American People Damned After All

An exhaustive ten-year inquest by an ecumenical team of the world's foremost authorities on divine and/or cosmic judgements has determined that Americans' various godheads and other powerful retributive forces have, after all, been and will continue to be holding the American people accountable for their nation's mortal post 9/11 sins against humanity such as the subjecting of their fellow woman and man and girl and boy to both large and small-scale slaughter, to dismemberment and other forms of maiming, to almost unbelievably widespread displacement, to physical torture and population-wide psychological torture by drones and other sources, to lifelong unwarranted detainment, to depleted uranium and white phosphorous poisoning and the relentless multi-generational specter thereof, and to a host of other known and as yet unknown and/or uncategorized horrors.

"As it turns out," said Dr. Shivani Patel, chair of the Karmic Studies department at Yale University, "9/11 didn't quite change everything. Human beings, American or otherwise, still can't with cosmic impunity have other human beings just go around on their behalf and slaughter and maim and torture and displace and inhumanely detain and genetically devastate other human beings.

"We can't quite yet say with 100% certainty that human beings after 9/11 can't without karmic and other repercussions ruthlessly persecute other human beings who disclose post 9/11 American acts of savagery and other kinds of sinfulness. But the preliminary data from our enquiries into recent whistle blowing cases is pointing decidedly in that direction."

Said Dr. Matthew Peterson from the Eternal Damnation Studies department at the College of William and Mary, "We've found unequivocally that there is no divine statute of limitations that saves a peoples if they can only let themselves be led long enough to believe that they don't need to feel guilty for all the horrific sins committed in their names.

"In fact, there's growing evidence that on their day of judgement the American people will pay dearly for the special circumstance of allowing the horrific sinfulness of their leaders to keep escalating by convincing themselves and allowing themselves to be convinced by others that all the horrific sins committed in their name are actually acts of righteousness.

"At any rate, for their part, Christian-Amerians should probably start facing the hard truth that there aren't enough bedtimes or Sundays left in most of their earthly lives to say enough Our Fathers and Hail Marys and Glory Bes to put a dent in the Old-Testament vengefulness their god has relapsed into in the face of his American children wallowing again in an olden day barbarity.

"We must keep in mind as well that all this unforgivable bloodthirsty American brutishness abroad comes at a time when greed and pride and wrath and envy and lying, cheating and stealing and trampling all over the poor and otherwise breaking the Golden Rule and not even thinking about forgiving the trespasses of others and hating and not loving not only our enemies but also our neighbors are running rampant at home.

"So anyway, all of us in the Christian tradition are in a real hole with respect to what the afterlife holds. A rather warm hole."

"That's just great," said Christian-American Ted Davenport from Ohio, "I spend a whole lifetime devoted to the teachings and examples of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and now I'm going to hell just because I was on board with all my country's slaughtering and maiming and torturing and displacing and inhumanely detaining and genetically wrecking generations of my fellow man and woman.

"It's just not fair. Even those of us who suspected at some level that what our country's been doing isn't right thought the price for all the evil would be paid by the soldiers and CIA agents and maybe their civilian leaders and these leaders' corporate leaders and definitely all the media personalities who've been selling the whole thing to us as perfectly normal in a post 9/11 world.

"So here I am now doomed to go from the frying pan of a minuscule threat of terrorism into the fires of hell and I'm way too busy keeping my small business thriving in this tricky economy to even begin to say all the prayers and do all the good works it would take to buy myself a little divine leniency.

"My only hope now is to throw myself at the mercy of St. Peter, who by the way is also going to get an earful from me about where to send the likes of Brian Williams and David Gregory and Ed Schultz and every damn one of the talking snakes on Fox News."

In related news, President Obama today used the occasion of another public statement on the Trayvon Martin case to announce an "exciting new tool" in the Global War on the Threat of Terrorism. Called Operation Stand Your Airspace, the new program substantially lowers the threat level that triggers the drone bombing of patterns of questionable Muslim behavior.

Career Counselors in Crisis

The Associated Press is reporting on the news from this month's annual conference of the National Career Development Association in Boston that the nation's career counselors are abandoning their five-year campaign to steer America's best and brightest young job seekers into careers re-writing the woefully outdated book on which skills, abilities, values, and personal traits and proclivities go with which vocations.

"Oh my god," said Nate Armstrong, career career coach with 25 years in the field, "I have no idea why any of us are bothering at this point. About the only skill I'm bringing to the table myself these days is an outstanding aptitude for pulling all kinds of bad advice out of my ass.

"I don't know what happens to this industry now that we've failed to steer the right people into a career in completely re-doing the job key that goes with assessment tool standards like the Values and Preferences Exercise and the Transferable Skills Worksheet. We're all this close to career coaching ourselves to take the transferable skill of just making stuff up with us into the field of Economics or maybe the school reform movement.

Said Margaret Thill, headhunter for the Establishment Journalism industry, "Who the hell coached these career coaches into careers in career coaching? How do you look at a guy with a dynamic aptitude for growing moss on his back and not launch him into an exciting career as a fossil regardless of how overqualified he might be.

"These Mr. and Ms. Van Winkles keep waking up just in time to send us another service-oriented, principles-ridden truth-teller who flames out in about ten minutes, five and a half if it's a day when another story comes up that would blatantly expose this democracy as the sham it's become if it weren't reported on properly.

"Memo to the Museum of Vocational Guidance Advisors: The boat left a long time ago and you guys missed it. Establishment newsrooms are obviously only hiring ambitious scruples-free ass-kissers with egos nonetheless equal to or bigger than those of the big shots whose fat asses they're kissing. You can start steering all the world savers toward careers in homelessness."

Said US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, "I'm not sure how America starts meeting the challenges of the 21st century if our schools don't start mass producing career guidance professionals who can place people at the head of the nation's classrooms who can mass produce career guidance professionals who can channel the nation's employment seekers into the jobs they're made for in a rapidly changing labor market.

"What nobody ever mentions in all the talk about America's crumbling infrastructure is the dire need to modernize the bridges between the right workers and the right work. What we have now in education, for instance, is a situation where far too many union enthusiasts way overqualified in the nurturing arts are leaving all kinds of children behind in the Race to the Top.

"America would have been much better served had all these workers currently racing their own former students to the top of the pension and benefits heap been steered into careers perhaps in over-coddling workers as state-mandated psychological wellness professionals in the real world's HR departments. They could even have helped themselves and each other get over their painful misconception that they do not have to work summers like everybody else.

"And with a little vocational rehabilitation, the unemployed, union-burned workers from America's decimated manufacturing sector could easily step in and implement the standardized, high stakes test preparation and delivery system that the current teaching corps is having so much trouble with."

In related news, a routine quality control inspection of the nation's career development industry has confirmed its dismal performance in most sectors but has found that the industry continues to do a remarkably good job of guiding the nation's greediest, meanest, most dishonest and self-important citizens into the fields of finance and politics.

Obama Pushes Government Personhood

In little reported judicial news, a case working its way through the courts may well soon decide whether or not the American government is in fact a person.

Based on information rumored to have been obtained through the judge-sanctioned adjudication-free illegal surveillance of the US adjudication system, the Obama administration is certain enough of an ultimately favorable outcome to have begun a full court press so to speak in getting the American people used to the idea of their government legally immigrating as a person to America from the realm of the inanimate.

Said Obama spokesman Jay Carney at a morning press conference, "We have very good reason to believe that thanks to an eventual 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in the United States v. Non-corporate Citizens United we will all soon be welcoming into our big democratic melting pot a new Abstraction-American well known already by everyone as Government.

"We the persons should all be proud. We, after all, gave birth to this dogged entity whose unrelenting upward mobility, particularly in recent years, is a true American success story.

"Ipso facto, of course, and by the commutative property of arithmetic, or maybe it's the associative or maybe distributive property, this all means that each of us traditional Person-Americans will also be a government and should thus be subject to the checks and balances that keep government working on behalf of and not against the American persons.

"It also of course means we now must all direct our healthy American distrust of government at one another and must each of us put up with the moderately inconvenient but extremely indispensable transparency that will keep us from abusing the power we come into as governments.

"We need to start thinking, for instance, about making the Freedom of Information Act go both ways.

"And with all due respect to aging former one-term president Jimmy Carter, he's dead wrong when he says America has no functioning democracy. How can he say that while Government, Corporations, and people are all coming coequally together as one under the democratic banner of personhood?"

Conservative groups have been quick to argue that the last thing America needs is another foreigner with a pathway to citizenship and/or personhood. "If anything," said Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham, "we need to start taking personhood away from some peoples who already have it."

Even more quickly, a host of Obama partisan groups ranging from The Vocal Obamajority to Democracy Now and Then! have hailed the endorsement of Government personhood as pure political genius.

Said Janet Pentz from the already formed Obama support group We the Governments, "As per usual, President Obama has put the right in a real bind. He's giving them their wish to shrink government to the size of something that fits in a bathtub, but that something he's shrinking government to the size of is a person. Not even the right wingers would drown a person--not in the middle of this right-to-life battle to the death they're waging."

For their part, a coalition of Taker-American groups is expressing doubt about the wisdom of opening the nation's door to another would-be Abstraction-American.

Said the coalition's Allen Greenberg, "Isn't anybody bothering to consider what kind of person a new Government-American is likely to be? I mean, what are the odds he doesn't turn out to be a big white plutocracy-curious dickhead from the Maker class? What democratic society's border patrol decides to roll out the big red welcome mat for an undesirable like that?

"And how much do you want to bet that nobody ends up ever seeing the new government person in the same room at the same time with any of these new Corporate-Americans who turned out to be such great persons?"

Greater Chain of Being Needs Redo

The long anticipated official reintroduction of the Neoplatonic ranking system known as the Great Chain of Being was interrupted today by a moment of awkwardness when someone in attendance at the gala ceremony held in Stanford University's elegant main reception hall wondered aloud why he wasn't seeing the common man on the newly modified Great Chain.

When the so-called little man failed to turn up after a quick double and triple check of the PowerPoint slide presenting the new alignment of the entities making up the known celestial and earthly world, a visibly embarrassed Tom Ridley, spokesman for the Hoover Institute's so-called Order of the Orderer, nonetheless deftly lightened the mood by quipping, "I certainly hope this unforgivable oversight doesn't get anybody dropped any links on the Greater Chain.

"But seriously though," continued Mr. Ridley, "to appreciate how honest a mistake this was, one would have to fully understand just how much shuffling was involved in bringing the scala naturae, or stairway of nature, up to date.

"In the centuries since the simpler times of St. Gregory and St. Thomas Aquinas, the divisions between the tidy descendingly ordered classes of beings and things in the nine-tiered system of assigning worth have all but dissolved.

"A certain tricky fluidity now complicates somewhat the great staircase where God, angel, king, nobleman, wild and domesticated animal, plant, and mineral are naturally arranged. Oh, and man too, of course.

"Where, for instance, does one place a Red Tibetan Mastiff or a show quality Pharaoh Hound or Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in relation to a white African diamond? Or a blue one for that matter? Or a pink one? Where does a white or blue or pink diamond stand in relation to the king whose land it was extracted from? Does that African king stand on a rung above or below a minor sheikh in a Middle Eastern land dripping with oil? Where does one place this oil in relation to all the above and everything else?

"Such puzzlers and many more just like them and many many more even more puzzling had a way of throwing the re-ordering of all things under and I suppose even over the Sun, not to mention the Sun itself, into a barely controlled disorder that kicked up quite a bit of dust--which itself by the way wasn't exactly a breeze to place on the Greater Chain, nor of course was a breeze exactly a breeze to find a spot for.

"At any rate, in light of all this upheaval, and I suppose you'd have to say downheaval as well, I hope the average man will not take his accidental absence from the Greater Chain of Being personally.

"And speaking of downheaval, the common man might do well, as he waits to find out where along the Greater Chain he belongs, to think about how God must feel now that the top link belongs to America's Makers and his new link is situated way down the line between the rainbow and a flammable variety of bush known as Dictamnus albus."

In a footnote to this story, one member of the Hoover Institute's Order of the Orderer told Shining City Gazette that he distinctly remembers the Order tabling the little man when an impasse was reached in a debate over whether he and she should be placed above or below the baser minerals he and she is made of.

According to this source, the Order must simply have forgotten to go back to the little man after they moved on to the tricky business of deciding how to order America's vast statuary of its Founding Fathers given the unbelievably complex relationships between the variable worths of these men and the various grades of stone and metal they were rendered in.

Ed Writes Back to Harris-Perry

Through an anonymous leak from the Surveillance State, Shining City Gazette has obtained the private letter that fugitive whistleblower Edward "Ed" Snowden recently sent to MSNBC's rising media star Melissa Harris-Perry in response to the open letter to him in which on her own TV show she stagily tells Mr. Snowden off for fleeing certain injustice and thereby getting in the way of her covering any of the unbelievably widespread government encroachment on the Fourth Amendment he uncovered before fleeing certain injustice.

Mr. Snowden's letter is printed here in its entirety:

Dear Melissa,

This is Edward. You apparently know me as Ed. May I call you Mel? Thanks, Mel.

And thank you so much also, Mel, for your advice on how to make sure attention gets brought to our government's frightening abuse of its frightening privacy-invading powers. I don't know why I didn't think of turning to the Establishment Media for guidance in this matter from the very beginning.

And Mel, let me please just say I'm so sorry that my selfish attempts to avoid persecution by the corrupt government whose corruption I uncovered have gotten in the way of your covering our government's frightening abuse of its frightening surveillance powers.

May I request, however, that you maybe jot down a reminder to yourself to cover this abuse once our government has illegally caught me and rendered me unable to stand in the way of your reporting on all this government abuse (did somebody just say "rendered"?). And by "cover this abuse" I actually mean "report on it".

And may I please add, Mel, that if you've grown tired of not talking about our government's frightening abuse of its frightening surveillance powers, perhaps you could move on to not talking about how my giving up so much of what I love in refusing to submit to our government's frighteningly unjust conception of justice is shedding light on the new reality that even American citizens can no longer trust a single branch of their government to treat them legally.

You see, Mel, this way, my fugitive status wouldn't force you to make the story be about you being griped about me making the story be about me.

Oh and Mel, in the future, to save yourself the trouble of writing an open letter to yourself for making the unconstitutional surveillance story be about you by writing open letters to me about making the story be about me, just type your letters to me on any computer or dictate them into any phone or just go anywhere and say them out loud and my friends at Booz Allen will make sure I get them. You could actually just lip the words, believe it or not. Soon you will only have to think them.

And Mel, speaking of my friends at Booz Allen, they're having some difficulty finding any drafts of any open letters you're writing to James Clapper for trying (albeit somehow unsuccessfully) to make the story of illegal government surveillance be about him and his lying to Congress about illegal government surveillance.

And they're also, Mel, not finding any letters from you to the president of the United States glibly criticizing him for overseeing a formerly secret Surveillance State so egregious that a coward like me would blow the whistle on it and then escape unjust justice and thereby keep you from doing your job as a journalist by reporting on the so egregious Surveillance State in question. Actually, Mel, it's not in question at all.

Anyway, Mel, hope all's well over there in America.

Sincerely, Ed.

In related news, Shining City Gazette has received word from an unnamed Booz Allen agent that MSNBC's rising media star Melissa Harris-Perry is now drafting an open letter to Shining City Gazette in which she stagily calls us out for printing Edward "Ed" Snowden's private letter to her and thereby distracting her from further reporting on Mr. Snowden's distracting her from reporting on the government's illegal surveillance program.

In even more Melissa Harris-Perry news, MSNBC's rising media star Melissa Harris-Perry's colleagues in the Establishment Media are reportedly beginning to wonder out loud if the completely nonsensical calling of attention to herself in calling for Mr. Snowden to stop calling attention to himself is a matter of her going way over the top on purpose to covertly expose the Establishment Media's commitment to running interference for the ruling class they're supposed to help hold in check.

Said media superstar David Gregory, "Sounds like she's blowing a dog whistle to me. I think the media watchdogs out there are picking her up loudly and clearly.

"If this once-divorced, slightly speech impaired implant from the Ivory Tower is secretly betraying the media, she should really find the courage to do it out in the open so we can cover it."

A spokesperson for a prominent media watchdog group, requesting anonymity to make it more difficult for the media to make the story be about him or her making the story be about him or her, told Shining City Gazette that if Melissa Harris-Perry is blowing any whistles "on her own pack of narcissistic Establishment Media lapdogs", nobody can hear it over "all the sound and fury of the toothless lapdog yip-fest that has done nothing but grow and grow ever since Edward Snowden let the latest big bad cat of Establishment criminality out of the bag."

Elite Purchasing Power Unleashed

In a transaction reportedly making the Louisiana Purchase look like the acquisition of a postage stamp, a limited partnership of Plutocrat-Americans has just bought up all the vast expanses of social distance between the ruling elite and the rest of America.

This so-called "Deal of the Century So Far" is just the latest spectacular example of the course conspicuous spending has taken in America now that the fantastic irresistible purchasing power of its richest citizens is stretching beyond recognition the human conception of what's salable.

Said Rick Simmons, the so-called unreal estate agent who brokered the sale of all this social swampland now being called the Mother of All Moats, "Oh my god, anybody out there who can sew could singlehandedly reintroduce upward mobility into the system by making billions patching up the unbelievably gaping holes left by all the money burning the pockets of these incomprehensibly big spenders.

"Seriously. These guys are turning us old fashioned free-market go-getters into regular tree huggers saving the global climate by giving these pyromaniacs something else to do with all that money they have to burn."

Among the exclusive new goods and services the elite can now go shopping for on Easy Street is an insurance policy that protects their unprecedented illustriousness against any and all backlashes against this Gilded Age that the masses may yet find the courage to wage in the decades or centuries to come. Image groomers and their progeny and the progeny of their progeny are now reportedly being retained to usher the legacies of the nation's best and brightest as far into the future as the natural devaluation of a dollar over time allows.

According to sources, one of the pricier packages includes the super slow motion unnoticed morphing of the faces on US currency and on iconic public statues and monuments like Mount Rushmore into the likeness of a client.

For a reportedly astronomical fee the elite can now even experience the novelty of paying corporate taxes.

Said Elizabeth Sanders, founder of a very popular boutique where the elite can buy the unconditional love of a deceased mom or dad, "Most of these people made their billions out of thin air anyway, so they really don't bat an eye when they're buying the kinds of pretty rarefied products popping up on the market.

"I'm actually thinking about starting up an imagination emporium modeled after those Sky Mall magazines you see on commercial airline flights. I've got an unemployed uncle who's going to use his background as an engineer to start a business turning all the clocks in super rich people's mansions and on their persons back to a time in human history before Pride and Greed were added to the Five Deadly Sins."

Said consumer protection activist Ralph Nader, "It looks to me like all the smartest guys and gals in the room are being hit by a wave of good old fashioned scamming.

"But hey, if it takes putting the shoe of charlatanism on the other foot to re-redistribute the wealth in America, I'm all for it."

In more plutocrat news, the beleaguered Obama administration is announcing that it has reached some middle ground it believes will satisfy both the privacy-seeking American people and the corporate stakeholders in the Surveillance State.

At a morning press conference, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that the American public can now purchase minutes of surveillance-free communication. Also now for sale are the records of having bought these suspicious surveillance-free minutes.

According to Mr. Carney, however, the president, "in the interest of holding the line against those who would do harm to America," will not be authorizing the sale of the records of the sale of the records of the purchase of these minutes spent outside the Surveillance State.

Pope Blasts Obama Trespass

At the Vatican, Pope Francis has issued a statement condemning America in the "strongest terms possible" for its reportedly having warned God not to even think about intervening on behalf of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden.

According to reports, the infallible papal statement characterizes the Obama administration's premonishment of God as a grievous if not a mortal insult to His almighty sovereignty, not to mention a clear violation of natural and divine and possibly international law or at least etiquette.

The Argentinian Pope also spent an infallible paragraph conjecturing that if he were of European and not Latin American descent there's no way the Obama administration would have so trampled all over his papal bailiwick.

In terms perhaps even stronger than possible, the Pontiff went on to condemn the widely rumored cyber scrambling of the air space over all the world's Christians in a bid to keep their prayers on behalf of Mr. Snowden from even reaching the ears of Our Heavenly Father.

Said the Pope in his statement, "In their singleminded merciless pursuit of one of God's children, the Americans are willing to render our Lord and Protector deaf to all his other children's petitions.

"Whose guiding hand will now make the football matches come out in a supplicant's favor? Who now will deliver the birthday ponies? Who at bedtime will bless the mommies and daddies and brothers and sisters and dogs and cats and guinea pigs and parakeets? Who will forgive the trespasses of all the trespass forgivers?

"One begins to wonder what happened to the Americans' hearts and minds. How could they not have thought of simply folding their hands and closing their eyes and begging the Lord to deliver Mr. Snowden into their custody?"

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, "With all due respect for the infallibility of Mr. Francis, with regard to beseeching God through regular channels for the delivery of Mr. Snowden into our custody, why should we bother competing with masses so to speak of rosary-wielding anti-American Latin Americans rattling off pater nosters in a language built for speed?

"The other thing is, our legal team is having some trouble finding the commandment that says 'Thou shalt not tell the Lord Thy God to keep his nose out of your business when it comes to protecting yourself against one among you who would question your all-seeing and knowing benevolence.'

"I hate to sound impious, but God's just going to have to get used to the idea that he's not the only omniscience game in town anymore.

"And with respect to the scrambling of the air space over Christian heads, let me just say that while we're not confirming or denying that an Operation Don't Go There exists, we are prepared to announce that we may or may not have almost finished work on a filter that would allow most if not all non-pro-Snowden-related supplications, particularly in times of life or death crisis and championship level sports series, to travel unimpeded if not unmonitored to the ears of God."

In related news, tensions have escalated between Russia and the US as President Vladimir Putin has refused to punish or even condemn the confederation of Sheremetyevo Airport Transit Area day and night laborers who are openly defying America's explicit will to keep the movements of former Surveillance State agent Edward Snowden "confined to a space that a Soviet bloc shot-putter turned Aeroflot stewardess couldn't even stuff an article of Mr. Snowden's overhead luggage into."

According to sources, with complete impunity Mr. Snowden has been crossing the beats of one private airport security cop after another as he has breezed into and out of the domains of washroom attendants and lounge hosts and hostesses and non-smoking and smoking area custodians and food court managers alike.

When asked by a United Press International reporter if she will continue resisting US pressure to join the global effort to isolate Mr. Snowden, Oksana Belova, manager of the Sheremetyevo Cinnabon, said, "Of course I will. What do I look like, Spain? France? Portugal? The a**-sucking spawn of a jellyfish and something truly spineless, like the two-faced a**-sucking head of an American puppet state?"

Armchair Whistleblowers Gather

According to event organizers, the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago has been stretched to well beyond capacity by the record number of the country's pundits attending the 42nd Annual Armchair Whistleblowers Conference in the Windy City.

Said Nate Russell, the so-called armchairman of the Conference Planning Committee, "There's just so much to talk about this year here at what we're calling the mother of all water coolers. It's like one big month of Superbowl Mondays, but without the hangover and onion dip breath and GI issues.

"I just hope an actual whistleblower didn't sneak into this Chicago fire waiting to happen all over again while we violate who knows how many fire codes in all the packed break-out sessions.

"But then again, what whistleblower's heroic enough to stoke the fire breathing ire of a mustered army of professional second guessers when it comes to the disclosing of lawlessness."

NBC's David Gregory began his lengthy keynote address by congratulating the standing room only crowd in the Convention Center's Main Ballroom on a job well done with regard to uncovering all the real stories behind the story that the whistle has been blown on unbelievably widespread unconstitutional government spying.

Said Mr. Gregory, "Two cents worth at a time you have piled up a truly newsworthy jackpot of column inches over these past few weeks. Well done everybody."

Mr. Gregory went on to remind conventioneers that it was on a Sunday in 1971 that Chicago's native son Daniel Ellsberg helped kick off this annual gathering of Monday morning whistleblowers when the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers he leaked.

After a rousing hand for the Times and/or Mr. Ellsberg, Mr. Gregory exhorted his audience to never forget the debt of gratitude the Establishment Media owes the institution of whistleblowing.

"For one thing," said Mr. Gregory, striking a lighter note, "thanks to Edward Snowden you can all put your pens and notepads away. We've been able to arrange for the NSA to provide us a full and complete set of notes on any and all conference activities."

Continuing in this jocular vein, Mr. Gregory asked Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, seated on the dais, if he wouldn't mind thanking his former boss for having lured so many whistleblowers out into the open by lavishly praising them in advance in his 2008 presidential campaign.

Quipped Mr. Emanuel, "Thank him yourself. I'm sure he's listening in."

Ending on a more serious note, Mr. Gregory introduced the theme of the 2013 conference--"Uncoverage". Said Mr. Gregory, "Uncoverage. Let us all keep resolving over the next few days to always keep covering the uncoverage of the stories that too often get covered when the blowing of whistles starts kicking up dust."

Said Planning Committee armchairman Russell, "The titles of the conference sessions give a good sense, I think, of just how exciting this year's gathering is: 'Hey, the Cat out of Your Bag Just Crapped in My Garden'; 'Deep Throat This: Blowing it in the Time of the Benevolent Unitary Executive'; 'Whistleblowing Dixie'; 'Smile, Big Brother's Watching You Not Watching Big Brother'; 'La La La La La: Not Facing the Music of Your Whistleblowing'; 'Thanks a Lot: Extramarital Conference Sessions (or Lack Thereof) in a Post-Snowden World'.

"I'm personally looking forward to CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin's 'Tuesday Morning Armchair Whistleblowing: Protocols for Commenting on the Comments of Monday Morning Whistleblowers'.

"And MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry's 'Squeal Like a Flying Pig' should also be great. I hear Professor Harris-Perry's boldly proposing that all government and/or private employees with top secret clearance status be made to sign an oath to the effect that if and/or when they break their oath to not blow the whistle on government wrongdoing they will submit to the penalties imposed by a government prone, if not addicted to, chronic wrongdoing.

"Professor Harris-Perry's expected to unveil a table for keying the degree to which one may claim to be a whistleblower to the degree of unjust persecution one suffers for revealing injustice."

Beltway Assails Beltway Leaker

The Establishment Press is reporting today that the spokespersons for a multitude of government and corporate and Establishment Media agencies are coming together as one to denounce what they're calling the grandiose narcissist from inside the Establishment Press who is reportedly blowing the whistle on the grandiose narcissists in the Establishment Press who have decided they are so much smarter than the rest of us that they are the last word when it comes to deciding what the government and corporate America and the Establishment Media itself will, but more to the point, will not, be held accountable for.

Said Bob Schieffer, Establishment Media personality and grandiose narcissist, "Who does this guy think he is? Did he just wake up one morning and decide he all of a sudden knows more than all the people who know more than all the people outside the Beltway?

"I've got a simple little IQ test for this boy genius. On a scale of one to ten, how smart is it to start bad mouthing all the arbiters of who should be bad mouthed and how and for what?

"And for the record, I somehow don't remember Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks ever deciding they knew more than the Establishment Media who decided how America should think about them."

Said Jeffrey Toobin, senior legal analyst and grandiose narcissist for CNN and the New Yorker, "What, one wonders, did this leaker think the Establishment Press did. 'Hey look at me everybody, I'm blowing the whistle on the obvious.'

"Here's my own little news flash for my junior colleague--you're going to have to think of a better way to take attention away from your fellow Beltway journalists than by shining a spotlight on them for being whorish egomaniacal glory hounds running interference for corporate and government and media America."

In the government sector, Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, told Establishment journalists today that in his mind the journalist in question should be prosecuted both as a whistleblower and as a journalist enabling a whistleblower.

At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney told Establishment reporters, "The president has already pointed out the problems we're going to have if people can't trust the president or Congress or the courts.

"Well let me tell you, we're really going to have some problems if the people stop trusting the Fourth Estate to make these problems go away."

In the corporate/government/Establishment Media sector, Jeffrey Immelt, president and CEO of General Electric, told Establishment reporters that he personally feels grateful to the whistleblower.

Said Mr. Immelt, "It's always nice to get confirmation that the arrangement is still working."

In more whistleblowing news, the Guardian today has released a chilling document recently leaked by Edward Snowden that shows the NSA and its affiliate public and private agencies and individuals and other entities still have no idea how many terrorist plots went unfoiled in 2009 when the Surveillance State had to be shut down for repairs for several hours when the main NSA supercomputer processing the mountains of data the Surveillance State was gathering kept spitting the NSA itself out as the nation's primary engaged in unAmerican activities.

In brighter Surveillance State news, the government is now assuring a nervous.American public that a team of the nation's best and brightest computer engineers has almost worked the last of the bugs out of a butt-dial recognition program that would exonerate any American who made contact with a Muslim or someone who knows a Muslim simply by sitting wrong on a cell phone.

The team reportedly is now just waiting for the finishing touches to be put on an algorithm engineered to expose those who might exploit this safeguard against wrongful persecution of innocent American citizens by training themselves to butt-dial Muslims and/or acquaintances of Muslims on purpose.