By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

Now that President Barack Obama has treated us to a madcap budgetary joke, it's time to get serious for the sake of national survival.

Even the worst of presidents cannot stop the best of times, and it's beginning to look as if an unprecedented energy boom just might save President Barack Obama's re-election, despite his undying efforts to thwart energy development.

The latest embarrassment from President Barack Obama is more than an embarrassment. It's an assault on faith that begins with a 2,500-page health care bill enacted with no one expected to read it except the bureaucrats paid to translate its obscurities into thousands more pages of regulations.

Mitt Romney won the Florida primary, but can he get the Republican presidential nomination and then win the White House?

If Albert Einstein had been in a debate and was given 30 seconds to explain his relativity theory, he could well have sounded like a boob. "Time is not a constant, you see. Motion affects how fast it passes, and ..."

In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama reminded you of the captain of the Italian cruise ship that took a deadly dive. This seafarer keeps making up weird tales to justify his actions. Those rocks he crashed into? That was to avoid sinking. And he didn't abandon ship. He fell into that lifeboat.

Join with me in an imagined future, one in which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich manages to grab the Republican nomination for president and then wins the presidency. It had helped that President Barack Obama had decided to wipe out all of America's 2 million miles of pipeline because of possible contamination of the moon.

In his weasel-worded decision to block a perfectly harmless pipeline that would have provided America with jobs, energy and hope, President Barack Obama betrayed his country, lied and even welshed on a deal with Congress. I am sorry to say so, but it's true. Let's look at some history to get there.

Four Marines urinated on the bodies of three Afghans apparently thwarted in their ambitions to shoot off the Marines' heads. The desecrating deed was an abridgment of military rules, and though it's highly dubious, could have an adverse impact on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, but something worse has ensued.

When Ron Paul approaches a podium to speak, you can almost hear the Looney Tunes merriment music at the start of a cartoon -- tra, la, la, tra, la, la, la, ding, da, ding, ding, ding. The antics seldom disappoint, but you have to grant the fellow has his serious side, too.