Today's Headlines 9/3/06

* Ford has announced that due to decreasing demand it will begin dismantling all the vehicles it has produced in 2006. The program entitled "A dismantled Vehicle for Better Yesterday" will be implemented beginning next week. Ford had considered the destruction of its vehicles, however, the United Auto Workers threatened to picket Ford. Ford which has been paying 70% of its workforce not to work since 2004, will now require its employees to return to work to dismantle the vehicles. Ford is considering whether to build any vehicles in fiscal 2007. Projections by leading economists are that Ford will lose $1.2 billion if Ford manufactures any vehicles in 2007, but will only lose $280 million if no vehicles are built.

* Due to limitations in federal funding, the National Hurricane Center of the National Weather Service will begin selling the names of hurricanes beginning in 2007. The first slate of "Advercanes" has been announced.

Hurricane Avis
Hurricane Bechtel
Hurricane Chevrolet
Hurricane Disney
Hurricane Enron
Hurricane Fruit of the Loom
Hurricane Google
Hurricane Halliburton
Hurricane iRobot
Hurricane Johnson & Johnson
Hurricane Kool
Hurricane Lego
Hurricane McDonald's
Hurricane Nestle
Hurricane Owens Corning
Hurricane Pfizer
Hurricane Rand
Hurricane Staples
Hurricane TWA
Hurricane Verizon
Hurricane Wal-Mart

The Center rejected a bid for Hurricane Marry Me Rhonda.

* The International Astronomical Union has determined that the only planet in the solar system is Jupiter. The IAU made the determination by a vote of three to two, while the other 10,000 members were having lunch. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars were all declassified as planets due to their proximity to the Sun. Mercury, Venus and Mars will now be called moons orbiting around the sun. Earth will be reclassified as a cheese grater. Saturn is being reclassified as a sun due to the groundbreaking work done by Arthur C. Clark in his work 2001: A Space Odyssey. Uranus and Neptune will be reclassified as not existing. Meanwhile Pluto in defiance of the IAU has changed its name to an unpronounceable symbol and is being called "The Planet formerly known as Pluto."

* The Transportation Security Administration has announced that it is banning all air travel through the November 2006 midterm elections. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff made the announcement in Washington, DC. "We had hoped that the arrest of the London terror cell and prohibiting the taking of liquids on flights would cause enough fear to improve the President's poll numbers, but clearly more drastic action is needed." When asked how banning air travel would make the nation safer, Secretary Chertoff said, "Oh it does. Trust me." Chertoff recently rejected a proposal by Senate Democrats to turn over operation of the TSA to the British. "We are not going to allow the British to protect this nation from terrorism. The fact that the British are disrupting terror cells that plan attacks in this country is no reason to trust a foreign nation with our security. Meanwhile the Administration announced that an Iranian corporation, Death to America Corp., Inc., LLC, would be given a contract to operate security at the Port of Los Angeles.

* Hurricane Ernesto has been blamed for three deaths nationwide. In Fort Lauderdale a man committed suicide when he overheard his wife on the telephone say that she was worried about her husband being out in Ernesto. The man, who happened to have a lover named Ernesto, shot himself. In Baltimore an 86 year old man had a heart attack when he and his wife decided to stay in Saturday evening due to Ernesto. "We usually go to bingo on Saturday nights. But we were afraid to go outside due to Ernesto and we ended up staying home and having sex for the first time since 1995." The third death was a Virginia woman who slipped on a banana peel that was not visible due to a rain puddle caused by Hurricane Ernesto.

Today's Headlines 8/6/06

* Tony Snow denounced accusations that President Bush's shorter vacation this summer was somehow related to his poor polling numbers and the midterm elections. "The president is taking a shorter vacation this summer because he has not done anything this year and as a result doesn't need as long a vacation."

* Joseph Lieberman announced today that if he lost the democratic primary he would run as a republican and as an independent in the November election. Lieberman also announced the formation if a new party, "Centrist Jewish Democrats of Connecticut Whose Positions Aren't all That Different from Hillary Clinton." Lieberman, whose trademark optimism caused him to characterize his 9% sixth place finish in the 2004 New Hampshire primary as cause for celebration as a "three way split decision for third place" is very excited to be polling second in the democratic primary. Meanwhile bloggers supporting Ned Lamont have been criticized for a photoshop image of Lieberman, President Bush, Dick Cheney, Adolf Eichmann, and Darth Vader in blackface, at a gay orgy, murdering kittens.

* Disney has abandoned its project with Mel Gibson to create a cartoon based on the life story of Adolf Hitler. Disney has denied that there was any connection between canceling the project and Gibson's arrest for drunk driving and well-publicized anti-Semitic comments. Gibson has also denounced the Jews for giving Fidel Castro diverticulitis, spiking Floyd Landis blood test with testosterone, and for Ned Lamont's polling ahead of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut democratic primary.

* A peace treaty between Israel and Hezbollah has been derailed by the Israeli delegation being 15 minutes late to the signing. Criticism has already been placed upon Condoleezza Rice who mistakenly told the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert the actual time, forgetting to take into account Jewish Standard Time. It is well known that in 1978 at Camp david Jimmy Carter managed to arrange a peace agreement between Menachem Begin only after he began telling Prime Minister Begin to arrive at the meetings fifteen minutes before they were set to start. Jewish Standard Time is also blamed for the failure of the Taba accords in 2001.

* The United States and France have agreed to present a joint resolution to the United Nations Security Counsel. The resolution is a compromise between the two proposed resolutions put forth by those nations. The original French resolution called for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, the end the occupation of the West Bank and to withdraw to areas were part of Israel in 1948, to release all Hezbollah and Palestinian prisoners, to pay reparations to Lebanon in an amount to be determined by Syria, the cede the Golan heights to Syria and for all Orthodox Jews to stop keeping kosher. The original American resolution called for Hezbollah to turn over all of its arms to Israel, return the kidnapped Israeli officers to Israel, demanding that Bashar al-Assad institute democratic reforms and step down in Syria and requiring all Hezbollah members to be tried by military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. The joint resolution will ask Israel and Hezbollah to "cut it out."

* Donald Rumsfeld stated today that the fact that Iraq was in the midst of a civil war was a sign that the United States had won the war in Iraq. "If Iraq is in a civil war, Miss Henny Penny, it can't be in a war with the United States. Therefore, we must have won that one." When asked whether the US troops could begin to return since we had won the war Rumsfeld said, "Since we've obviously won the war it's not going to be dangerous for our troops. I don't understand all you Henny Pennys asking for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. There is probably no safer place on earth for an American soldier than in Iraq."

* Correction: In last week's paper in an article about the war in the Middle East we stated that the end of the world was imminent. It appears that the end of the world is merely incipient, not quite imminent.

Today's Headlines 8/5/06

Because it is the end of the world, I thought I would give you translations of some of the prophesies of Nostradamus about the end of days.

* And so it will be in the end of days that the man who told the tale of the Passion of the Christ will understand what is befalling humanity and he shall take to drinking heavy intoxicate and he shall drive his carriage in an erratic manner in the City of Angels so that the constables shall take him in. And when he is taken before the constables he shall prophesy that the people of the book have taken over the land of entertainment and have persecuted him. And then when the man who told the tale of the Passion of the Christ ends his prophesy he will give up intoxicants and then he shall recant his prophesies, but they shall remain true in his heart. And the way we shall know that this is true is that he shall say that some of his best friends are people of the book.

* And so it will be in the end of days the ruler of the land of cigars shall have diverticulitis and he shall be attended to by many physicians and those physicians shall advise him to go under the knife as a curative. When the ruler of the land of cigars shall enter surgery he shall nominally pass authority to his mother's son who shall also be his father's son and he shall rule in his stead. And the former inhabitants of the land of cigars who live in the land of the elderly shall make much rejoicing that the ruler has diverticulitis and that he has handed power to his brother. But the brother shall not rule for long and the curative shall be successful.

* And so it shall be in the end of days that a senator in the land of the west who shall be a person of the book shall engage in a political battle with a wealthy man who believes nearly everything the senator believes, but the senator shall be chastised for his support of the war and he shall poll very badly.

* And so it shall be in the end of days that the senator who was the wife of the ruler of the land of the west shall watch the political battle of the senator who is a person of the book and she shall realize that her support of the war will hut her when she attempts to become the ruler in the next cycle of elections. So the senator who used to be the wife of the ruler shall call attend a government hearing and call for the resignation of the government minister who led the war. And no one will ask why she had not called for the resignation of the minister months or years before when his incompetence was clear to the world.

*And so it shall be in the end of days in the land of the west that the part in the minority will call to raise the salaries of all workers and the party of the majority shall say that they will raise the salary of the workers if they agree to end requiring the rich to pay a tariff on their estate to the government when they pass. And the party in the minority shall if this is the end of days, why does it matter if the government collects tariffs on the estate of the deceased who are wealthy? And the party in the majority shall say, if this is the end of day why shall we raise the wages of the workers? And no vote shall be passed. And the party in the minority shall call the party in the majority duplicitous. And the party in the majority shall call the party in the minority obstructionist. And both party shall go to campaign in their elections and blame the other.

* And so it shall be in the end of days that there shall be a contest of men who ride two wheel vehicles in the mountains of France and there shall be a man from the land of the west who shall dominate the sport until his retirement. Then after his retirement another man from the land of the west shall complete the contest in the shortest amount of time but then they shall test his humors and they shall find a substance in the stream that would indicate that the man from the west violated the rules. And he shall be disqualified and it shall be a great embarresment to the people of the west.