Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Corporate Persons Feeling Burned


The Wall Street Journal is reporting a growing rift between the Confraternity of Corporate Persons and the Confederation of Staunch Republican E-Voting Moguls.

At issue is the CCP’s plan to save as much as a billion dollars in the next election cycle by simply not bothering at all with manipulating the general election.

Said CCP president General Electric, “We feel it’s completely unfair that we’re almost singlehandedly having to foot the bill for maintaining the pretense that it matters at all whether Republicans or Democrats win in these elections.

“I’m sorry, but it’s not our job to keep pouring hundreds of millions of campaign donation dollars worth of essentially intra-corporation welfare into the right-wing e-voting industry’s efforts to keep suckering the conservative powers that be into believing they need truckloads of easily rigged e-voting products in every precinct across the land to achieve their unpopular economic ends.

“I mean, we corporate persons are still a little young, but it wasn’t a turnip truck we fell off of when we landed in the lap of America. Why should we have to bankroll the nonsense that neoliberalism loses when Democrats win?”

Responded Republican e-voting mogul Trent Stockton, “It’s not just us the CCP royally screws if it stops playing ball. And it’s not just the rest of the multi-billion-dollar year-round perennial campaign economy either.

“You can’t find a corporate grown-up in the room who’s seeing how anybody makes any money in the chaos of these corporate snotnoses blowing up the illusion of a democratic, two-party system by not picking one side over the other. What the hell do they think they were born for?”

“For one thing,” said Mr. Electric of the CCP, “Trent is wildly overestimating how much the American voting public doesn’t know about how ridiculously miniscule the difference is between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to economic matters.

“Nobody’s truly fooling anybody. Come on. You think people can’t see what corporate profits have done in the middle of this great recession with a Democrat in the White House? What has the One Percent gobbled up, something like 93% of the recovery?

“And for another thing, to preserve the flimsy illusion that Republicans and Democrats want different things while also preserving policies that continue the upward flood of money, all you’d have to do is have the House and the Senate and maybe the blue and purple statehouses use e-voting in the process of deciding important legislation battles.

“The Democrats we’ve spoken to would kill for the cover the blatant specter of electronic legislative voting fraud would give them, particularly in light of the American left’s seemingly impervious will to believe the system’s just dandy except for a few little technical glitches.

“Listen,” added Mr. Electric, “the bottom line is that all the Confederation of Staunch Republican E-Voting Moguls is worried about is their own bottom line. “

In other business news, a rift is reportedly widening between the For-Profit Detention Industry and the US government over the policy of granting blanket criminal immunity to Wall Street and Pentagon and government elites.

Said Big House, Inc. CEO Tony Walton, “First it was Bush, now it’s Obama. Thousands upon thousands if not millions of years worth of high-end incarceration right down the drain. It’s so typical. Thanks to government policy we’re going to need a government subsidy to make our industry profitable enough to keep attracting top talent like myself.”

Friday, October 26, 2012

White House Not To Be Leveled


The Romney campaign today is responding to rumors that the Republican candidate’s plan for the first one-hundred days of a Romney presidency includes leveling the current White House and building a new, much larger structure in its place.

“That’s nonsense,” said senior Romney campaign adviser Barbara Comstock. “We’re perfectly aware of the existing structure’s value as a site of historical significance. It’s not going anywhere.

“The plan simply is to take twelve acres or so of the South Lawn and build a national-scale dwelling place that better reflects America’s commitment to all its peoples, not just some of them.”

Explained Romney press secretary Andrea Saul, “America’s symbolic monuments are absolutely vital to keeping her grandeur always in the hearts and minds of her peoples. Every time an average American looks at the White House, with its six floors and its 55,000 square feet and 132 rooms and all those pillars and all that marble and bluestone gneiss, he gets a new infusion of that heady sense of America’s greatness.

“And that’s great for him, great for the country. But what about the above-average American—the one creating the jobs that allow all the average Americans to achieve their averageness? They’ve got second vacation houses that make the White House look like their third vacation house’s boat house.

“Is it fair that they don’t get to experience all the majesty of America as captured in her national monuments?”

Added Ms. Comstock, “Isn’t it ironic, and in many ways tragic, that the very people most responsible for America’s greatness don’t get to have that greatness reflected back at them in the nation’s symbols?”

Said Ms. Saul, “Above-average Americans are not asking for the moon here. I think they’d make do with perhaps a chateau-style palace on the order of something like 200,000 square feet. Of course all the marble and woods and fixtures would have to be dramatically upgraded, but all we’re talking about is roughly multiplying the wow factor of the current White House by four.

“Average Americans need to look at this if they can from the above-average perspective. Let’s just very conservatively say that the most successful among us make 300 times more than the average American does. And let’s round off the Washington Monument’s height to 550 feet.

“For our national obelisk to serve the job creators to the same degree it serves the job takers, it would need to rise over 33 miles into the sky.

“Put another way, it would take looking at 1,200 giant faces carved into an entire mountain range for the nation’s best competitors to feel the same sense of America’s greatness that Mount Rushmore gives the nation’s also-rans.

“In what vision of America is that fair?”

In related news, Shining City Gazette has uncovered a copy of a lengthy paragraph that was edited from the letter 80 American CEOs recently published in the WSJ in their ongoing efforts to look out after the financial well-being of society by having their own taxes lowered and removing costly strands in the social safety net.

Penned reportedly by Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, the paragraph draws heavily on neoliberal principles in arguing that the bald eagle should have to compete with the golden eagle for the title of the national symbol of the United States.

With regards to the Great Seal of the United States of America, Mr. Moynihan also makes the case that in the unlikely event of the bald eagle beating out the much fitter golden eagle, the leafy olive branch in the right talon should still be replaced with a gold brick.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Ohio Republicans Face Exit Poll Dilemma


According to sources inside Romney campaign headquarters in Ohio, Republican Secretary of State John Husted is still undecided about which official explanation he will use to defuse Democrats’ and the media’s unease when exit polls in the upcoming election unequivocally indicate massive electronic voting fraud again across the state.

Explained Bernadette Harris, Cuyahoga County elections board chair and co-chair of the Romney for President campaign in Ohio, “Internal analysis shows that just too many black voters are going to wind up making it to the polls after all for Mr. Husted to deliver the state to Romney without borrowing Karl Rove and former Secretary of State Blackwell’s Plan B from 2004.

“Certainly we’re going to keep up the caging. We’re going to keep illegally purging blacks and other minorities and young people from the voter rolls. We’re going to slash the number of voting machines in heavily Democratic precincts and then keep withholding provisional ballots as Democrats wait in lines for ten and twelve hours and more, hopefully in the rain.

“And like in 2004, the RNC is going to send us a Strike Force of operatives to challenge and generally intimidate all the hopefully rain-soaked, demoralized and systematically misinformed Democrats waiting in all the long lines.

“But according to our numbers, voter suppression alone is not going to get the job done.”

“And what that means,” said Ms. Harris’ co-chair Pat Kaplan, “is widespread electronic voting fraud, and what that means once again folks is that exit polls are simply not going to remotely square with election results.

“Voters across the country are going to wake up again the next day to the impossible news that an insurmountable Democratic lead at bedtime was somehow surmounted while everyone was sleeping.

“And these people and the media are going to need an explanatory bone thrown to them.”

Based on interviews with Ohio election officials and/or high-level Republican operatives, the conventional Republican wisdom seems to be that it would be needlessly risking the chance, however remote, of waking the sleeping giant of disenfranchised voter outrage by going again with the Reluctant Responder hypothesis to explain away the three to six points worth of fraud that exit polling has uncovered.

Secretary of State Husted is reported to have narrowed his list of potential new explanations down to two: the Contrary Responder hypothesis, according to which Republican voters in large numbers would be said to have claimed they voted for Obama; and the Repeat Responder hypothesis—the notion that Democratic voters changed shirts with each other or deployed other measures to respond more than once to exit pollsters.

Said Mr. Husted’s press secretary Katherine Thomas, “Obviously the explanation doesn’t need to be much. I mean, look how easily everybody swallowed the unbelievable, thoroughly debunked idea that for the first time in recorded history all us Republicans got shy about sharing our political views.”

Ms. Thomas also dispelled the rumor that Mr. Husted may simply outlaw exit polling in the state, or have RNC Strike Force operatives harass pollsters till they give up.

“Think about it for a minute,” explained Ms. Thomas, “without the pretty much fool proof numbers from exit polling, how’s our IT guy supposed to know how many votes to flip in the middle of the night?”

Added Ms. Thomas, “The whole thing’s pretty moot anyway. If the American public hasn’t found the courage by now to stop pretending they don’t know these elections are being electronically stolen, they’re never going to find it.” 

Friday, October 19, 2012

Team Finds Genesis of Catholic Homophobia


A pair of research scientists in the Religious Studies department at Lewis and Clark College have traced the anti-gay marriage element in the homophobic stance of the Catholic Church back primarily to the intense theophobia fomented in the pages of the Old Testament.

Explained Dr. Peter John from the Lewis and Clark team, “When a Catholic feels the deep-seated fear of two men in a state of holy union, he or she is really just experiencing a misdirected and slightly warped version of his or her perfectly natural fear of God.”

“You see,” further explained Dr. John’s long-time partner Dr. Frank Ryan, “Christians in general and Catholics in particular subconsciously associate the two-dads model with their conception of a still fear-inducing divine sort of nuclear triad made up of a father, another adult male figure known as the Holy Ghost, and a son otherwise known as Jesus.”

Added Dr. John, “The strain of seemingly irrational repugnance running through this fear of gay men has to do with the role that dirt played in the Father and the Holy Ghost’s giving birth to Adam.”

Added Dr. Ryan, “And the strain of loathing has to do with Catholics’ deep resentment over the so damaging Original Sin of humanity’s two dads—Adam and his clearly phallic rib.”

“And the fear of lesbian couples,” added Dr. John, “given women’s biblically-derived status as phallic symbols, comes of course from the deep Christian fear of the two-phallused God of the pre-Jesus Old Testament.”

“Interestingly,” added Dr. Ryan, “the Church’s homophobia has now outstripped its theophobia in terms of intensity.”

“Our guess,” added Dr. John, “is that the deep-seated love of God that goes with all the longstanding fear of Him/Them in some way explains Catholics’ so intense fear of homosexuals.”

Added Dr. Ryan, “Given the subconscious equating of the so feared homosexual couple with the so feared God they also love so much, Catholics are likely experiencing a fear of the love they subconsciously feel for the homosexual couple thanks to their equating them, as mentioned, with the Father and the Holy Ghost.”

Added Dr. John, “Frank and I believe Catholics are now totally overcompensating for this love of homosexuals by over-focusing on all their fear and loathing and repugnance with regard to them.”

“With all due respect to our brothers at Lewis and Clark and these new brainchildren of theirs,” said Father Vincent at the Catholic Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, “this so-called fear of gay marriage is really just a devout Christian adherence to the principle that marriage—that holy union in the four loving arms of which all God’s children are meant to be raised—can only be between a man and a woman.”

Added Father Timothy, Father Vincent’s long-time partner at Saints Peter and Paul, “The Church and all its children are simply following the natural and divine law that our Holy Father and all the prophets and Jesus and His Disciples and all the popes and cardinals and bishops and padres thereafter have laid down since time immemorial—that all families are best headed by a man with a woman by his side.”

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Romney Close to Landing Key Endorsement


At their semi-biennial gathering in Kansas City, Missouri, the League of Low-to-No-Information Voters announced today that they were leaning “pretty heavily” toward endorsing Mitch (sic) Romney in the upcoming presidential election.

Said League president Todd Powell in his opening address, “It’s still possible in the few months it has left for the Obama campaign to win our backing, particularly since it’s taking longer than expected for our Democratic Principles Committee to find a system for giving all League members a fair say in this important endorsement decision.

“But in light of what we’ve heard about what’s been taking place in the debates, if the election were held today—which, just to be clear, it’s not—we’d most likely have to go with Romney.”

The buzz stirred up in the room by these apparently unexpected remarks made it very difficult to hear what Mr. Powell was saying about which tables would be invited up to the buffet first.

On the other hand, Decorating Committee Chair Sara Hunter, sitting at Table One, could clearly be heard saying, “I just wish somebody had told me this endorsement was coming. I could have gone exclusively with blue bunting. The red bunting makes no sense now.”

“Don’t you mean the blue bunting makes no sense now?” asked a lady from Table Three. “I’m pretty sure red is for Republican.”

Said Ms. Hunter, “And I’m pretty sure red is also for Communist, which in case you haven’t heard, Obama is one.”

“Wait a minute. Obama’s the Republican?” asked a man at Table Seven, setting off a spirited debate in the room that Mr. Powell had to quell with his gavel.

In the ensuing quiet, a man at Table Four asked the League President, “Are you sure the election’s not being held today?”

In the pause that followed, as Mr. Powell consulted his notes, a woman at Table Eight said, “I’m pretty sure elections are held in November, in which case we’ve got considerably less than a few months to find a way to find out how to determine who a majority of us want to endorse.”

“Aren’t we in August?” asked Mr. Powell, setting off a spirited debate that lasted through lunch.

During the dessert course, one middle-aged man from Indiana sitting at the same table as this Shining City Gazette reporter captured the political mood in the room when he said, “I just get the feeling the Obama people can’t relate to the common man. I heard that at the debates and on the campaign trail they have kept demanding that Mr. Romney and that egghead with the big ears explain all the math behind their plan to cut all taxes and erase our deficit and preserve our entitlements and strengthen our military forces.

“Seriously? Are you kidding me? I mean here I am, getting myself trained in burger flipping after a long hard day of training a couple of Chinese guys to do the job I’m losing because another greedy corporate bastard wasn’t getting filthy rich enough by exploiting American workers, and now I’m supposed to retrain myself in arithmetic so I can double-check all the numbers the Obama people want Romney to dump on us.

“The Romney people, they understand that we’ve maybe got more to worry about than correcting their math for them.”

Said one man who joined the table late because he thought the meeting was in Kansas City, Kansas, “I’m leaning toward Mitch (sic) Romney for president and Joe Biden for vice president. That weaselly, bug-eyed goober Joe debated just annoys the hell out of me.

“I think my wife’s going to cancel me out by voting the other way around, though, so I may end up just not voting at all.”

Added an elderly woman who actually watched the first presidential debate, “I’m probably going to vote for that distinguished older gentleman from the Moderator Party I believe it was called.

“He didn’t say much in the debate, but he had the kind of take-charge attitude I like in my presidents. Tim I believe his name was. Or maybe Larry.”  

Friday, October 12, 2012

World Watches Condolleezza Rice Lose It


In an irony some are calling the height of poetic justice, the Surveillance State that former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Dr. Condolleezza Rice was so instrumental in creating and rationalizing has accidentally leaked all over the Internet all the details it has dug up on her private struggles to come to terms with all the bloodspots on her hands.

In one high definition surveillance tape that is extremely hard to watch, a nightgowned Dr. Rice is seen in a sleepwalking state bitterly complaining, according to a team of NSA lip-readers, that “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the little hand” apparently reeking of all the blood she has been trying unsuccessfully for years now to wash off.

At one point in the tape, Dr. Rice unlocks her closet, takes out paper, folds it, writes on it, reads it, seals it, and goes back to bed.

With assistance from a team of NSA pen-readers working in tandem with a team of NSA mind-readers, Surveillance State officials were able to glean Dr. Rice’s secret missive in its entirety: “Somebody please help me. I’m being indefinitely detained without charges or trial in a cage of guilt.”

After watching footage of the Stanford professor’s nightmare playing out on Youtube and Facebook and elsewhere, retired SERE trainer Sergeant Roy Stallings told this Shining City Gazette Reporter, “This was all so predictable. I told the brass on day one that all these chickenhawks better get some training in survival, evasion, resistance, and escape before all the torture and death they unleashed came back like a rabid Abu Ghraib attack dog to bite them in the ass.

“Now look at what you’ve got--Little Miss Concert Piano Player singing her guts out all over cyberspace. All those years an army of good people on both sides of the aisle spent working around the clock to maintain plausible deniability with regard to our worst war crimes and now we’re all glued to a documentary starring one of the major players in this horror show in her greatest role as the nut who cracked on the first twinge of psychological torture over all the mortal torture she orchestrated.

“Not so much as even a half-hearted coughing up of only her name, rank and serial number. Just an automatic rolling on herself and all her partners in war crime while the Surveillance State cameras she signed off on are rolling away.”

According to the psychiatrist’s notes that Surveillance State agents inadvertently misfiled in the Obama administration’s cabinet for flattering national security leaks, the RNC spokeswoman and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute is holding on thanks only to all the practice she got feigning righteous indignation in the face of public outcries over her criminal behavior.

“At some level,” says one note, “the patient may actually have convinced herself that baldly and repeatedly lying America into brutally killing hundreds of thousands of people was perfectly OK in a post 9/11 world.”

The notes also indicate that the 30 Rock guest star is having a hard time coping with the unsynchronized beats of the thousands upon thousands of tell-tale hearts pounding in her ears and making it very difficult to keep the rhythm in her beloved piano playing.

Said Code Pink spokeswoman Frances Taylor, “Finally news of a little justice. Some Poe-etic justice at that. I just hope the pounding hearts of all those murdered people aren’t drowning out the bell tolling and the diabolical snickering of that guy Dr. Condolleezza Rice sold her soul to.”

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

End to He Said/She Said in Sight


The mainstream media is actually reporting today that it may be forced to abandon the balanced He Said/She Said style of journalism that has characterized its coverage of the country’s most pressing debates over the last several decades.

Explained the National Press Club’s Teri Richards, “It’s just not fair any longer to ask reporters to keep using the He Said/She Said method of maintaining the pretense that the right’s positions on the issues have anywhere near the same merit as the left’s.

“I mean maybe a generation ago that approach was viable. But good lord, after 30-plus years of nonstop neoliberal and neoconservative nonsense the right’s now so demonstrably wrong on so many issues that who could blame the Mainstream Media Reporter’s Guild for launching a Labor Relations Board complaint, if not a class action suit, against the corporate media’s play-callers for making everybody feel like a VW bug full of clowns?”

Added Wayne Mitchell from the American Society of News Editors, “It’s a big joke. She says waterboarding is and always has been torture and He says John Yoo and Jay Bybee. She says Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and He says 9/11. She says our long, well-documented history of heaping indignities and hypocrisy and death upon the Muslim world may have something to do with their attitude toward us and He won’t stop saying they hate us for our freedoms.

“The right’s just not giving us anything to work with anymore. Seriously. She says when we haven’t regulated the fat cats they have screwed us blue every single time since time immemorial and He says just leave everything to the magic hand of the unfettered free market. She says rich people never ever willingly let money trickle down and He screams socialism. She says corporations are not people and He says Antonin Scalia for god sake. She says it’s not democratic or even American to suppress the votes of poor people and minorities and He says Mickey Mouse once voted in an election in Florida.”

“I mean, please. Come on. She says over 40,000 people per year were dying only because they couldn’t afford or even acquire health insurance, and this is to say nothing of all the people going bankrupt for the same reasons, and He’s still saying Barack Hussein Obama wants to kill your grandma.”

Added Ms. Richards from the National Press Club, “Certainly there are large swaths of the American Mainstream Media’s audience who are still perfectly mollified by this old approach to perpetuating the myth that there are two equal sides in the nation’s debates. But the reporters asked to implement this outdated approach have simply reached their limit.”

By way of illustrating this pretty pass the world of American journalism has come to, one mainstream media reporter asked this Shining City Gazette reporter, “How would you like the double whammy of finding yourself reporting on the record-breaking low self-esteem you and all your college-educated fellow reporters are feeling for half siding all the time with the unbelievable dumbshit He in the He Said/She Said scenario?”

“There’s hope, though,” says the American Press Institute’s Rachel May. “Don’t believe reflexive mainstream media reports that say He said the He Said/She Said style of American journalism is here to stay after She said its days are numbered.

“The truth is that we’re moving even as we speak to what’s called the Yes, But…style of journalism. To maintain the illusion that what She says is counterpoised by an equally believable body of positions, we’re going to start ignoring the right’s preposterous side altogether.

“When She says something like ‘Bush and company lied and cheated us into a mind-bogglingly stupid and inhuman war in Iraq,’ we’re no longer going to say ‘He says She hates her country.’ We’re going to say, ‘Yes, but there’s more than one side to the story’ and leave it at that.

“Certainly it’s not a perfect fix, but it’s that I’m afraid or stop reporting altogether on every single one of the major issues of the day.”

Friday, October 5, 2012

Fourth Member of Conservative Psyche Found


A team of Exploratory Depth Psychologists in the Mt. Sinai Medical Center’s Department of Mental Health Research is announcing the discovery of a highly conniving and destructive fourth component of the right-wing psyche.

Said team leader Dr. Margaret Thomas, “Something was quite clearly amiss in the minds of our conservative subjects. We just could no longer explain the antisocial behaviors of our study’s partisan Republicans using the standard id/superego/ego model.

“In trial after trial we kept finding the superego’s stamp of moral approval all over even the most brutish, selfish, sociopathic, bloodthirsty impulses of the id. At the same time, the superego seemed to have virtuously turned its bent for censure on its own championing of the virtues of compassion and honesty and humility.

“It was like the conservative ego had lost all control of the situation.”

Explained Dr. Nolan Roberts from the Thomas team, “Our first working hypothesis was that in these anti-Enlightenment times in the conservative world the primitive id had gained sufficient ascendancy to shift the balance of power—to drag the superego as if by the hair into a pre-civilized state.

“The problem, of course, was that if anything, relative to the id the superego was more robust than ever, plenty powerful enough even to lend the cover of civilized rightness to the id’s dragging of her into a place where lying and cheating and stealing and killing and maiming are the order of the day.

“So we began looking into the possibility that the ego was the source of all the distortions, reasoning that perhaps in its frustration with the direction in which the right-wing psyche was heading it had called it quits and some other less adept entity had taken its place in arbitrating between the id and the superego.

“We were even ready to begin referring to this disorder as Replacement Ref Syndrome when in our experiments we started picking up a shadow, a relentlessly skulking something that was tirelessly playing all ends of the traditional psychic triangle against the middle.”

Said Dr. Thomas, “We knew pretty much immediately what we’d discovered—a pot-stirring, water-muddying new player in the psychic mix. What we didn’t at first know is where it came from.

“Given its seeming mission to warp the survival instinct into an implacable will to win at all costs at everything at all times, the team assumed this new factor in the age-old Freudian equation was perhaps a broken off fragment of the death wish.

“What we have learned, however, is that it’s most closely related to the human instinct to feel victimized. More specifically, it is associated with what appears to be the long hypothesized fourth “F” in the well known human instinct that includes the fight, flight, and freeze responses to feelings of persecution.

“This fourth response, foment, thought to have been spawned in a fever swamp of hard feelings stirred up in the place in the brain where revenge fantasies over slights sustained in junior high or high school are stored, seems to be the perpetually overzealous animating force behind the sneaky new mental entity we’ve caught throwing monkey wrenches right and left into the works of the conservative moral compass.

“As for the name of this deeply wounded new component of the right-wing psyche,” said Dr. Thomas, “we’re calling it turd blossom for reasons that ought to be obvious.”

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Corporate Persons Flocking to Catholicism


The US Conference of Catholic Bishops announced today that with open arms it will be receiving corporate persons as full-fledged members of the Catholic flock.

Citing an Academy of Neoconservative Scientists study showing that corporate persons have been aging at approximately the same rate as dogs since their inception in 2010, USCCB president Cardinal Timothy Dolan is encouraging parishes across the country to rush their already now post adolescent corporate initiates through the holy sacraments of Baptism, Communion, Reconciliation, and Confirmation.

Said RNC spokesperson Timothy Osleger, filling in for Cardinal Dolan’s spokesperson Joseph Zwilling, “The Archbishop is especially concerned with expediting the Baptism process. The Church certainly doesn’t want all the corporate persons who die in this dog-eat-dog business environment to meet their maker in a state of Original Sin.”

Added Mr. Osleger, “Regarding the question of whether to extend the sacrament of Marriage to its new corporate members, the Church will be issuing an answer upon the completion of an Academy of Neoconservative Scientists effort to detect the presence of sex differentiation among corporate persons.”

“Speaking of marriage,” said Catherine Fischer from Americans United for Separation of Church and State,” these Catholic Bishops, in their hard shift toward enforcing conservative theology, seem paradoxically to be endorsing same-sex polygamy as they hop into bed with these almost exclusively male corporate teenagers who are already in bed with Uncle Sam.”

Added Chuck Phillips of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, “As we speak, Bill Donohue from the Catholic League is partnering with Karl Rove’s American Crossroads in a campaign to make registering as a Republican the eighth holy Catholic sacrament.

“And they are already well on their way to moving greed from the Deadly Sin to the Virtue column.”

Multiple sources from the Center for Media and Democracy have also informed Shining City Gazette that the American Legislative Exchange Council has already drawn up one model holy writ making it only a venal sin to murder electronic voting machine hackers and another that reworks the eighth commandment to allow for the stealing of elections.

According to these sources, ALEC has also begun drafting an addendum to the second commandment that would secure a place for gold-plated, Wall Street-inspired graven images of a bull alongside other iconic Catholic statuary.

In addition, Shining City Gazette is receiving unconfirmed reports from various sources that former Department of Justice advisors John Yoo and Jay Bybee are currently working pro bono on a memo laying out the legal justification for enhanced brotherly love of altar boys.

Citing Church security concerns, the USCCB’s Joseph Zwilling, filling in for the RNC’s Timothy Osleger, would neither confirm nor deny these reports.

In a related story, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, citing the Academy of Neoconservative Scientists study showing that corporate persons are aging at the rate of seven years for every one traditionally human year, today pointed out that all the corporate persons born on January 21, 2010, the day the Citizens United case was decided, turned 18 on August 22 of this year.

Said Mr. Priebus, “I hope to God the Democrats aren’t planning to continue their assault on religious freedom by suppressing the vote of all our corporate Catholic brothers and perhaps sisters.”