Source: Brown Not the New White

The US Department of American Exceptionalism assured the world today that it is doing everything in this country’s unparalleled power to padlock the gate against Latin American attempts to move into the exclusive neighborhood upon a hill where America resides by herself under her assumed name of the Shining City.

Said DOAE public communications director Tiffany Witherspoon, “I just have to laugh, and maybe cringe a little, at the thought of these two-bit beacon wannabes risking life and limb to flip on the faultily wired switch on the dangling 20-watt bulb posing as the light of social justice guiding the world.

“You just want to grab them by the lapels of their sarape and say very loudly so they can understand you, ‘Wake up, amigo. Look around. While you were taking that siesta America was leading the rest of the world in this little thing called the March of Human Progress. You might have heard of it back when we were using you banana republics as stepping stones up this hill your best coyote on his best day couldn’t get you muchachos past the foot of.’

“Somebody needs to translate a certain memo into Spanish so all these Hugos and Evos and Rafaels and Cristinas and Dilmas can understand it: ‘Heyo Latinos—social justeeceeo is oldo newsio.’”

Said Lisa Whithaus from the DOAE, “All these socialistas are doing with the measly handful of lumens they’re shining on their social do-gooding is enlightening everybody about the embarrassing fact that they’ve been left in the dust again by the First World, which some time ago moved on to fighting poverty with poverty, ignorance with anti-intellectualism and truth flaunting, inequality with more inequality.

“Check that. That’s not all they’re doing. These dim bulbs have also been shining a light on all their despotically not lifting a finger to help their own people deal with the pain of unemployment and personal debt and lowering wages and fraying social safety nets and environmental degradation and massively expanding wealth inequality by offering them the comfort of the cold, hard austerity it takes to achieve the comfort of a reduced national debt.

“And don’t talk to me about the happy happy Zippity Doo Da that Gallup Incorporated claims Latin Americans are all whistling out their asses. Who cares if seven of the ten big winners in the worldwide national happiness sweepstakes are living it up in South and Central America?

“Who couldn’t make their people happy by giving them what they want? I mean, our people want a social safety net too. And a blind justice system. And fair wages, and equal education, and a little regulation and an independent media, and a government for and by the people and all the rest of it.

“But that’s not where the March of Human Progress has taken us, sports fans. At this juncture in human history it’s the bounden duty of the Makers to correct the expectations of the race’s Takers.

“And guess who’s leading the way? Here’s a little hint. It’s not Venezuela. Or Ecuador. Or Bolivia. Or Argentina.

“Here’s another hint. A certain country with the initials USA has one man, with the initials PP, who all by himself has spent half a billion dollars on a multi-gazillion-watt floodlight to stop the deer-like masses in the tracks of their marching in the wrong direction.”

Added Ms. Witherspoon, “And the flash from any Shining City worthy of the name needs as often as not to be the launching of another missile to convince folks to head in the direction our guiding lights are pointing them in.

“I think the only missiles to be found in Latin America are the missals found in the pews of a certain church devoted to peace on earth and good will toward man.

“So no. I don’t think the neighborhood up here on a hill will be going to hell anytime soon. The new white is not brown. It’s an even brighter white.”

Obama To Challenge Pope

Sources close to the Oval Office are telling Shining City Gazette that President Obama is “quite concerned” about the Pope’s having recently relinquished his infallibility at a time when he was still in possession of his papal infallibility.

As one advisor specializing in the consolidation of supreme executive authority said, “Basically what Pope Benedict XVI, or Joe I guess you’d call him now, just told the world is that it was an infallible decision for him to give up his infallibility.

“Needless to say, the president’s not crazy about the message this sends at a time when he’s achieved for himself a sovereignty roughly equal to the Pope’s supreme apostolic authority, especially with respect to his own drone killings and the granting of special dispensations to an array of mortal sinners and his tireless covering up of all the horrible crimes committed by these sinners.

“It would have been much more to our liking had the former Pope made the more infallible decision to give up his infallibility only after already having given up his infallibility so as to leave a little room for plausibly arguing that it’s a fallible decision to give up one’s infallibility even if you’re a pope.

“President Obama, and President Bush as well for that matter, could have referred him to any number of legal minds that could have made that work.

“At the very least we would like to have seen Joe stay on as Pope at whatever percentage of full-time allowed him to retain his infallibility. Back when he was still infallible, how hard would it have been to work with the Vatican’s HR department in crafting a holy writ that said working even one percent time as Pope conferred unquestionable authority on a person?

“And this is to say nothing of the simple standby of infallibly invoking state secrets to avoid confirming or denying that his infallibility had infallibly been relinquished.”

Said Obama senior legal advisor Harold Koh, “What our work on providing the president cover for his killing of children and other innocents has shown us is that the presumption of personal infallibility gives a world leader a lot to work with legally, and politically too I might add.

“But what the hell good is the presumption of infallibility if you’re going to give it up just because you’ve presumed to presume you’ve acted fallibly?

“What we’ll soon be arguing before the world court is that given the petrine supremacy the Pope came into upon ascending to the holy cathedra, he is not legally in a position to make the clearly fallible decision to give up his infallibility.

“Of course, this means we’ll probably need to convince the Court that the Pope was acting infallibly when he chose to cover for all the child molesting that went on during and before his holy watch.

“But we’re considering this good practice in case the world ever tries retroactively to challenge the infallibility of the president’s drone killing decisions.

“Obviously the Pope’s people only raped children and the president’s are killing them, but we’re confident that the principles on which we’re building our case for the infallible legality of enhanced brotherly love will have applications in any future case we build for the legality of the enhanced tough love that goes into all the president’s efforts to make the world safer for the children who survive his efforts to make the world safer for the children of the world.”

Think Tanks Being Rethought

The Wall Street Journal today is reporting on the developing story of the hard times the conservative think tank industry has apparently fallen on.

According to some estimates, the cost of keeping zombie right-wing ideas up and running has nearly tripled in just one election cycle.

Said Dr. Richard Armour from the American Foundation Enterprise Institute Research Center, a boutique think tank specializing in anti-science ideas, “As just one small example of the astronomical number of financial Catch 22s the conservative think tank industry’s numbers crunchers are dealing with these days, the more truckloads of money we spend convincing America that you have to pay your best people truckloads of money, the more truckloads of money our think tanks need to pay their best people or everybody’s going to stop buying the high-dollar zombie idea that you need to pay your best people truckloads of money.

“The cost of protecting our investment in skyrocketing CEO compensation is just skyrocketing. The American Foundation Enterprise Institute Research Center is paying me seven figures for god sake. We can’t afford that and expect to keep keeping alive all the ideas running counter to modern science—not with all the big government money all the Poindexters and propeller heads have at their disposal.”

Said Shane Baxter from the Liberty Freedom Eagle Patriot Group, “Even the name of our industry is just killing our bottom line.

“Think about it. Our think tanks only work if the people we’re working on don’t think. And these right-wingers, in case you hadn’t noticed, are a highly suggestible bunch.

“So when the word ‘think’ keeps coming up every time a conservative think tank gets mentioned in the liberal media, well guess what, these people just keep putting their thinking caps on and we keep pouring more and more millions into life support for all the ideas that thinking tends to kill.

“It literally strikes me dumb sometimes how dumb we’re being. We’ve spent how many billions of dollars spreading an anti-intellectual fervor across the land and we go with ‘think tank’ as the generic name for our various ideological enterprises?

“It literally boggles the mind. We all call ourselves think tanks and yet we can’t even think up the idea that it might be time we had our wonderboy Frankie Luntz dream up something to call us other than ‘think tank’.

“Something along the lines of truth tank maybe. Or common sense tank. Or even belief or faith tank. Anger tank wouldn’t be too bad.

“Sometimes I wonder if maybe we all haven’t been pushing these zombie ideas a little too long. I think it might be having a bad effect on our ability to formulate ideas that actually make some damn sense.”

Said Heritage Foundation president and former Republican Senator Jim DeMint, “In our shop for the first time ever we’ve had to move to a managed care system of life support delivery.

“Certainly it helps that the media is doing more for us than ever before to help keep our zombie ideas on their feet, but gone are the days that we can afford for every single idea coming out of our think tanks to fly blatantly in the face of empirical reality.

“And now there’s even talk of big government trying some kind of a cap and trade type of deal where think tanks start bearing some of the cost of all the so-called toxic ideological hooey in the air.

“What kills me is this pretty pass we’re at could not have come at a worse time. Roaming around out there right now even as we speak are some of the most important zombie ideas this nation has ever desperately needed to keep alive and well.

“Lord help us when we start pulling the plug on the idea that money trickles down, or that you can tax cut your way to general prosperity, or that government’s the problem, or that now is the time for austerity, or that it’s the greed of the Takers making life miserable for the Makers.

“What’s going to become of America when her conservative think tanks get too cash-strapped to even keep alive the idea that it’s the liberals whose ideas are just killing this country?”

SOTU Speech a Stand-in

Shining City Gazette has obtained a copy of a widely rumored early version of the president’s State of the Union address that was drafted for him by a team of his closest economic advisors.

Had this team of financial experts on and off hiatus from Wall Street jobs not been stumped by a tricky lexical complication, the president would have used his annual updating of Americans on where their country stands as an opportunity to take the bold, transparent step of officially announcing that Corporate America, by all measures currently available to modern science, has now grown “too big to rail…at.”

In one line designed to get the country’s ostensible leaders all standing and clapping, the president would have said to America, “If they’re too big to fail, if they’re too big to jail, if they’re too big to derail or curtail and too big even to veil, guess what folks, they’re too big to rail…at.”

Said senior White House wordsmith Elizabeth Duncan, “The problem was that in rehearsals the president just didn’t feel like he was nailing the pause between the rhyme word and the preposition that had to go with it.

“We tried switching out the “at” and putting in “against”, and that didn’t work. We gave “sail…into” a try and really nobody was happy with that. We racked our brains for days searching to no avail for a transitive verb that rhymes with “fail” and “jail” and means to carp or snipe or sneer at or to badmouth or nitpick or blame or dump on or even to whine about or disrespect or insult.

“Sadly everyone on the team gave up and, well, you heard what the president went with.

“As a footnote, though, in the eleventh and a half hour, a White House intern majoring in English at Georgetown University told Tim Geithner I think it was, or maybe Jeffrey Immelt or Peter Peterson. Come to think of it, maybe it was Penny Pritzker. Or maybe Jamie Dimon. Anyway, the point is, the intern told one of the president’s people that ‘assail’ or ‘bewail’ would work.

“By that time, sadly, the president had already put the last bit of polish on his delivery of the back-up speech.”

“It’s too bad,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “Now we’re going to spend another year listening to 99 percent or so of the country keep griping about Corporate America. If they’re so crazy about wasting their time, why don’t they just complain about the weather or something else they have no control over. OK, maybe the weather isn’t a great example anymore, but you get the point.”

Said outgoing Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, “It’s time, as the president has repeatedly said, to look forward. It’s time for America to finally just accept the plain and simple subtext of the president’s stand-in State of the Union speech—that it’s their government’s mission now to put them cradle to grave at the disposal of the job creators.”

In related SOTU news, the president also reportedly chose at the last minute to postpone sharing the progress he’s made on creating a legal framework for his killer drone program.

According to reports, the president’s evolving plan now is to key the scope of the weaponry any given American has a right to own and operate to the extensiveness of the background check he or she undergoes.

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, after refusing to confirm or deny that such a plan is in the works, “I’ll just say, that given the very well known extent to which the president’s background has been checked and rechecked, I can’t imagine a reason to deny the president any weapon on the planet or any use of that weapon.”

World Lends Lefty a Hand

In a heart-warming story said to be restoring much of the world’s faith in humanity, what’s being called a global brother and sisterhood of concerned little peoples has come by the millions to the aid of professional golfer and high-end corporate pitchman Phil Mickelson.

In a wrenching time-out from the rigors of a recent PGA tour event at La Quinta Country Club in Southern California, Mr. Mickelson courageously shared with his fellow man and woman all the hardship he now faces due to a new three percent increase in his California state tax rate and a four percent hike on all the money he makes over and above $400,000 per year—all the money, that is, except for all the money he makes money on through investments, which is taxed at roughly half the rate draining his other moneys.

“It doesn’t work for me right now,” said a somber Mr. Mickelson regarding America’s efforts to address the economic hardships that have blighted the hopes of so many.

The global community, though, has responded. In less than a month the worldwide Save Lefty campaign has raised millions, mostly in individual donations amounting to a few cents in US currency.

The success of this mission to supplement Mr. Mickelson’s $150 million net worth by way of rescuing all his well laid financial plans is thanks largely to the efforts of Adoyo Kiprop, a Kenyan titanium strip mining laborer who is dying from long-term exposure to the radioactive uranium and thorium released from the Kwale Sands where according to local legend the titanium used in Mr. Mickelson’s Calloway driver comes from.

Said Mr. Kiprop when asked what inspired him to lead this humanitarian effort, “I just had to do something before I die. I couldn’t leave all my children behind in a world where a great guy like Lefty can’t afford to buy the majority share of the San Diego Padres anymore just because his country is experiencing hard times.”

Even by some corporate standards the money being sent Mr. Mickelson’s way is considerable. Said a spokesman for Barclays, the major global financial services provider whose brand Mr. Mickelson is helping to “expand and strengthen” worldwide, “It’s not like Phil’s not going to notice it on the bank statements we send him.”

And by less corporate standards the money can only be described as pouring in as it arrives one or two ringgits  and satangs and tambalas at a time from the shovelers along the special beaches where the sand is gotten for the traps Mr. Mickelson has made such a fortune avoiding or so elegantly extricating himself from.

It is pouring in by the santeem and the dinar and the yuan from the miners of the raw materials that go into all the Rolex watches Mr. Mickelson has sold so many of.

It keeps pouring in from the ground-level extractors and processors of the rubber and other substances that make Mr. Mickelson’s golf balls fly so far and true.

It comes in torrents from all the tree-cutters and the paper millworkers, the fruits of whose labors possibly, just possibly, go into the issues of Golf Digest whose cover Phil so often graces, or maybe even into the oversized large checks Mr. Mickelson holds up for the cameras when he’s won another tour event, and perhaps even the regular-size large checks that Barclays and KPMG and Amgen and Exxon Mobil pay Lefty for putting so kind and smiling a face on their corporate undertakings.

Said a lighthearted Mr. Kiprop with a mostly toothless laugh, “We are even receiving donations from the poor ladies and girls in the sports apparel sweatshops working over-overtime to keep up with all the ups and downs of Lefty’s weight.”

In related news, on the set of a commercial shoot in Dubai, Mr. Mickelson yesterday told reporters, “The support the world’s showing me has been great. Just wonderful.”

“In all honesty, though, the five or ten million US dollars these people are sending me is not going to make that big a difference. I’m still probably going to have to move to Florida or some other low-tax state. It is very likely also that I’ll soon have to quit the PGA. I can’t really afford to make so much money that is not money made from other money.

“And actually, the titanium used in my driver doesn’t come from Kenya. It comes from Mozambique and Sierra Leone.”

In more related news, Mr. Mickelson apologized late yesterday for any impression his earlier statement may have left that he is less than thankful for what the Save Lefty peoples are doing for him.

“I really do appreciate the little peoples of the world who in many ways have made it possible for me to even lay the financial plans that are now being so compromised by my government.

“And I truly hope these peoples don’t forget to talk to their brokers about the tax deductions they can claim for their charitable giving.”

Coma Survivor Still in Dark

Within an hour of waking up yesterday from the diabetic coma he slipped into shortly after 9/11, Ted Banks, the self-styled biggest movie buff on the planet, was in a theater eating popcorn, drinking a large diet soda and watching Zero Dark Thirty, the second installment of Katherine Bigelow’s heroic effort to narrow the lenses through which the world sees America’s Global War on Terror.

A teary-eyed Banks told reporters after the show, “I’m just so proud of my country. Where else but America could the people have limited the extent of their overreaction to something like 9/11 to torturing a few people we knew with 100% certainty to be involved in the terrorism.

“It would have been so easy, I’m sure, for us to go on a rampage and just start invading innocent countries and dishing out misery to innocent Muslims by the millions. I can’t tell you how good it makes me feel to learn how famously the US Constitution did its job as a bulwark against the depraved behavior the peoples of so many lesser countries are prone to.

“Certainly the limited torture we were guilty of is a small stain on our exceptional reputation. It’s not really legal or maybe even right to brutalize defenseless people in our custody even when we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have it coming.

“But my god. Jesus himself I’m sure dealt the odd egregious wrongdoer the occasional backhand upside the head.”

After a long awkward silence, Mr. Banks went on to say, “It must have taken a great deal of courage for Katherine Bigelow to shine a light on the one dark spot on the otherwise so honorable manner in which we’ve conducted ourselves post 9/11.

“And kudos to Bigelow artistically as well. Who would have thought you could come up with enough material for a feature length film telling the story of a country that showed so much restraint in its reaction to a national tragedy as to limit itself to a decade-long search for one bad guy.”

After another long silence, Mr. Banks added, “I also thought it was a wise decision on Bigelow’s part not to show all the legal troubles the torturers and their superiors must have faced. I really hope the prison terms they received aren’t too long. I can even see where a presidential pardon might have been in order. Did that happen?”

“Not exactly,” said one reporter. “Sort of,” said another.

In other global war news, the Obama administration was still scrambling today to calm the widespread panic in America that erupted earlier in the week when the public thought Obama spokesman Jay Carney was talking about all Muslims when he assured the country that the president only performs extrajudicial killings when there is an imminent threat of violent attack.

“Jesus,” said one alarmed American, “hasn’t Obama been killing like tens of hundreds of Muslims all over the world with his drones? Doesn’t that mean America has been narrowly escaping violent attacks by the thousands?”

“Oh my goodness,” said White House spokesman Carney. “Everybody needs to just stay calm. The DOJ white paper everybody’s so worked up about makes it crystal clear that it’s only Muslims who are also American citizens that we only kill extrajudicially when they pose an imminent threat.

“And even then our legal team has been quite successful at broadening the concept of imminence enough that there’s no reason for Americans to infer from an extrajudicial killing of a Muslim-American that a violent attack was imminent in the traditional sense of the word.

“And of course there’s even much less cause for alarm when the public hears about all the extrajudicial killings of Muslims who are not Americans.

“In many ways the president is being unfairly victimized here by his own success. With all the progress he’s made in legally redefining “violent” and “threat” and “militant”, and given that his drone program itself has nudged the threat of violent attack posed by just about every angered Muslim in the world into the realm of the so broadened concept of “imminent” by which he decides if an extrajudicial killing is warranted, and given, as we’ve pointed out, that the planet doesn’t really have a court on it or any other body with the power to judge if an extrajudicial killing was warranted, the president has such a free hand to extrajudicially kill Muslims that he can’t even start justifying all his extrajudicial killing of Muslims without alarming the American public.

“Trust me. Americans can go back to sleeping well. The president’s got this.”

Corporate America May Come Clean

The US Chamber of Commerce is reportedly growing very concerned over the sudden sharp drop in American worker productivity caused according to most experts by the dangerous record levels of cognitive dissonance the public is being exposed to.

“We’ve way prematurely reached the tipping point,” said Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue. “By the tens and tens of millions we’ve now got so-called workers up to their spinning ears in the need to sit down somewhere and just get their bearings.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen for another couple of generations.”

Explained Raymond Whithers, the Chamber’s Chief Misinformation Officer, “Cognitive dissonance is a lot like radiation in terms of its cumulative toxic consequences. Human beings can only be exposed to so much of it over a lifetime before the strain of reconciling the unreconcilable throws their equilibrium so out of whack that they become more or less useless to the Maker class.”

Said the Chamber’s Donohue, “It’s the political and military and religious and media guys we all have to thank for this maxing of the American people out on ideas that don’t remotely square with reality.

“We could have avoided this moment for half a century or more if we’d kept the cognitive dissonance down to the levels associated with pushing supply-side, trickle-down, unregulated economics.

“There would have been room left over even for corporate felons to keep getting off scot free in a society where justice is blind, and probably the American public could have held up under the relatively low-grade strain of buying the idea that the super rich are the job creators.

“Definitely there would have been a good long life in the notion that austerity is the way to go in a society where the super rich keep doing better and better than ever before at the expense of all those below them.

“But no. Year after year after year the military keeps acting like nothing but a bunch of terrorists in a Global War on Terror they’re passing off as a noble cause largely by propping up the nonsense that the terrorists, the people whose people we’ve spent decades if not centuries pissing off and just flat killing with our policies and actions, hate us for our freedoms.

“’Dinosaurs’ is all that needs to be said about all the rabid enemy-hating Jesus lovers in this so-called Christian society, and my own head has started spinning with all the constant ongoing so-called liberal media’s spin making the left out to be as responsible as the right for all the worsening cognitive friction between our actions and what we stand for as a country.

“In the political realm, without even getting started on the reality-scrapping Republicans, there’s Obama who all by himself has lopped probably a decade off the time we had to play with before the dissonance reached critical mass by keeping up the ludicrous pretense with all those million-dollar smiles that he’s some kind of good, honest, peace and Constitution-loving populist not at all owned lock, stock, and barrel by us in the corporate sector.

“So now we’ve got a labor force petering out all over the place on the tread wheels of American productivity because some people won’t stop overloading the Takers with all this incongruity.

“We’re not sure how we’re supposed to keep widening the wealth divide if American workers can’t keep upping their game enough for us to keep skimming extra profits off their harder and harder work.

“My best guess is that in the very near future we’re going to have to just break down and point out the truth under the American people’s noses—that they live in a full-blown corporatocracy.

“Certainly Americans are not likely to be pleased by this news, but when their conception of their situation starts squaring better with the reality, at least their vitality won’t be so sapped by the malaise associated with so much chronic disequilibrium.”

Said Harriet Stenzel, the Chamber of Commerce’s Chief Compliance Officer, “Nobody’s crazy about going old school and using brute force instead of mind control to keep workers hoisting the money upwards. But if you’re compromising all the minds too much to control them or the bodies anymore, what are you going to do?” 

Race to the Top Hits Bump

The leading elite Racers to the Top of the nation’s school reform movement suffered a minor setback last semester when an unfortunate word problem slipped somehow through the quality control cracks at one of the country’s top for-profit high-stakes testing corporations.

According to 10^th grader Zach Little, who has a self-reported photographic memory, the problem in question read,

If a society’s schools are reformed according to the same principles that led to a society where some kids go hungry to schools with a fraction of the resources found at schools where well fed kids go, what are the odds that the products of this society’s reformed schools will go on to fix the glaring inequities in this society?

Responding to high schoolers’ 100% correct answer rate on this word problem, Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, told reporters, “One obvious problem with this problem is that it inflates the performance ratings of these students’ teachers. What is the point of using high-stakes testing to achieve teacher accountability if give-me problems like this one are going to wind up on the tests?

“Another problem, of course, is that solving this word problem involves higher-order, imaginative-type global thinking. That’s really not what we’re high-stakes testing for.”

Said Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools now in the third or fourth different lap of her personal Race to the Top of the school reform movement, “I’ve got a word problem for you: ‘How many teachers are now not going to be fired and how many schools are not going to be shuttered and how much stronger did the teachers’ unions just get because the wrong word problem showed up on a high-stakes test?’”

Added California’s first lady, “As a first step toward correcting this situation, we’re challenging the answer key for the tests with this problem on it. We’re not sure what the right answer is, but whatever answer 100% of the students in this nation’s failing schools came up with can’t be it.

“I also think the sentence is a run-on.”

Said Bill Gates, winner of the Race to the Top spot among accumulators of the most unequal share of the American wealth pie and now odds on favorite to win the Race to the Top of the school reform movement, “It’s called a Race to the Top. We owe it to these kids to run them through a battery of tests rigorous enough for the best of them to separate themselves from the rest.

“We also can’t afford to let an inflated test performance on their part raise their estimation of their teachers. If America is going to keep winning the Race to the Top of the world order, we can’t very well have large numbers of our young generation aspiring to nothing more than a career in public education at the teaching level.”

In related news, the Sacramento chapter of the Elementary School Teachers Union has reportedly called Michelle Rhee’s parents in to talk to them about their daughter.

According to sources, the teachers are very concerned about Ms. Rhee’s citizenship. It seems Ms. Rhee has stopped caring altogether about how her actions are hurting others who don’t deserve it. The teachers believe this might have something to do with the clique of bullies she now belongs to.

Ms. Rhee also apparently needs to work on her numbers and/or her honesty. She has had a chronic problem with giving an inaccurate accounting of her performance as a teacher and administrator and crusader. She’s also had a big problem with cheating.