We did so have a Mayan Apocalypse. Fortunately, only one man got caught in it.

Given the insanity in politics, and particularly the insanity in Republican politics these days, I'm not saying this is a sure thing. However, I suspect that after the rejection of his "Plan B" by fellow Republicans (a political apocalypse if ever there was one) on the eve of Mayan Doomsday, John Boehner's House speakership is toast.

Which is just as well. President Obama, this time with the collusion of Nancy Pelosi, was once again about to give away the store. They had agreed with Boehner to sock America's oldest, weakest and poorest Social Security recipients with a nightmare called Chained CPI, meanwhile moving up the top tax bracket from $250,000 to $400,000. This would have given those poor slobs who have to scrape by on $399,999 a year a wad of cash at the expense of poor Grand Aunt Mildred.

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go off the cliff, and to hell with it. If we can't spread around the wealth a little, let's at least spread around the misery.

Fallout from Onion spoof reporting on a “hostage-taking” Congress proves nobody in Washington has a sense of humor. Least of all Republicans.

If there’s anything Congress hates more than an agreement that could put the United States back on a stable economic footing, it’s a spoof that highlights its Republican-driven incompetence and irrationality.

Case in point:

The satirical newspaper The Onion ran a spoof – both online and in Twitterfeeds – that purported to follow Congress taking twelve children hostage and demanding $12 trillion to let the kids live.

A half brain-dead idiot would have to know it was a spoof, and a damned pointed one at that. It featured a Photoshopped picture of John Boehner holding a pistol to a little girl’s head. That’s it, at top right.

The spoof included a Tweet that said, Three-course lunch from Charlie Palmer's Steakhouse delivered as per Rep. Boehner's demands #CongressHostage

And what was that, if not a pointed reference to the fact that in the United States, wretches starve while the Congressmen, who could turn around the economy if they wanted, instead stuff their faces and make trouble for the nation?

The spoof even included a followup story that involved the pompous pontificating of Senator Mitch McConnell, who has had a major hand in holding up agreements in the Senate. Here’s the Onion explaning McConnell’s alleged position on the ransom:

Obviously, the most important thing here is to reach a deal that works for both sides," read a statement from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the disputed $12 trillion agreement that would free the young children currently being held at gunpoint by the country’s legislative branch. "But many important questions still remain: How will the ransom money be allocated? How can we cut needless expenditures such as individual ski masks for every congressman? Should there be a stipulation to take one of the children with us to ensure a clean getaway? Unfortunately, it may be quite some time before we can reach an adequate consensus on these and other issues." At press time, FBI officials said Congress had moved to extend the money drop-off deadline until early December.

The bad congressional behavior that inspired this spoof was so pointedly reflected in this story that the Republicans must have had a Category Five meltdown. Next thing you know, the Capitol Police — this is for real now — began investigating the Onion reports.

C’mon! What’s to investigate? We know where the report originated. At the Onion. We know what their motivation was: to spoof Congressional bad behavior. And we know who did it: The Onion staff members.

I met a few dumb cops in my police beat reporting days, but never this dumb. Why do I suspect that the cops aren’t "investigating" on their own?

Why do I think that somebody on the Republican side of the aisle is putting them up to it — perhaps by threatening sotto voce to cut the Capitol Police budget is they don’t make a big deal out of this to punish the Onion staff?

Instead of investigating The Onion, I have a better idea. Let's investigate Congress.

A warning to Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Jon Kyl and our too-quick-to-compromise President from...Madagascar!

In Madagascar, an island nation off the coast of Africa, a bunch of tinpot colonels and other military types decided to take over the government.

That was a day or so ago. Since then, the military usurpers seem to have found themselves up a certain unprintably-named creek without a paddle.

Seems the usurpers, having announced that they were bringing the government down, have – umm – retreated to the safety of their barracks. Maybe they could still pull this thing off if the new president will negotiate, but so far he seems to be telling them to go jump in that creek they're stuck in and take a few deep gulps of swamp water.

Now right here in the United States, Senator Mitch McConnell, Representative John Boehner, and lately Senator Jon Kyl, Republican problem children all three of them, are also threatening to bring down the president and make him a one-term phenomenon.

Yes, their actions would bring the government to a halt for the next four years. Yes, they're endangering the United States economy and what's left of the prosperity and health of every American citizen. Yes, their near-treasonous attempt at a forceful overthrow of the presidency is even endangering us diplomatically and militarily.

But the thing is, you see, they think Barack Obama will negotiate himself out of power if they keep this sociopathic stuff up. And his behavior since he came into office gives them a rational basis for thinking this way. So...

Memo to President Obama: Stop trying to negotiate with politicians who are trying to kill you. If you explain your case to the American people carefully, forcefully and frequently, they'll see that their interests are in line with yours, not the subversive Republicans.

Memo to McConnel, Boehner, Kyl and other Republicans: You might win this. But you might end up getting sent back to the barracks, your butts whupped, to sit in the corner with your dunce caps on until you're voted out of office. Is it really, really worth the gamble to you?

Bonehead

The presidential election didn’t stop the conservative crazies. They’re coming out of the woodwork again.

Congressman John Boehner — formerly an upholder of the Bush borrow-and-spend program that helped run the United States into the ground — is now criticizing Obama for a borrow-and-spend program.

This is just when, thanks to the previous administration, we have no other choice if we ever want to dig ourselves out of the financial mess we're in.

And since tax-cuts for the rich were great for the rich but ultimately didn’t do much for the economy — just look where we were before Bush got elected and where we are now, after the Bush tax cuts — bonehead Boehner is avocating…well, you almost guessed it!

Boehner wants tax cuts that would lower tax rates while essentially giving nothing to the poor and unemployed. Yet it's the poor and jobless who would have no choice but to pour their money into the economy as fast as more comfortable citizens have shunted their tax refunds to the banks in the past.

I’m not wildly enamored of the currently evolving Obama program either. It tries to make nice to too many uncooperative forces, including the likes of economic obstructionists like Congressman Boehner.

On the other hand, at least the Obama tax cuts and credits for the struggling middle class and poor will quickly inject some money into the economy, as will a program of infrastructure repair. However…

Here's what we need most

We’ve got to start thinking long term. Highway repairs are just another temporary palliative.

Yes, we need to repair infrastructure. Desperately. But we also need the equivalent of the space program of the 1960s and the Manhattan Project in the 1940s to create new American technological advances, prosperity and new industries. Otherwise, 20 nears from now, in our ever-weakening “service economy,” we’ll all still be grubbing a living by taking in our neighbors' laundry and flipping each others’ hamburgers.

Parts of this got talked about during the election campaign. Why, oh why, has it almost gone away?

We need programs to fund nonprofit laboratories in universities and governmental facilities, from which the technologies (and the technical innovators) of the future will emerge.

We need to educate the engineers and architects who can build not only the cars and transportation systems of the future, but also the homes and offices and (let us pray) factories of the future.

Let America become the world’s leader in developing and manufacturing wind turbines rather than coal plants.

Let’s be innovators in making power-generating light cells rather than buzz-generating celebrity gossip.

Let’s pioneer more energy-efficient and less toxic ways to dispose of waste.

Instead of developing new and improved anthrax strains for germ warfare, how about putting government scientists to work on anti-malarial drugs to replace the ones that are losing effectiveness against new strains of the disease? Let’s have a government push to create a truly effective an AIDS vaccine. And better (and cheaper) anti-cancer drugs.

Now that we can begin thinking seriously about stem cell research again, how about a government-funded push at universities to become stem cell innovators?

Better teachers, free college tuition

How about a government-funded program to train and pay for a legion of well-paid and inspirational science teachers —a program that will not only increase employment in the near future, but also supply well-trained Americans to develop new technologies? If we attract the most innovative minds to education, not only will education in this nation become better but fewer people will spend their time devising arcane and mischievous financial derivative training programs.

How about a free — yes, that’s free — college tuition program. It’s outrageous, for example, that a Ph.D or M.D. finishes his or her education carrying a debt big enough to mortgage a McMansion. Little wonder some of the smartest young graduates have been headed to Wall Street where they were able to pay back these crushing debts quickly — and ultimately at the expense of the nation.

Free (and all right, dirt cheap) city and state colleges helped make the United States the 20th Century’s most innovative nation. Then, late last century, we started charging more and more for tuition and insisting that more and more students borrow the money to get their degrees. Now we’re a nation of increasingly desperate, debt-ridden money-grubbers.

Yes, fix the roads. Yes, fix all the infrastructure. We need to do that. But listen up: all that won’t really fix the economy until we also fix our thinking.