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The conservatives are absolutely right. Marriage in this country is a mess. In the last 30 years, marriage has become one of a menu of options rather than the standard, and marriages are not taken seriously. People divorce a lot, make pre-nuptial agreements in preparation for divorce, re-marry, re-divorce, and pretty much treat the former sacrament as they would an apartment lease.

Marriage is, in fact, under attack. The trouble is, they have the wrong target. For inexplicable reasons my fellow Americans have chosen as their enemy homosexuals wishing to marry. Apparently the tolerance of these unions is corroding the entire institution.

Piffle. The problem is divorce. Easy, painless no-fault divorces and remarriages debase the currency of a sacrament. Who values a contract you can tear up with $100 and an hour with an attorney?

So, if we are to protect marriage from the destructive influence of convenience, it's obvious what's needed: A constitutional amendment forbidding divorce. Leave your mate if you wish, but you're still married in my America. We have a standard to uphold here.

Some people may find this draconian, and it could be a hard sell. There's a second less preferable option: A constitutional amendment barring re-marriage. If your marriage is so horrible that you can't stand it one more minute, it can be dissolved. But that was your chance. We can't have people abusing the seriousness of the institution.

If there's squawking and whining about this one too, and it's not politically practical, there's only one other possibility. Marriages must be made painfully expensive after divorce. Perhaps $10,000 for a second marriage, $100,000 for a third, and $1 million for any afterwards. If there's no other way to get our citizens to understand the power of marriage, money may have to do.

I know some of you are going to say that this is unreasonable, unworkable, and an unnecessary intervention of government in a deeply personal matter. There are going to be complaints of interference in religious belief as well. But if you ask your government to help you defend marriage as an institution, we're going to have to do that the best and most equitable way for everyone.

The alternative would be to let people decide what marriage means on their own and just approve and record the union. But I guess you didn't want that, did you?

Our local failing shopping center in Costa Mesa, Triangle Square (love the name), has been flailing for years. Their rent is high, they put the supermarket in an unattractive basement, and they've been shedding tenants including: The North Face, Whole Foods, several restaurants, Virgin Records, and their anchor Nike Store. It's a ghost mall now with the exception of a couple of remaining stores, a pretty good sushi place, and a beer bar for assholes called The Yard House.

Since the only people who can afford to remain there are selling retail alcohol, they've decided to fill the whole damn thing up with bars and restaurants. The place is pretty much a block of concrete between three streets, with layers of retail spaces on top of layers of parking lot. How to set this up?

I have an idea!

Towering above the complex will be a huge water tower-like structure. This will contain tens of thousands of gallons of top-shelf alcoholic beverages, probably setting some type of Guinness record. There will be a permanent rotating light on this structure, and ad logos for the liquor companies. It will be called something whimsical like "The Drunk Tank" or "Well Well".

On the top floor of the mall there will be some very swank bars, like the horribly named "Sutra" night club that's there already. High cover charges, velvet ropes, mortgage brokers and their trophy girlfriends. Drinks will be $10 or so.

Each floor below will have a less expensive and less fancy set of places: a TGI Friday's and a National Sports Grill in the middle, a Red Robin and a Shooterz further down, and at the bottom a shitty beer bar with bad pool tables. On one corner of the bottom level there will be a hipster bar that will be just as bad as the beer bar, but will charge as much as as the top shelf places.

The genius part is this: every level below the top is actually drinking the urine produced one level above. As the rich bro's and ho's piss out their Grey Goose and Dom Perignon, it gets filtered and realcoholized and served as Absolut and Sam Adams down below, before finally turning into Jim Beam and Coors Lite at the bottom. The hipster corner of the bottom level will get it as PBR.

I'm off to get venture capital now.

It's an angry white guy talk radio show with a twist. We'll have the angry white guy as usual, with his hard-hitting, straight-shooting, "politically incorrect" take on things which is the same as every other angry white guy talk show. We'll have the callers who take it a step further and yell a lot about how the brown people and the "international bankers" and Bill Clinton and women are responsible for all our troubles, and advocating the usual genocidal and/or unworkable solutions to complex problems.

The twist is that all the callers are actors. Any real callers are immediately referred to a psychiatric intervention which is mandatory and may be carried out by force. We'll have them agree to this by pressing "1" on their touch tone phones while waiting to go on the air, and none of them will listen to the disclaimer anyway.

This is going to require some resources, including air time, an 800 number, and quite a few "mobile intervention centers" (windowless panel vans with hospital beds, 4 point restraints, and gallon bottles of Risperdal).

Who's in?