What makes most Americans laugh out loud today is conservative whining about liberals wanting to "redistribute the wealth," when that's exactly what conservatives have been doing successfully since Ronald Reagan took office: redistributing the wealth upward. The true agenda of the Republican Party is to get as much money in as few hands as possible. Independent voters already have seen that; blue-collar voting Republicans are finally beginning to see that. After thirty-two years of killing the American worker, the GOP is finally killing itself. And I will not attend any memorial service for it.

Indeed, hard work for a major CEO means a 10 a.m. meeting sitting around a conference table being served coffee and danish by someone making 1/200th of his pay, followed by a two+ hour two martini lunch, followed by a 2 p.m. meeting sitting around a conference table being served coffee and danish by someone making 1/200th of his pay, and at 4 p.m. going to the Country Club for a couple of more martinis, followed by a filet mignon dinner, followed by cigars and port. And -- woe is he -- he has to get up at 8 a.m. and do it all over again. Poor guy. No wonder he makes the big bucks. If he does good, he is paid a multi-million-dollar bonus for laying off hundreds of workers. And if the company goes to hell in a hand basket under his leadership, he negotiates a multi-million dollar golden-parachute severance package. Ah, yes, no wonder he gets paid the big bucks.

Oh, no. Neither the Constitution nor our view of it can change -- not one iota. I know this because Justice Antonin Scalia -- a great legal scholar -- has repeatedly assured us that "[T]he Constitution is dead." (If you think I'm overstating this, just Google "Scalia Constitution dead.") You know Justice Scalia, don't you? He's the one who makes public out-of-court comments on matters that are currently before his Court. He's also the one who goes duck hunting with a man who later becomes a litigant before his Court, yet does not recuse himself from hearing his case. Yes, a great legal scholar, he.

Well, I'll tell you, Rand Paul has me convinced. I'm ready to vote for 19th-Century Republicans. Where can I find some?

And, once again, guns don't kill children. Children kill children.

And, once again, we know for a certainty that these parents were NOT members of the NRA because the NRA teaches its members not to leave loaded guns lying around like this.

The stock market is going great guns and still the huge corporations aren't rehiring. This is typical when coming out of a recession. Corporate capitalism wants to milk the recession as long as possible by demanding more productivity out of the workers they kept as long as they can get away with it. Keeps the payroll low and the profits high. The high profits don't trickle down that way. The guys at the top get to keep more. And more. And more. . . .

Of course, if they all hired more workers, there would be more workers out there with more money able to buy the products that corporations want to sell, and corporate profits would increase still more. But that's demand-side economics, a language that corporate America does not understand.

Now, now, children.

Employers, particularly corporate employers, are continuing to take advantage of the downsizing they did during the height of the recession. Instead of rehiring employees now, they simply make each current employee continue to work harder to produce more for the same pay. That's called "productivity," i.e., the amount of work produced per employee. This enables top management to make their bonuses both during the recession (from laying off workers) and during the recovery (by not hiring them back). This is American corporate capitalism at its best: the already wealthy getting wealthier on the backs of working people--"working people," you know, the people who really do the work?