DISNEY KILLS LONGE RANGER & JOHNNY DEPP

Tarnation...! I guess now it's finally official. The glory days of the Old West with the great horse Silver are over. When a great American movie studio like Disney cancels plans for a great American cult hero like the Lone Ranger and a great American cash cow like Johnny Depp as the faithful Indian companion Tonto -- well, something must be seriously wrong here in America.

Standard & Poor's already explained that to us. But they're just financiers. Whatta they know about the real, blood- and guts, tall-in-the-saddle America we've all lived and breathed and played ever since we were kids? On the other hand, Disney Studios should know better. They know all about that America, because they've been bringing it to us ever since they brought us Davy Crockett, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza.

So how-in-the-name-of-everything-west-of-the-wide-wide-Missouri can these Hollywood dudes do this to us? And to Johnny? I mean, lets be honest. We big-A-Americans like to see and understand our country in big Western ways where the good guys wear white hats, the bad guys black, and the hero kisses the girl but rides off with his horse.

Now that, pardner, is big-A-American, black-and-white thinking at its best. No crazy confusing grays like some of these complicated Sundance Festival films where you can't tell the good guys from the bad until the last reel. And even then, dagnabit, you're still aren't really sure.

Maybe I've read my country wrong lately, because I was sure-as-shooting sure that the Tea Party gunslingers were keeping that great old black-and-white American thinking alive. I mean look how they drew from the hip and shot down even their own sheriff, John Boehner, before they'd let him cut a deal with that crazy serial-killer living in the big white house down main street. Look -- when it's good versus evil, when its simple raging versus hard thinking, then every red- blooded posse know what to do!

Funny thing, though. You'd have thought the Tea Party posse out to save the "real America" would pause when one of America's most tall-in-the-saddle heroes, Warren Buffett, speaks. He just wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he says to the no-new-taxes gang at the bar: "Billionaires like me should be taxed more!"

What...?