Dogs must be going nuts in America. They say animals can smell fear in human beings and we must be stinking up the joint these days. If we're not fearing nebulous threats from rag-tag militias or small nations we're fearing for our health. The Republicans, experts on creating and exploiting fear, are already starting the not-so-subtle process of creating fear ads in regard to Barack Obama, who hasn't even won the Democratic nomination yet. All manner of journals and video media are implementing fear campaigns about threats to the health of Americans, possibly the most well-fed and healthy group of people in history. I'd bet dollars to Trans-fat soaked doughnuts that poor people in Third World countries would trade places with even the poorest Americans in a heartbeat, figuring they'll cross the cholesterol bridge when they come to it.

And if they did manage to get to reside here, do you think these people who have had to fight over canvas sacks of flour and grain would give a rat's ass whether their meat was cooked on clean propane or regular gas? They'd be eating meat for a change, and their children would have a better shot of seeing their tenth birthday! They'd most likely take their chances with acid reflux and elevated cholesterol levels. Would these people wonder about the phobias and fears Americans are embracing? You bet. They' look around them and see more cars in a single city than exist in their entire nation, retail food outlets specializing in cups of coffee and they'd be hard pressed not to faint in ecstasy when entering any supermarket anywhere in the United States.

You think they'd notice that not only is schooling freely available, but mandatory? That public libraries would lend them any book they wished to read for free? That water is so plentiful that people grow inedible pants just to beautify their surroundings? Would it escape their notice that even many poor Americans are fat? Or own cell phones, TVs and computers? That sanitary conditions, clean running water, reliable electricity and paved roads are universal? They'd be all eyes and ears. And being humans, they'd be full of questions. Such as: What he hell are you people afraid of? You're Americans living in America and nobody's coming here to shoot up your village, steal your livestock and crops and kill you.

You're Americans who get to decide who runs your government, giving you at least the opportunity to change things. You can watch any sort of TV show you like, read whatever you feel like reading and travel around free as a bird with no checkpoints anywhere to inspect your papers. You can call your leaders idiots if you like, practice whatever cockamamie religion appeals to you and nobody will lock you up for it. No government agents kick down your door in the dead of night and haul you away or stop you in the street for no reason. You can get rich in America, where, by Third World standards, everybody is rich. You can enjoy all these things and rejoice that you live here.

Or you can be afraid of your own shadow and ruin the whole experience. You can succumb to the repressive politicians who would have you making decisions based on fear or you can worry yourself sick over every killjoy report hat comes out identifying yet another nebulous threat to your perfect health. Better to recognize that the fear mongers run in packs like wild dogs, knowing that their kind is dying. What has worked so well in the recent past need not work anymore. There is a man named Barack Obama who wants to prey on your hopes and dreams and concentrate on the positive aspects of life in America and that has the fear mongers working overtime to cut that nonsense out. The last thing they want is for people to open their eyes.

I tend to give cars with I’m-more-religious-than-you bumper stickers a little more space than regular cars. I figure that people who rely on divine intervention to get where they’re going aren’t as alert as other drivers. Which other drivers? You know, regular people who realize it’s their responsibility to get themselves and their passengers from Point A to Point B in one piece. Regular drivers figure God might be too distracted answering the incessant prayers from the religious bumper sticker crowd to guide each and every one of us safely to the supermarket and the dry cleaners and back home again. Maybe the reason so few prayers get answered is the sheer volume of such supplications.

Now, according to believers, God is the entity who created the entire universe, and the Hubbel telescope tells us he’s not done yet. There’s stars being born at an incredible rate out there in space, forming new galaxies as we speak, so apparently the universe in still a work in progress. And believers also feel that we are made in God’s image. Okay then, aren’t we for the most part the type of beings who prioritize? We don’t attach the same importance to spilt milk, for example, as we do to broken legs. Now imagine 6 billion people complaining to you about spilt milk and maybe only fifty thousand about broken legs. Don’t you think the help-me-I’ve-got-a-broken-leg requests would get a little more attention from us than the milk spills? You’ve got to figure that God as we imagine him has an awful lot on his plate requiring his attention other than your questionable driving skills. So, just in case God’s in the middle of a particularly tricky cosmic building project, perhaps it’s best to keep your eyes on the road and use the skill he built into you.

We assume too much, we humans do. Being at the top of the food chain will do that to a species, make us think we’re in control of things. Then tsunamis and earthquakes happen and all the kings horses and al the kings men can’t do jack about it. And those are just the natural disasters. What about the ones we create? Has anybody ever seen the town of Nyack, New York? Sorry if that’s your hometown, but you should be even sorrier. And that’s not the only eyesore by far. But that’s only ugly, a spilt milk complaint, really. How about all the poisoning we’ve done to our sky and land? That’s broken leg material well worth getting our attention but still we burn the remains of our planetary predecessors to get energy. We assumed this resource would last forever even though unlike wood, our previous go-to energy source, we can’t grow any replacements.

And it’s not like we have had no warning that the oil is disappearing. The old figures stating that it would last for hundreds of years to come forgot to factor in all the former have-nots of the world finally getting to have stuff, and thus ratcheting up the demand for oil and rendering those predictions even sillier than they were. Did the Western nations think they’d keep all the cookies in the jar forever? Apparently so. But then they decided that western workers were too well paid and too well fed to manufacture goods anymore so poor nations were enlisted to make cheap goods. The only problem is that the ingrates in the poor nations wanted electric lights and running water once they had a taste of modern amenities so now the demand for oil is through the roof.

And the roof, by the way, is leaking, that roof being our sky, the atmosphere that we breathe, and a thing more important to our lives than SUV’s or flat screen TV’s. And so we cry that the planet is in danger when nothing could be further from the truth. It is us who are in danger, not the planet. The Earth can get along just fine without oxygen or an ozone layer. We sure as hell can’t. So we panic about losing our ability to survive and governments respond by convening committees, the places where ideas go to die. Committees are relatively cheap and and make us feel the problems are being solved. Meanwhile, our own government, for one, spends more in a single day on warfare than it does on research for the entire year on how come up with an alternative to burning and poisoning ourselves out of existence. Doesn’t look like such a rosy future unless we get serious about alternate energy sources. Maybe we’ll have a lot to ponder in the eons where we rot away into fuel for the next species to inherit the Earth.

Here's another phony crisis created by bored newspeople. The headlines say that some place called Sam's Club is rationing rice in the United States. It turns out that Sam's Club is one of those giant wholesale grocery warehouses that sell 55 gallon drums of corn flakes and is owned by one of America's greatest enemies, Walmart, and named after the dead guy Sam Walton who founded the rapacious retail chain. Anyway, here's the "rationing" plan: 200 pounds per customer per visit. That's rationing? Presumably you could haul your 200 pounds of rice to your car and revisit the place for another 200 pounds and do this all day long if you like. It's just like any coupon store in any supermarket, limit four to a customer, nothing out the ordinary there. What you're gong to do with enough rice to feed a large town is another story, and probably one more interesting than the phony food rationing reports.

Now, I'm an American and I work in the food business. During any given year, I personally throw out more perfectly good food than would sustain any thirty or forty large people, their entire required intake to maintain them as fatsos, fancy desserts and all. I just dump it right in the trash. Am I being malicious? Wasteful? Callous? No, I'm dealing with the realities of the food and party business. I'm sure not going to put leftovers in my car and take them home. If there was somebody to give this good food to I'd be glad to let them back up their own vehicle and haul it away but except in rare cases, that just doesn't happen. So if anything, there's too much food in America. Why do we have so many well-fed rats in New York? Well, because we're feeding them a lot of tasty stuff that we have no use for.

As far as the politics of having so much food and other places not having enough, well, I don't know how to fix that, any more than I know how to fix the phony news business. You can't just throw out unnecessary news people like you can uneaten linguini, as tempting as that thought might be. Bill O'Really would look good in a dumpster. There's a guy who wakes up in the morning with phony news stories floating around his funny shaped head and there's nobody where he works who has the nerve to tell him he hasn't had a lucid or important thought in decades. And he's far from alone in the video news media when it cones to inventing a phony crisis. No shortage or rationing there.

Unless of course your idea of an important story is declaring American flag lapel pins a good barometer for gauging someone's patriotism. Nowhere is it mentioned that turning our national symbol into a trivial wardrobe accessory seems like a pretty cheesy and cynical idea. No,that aspect is overlooked. It's like the whole flag burning issue, where people got all hot and bothered about burning American flags to the point where some wanted a Constitutional Amendment banning this act. The only trouble there was that there is already an existing law mandating that the only legal way to dispose of a worn-out American flag is to, you guessed it, burn it. So there was a tempest in a teapot, no? The Supreme Court agreed and sent the fools packing.

And once again, no mention was ever made by these geniuses of the disgrace to our flag by flying it over a nation conquered for no reason at all except to steal their oil. Or the disgrace not to the symbol of America, but America itself, of having a presidential administration mounting unceasing attacks on the Bill of Rights. That's okay with these people. The same people who use the words "market adjustment" for recession, "down-sizing" for firing workers and "outsourcing" for selling American jobs overseas would now have you believe that limiting somebody to buying 200 pounds of rice is food rationing. I've got a lot of leftovers for these guys to eat before they start talking about famine in America. Come to the kitchen door and bring your appetite.

Some days life is a dog and you're a fire hydrant. Bear it with as much dignity as you can muster and hope tomorrow is a better deal.

I must confess that I think about Guam about as often as I think about wolverines. That is to say, not all that much, with wolverines actually having a pretty big edge in the cross-my-mind department. And now Guam is the next primary in the hotly contested Democratic Presidential campaign. While the 4 delegates at stake there are hardly scale tippers for either Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama, no state or territory can be taken for granted in such a close contest. So now Guam gets to make some news other than being a remote battlefield of World War 2 in the 1940's or a prize in the Spanish-American War of 1898. When you're Guam, it's a long time between headlines so you take what you can get.

Guam is an unincorporated territory of the United States, meaning…um… meaning… hmm… what? They don't get to have Senators or Congressmen, but they do elect a governor and a 15 member legislature and send a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, one supposes to remind Washington that they exist and have needs just like anybody else. The electoral delegates they do send to the Democratic Convention don't get to vote but presumably can try to influence other delegates if they're of a mind to. Maybe invite them to Guam for some duty-free shopping and whatever else goes on there.

It must be a happening place since a million tourists a year visit this island of 173,000 American citizens. Ninety percent of their tourists are from Japan. Most of the rest come from South Korea, Philippines and Taiwan. Not many American citizens visit the place except for the many U.S. Military personnel stationed in the six bases there: four Navy installations and one each for the Coast Guard and Air Force. The Marines will be joining them between 2010 and 2014 when the Third Marine Expeditionary Force relocates to Guam from Okinawa. That move will increase the island's population by 25%. With all that firepower concentrated there you wonder exactly what's so valuable on this 209-square mile island smack dab in between Indonesia and Japan.

One supposes that like all real estate, Guam's great value is due to location, location, location. Modern day Imperial America needs to project its military might globally and Guam is pretty handy to Asia to deter the Chinese from getting frisky in the Pacific like Japan did 70 years ago. So for a place that doesn't have a lot of territory and not much to say about what goes on in American politics and whose capital "city," Hagatna, boasts only 1,100 inhabitants, Guam is actually more important to Imperial America than Arkansas. Probably a lot more fun and interesting too but that's another story. Candidates actually do visit Arkansas to try to win votes, as bland an experience as that may be, but none of them ever seem to visit Guam. I wonder if they hit the Virgin islands? That's also a territory and a tropical paradise, and pretty close to the mainland as opposed to the almost a half a planet away that Guam is from Washington, D.C.

At any rate, I think we all know about as much about Guam as is necessary for going about our daily lives. With all that military might assembled there one supposes it's safe from the Axis of Evil and Al Qaeda. Wondering why that armed juggernaut isn't assembled around around places like New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Seattle, New Orleans and a whole lot of other vulnerable and densely populated U.S.A. cities only gives you a headache. Let's just stay glued to our TV sets this May 3 to see who gets those four non-voting delegates. In politics, as goes Guam, so goes the Marianas.

DOPOTO, shorthand for the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious, has been getting some late breaking news reports form all corners of our great nation and beyond. We bring you the highlights.:

The efforts to develop bio-fuels is taking away much of the world's food supply. A lot of land once used to produce food crops is being converted to growing plants for producing synthetic and renewable fuel, thus reducing grain supplies and driving up prices. Combine that with some unfortunate dry weather in some key farming regions around he globe and the result is worldwide food shortages. In an effort to stem the wave of food riots in hungry nations, the ruling elite in those countries are turning to genetic alteration. Not of the crops, but of those pesky food rioters. They feel that the need to eat three times a day is selfish, wasteful and counterproductive. They have ordered their scientists to manipulate the genes of the working classes so that they need to eat but once or twice a week. While that is the norm in many of these places today, it makes the people pretty irritable and prone to all manner of debilitating diseases. Many kings and dictators in stricken nations are offering incentives to scientists for curbing humanity's appetite, promising them valuable prizes like staying out of prison and not being slain.

Piracy is becoming a huge problem off the coast of Africa. Sounds like a job for Pompey, the Roman military leader who once cleared the Mediterranean Sea of Pirates in only 3 months. Unfortunately, Pompey's been dead for over 2,000 years so all DOPOTO can say is Aaaargghh!

In Paraguay a Roman Catholic Bishop has been elected to the presidency, vowing to return that nation to the greatness it once enjoyed. Researchers at the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious have thus far been unable to determine when exactly that was but are working diligently to figure that out and will get back to you as soon as we discover when The Golden Age of Paraguay was.

Most of us here at DOPOTO come from Earth so we welcome the annual celebration of Earth Day. However, our studies reveal the focus is a bit skewed. It seems that contrary to popular wisdom, the Earth is is no danger at all from humans, no matter how many pollutants we belch out into the land and sky. It is humans who are in danger from all that icky stuff, not the planet. Our research has confirmed that the Earth got along just fine for billions of years before we got here and will get along fine without us. The planet really doesn't care what sort of atmosphere surrounds it or whether or not it is sheathed in mile-thick ice sheets or blazing lava. Nor does it seem overly attached to any of the creature who happen to ride its back as it spins through the heavens. So perhaps we should celebrate People Day and try to focus on keeping the Earth a user-friendly place. Just a suggestion from the people here at DOPTO who would like to stick around and keep pointing out the obvious a while longer.