we're talking about

Jones writes:

"The decision to apply the executive order to green card holders, including THOSE IN TRANSIT, is almost insane. (Jones' emphasis.) Whatever else he is, Steve Bannon is a smart guy, and he had to know this would produce turmoil at airports around the country and widespread condemnation from the press. Why would he do this?"

Jones posits that Bannon really wanted turmoil and condemnation and bad press, and the airport chaos was intentional to create this flurry of media attention.  He totally wanted all this publicity. He wanted the ACLU and refugee advocates to freak out.

They did. The executive orders brought out thousands of protesters, and condemnation from the main stream media. The executive order pissed off a lot of people, including radical Islamists.

Maybe Bannon actually hoped for some terrorist attack so that he could point to the protesters and the media as un-American, and thus gain loyalty from Americans frightened by the terrorist attack.

It seems like the ground work is already being laid. There was a terrorist attack against a mosque in Quebec last night that killed at least six people.  Note that this happened in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has very publicly supported refugees as the United States "Muslim ban" went into effect.

Note also how Bannon vilified the media as the opposition and said the press should "keep its mouth shut" about Trump. The president's counselor, Kellyanne Conway, wondered on Sunday why pundits at major media companies hadn't been fired for crticizing Trump.

See, they're trying to cow the press into being their PR department, rather than report what happened.

Bannon could also use the Quebec terrorist attack to vilify sane national leaders like Trudeau.

Then there's Trump's decision to bring Bannon into the Joint Chiefs of Staff and demoting the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This is a big departure from past presidential practices of both parties who tried to keep politics out of the critical military decisions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, the decisions made will be more political, hewed toward Bannon's white supremecist views, and away from the traditional strategic military thinking the panel had always done in the past.

There's also signs a constitutional crisis might already be brewing. There are reports the Trump administration is ignoring this weekend's court orders that would allow some refugees and green card holders into the country, instead of detaining them.

The President is subject to the law just like everybody else, and if President Trump is ignoring court orders, is he trying to be our white supremacist dictator instead of the head of a Constitutional democracy?

That's the dark scenario.

The more this goes on, the more demonstrators hit the streets. Huge crowds of protesters showed up spontaneously in cities like New York, Washington DC, Boston and many others on Sunday decrying Trump's unconstitutional moves.

Democratic lawmakers have been howling, too. But with few exceptions, Republicans have remained silent. Are these Republicans complicit in Trump's possible moves to become Dictator for Life? Or maybe just OK with it, because what the hell, Trump fits their agenda and to hell with democracy.

I'm not the only one coming up with theories like this. When I was almost finished writing this, I found an analysis, much more detailed than mine, that covers exactly the same ground I did. 

The article, and my thoughts, could be paranoia, but maybe not. It's so hard to tell at this point.

Even if I'm wrong, Trump is terribly damaging the United States morally and economically, and destroying our standing in the world.

Like I said, my fears might be overblown, but let's all remain vigilant and active anyway. The nation you save might be your own.

North Carolina Exhibit One On How GOP Could Destroy National Democracy

Demostrators rail against an undemocratic power grab
by North Carolina Republicans. At least 20
were arrested, including at least one journalist.  

Autocrats entering the White House under Donald Trump need to look no further than North Carolina on how they can end democracy and usurp the will of the people.

The Republican legislature in North Carolina this week basically launched a coup d'état against the recently elected governor, a Democrat.

As numerous news organizations, including Daily Kos point out, Republicans in North Carolina, at least, don't give a shit about such niceties as the rule of law, the will of voters and fair elections.

The Republicans in North Carolina held a surprise special session in which they took a lot of powers away from the governor and gave it to the legislature. That's because a Democrat, Roy Cooper was just elected North Carolina governor.

They also changed the Supreme Court into elected positions, to ensure Republicans get on the state's highest court from the Republcans' badly gerrymandered districts.

That's because the North Carolina Supreme Court has in the recent past ruled against the Republicans' shenanigans, power grabs and voter suppression moves.

If you think this is just a North Carolina thing, it isn't. That's why you should be worried. The Donald Trump administration is likely to do similar things writ large in the entire United States.

Your rights to pick and choose who leads the nation might be going by the wayside, which is a truly terrible and terrifying thing.

North Carolina has been at this for awhile. It's a lot of work destroying democracy, apparently, but they've proven it can be done.

Daily Kos notes that this has been the M.O. of some GOPers for awhile, and it might only get worse.

"Republicans had previously gerrymandered the legislature so aggressively that they won to-proof majorities in 2012 despite losing the popular vote, and they easily maintained them in 2016 despite McCrory's loss. 

A courty in 2016 struck down those maps as unconstitution racial gerrymanders, meaning the North North Carolina Republicans are using an illegally obtained legislative majorityto ursurp the powers of the fairly elected new Democratic governor. 

Democracy relies on electoral losers recognizing the legitimacy of the victor, and this breathtaking power grab can only be describd as a full-blown legislative coup d-etat design to subvert democracy itself."

Slate describes how serious the North Carolina situation is:

"What's happening in North Carolina is not politics as usual. It is an extraordinarily disturbing legislative coup, a flagrant effort to maintain one-party rule by rejecting democratic norms and revoking the will of the voters.

It is the kind of thing we might expect to see in Venezuela, not a U.S state. It should terrify every American citizen who believes in the rule of law. This is so much more than a partisan power grab. This ia an attack on democracy itself. "

Oh, sure the courts might overturn what North Carolina Republicans did. Until we get new judges. In North Carolina, newly elected governor Roy Cooper plans to sue the legislature for what they've done.

What do we do when Trumpsters get rid of federal judges that rely on things like the rule of law and precedent in favor of hacks that would do their bidding?

Then, we would see the North Carolina-style autocratic rule go nation wide. Democracy would die.

As a patriotic American who has used his First Amendment rights to criticize, praise or mock elected officials, I really worry if my ability to do so will soon end.

 We can all hope that cooler heads prevail, and lawmakers, judges and such will find their moral compass and act in accordance to the Constitution, and not some autocratic dimwit like Donald Trump and his ilk .

But we can't count on it. North Carolina Republicans didn't find their democratic moral compass, so why should we rely on others?

Since Trump was elected, I've kept hoping that my fears about the stability of our democracy and rule of law were overblown.

Unfortunately, those fears look more and more like they're well placed.

I don't know if we as citizens can fight back all that well. Still, the time might be coming for a new American Revolution.

Is Donald Trump The Sign Of The Apocalypse?

Is Donald Trump so popular because America lost its way?  

You gotta hand it to Donald Trump. He's simultaneously turned himself both into a national crisis and the Great Buffoon Of The Day. And, to many, a savior.

Half the country is scared to death that he might actually become president and ruin the nation and the world. I'm pretty much in the camp.

The other half want him to do all the outrageous things he proposes, because it's "fighting back" against all that they see is wrong with the world.

There doesn't appear to be a way out of this standoff.

Getting Serious About Trump:

Trump had a great Super Tuesday primary. Google searches of the phrase "How to move to Canada" increased by 1,500 percent late Tuesday night as the results came in.  The government of Canada's immigration page experienced delays under the load of presumably mostly Americans looking at it, the Montreal Gazette reported. 

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to build a wall along the United States southern border to keep illegal immigrants from Mexico out. So many Americans might want to move to Mexico to flee Trump that it might be Mexico that builds that border wall.

Hey, if that happens, at least Mexico would pay for it, fulfilling one of Trump's campaign promises.

More seriously, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, writing in the Washington Post, said just the threat of a Trump presidency could well badly damage both the national and global economy.

Summers went so far as to call Trump a threat to American democracy with his authoritarian viewpoints.

He wrote:

"The economy is already growing at a sub-two percent rate in substantial part because of a lack of confidence in a weak world economy. A growing sense that a protectionist demagogue could soon become president of the United States would surely introduce great uncertainty at home and abroad.

The resulting increase in risk premiums might well be enough to tip a fragile U.S. economy into recession. And a concern that the U.S. was becoming protectionist and isolationist could easily undermine confidence in many emerging markets and set off a financial crisis."

I know in my head I've started thinking about spending less money and trying to horde as much cash as I can to stave off what is to my mind the inevitable Great Trump Economic Depression if he's elected president.

Rise Of The Authoritarians:

There's an incredible amount of commentary floating around as to whose fault it is that somebody like Trump could capture the imagination of so many Americans.

The hard question is how to reverse this. It won't be easy.

One major reason why Trump is so popular is that so many people have lost trust in most institutions and the "establishment." Which means not many people are going to listen to the likes of Lawrence Summers and abandon their infatuation with Trump.

And sorry, Mitt Romney, they're not going to listen to you, either. 

Vox this week had a long but fascinating piece on how big picture fear and uncertainty and societal change can bring out the authoritarian in a large segment of the American public.

Vox cited the work of Karen Stenner, author of the book "The Authoritarian Dynamic."

Vox reported:

"According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or 'activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.

Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order - diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order - are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security. 

There's certainly a drumbeat of big changes in threats we're all hearing about, amplified by the 24 hour news cycle, cable TV shoutfests, zillions of radio shock jocks and social media that scream all kinds of dire news and warnings.

Some of the changes and upheavals are good:  Gay people can now marry in the United States. The Black Lives Matter movement is putting a spotlight on racial injustice and the excesses of some police forces. Authoritarians equate police with social order, so even objections to police shootings of unarmed citizens is equated with a breakdown of social order.

Other changes are indeed threatening to all of us. Rising income inequality is threatening everyone's livelihood, except for the elites, which were the ones who were suppose to maintain social order. They're not anymore, which encourages the authoritarians. Money in politics, and inaction by Congress do the same thing.

You can see why the world seems to have turned upside down and inside out, especially from the perspective of white lower and middle income men, who are really being buffeted from all sides.

Ever notice how many white male faces you see at Trump rallies? I don't think that's a coincidence.

This Won't End Soon

Here's the intractable problem:  Even if the Trump candidacy implodes, the nation is ripe to embrace some other demagogue. The "Trump problem" isn't going to go away if Trump goes away, as Vox notes.

So-called establishment Republicans are in a tizzy, because they fear Trump will be the Republican nominee, and might not win the presidency because of his crazy ideas. Sure, Trump, with all his excesses, might open the door for Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders to win the White House.

But there's still a chance Trump could win. Or, because I don't see signs of our nation's upheaval and resentment among its citizens going away anytime soon,  another dangerous authoritarian overlord type, one that's less of a clown than Trump, could become President in 2020, or 2024.

Yeah, I'll keep laughing at Trump's buffoonery, but meanwhile, I, like Summers, am fearful of some authoritarian jerk, be in Trump or someone else, taking power.

We've gotten into this mess because leaders don't lead, the idea of making money while maintaining a sense of ethics and fairness has gotten quaint, and many members of the media value ratings more than responsibility, and let every wacko commandeer the microphone.

No wonder so many people are pissed off and would go so far as to vote for Trump. In embracing a crazy person, they're screaming for some sanity in this nation.

Checking In On Flint: The Scandal Keeps Getting Worse

The revelations about how the administration of
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder managed Flint's water,
leading to mass lead poisoning among the city's residents,
just keeps getting worse and worse.  

I feel like I should check in once in awhile to see how the scandal involving Flint, Michigan's water contamination is going.

The water isn't getting much better in terms of lead poisoning and other contaminants.

Speaking of contaminants, the drip, drip, drip of scandal news is getting worse and worse in terms of how the people running the show handled this whole thing.

I'm repeating reporting from publiciations like Flint Journal, MLive, Detroit News,  The Guardian and other outlets, as I believe their reporting on this tragic scandal ought to be repeated as often as possible. The bit of any optimist in me hopes this drumbeat of reporting and sharing information might help to prevent something like this from happening again, and/or hold people accountable.

Way back in April, 2014, so called financial "emergency managers," in a cost cutting move, switched Flint from a more expensive water source from Detroit to a less expensive source in the Flint River.

The Flint River is full of pollutants. City residents almost immediately began complaining about water quality, but, given that budget austerity is MUCH more important than people's health, or so the emergency managers, under the Gov. Rick Snyder seemed to think.

As we now know, the Flint River water was incredibly corrosive, and wore down pipes, which leached lead into the drinking water. Thousands of people were likely poisoned and many kids will now live the life long cognitive health effects of lead poisoning.

I've said before Snyder's handling of the whole thing is criminal and he should be jailed, much less the governor of Michigan.

And as with most scandals, new revelations over how bad this thing was managed keep coming out.

There was a growing, very loud chorus from Flint residents by October, 2014 about the water.

Michael Gadola, Snyder's legal counsel wrote in now-leaked emails that the Flint water situation had gotten "downright scary" and said the city "should try to get back on the Detroit system as a stopgap ASAP before this thing gets too far out of control," according to The Guardian. 

Well, it was too far out of control, but I get what Gadola was saying. He knew, correctly, that if Snyder stayed the course, this would get even uglier. Much uglier. We know now he was right.

However, other advisors to Snyder decided it would be too expensive to assume the monthly $1 million cost to return to Detroit water.

Yeah, that's pricey, but what about the effect on Flinters' health. And if you don't care about people, it's gotten a lot more expensive than $1 million a month, now, huh, Ricky?

The Guardian's reporting goes on:

Snyder's chief of staff at the time, Dennis Muchmore, told the Detroit News last week, "The assessment was you couldn't do it because it was a cost that should have been borne by the system."

On February 5, 2015, a reporter asked the Snyder administration about returning Flint's water to Detroit. State Treasury Spokesman Terry Stanton said, again, it would be too expensive to do so.

Later that day, according to the recently discovered emails and documents, Muchmore wrote that switching Flint back to Detroit would "probably be a good use of money as opposed to people refusing to use city water."

He went on: "After all, if (General Motors) refuses to use the water in their plant and our agencies are warning people not to drink it....we looks pretty stupid hiding behind some financial statements."

That memo referred to a previously disclosed GM's decision not to use Flint water in its plant because it was corroding the brand new cars it was trying to manufacture. And it referred to a state office building in Flint in which workers were given bottled water to avoid Flint water, a piece of the scandal also previously disclosed.

Snyder finally put Flint back on Detroit's water in October, 2015 when the public pressure finally became too much to bear.

This new information above, reported in The Guardian and Flint Journal, were part of a batch of 2,500 emails released last week under Freedom of Information Act requests.

Why didn't we read these sooner, when other batches of Flint water-related emails were released?

Because the administration, naturally dragged its feet on releasing them. I can give Snyder a quick PR 101 lesson here: If there's a mess up: Release all the information you have right away. No matter how hard you try to hide information, it's going to come out sooner or later.

The PR damage, if thats the only thing you care about, will be much less if you're upfront, early.

Getting back to the Flint water issue here,  Snyder's administration has repeated said, over and over again, it was Flint officials' decision, not his or his aides or his emergency managers, who decided to take Flint off Detroit water in the first place and start taking water from the dangerous Flint River.

The Flint Journal reported this weekend, that despite Snyder's claims to the contrary, emails show that wasn't the case.

Says the Journal: "Newly released emails show an aide to Gov. Rick Snyder disputed that notion just days before a damning op-ed by former Flint Emergency Manager Darnell Earley.

'It is important to note that council did not take a vote to use Flint river (sic)',  Harvey Hollins, Snyder's director of urban initiatives wrote in an October 7, 2015 email to Dan Wyant, former director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

Days later, Earley penned an op-ed claiming Flint officials approved the switch to the Flint River as the city's drinking water source."

The Flint City Council DID agree to stop using Detroit water, but they also never voted to start taking water out of the Flint River.

This doesn't make clear precisely who decided to make the switch, but it doesn't exactly absolve Ricky, does it?

I'm sure there will be a continued slow parade of new revelations about Flint, his emergency managers and the government of Michigan.

Meanwhile, Flint is still struggling with undrinkable water, an unknown number of kids from Flint, no doubt many, will have to contend with the lifelong effects of lead poisoning, and gawd knows new horrors we will learn about what happened to all those unsuspecting citizens of Flint.

I keep saying Snyder should face criminal charges. Investigations are still underway. But it's looking worse and worse for him. Though frankly, I care much less about him than I do about the fine residents of Flint, Michigan.

Thoughts on the Great Twinkie Crisis of 2012

The Great Twinkie Crisis of 2012 rolls on, and nobody is sure if the company that makes Twinkies and a bunch of other really bad for you stuff, Hostess, will stay in business, or whether somebody else will take over Twinkie production.

Like millions of deeply concerned Americans, I have many questions about this dire sitution. Among them:

Who knew this would become the biggest
crisis of 2012?

Could we raid all the old abandoned Cold War bomb shelters and take the Twinkies out of there and serve them to a desperate nation?  I'm sure they haven't spoiled yet. My colleague Aki Soga raises another point: If we remove Twinkies from Cold War bomb shelters, what will keep the radiation out of said bomb shelters?

What does Little Debbie think of this whole situation? Sure, she looks like a sweet, innocent girl, but I bet she did something underhanded to Hostess to increase her market share.  Never trust a 1930s or 1940s girl in a cute hat. They'll get you every time.

Was the underhanded Little Debbie involved
in the potential death of Twinkies?

If Hostess executives get in trouble for allegedly give themselves big fat pay raises when the company was going under, can they use the Twinkie defense and get off scott free?" For that matter, if union representatives made too many unreasonable wage and benefit demands, could they also use the Twinkie defense?

Will the fortunes of Dow Chemical plummet because, at least for now, they are not supplying Hostess with critical Twinkie ingredients?

Will the worst Twinkie hoarders be featured on the television show "Hoarders?" If so, will any of the hoarders kill the host of Hoarders for trying to eat one of their Twinkies?

If Twinkie production resumes, can we use Twinkies as sandbags to protect property from the next really bad storm?

Or, if Twinkie production resumes and the United States gets even more ticked off at Iran for possibly developing nuclear weapons, can we bomb Iran with millions of Twinkies so that everybody there gets so fat on them they will become incapable of making, moving or launching nuclear warheads?

Hostess makes Wonder Bread, too. If sales of Wonder Bread have been lackluster, could they rebrand Wonder Brand as a wonderful kitchen sponge? The bread is perhaps even a Quicker Picker Upper than Bounty.

If Hostess and Twinkies become just part of American history, will the Smithsonian build a Twinkie museum? If so who would guard the Twinkies without being tempted to eat them?

I'm sure readers here have other questions. If you are concerned like the rest of America, please feel free to post your urgent questions in the comments section.

"Peak Chocolate," Could Mean Crisis For Me, Many Others

Many of you might have heard of the concept of "peak oil," in which demand for oil worldwide outstrips supplies and the ability to drill for enough. This, the theory goes, would lead to global chaos, war, death and other highly unpleasant stuff.

To make matters worse, I found another "peak" crisis to fear. Experts say we might be heading toward "peak chocolate," where we want more chocolate than can be produced, according to ABC News.

Possible shortages of this necessity raise fears
of global chaos.

More and more chocoholics are roaming this earth. Meanwhile, cocoa plants, which ultimately give us our chocolate, are finicky, so you can't just plant them anywhere and expect them to be happy, good producers.

So, it might be time for me to start panicking, since going without chocolate is like asking politicians to go without attack ads.

Do I create a bunker to store a cache of chocolate? How do I defend myself from maurading chocoholics coming after my stash? I can see how peak chocolate, like peak oil, can cause worldwide apocalyptic doom.

Let's hope our cocoa scientists can find our way out of this dreadful potential mess.