The gift that is the race for the GOP presidential nomination just keeps on a-giving. SNL, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report might as well just add their writing staffs to the unemployment stats, because the candidates are serving up all the material they’re ever gonna need, and for free, too.

Herman “Just Kidding (Not Really”) Cain wants to electrify the fence between the United States and Mexico; I’m not sure who picks up the tab for that, but I suspect Cain plans to bill grieving Mexicans for the cost of electrocuting their kinfolk. “Careful, señores, hot fence!”

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney says that rather than providing foreclosure relief to struggling homeowners, he would let  foreclosures “run their course and hit the bottom,” put all those bums on the street, and then sell the bums’ houses to investors, who could turn around and rent the bums’ houses back to them (assuming the bums could pass the credit check, raise first, last and damage deposit, and get out of the leases on the Dumpsters, refrigerator boxes and pup tents they’re living in).

And he says this in Nevada, where a day without foreclosures is like a day without sunshine. It’s like throwing an anvil to a drowning man — more than 80 percent of homeowners there are underwater on their mortgages, and one in 44 houses has been hit by a foreclosure filing in the third quarter of 2011, nearly double the number in runner-up California and putting the Silver State squarely atop the foreclosure heap.

Remember, this isn’t your crazy Uncle Hermie who talks to the toaster and Thurston Howell III, who was a TV caricature of an obscenely wealthy, amoral fuck, not the real deal. These are the frontrunners for the GOP nomination. One of them could actually become president.

Today, as you all know, is International Workers Day, when we celebrate the final triumphant victory of the working class over the ruthless despots of global capitalism.

Whoops — kind of skipped a step or two there, didn’t we? The “fighting” and “winning” bits, if memory serves.

A quick Google search finds a few stalwarts still out there manning the barricades: the International Workers of the World (IWW), better known as the Wobblies; the Socialist Party USA; the Democratic Socialists of America; the World Socialist Party (US); and of course, Old Reliable, the Communist Party USA.

I haven’t seen an actual commie on the hoof for the better part of quite some time — since I fancied myself one, back in the late Seventies. They appear to be as rare as honor and dignity in the workplace.

Small wonder. Considering the calumny and vitriol heaped upon the decidedly non-socialist Democrat currently occupying the Oval Office, can you imagine what sort of horror awaits someone who actually declares himself a pinko in public?

And more’s the pity. It would be refreshing to see someone standing tall for working people instead of heaping more shit on their plates.

So, until someone shows up — perhaps the Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad — we’ll just have to settle for some old-style agitprop. Here’s an English-language version of the Internationale from the late folk-punk artist and socialist Alistair Hulett to put the red back in your blood.