Last year, during an intimate chat and chew dinner with some Silicon Valley high-tech barons, President Barack Obama posed a question to Steve Jobs, baron of the Apple empire.

Justice Kennedy, meet Sheldon Adelson — a product of your cluelessness about how real politics work. For years, this casino baron has spent lavishly on right-wing front groups to advance his personal agenda, including pouring money into Newt Gingrich’s campaign.

Why do congressional Republicans hate unborn babies? Yeah, I know they profess to love the unborn, even considering them “persons” from the very moment of conception. Yet, whose interest do you think these same politicos have chosen to protect when it comes to regulating an especially nasty industrial toxin that wreaks holy hell on unborn babies?

The Powers That Be constantly try to pull the wool over people’s eyes, but sometimes the wool blinders are so itchy that people rip them off and clearly see the scam.

Let’s hear it for American Tradition Partnership! It’s an organization that stands up for the politically dispossessed in our land. It goes to the highest courts to assert the fundamental rights of a minority that’s been denied its full voice in America’s political and governmental power circles. Yes, American Tradition Partnership is a tenacious advocate for (cue the patriotic music): corporations.

Let me just mention a few of the bigger bumps: non-stop Congressional gridlock, Donnie Trump, the working class depression, Obama’s serial surrenders to raw Republican partisanship, Newt Gingrich, the re-emergence of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko arrogance, right-wing governors gone wild, Rick.

Today, that insidious love (taking the form of greed and excess) is celebrated in our country and has even exalted into official public policy, marring our economy with inequality and injustice. The reigning ethos of our nation’s upper crust is that too much is not enough. They’re not merely out to make loads of the money they love, but to make a killing, everyone else be damned.

Greenwashing” is the use of shameless PR campaigns by notorious polluters to portray their corporations as benign Bambi-loving protectors of nature. But now comes “Greedwashing.”

Great news, people: a hot spot of nine-spotted ladybugs has been spotted in Amagansett, N.Y.! This uplifting story is a rich organic mixture of state pride, nature’s resilience, America’s scientific pluck, teamwork, serendipity and bug love. In today’s hard times, we need this.

Double-dippin’ Joe is back in the news. Double-dip is not some soda jerk working in an ice cream shop, but that’s not too far off. He’s a state legislator working in Texas to jerk taxpayers around for his own financial gain.