I love reading Mark Morford -- he's got bits of Molly Ivins and Hunter S. Thompson and a sense of palpable wonder/excitement/outrage depending on the subject at hand. I'd forgotten about him for a while, until Julie was laughing over his column one day. There and then, I added his rss feed to my reader.
His latest column is, to me, a great read:
Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas
It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?
No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?
Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium. [...]
What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.
Go, read it. Be entertained. Think about reading him regularly, for brilliant beautiful hyperbolic rants on the crazy state of our country.