Column Space for Rent

To: The Bush Administration
From: The Joe Livernois Column
Re: Our Pricing Schedule

Thank you for this opportunity allowing us to offer our services in your vigorous efforts to communicate your initiatives to the American public.

We are very much impressed by your willingness to enrich hardworking journalists, columnists, commentators, pundits and wild-eyed fanatics who are willing to "go to bat" on your behalf while you mollify an anxious public during the final four years of your administration.

We understand that many "negative thinkers" believe it was unethical for commentator Armstrong Williams to receive $240,000 from your Education Department to help push the No Child Left Behind initiative.

And others pretend they are horrified that another columnist, Maggie Gallagher, was rewarded a $21,500 contract with the Health and Human Services Department to promote healthy marriages.

But you know your career as a columnist is stuck in Piddlesville when the Bush Administration hasn't offered you cash money to say nice things about his initiatives. And, personally, we could use some money.

Up to this point, the Joe Livernois Column has missed out on the gravy train. However, please be assured that we strongly believe our words and our reputation mean nothing if we can't earn some serious money along the way.

In short, the next time you are looking for a shameless greedhead who is willing to do the "hard work" of stringing a few words together on your behalf, please add us to your list.

Please refer to the following price guide:

* A furious defense of the treatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners, including a series of cheap shots directed at pantywaist liberals who probably never served in the military and who obviously don't understand what we're up against over there. $5,000.

* Full column linking homosexual behavior to the primal urges of rhesus monkeys. $7,500.

* Full column linking Dan Rather to the primal urges of Saddam Hussein. $10,000.

* A dispassionate thesis proving that Americans can still support the troops while only paying $12,000 in benefits to a dead soldier's family if only more of us would affix those yellow ribbon stickers on our Hummers. $12,000.

* Vicious and vaguely racist attack on anyone who honestly believes that immigration reform can't be accomplished unless American businesses are aggressively prosecuted for their hiring practices. $17,000.

* Expert economic analysis explaining why a $427 billion budget deficit isn't such a big deal after all. Negotiable, cash only.

* Feature story that introduces the world to the warm, fuzzy and playful character of Candoleeza Rice and/or Donald Rumsfeld. $35,000.

* Sober summary about how really hard everyone is working lately — really, really hard — to resolve all these nagging problems, with judicious and liberal use of the term "post 9/11 reality." $50,000.

A Primer on California Politics

Despite all the high-minded rhetoric and the giddy expectations when he was elected, the governor has let us down.

I think I speak for all of us here in California when I say we are bitterly disappointed that Sarah Conner is still alive and is destined to change the destiny of mankind when she gives birth to famed future resistance leader John Conner.

Also, I fully expected I would have received my state-issued Hummer by now.

All Arnold Schwarzenegger has really done of consequence since he was elected is hang around the Encino shopping mall, assuring citizens they need not worry about Sarah Conner anymore.

He also performs some other government-related functions, such as distributing cigars to political allies, issuing pronouncements against his enemies and releasing complicated documents that government analysts have identified as "state budgets."

As it turns out, these state budgets are very important items in the operations of government.

During the next several months, Schwarzenegger will be involved in a rigorous campaign known as the "budget process."

While important and instructive, the budget process is not quite as exciting as the time Arnold managed to massacre an entire tribe of warlords while wearing nothing but a loincloth made of animal pelts.

Unfortunately, we didn't elect Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was younger and still capable of swinging through the trees, at a point in his life where he could really help California.

Arnold is getting old. And nothing infuriates an old person more than rising taxes.

As a bonafide old person, Schwarzenegger no longer has the energy to worry about cold-blooded tribal warlords or the pending insurrection against Skynet, not while thieving politicians threaten to levy more taxes.

(Note to self: Include provision in living will allowing physicians to pull the plug when I become so infirm and useless and white that all I do is babble madly about taxes.)

Schwarzenegger's budget was released earlier this week, unleashing a torrent of boring newspaper stories that never once mentioned the word "groping."

Almost immediately, savvy Californians became aware that radical changes were afoot. For instance, they were shocked to see the governor's budget includes provisions in which Schwarzenegger will no longer be making appearances in Encino but instead will be showing up at the megamall in Azusa.

Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger's nagging political enemies in state government — known variously as "Democrats" or "girlie men" — are whining up a storm about his budget.

These girlie men, many of whom have never appeared in public in an animal pelt loincloth, are already whining about provisions in the governor's budget that will replace city libraries with Bavarian-style beer halls.

They are also howling about Schwarzenegger's proposal to consolidate the state's prisons with the state's school system. The newly-formed Department of Prisons and Education would be privatized, contracted out to the lowest bidder, to ensure the best value for California taxpayers.

The whiners have also questioned why Schwarzenegger's budget is mute on the question of Sarah Conner.

Ban Bicoastalism Today!

It's high time the people of America rise up in a united and righteously shrill voice to condemn bicoastalism.

It has become painfully evident that bicoastalism threatens the sanctity of marriage.

We need laws, that's what we need. Better yet, we need constitutional amendments.

We need strong and decisive action to protect the institution of marriage against the diabolical poison of unnatural bicoastal marriages that have crept into our society.

Of course, we are not being judgmental when we say that flaming bicoastals are wretched handmaidens of hellish terror who undermine everything that is right and good.

But the threat is there, and we can either ignore it or we can write our Congressman today and demand that he support legislation to ban bicoastalism.

The foreboding spectre of bicoastalism reared its ugly head this week with news that Gavin Newsom and his wife, a woman called "Kimberly," are ending their 3-year-old bicoastal marriage.

Are you surprised?

According to whispered rumors, reckless innuendo and hard fact, Kimberly Newsom lives and works on one coast while her husband — shockingly — lives and works on another coast.

Kimberly, a former lingerie model who first drew Gavin's attention when she worked in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, now works in the entertainment field, wears fashionably black garments and lives in New York.

Meanwhile, Gavin lives in San Francisco and hangs out with gay people, welling up shamelessly at their weddings and learning to make killer canapes.

Friends of the couple saw disaster coming long ago, when Gavin and Kimberly first announced they would become a bicoastal couple.

At the time, Gavin had just been elected mayor of San Francisco, a city renowned for its brazen bicoastalism.

Married less than a year, Kimberly announced that she "never signed on" to be a mayor's wife. Plus, she had just received that fabulous offer to work for Court TV and who could turn down a job like that?

So she took off for the big city, while Gavin was forced to remain in California. As mayor of San Francisco, Gavin is thrust with the awesome responsibility of crafting new civic measures meant to offend prudes, sanctimonious zealots and Ann "Sugar Britches" Coulter.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle story, a close friend whispered that "it's no secret they have been leading separate lives. She's on one coast, he's on the other — how can you make a marriage work like that?"

So they are getting a divorce, another marriage torn asunder by the insidious menace of bicoastalism.

And when bicoastalism is allowed to flourish and prosper, it's a well-known fact that those of us who practice unicoastal marriages suffer. Somehow. We're not sure how yet, but we're pretty darn certain it's true because our literal translation of something we read seems to indicate it's true. Or something.

Anyway, let's get that constitutional amendment rolling. The sanctity of your marriage depends on it.