Friday, September 28, 2012

Drone Impact Report Brings Leaks


The Associated Press today is reporting a torrent of coincidentally exculpatory White House leaks following the recent publication of a new Stanford/NYU report, “Living under Drones”, that documents the long rumored Obama drone program’s long rumored terrorizing of Pakistan’s 800,000 Waziri people.

According to one leak, the Pattern of Life analysis used to identify targets for Predator and Reaper drone strikes is widely regarded in the industry as being beyond reproof.

This anonymous source revealed that before a person of interest becomes what drone program insiders refer to as “bugsplat”, he has to be caught engaging in no fewer than one hundred habits consistent with the modus vivendi of a terrorist.

Countered Human Rights Watch spokesperson Willa Hayes, “What the Obama administration’s secret leaker forgot to also leak is that when you add up the ablutions of the face, hands, and feet and add up all the prescribed postures and recitations in the 14 steps taken in each act of ritual Islamic prayer and you multiply all that by five, a Pakistani can be caught engaging in 99 of those habits in just one day of practicing just one aspect of his religion.

“And then if the Pakistani in question also happens to be caught engaging in the habit of being a male, an official America-sponsored target suddenly appears on his back—a target, by the way, that has the habit of rippling outward to include everything and everybody within a 50-yard radius.

“It is a target that also, by the way, has the amazing habit of outlasting the very drone strike it has prompted so it can be “double tapped”, as they say in the drone business, when Waziris start engaging in the highly suspicious habit of searching for the remains of blown-up loved ones.”

In another government leak, apparently calculated to assuage the conscience of the American people, it was disclosed that America’s drone strikes will soon no longer really even have America’s fingerprints on them.

In the works, according to the leak, is a new generation of unmanned aerial vehicle, called the Apocalypse drone, that will be equipped with sufficient artificial human intuition to generate the gut feeling needed to identify and bomb targets all on its own, effectively washing all the blood off all the hands of all its American sponsors.

In an apparently actual leak in response to this presumably well orchestrated one, an anonymous source deep inside the American security apparatus is blowing the whistle on the wasting of taxpayer dollars on a campaign to ease the minds of a populace that by and large couldn’t care less about how many Muslims get themselves blown up by American bombs.

In related news, the pharmaceutical industry is reporting record third-quarter profits, in part thanks to the explosion of demand for anti-anxiety drugs in areas where the eerie around-the-clock buzzing noise emitted by American drones poised within eyeshot overhead is relentlessly reminding all those below that they and/or their loved ones could become so-called bugsplat in any place at any time.

In response to charges of Pentagon complicity in war profiteering, White House spokesman Jay Carney today flatly denied being at liberty to comment on whether national security considerations allowed him to flatly deny that the Obama drone program that national security considerations did not allow him to deny or confirm the existence of is in any way, shape or form involved in American drug companies’ efforts to profit from any collateral mental health damage that may or may not result from a drone program that may or may not exist.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Justice Scalia Diagnosed with Rare Disease


Shining City Gazette has confirmed reports that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is suffering from a rare disorder known as Geppetto Syndrome.

Primarily afflicting elderly men of Italian descent, this condition fills its victims with the irrational wish to pull all the strings and to bring inanimate entities to life.

“This diagnosis really explains a lot,” said Supreme Court historian Dr. Paul Clarke. “Scalia’s pathological weakness for puppeteering and for male offspring figures prone to vices and woodenheadedness perfectly explains his strange relationship with Clarence Thomas.”

Added Italian-American juridical psychologist Dr. Sophia Petrocelli, “Now we all have a way to wrap our brains around the Citizens United ruling. Scalia’s fellow conservative justices most likely caught his infectious will to recreate the Pinocchio story.

“Across the country, what we now have is a raft of brand new real boys out there at the mercy of all the Honest Johns and Gideons running the corporate and political show.

“In other words, thanks to this crippling disease that has claimed the mind of Justice Scalia, the US Constitution—at one time an immutable thing made of tree-based paper—is now a living document with precious few defenses against a world full of hucksters and would-be slavemasters.”

“Perhaps the worst part of this whole unfortunate business,” said Dr. Clarke, “is that in Scalia’s doting paternal eyes the litter of corporate persons turning America into a veritable Paradise Island can do no wrong.”

With characteristic prickliness, Justice Scalia is scoffing at the commentary his illness has spawned in liberal quarters.

Said Scalia, “What all these Blue Fairies on the left ought to be wasting their time getting their undies in a bundle over is the Third Degree Aggravated Coachman’s Syndrome I’ve contracted by wishing too hard upon a star that somebody would shut all the libertine donkeys up around here and put them to work in the salt mines of the job creators.”

For all the 76-year-old jurist’s bluster, according to sources, when all alone behind closed doors he can often be heard carrying on tender conversations as if with a real boy.

Said one aide to chambers, “In light of his Geppetto Syndrome and the Citizens United ruling, I’m afraid he’s maybe personified the Heritage Foundation in his increasingly senile mind. Or maybe the American Enterprise Institute.

“Either that or he’s in there holding a conversation with the hard-on he’s always had for liberals.”

In related news, the National Right to Life Committee announced today that it is joining “full force” in the fight against efforts to terminate the corporate persons conceived by the Supreme Court’s conservative judges in the landmark Citizens United case.

Friday, September 21, 2012

New Poll Test in the Works

Democrats announced today that they are mounting a counter-offensive in the Republicans' ongoing war on left-leaning poor and minority voters.

Said DNC spokesperson Dale Humphries, "We're telling Republican governors and state attorneys general across the country that we'll see their voter ID laws and we'll raise them a poll test that all would-be voters will have to pass to prove their citizenship in the reality-based world.

"Right now what you've technically got in the Republican base is literally millions of aliens trying to vote in America's sovereign elections. We're sorry, but if you don't know within an eon how old the real world is, you don't get to vote in it."

Added Democratic strategist Ted Davis, "One good thing about this new effort to protect our democratic system is that for inhabitants of the fact-driven world, the test will be so simple that our get-out-the-vote volunteers will not have to use valuable resources organizing cram sessions for registered Democrats.

"What I also love is that all the costly cram sessions in the world are not going to up in the least what is likely to be the abysmal pass rate of Teabaggers.

"Let me put it this way," explained Mr. Davis, "A senile former flower child on a magic mushroom trip warped by an acid flashback has a much better chance of passing this test than a bloc of musket-toting wingnuts who don't know that God doesn't really sit down and hold personal conversations with their political heroes."

"For fun," said Mr. Humphries, "the test's first item is going to be the following. 'True or false: a handful of Mickey Mouses and Julius Caesars casting votes in America's elections over the course of decades constitutes a graver threat to American democracy than an electronic vote-counting machine in a swing state with a Republican attorney general.'

"And by all means," Mr. Humphries told this Shining City Gazette reporter, "go right on ahead and print that little sneak preview. The beauty of the pig-headed, reality-challenged right-winger is that he or she's not ever budging from the comfort of Planet Fox no matter what the stakes are.

"Hell, we're not even going to have to change the test from one election to the next. Not when all the leaders of these people have infantilizing misinformation campaigns down to such a science. Or should I say anti-science?"

In other voting news, the mainstream media failed again today to report on an electronic voting fraud story coming out of the nation's swing states.

In county after county across Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, irregularities have arisen as elections boards have used complimentary electronic vote-counting machines to determine the outcome of their votes for or against proposed measures for addressing the nearly one dozen cases of voter ID fraud nationwide over the past several election cycles.

According to sources, in one case after another, by votes of six to five, ten-member boards evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats have reached the decision to suppress the votes of poor people and minorites.

In one case so troubling that the mainstream media may have to cover it, the nays got no votes at all against 110 yays.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Muslim Hearts and Minds Fall

In a stunning development, the Muslims today surrendered en masse in their civilization's longstanding violent clash with America. Reports are coming in from every corner of the globe that the Muslim world is admitting to a man and now also to a woman that their hearts and minds have been won.

According to experts, the recent deadly wave of Muslim uprisings against America is proving to have been only the last passionate spasms of the hard-to-get that Muslims have been playing for years relative to unrelenting American overtures.

As Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer eloquently put it, "Like so many towels thrown into the ring, the Muslims are laying down their turbans and hajibs by the hamper-load."

Added Mr. Krauthammer, "It's a great day to be a neoconservative chickenhawk. I guess 'No' doesn't necessarily mean 'No' afterall when you're pitching some good old American-style woo at another would-be conquest."

Said one dancing woman on the streets of Kandahar, "As far as my heart goes, they had me at Shock and Awe, but it took my mind until today to wrap itself around the idea that killing and torturing us pretty much indiscriminantly meant they were nuts about us."

Added her male companion, "For me it was sort of the other way around. My mind kept telling me it made perfect sense that America was trying to sweep us off our feet by bombing us, as they said, back to the Stone Age. My heart, however, just wouldn't let me see America's throwing itself at us for what it was."

One elderly Yemeni gentleman told reporters, "For me it all came together when the Americans did me the favor of not bombing me as I gathered the collateral damage a Reaper drone strike made of my children and grandchildren. The icing on the cake, as they say in America, was the bomb that did not fall on us and ruin the funeral."

Explained Iranian couples therapist Dr. Massoud Kahanian, "I'm sure at some level we Muslims have simply come to understand that America is just an overgrown schoolboy with a big dumb crush on the Muslim girl in his class. We have come to see all the violent indignities heaped on us for so many decades as just so many of our pigtails dunked in an inkwell."

In a hastily arranged press conference, President Obama this morning told the world, "This obviously good news has caught us a little off guard. Unfortunately we're still under legal contract for several dozen more Reaper drone strikes.

"So we need Muslims to hold that thought regarding the white flag they're so joyously waving today. Please just everybody sit tight and be patient while America does what it does--honor its commitments."

For its part, the Romney campaign, reluctant in the homestretch of this election season to allow President Obama to be seen as the man who won over the Muslims, has issued a statement warning Americans not to fall for this sudden conversion.

"At the very most what we're looking at," says the statement, "is a widespread outbreak of Stockholm Syndrome."

Friday, September 14, 2012

Taxpayer Relief Coming: Part Two


In an exclusive interview, the Surveillance State division’s Director of Research and Development Dr. Anthony Parks recently shared with Shining City Gazette some of the exciting new fronts in its all-out push to get SS off the taxpayer dime.

As one example, in an effort made possible by a sizable grant from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Association, the agency is looking into ways to capitalize on the creepy unremitting SS-generated feeling among Americans that they are being watched.

According to Dr. Parks, this chronic, around-the-clock sensation has dangerously over-agitated the fear centers of the phobia-prone conservative mind. To a degree that is threatening to shred the American social fabric, conservatives have grown irrationally afraid of women and their bodies, Muslims, gays, socialists, truth, science, black people, brown people, their shadows, even fear itself.

Said Dr. Parks, “I wish I could share with you some of the crazy paranoiac right-wing activities we’ve stumbled onto as we’ve turned over every stone in America in our search for Islamic terrorists.

“We are obviously not going to let the terrorists win by letting the surveillance state they made necessary tear America apart. So we’re working closely with PhRMA to develop a drug, perhaps one in the SSRI family, that will chill conservative Americans out enough to avert a meltdown, but not so much that they can’t continue to see the dire need for a surveillance state.

“If all goes well, by this time next month the SS division will be collecting its 20% of the revenues on these new bullets if you will in the War on Terror.”

On another front, the SS division is exploring ways to exploit the electoral element of the American democratic system.

Explained Dr. Parks, “We’ve got way more than enough information on every American citizen of voting age to predict how they will vote in any given race and on any given issue with a tiny margin of error that actual voting can’t come close anymore to competing with.

“Oh my god, I wish I could share with Shining City Gazette some of the unbelievable electronic voting fraud activities we’ve picked up in our hunt for terrorists. If the American public knew what I know, they wouldn’t bother going to the polls anyway.”

According to Dr. Parks, the good news for the agency on the voting front is that there are so many Americans facing the array of obstacles that Republicans have been placing between them and the voting booth. The bad news is that these Americans are all mostly too poor to afford what SS would have to charge to determine and register their voting wishes for them.

Added Dr. Parks, “Of course in this increasingly election-based economy, the good idea to move to a best-estimation-based voting system is meeting with stiff resistance from any number of public and private parties.”

Perhaps the plan with the greatest potential for generating funds, according to Dr. Parks, involves the so-called gold mine of incriminating information on which the SS division is sitting.

Advisors at the Department of Justice are even now working on the last draft of a memo laying out the legal justification for subjecting Americans to blackmail and other forms of extortion.

“According to my sources,” said Dr. Parks, “which by the way are let’s just say pretty good, the lawyers over at the DOJ are having a little trouble finding the right weasel words for the behaviors in question. Apparently ‘Enhanced Changing of Hands’ isn’t striking quite the right note to some ears.”

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Taxpayer Relief Coming Says Homeland Security


[Note: This is Part One in a two-part series]

The Surveillance State division of the Department of Homeland Security announced today that the blueprint of their plan for letting taxpayers entirely off the hook for the agency’s services by close of fiscal year 2014 is just about finished.

Explained SS director Jay Davis, “With our countless taxpayer-funded fingers on untold pulses we’ve literally been picking up loudly and clearly the terror over the growing national debt that conservative politicians and economists and pundits of all stripes have instilled in the hearts of their fellow Americans.

“So in a massive undertaking we’re calling Operation Car Wash, the SS division will be taking the lead in the government’s temporarily taxpayer-funded efforts to make its agencies, both those we acknowledge the existence of and those we don’t, self-sustaining in two years’ time.”

Explained the SS division’s fundraising Chair Wendy Galagher, “Think of it as the mother of all bake sales, only we’re not selling red velvet cupcakes for a quarter. At ten dollars a pop, we’re going to sell intelligence directing literally millions of Americans to the exact whereabouts of their lost keys as an example, or to the roadside location of their kid’s dead pet cat or the kid’s dementia-addled grandma or grandpa.

“Let me put it this way. What would you pay for a government service that any time of the day or night could immediately refresh your memory regarding any and all passwords you may have forgotten--a service, by the way, that could render the infamous goose chase after the remote control or even ticks on the family dog a thing of the past?”

According to SS marketing director Terry Michels, in a promotional campaign with the slogan “We’ve Literally Got Your Back,” the agency will be making a one-time free of charge offer to provide all Americans unsolicited information regarding up to two iffy-looking moles on parts of the body not easily self-inspected.

Said Ms. Michels, “We’re particularly excited about the Mother’s Little Birdy Special we’ve got in the works. For a reasonable fee, SS can at long last make American mothers’ maternal omniscience the real deal. No more relying on educated guessing and a woman’s intuition to convince American children there’s no place they can hide their activities.”

Added SS director Davis, “Wendy’s also put together some very attractive package deals that will allow Americans to be automatically apprised of everything from whether something is stuck between their teeth or whether their breath smells to whether a dress makes them look fat. She’s also working with the folks over in Government-Government Relations to perhaps arrange tax credits for purchases of some kinds of our services.”

Not everyone, however, is seeing this development as an unqualified plus. Consumer rights groups, for instance, are expressing concern about the potential for abuse in this new program.

As Tim Dugan from the Center for Science in the Public Interest put it, “What’s to keep SS from jacking up the price on all the information it’s gathering on us? I mean, where’s the free-market competition? It all just seems a little anti-American to me.”

In related news, the US Department of Education today announced that its plan for becoming self-supporting involves auctioning school systems across the country off to the highest private bidders.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Change Detected in Conservative Brain


Researchers at the Center for Neuro-Acoustical Science in Scarsdale, New York announced today that they have detected a dramatic shift in the conservative mind.

Explained the Center’s Director Dr. William Raybould, “In years past when we have exposed subjects with a conservative frame of mind to a battery of inconvenient truths, our highly sensitive sound equipment has consistently picked up from areas of the brain associated with the subconscious a repeated intonation at a frequency consistent with if not identical to that of the la la la la la uttered to protect oneself from information running counter to one’s world view.

“Whether the truths in question have come from the realms of science, politics, economics, or even athletic performance or geography, the conservative responses have not varied by more than a hertz or two in either direction.”

Added lead researcher Dr. Hilary Reid, “Certainly the la la la’s have gotten louder over the years as our long-term participants have been repeatedly subjected to such bits of information as the truths that money sent upward to rich people does not trickle down or that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 or that the world is more than 6,000 years old. The la la la’s can get very loud in response to the truth that blatant and widespread electronic voting fraud gave Ohio to Republicans in 2004 and that Condoleezza Rice is a war criminal.

“But up until recently these la la la’s, however loud, have remained exclusively in the domain of the subconscious.  Suddenly, however, not only are the sounds we’re picking up not the la la la’s of yesteryear, but they’re also clearly emanating from a space in the conservative brain known to be associated with conscious thought.”

“Subject after subject,” explained Dr. Raybould, “when exposed to the truth, for instance, that Barack Obama is not a Muslim or that there is no good explanation for why Karl Rove is not behind bars or that Paul Ryan is a pathological liar, is now emitting a very conscious sound completely indistinguishable from a so-called raspberry, or a Bronx cheer if you prefer. And increasingly, this sound is being followed by one with the unmistakable sonic signature of a derisive horselaugh.”

Said Dr. Reid, “At this rate, our conservative subjects will be unabashedly vocalizing their deep disdain for inconvenient truth out loud well before this election cycle is over.

“Interestingly,” she added, “we seem to have found where the subconscious la la la’s have all gone. They’ve taken up residence in the liberal mind.”

Explained Dr. Raybould, “When subjected to the inconvenient truth that Barack Obama is himself committing a crime when he lets war criminals off scot free or that Predator drones are killing innocent people by the hundreds, study participants with a liberal frame of mind are beginning to sound exactly like their right-wing counterparts did a generation or so ago.”

In other science news, a team of University of Chicago researchers grown frustrated in their fruitless search for dark matter recently turned their machines and expertise to the task of detecting the storied magic hand of the unfettered free market.

“We have not yet found a magic hand matching the description provided by our colleagues over in Economics,” said Dr. Trina Hamilton at the Enrico Fermi Institute. “The data from our thoroughly decontaminated, regulation-scrubbed free market lab, however, clearly indicates the presence of what would perfectly fit the description of a fist if the third finger of the hand were not locked in an upright position.”

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

America No Longer a Democracy Say Scientists


A team of political scientists at Stanford University announced today that according to their calculations the long hypothesized shift in America toward a new form of government is not only very real but is also now complete.

“Say goodbye to Democracy,” said lead investigator Dr. Henry Bates. “We’re now officially living in a Dimocracy.”

According to Professor Bates, a Dimocracy is formed when the electorate in a Democracy becomes too dumb to engage in the free and equal practice of political self-determination.

“I suppose you could think of it as a Dumbocracy,” said Dr. Bates, “though it’s very difficult for most Americans to pick up the difference between ‘Democracy’ and ‘Dumbocracy’, auditorily speaking. The same goes for ‘Duhmocracy’”.

“In the vernacular of the times,” explained Dr. Peter Cummings from a rival research team in the Harvard University Department of Government, “you can think of the system we now find ourselves in as a D’ohmocracy, as in ‘D’oh, I just voted against my own self-interest again’”.

“And speaking of ‘d’oh’,” added Dr. Cummings’ colleague at Harvard Dr. Timothy Adams, “we really have to tip our hats to the Stanford team for avoiding our blunder of assuming too singlemindedly that the emergent form of government we were looking at was a Doughmocracy if you will.”

“In our defense,” said Dr. Cummings, “all the data was pointing to an entity that was quacking and walking and smelling exactly like the duck of Plutocracy. But as the Stanford team so elegantly point out, a Plutocracy isn’t even possible if a populace is not so dim it can’t figure out that floods of money tend to wash the popular sovereignty right out of a democratic system.”

Said Dr. Bates from the Stanford team, “The breakthrough for us came when we plugged Mr. Romney’s polling numbers and all his earnings from Bain Capital into our equations. It became quite clear that something under the surface was driving the Plutocratic duck we all thought we were looking at.”

Explained Dr. Elizabeth May from Stanford, “When an electorate mired in a long heart-breaking recession caused by a band of sociopathically self-interested moneybags can’t see unanimously that a filthy rich vulture capitalist and a lying Ayn Rand acolyte might not have everybody’s best interest in mind, you know you’ve got more than a garden variety Plutocracy on your hands.”

Added Dr. Bates, “Our findings only became more robust when we plugged in President Obama’s polling numbers and the number of neoliberals in his circle of economic advisors plus the zero representing the number of Wall Street and other high rollers who have been indicted for their crimes.”

When asked about the common perception in many quarters that America’s shifting governmental landscape has been toward a Theocracy, Dr. Bates, speaking for both research teams, said, “A Deomacracy, so to speak, was ruled out very early on.

“There is not one single shred of real evidence that God is anywhere to be found in our current form of government.”