Fed up with what he calls the “namby pambyness” of other Republican contenders, Mitt Romney today decried as “weak and unambitious” Rick Perry’s recent statement that he would “re-invade Iraq” and Newt Gingrich’s allusions to invading Germany (the candidate had said if Americans had the same resolve they did in that action, the price of gas at the pump would halve). Not to be outdone, and with some analysts saying he’s still not appealing to the majority of conservative voters, Romney said today that as President he would start another war with Great Britain, followed by a war with the French and remaining Indians, and then go to war with Spain over Mexico. “Eventually, a return to Viet Nam would be on the horizon,” said Romney, “but that would have to be in my second term”. When asked if conservatives in the US might be too prone to starting and engaging in conflicts, Romney said “We’re a nation with strong moral principles, and those principles are best expressed in who, how, and how often we fight.”

As we gear up for the 2012 campaign, supporters and critics alike are calling the President’s recent public appearances, “The Obama Reality Tour”. At his speech yesterday at Ft. Bragg on the occasion of the Iraq pullout, President Obama offered a litany concerning the Iraq experience that made even experienced killers blush. “Everything that American troops have done in Iraq,” said the president, “all the partnering, the sharing, the cuddling, the caring, the joining, the helping, the loving, the spanking, the building, the warm and friendly feeling, the occasional groping has led us to this moment of success…” A soldier interviewed by NPR expressed relief that the president didn’t mention “all of the raping, the pillaging, the torturing, the murdering, the stealing, the polluting, the destroying, the exterminating, or the initial framing”, but instead focused on the symbolism of the flag, all soldiers being heroes, how to write the history, and standing up for America. Whether he was neatly avoiding any mention of what actually went on in Iraq, or engaging in the ultimate euphemistic tirade is at the mercy of political interpreters. Today, the president is visiting other clusterfucks, like the US economy. Speaking to the banking industry at a Wall Street breakfast this morning, Obama borrowed from the Ft. Bragg motif, saying “all of your bleeding, your building, and your partnering – all of it has left behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant US…” Obama Reality Tour (ORT) spokesperson Glinda Goodwitch said tomorrow the president will speak to the Atlanta public school system about education in the US before departing at last for the Land of Oz.

The primary topic of the Republican presidential debates was who each candidate would bomb, if he or she were elected. Newt Gingrich wants to bomb Iran, starting with their oil supply, but said he’d bomb anyone if it would reduce the price of oil. Rick Perry said he’d bomb Syria, after implementing a no-fly zone. Michele Bachmann would bomb Mexico, as a way of stemming the tide of brown people into the US. And Herman Cain said he would continue bombing his own campaign. The general consensus was that someone always needs to be bombed, it’s the job of a president to conduct bombings, and that bombings would continue as long as a single Republican could gain access to the White House.

NASA, the US space agency, completed a study in July, and is now seriously considering fuel depots in orbit around the earth, so astronauts can get their fuel en route instead of lift it with them from the ground. An agency report indicates Loves and several other possible fuel station retailers are interested in the project. Fuel depots would have beer and cigarettes, his and hers restrooms, and a variety of snack foods. But retailers are concerned about “drive offs” and hot checks. As one Seven-11 representative put it, “If they decide to take off without paying, we’re talking about a lot more than a fifty dollar fill-up. And we can’t just tape the US government’s check to the register and shame them into paying. That doesn’t work for the UN; it won’t work for us.”

South Korea announced today that it will not tolerate any aggression from North Korea. Early reports suggest North Korea is shocked and its population reeling with surprise and confusion. “Previously, aggression was always tolerated,” said Lim Young-Gu, a restaurant owner, according to an official government translator.

As an aside, translators are needed because of the rarity of available speakers of North Korean dialects. Mistakes happen easily – for instance, in South Korea, the same statement would be translated as “Stop sabre rattling you meatheads, you’ll get us all killed. What is your problem, already?”

South Korea also warned North Korea that it is under the umbrella of US nuclear protection, which again prompted confusion and concern. North Korean Minister of Defense Kim You-Too, said “We always thought the Americans had gone home. It’s been 65 years after all. We haven’t looked over the barbed wire much in recent decades, but when we heard they had something called Cinemax, we thought the soldiers would all have left. We’re still watching re-runs of My Three Sons. How is Chip Douglas doing? Episode 17 cuts out just before we know if he learns a valuable lesson.”

England and the other realms which consider Elizabaeth II their monarch today scrapped the ancient rule of primogeniture which gives preference to younger sons in line for the throne over older female siblings. A new proposal was immediately launched to consider age discrimination in royal succession. Of today’s change, Prime Minister of England David Cameron said, “We’ve put aside the outdated, and archaic vestiges of a bygone era that no longer fit modern sensibilities.” Cameron later attended the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which involves all-male soldiers in bearskin hats.

England has had a royal family since 827 AD and the crowning of King Egbert, but many insist that it was actually King Arthur who pulled the sword from the stone. Oddly, without primogeniture, England would have been ruled by Arthur’s evil half-sister Morgause or Morgan le Fay. Merlin’s influence would have been defeated and Morgan’s son Mordred have prevailed over a millennium of darkness in the history of the realm. Women’s rights advocates are nonetheless applauding the measure.

A new organization, The Honest Conservatives, is creating discomfort among neoconservatives in the US, and their sponsored affiliates abroad. The group claims it is tired of the pretense that has gripped the conservative movement, and wants to free it to stand on the platform it really holds dear and important. The group’s founder, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “We have no aversion to conservatism or to most of its aims, instruments, or policies, but our chief difference of opinion is that it wishes its real platform to remain unknown, and we believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

The Honest Conservatives offers seven components of what it claims is a genuinely conservative platform:

1. Society: The fundamental unit of society is not the family, actually, but the corporation – specifically the multi-national corporation. Therefore, it is nationalism which serves as the best support of the power structure, because only with nationalism are multi-national corporations immune from social judgment, moral scrutiny, and any transcendent critique. In short, when the nation is the fundamental basis for moral and social evaluation, multi-national profit centers are the most free to prosper. Therefore, patriotism should be the core emotionally-charged basis for marketing of conservatism to the public.
2. Economics: The fundamental unit of the economy is not the dollar, actually, but corporate stock and its derivatives. Both money and stock can be printed at will, but money has universal distribution, and so is mainly useful for manipulating the economic activies of societies. Stock and its derivatives has a necessarily limited distribution, and so is the true currency among those who wield any economic control in any form. Stock and derivatives must be the true focus of all economic policies we create.
3. War: Military conflict is inevitable, so continual war must be a conservative policy. The goal of war is to reduce fundamental cultural oppositions to society as we have envisioned it, whether these are social and political, religious (such as the Orthodoxy of Serbia, Russia, and Greece, the Islamism of Iraq or Afghanistan, or even Hinduism), or ethnic (such as African, Latin American, Sinic or Japanese). Rather than creating pretenses and pretexts for war, or blaming the wrong country, or cooking the books on who is manufacturing what weapons, conservative policy should simply be to choose the next target without offering causes beyond the logistical vulnerability of the target nation or people, and the practicality and convenience of conducting the next military campaign against them. As a correlary to this, conservatives who are not invested in military suppliers, the arms industry, or energy and commodity multinationals that directly benefit from war, are either non-believers, in denial, or most foolish. It should be the policy of conservatives to provide education on sound investment by conservatives based on ongoing conservative military strategy, since enriching more conservatives by this method is the surest way to preserve support for continual warfare, and to give conservatives the stronger advantage over opponents. Likewise, opponents of war who actually invest in and profit from war, even indirectly, should be wooed to shift allegiance or moderate their opposition, or else should be outed so they can own up to their conservative support.
4. Warfare: In war, it is important to strike first, if possible, and deliberately utilize internationally banned weapons, apply torture, secret prisons, and create maximum disruption and hostility to civilian life, regardless of whether these methods produce intelligence value or even if they limit the ostensible conduct of the actual war effort per se . We should quit wrangling about words or pretending immediate effectiveness is the goal. It is specifically by these anti-civilian methods and the deliberate destruction of ethical boundaries that we quickly activate the amoral defensive rhetoric of neconservatives, neutralize the potential for moral outrage for fundamentalists (because of the inherent conflict between humanitarian concerns or civil liberties and divine authority bestowed upon the state and those who support or defend it), and we demoralize ideological opposition at home and abroad, since no one who lives a comfortable life feels comfortable standing together with those a state deems deserving of such treatment. In their hearts, if not in their minds, they wonder if the enemy, when a state devastates it in such a way, must have deserved it. Therefore, the policy of conservatism should not be denials that these methods are being used, or that what is being done constitutes torture or a war on civilians, but rather wholehearted support for comprehensive and total hostility using all available methods against civilian populations.
5. Environment: Preserving the ecosystem is not only not important but incredibly harmful, because doing so inhibits the growth of corporate share value. Nearly every multinational corporation that underpins the US political-economic system (as well as the social system of work and religious system of submission that supports it), depends utterly on disrupting ecological systems, not preserving them. In fact, almost all viable multinational corporate enterprises engaged in providing food, clothing, shelter, energy, fuel, and military resources, are based on the concept that producing such goods under a consolidated form of control is essentially the science of disrupting nature. Disruption is the ultimate basis of commodity production as it relates to a global currency of stock and derivatives. It is as much a law of production as Newton’s third law of motion is a law of physics: the potential for consolidation and distribution of profit is directly proportionate to the degree of conceivable ecological disruptions. Therefore, fully acknowledging the consequences and the edicts of science, and conscientiously paying them no mind, not merely pretending they don’t exist or have produced inconclusive results (e.g. silly acts of climate science denial), it is ecological disruption itself that should be the explicitly favored policy of conservatives.
6. Religion: Fundamentalism is the religious form of conservatism, rather than conservatism being the political form of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are a critical bulwark against the growth of anti-conservative populism, but they can also be easily mobilized into a conservative populist front through their various exclusive media outlets. The most important tenets of religious fundamentalism that conservatives must inculcate, support, and foster with moral rhetoric as self-evident realities, are a special destiny of the US, the divine right of US corporations, the illicit character of creative venues of popular dissent (gender roles, sexual proclivities, spiritual awareness, ecological awareness, science, and political non-conservatism itself), and the divine protection of Israel (as an underpinning for consolidation of oil rights and political control in the Middle East). Therefore, conservatism should strongly encourage at least some form of participation in a fundamentalist religious movement, whether nominal or credulous, by all conservatives. It is the essential conservative credential and should, by policy, be regarded as such. Conservative policy should be to favor those who have shown their loyalty to its precepts by affiliation with some fundamentalist denomination in the U.S.
7. Government: The United States should be a global empire. The sovereignty of individual nations is only valid if they also accept US hegemony. It is important to cement this way of thinking in the feelings, attitudes, and motivations of the average person, so that true citizenship in the empire is possible. Therefore, conservative policy should include highly restrictive immigration rules and concerted policies to stigmatize, limit, and emotionally charge immigration itself. Immigration contains the question of the fundamental basis for participation in an empire, and raises the question in a way that ideas about what constitutes full participation can be shaped and redefined along imperial lines. Rightly, the conservative reaction to differences from a monocultural norm, in areas like ethnicity and sexual proclivities, or the corellary issues of immigration and alternative marriage, are not really about racism or the attitude that sex is dirty, though those have in the past been useful pretenses to which to cater (the results of that, of course, having always been mixed). Rather, the creation and preservation, or even just the idea, of a monoculture itself is fundamental to the establishment (in reality, and in hearts and minds) of any global empire. That was true for the Romans, true even in the four failed attempts by Germany, and has been true of every socialist or totalitarian state (the USSR and China, most notably). It will be true on an even larger scale for the United States, as conservatives seek to impose a global monoculture. The goal of conservatives should be to make the world America , and to make America one thing. Therefore, it should be conservative policy to politically, socially, and rhetorically harass the creation of any micro cultures, breeding grounds of contrary conceptions of the world, within the US – that is those that are not themselves expressed in some way that still upholds or validates the monoculture we deem necessary to US global hegemony.

On its facebook page, recently, a spokesperson for The Honest Conservatives declared, again anonymously, that the Tea Party movement is an example of trending in exactly the opposite direction, toward even more pretense and concealment of goals and policies.

The Tea Party, one THC member said, “consists of people who use rhetoric like ‘trying to take America back to its roots’ to conceal the fact that they’re neoconservatives, because the conservative platform took such a beating under the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush administration.” That’s because, she explains, conservatism wraps its core policies in pretense, to begin with. “If it wasn’t so well defended by smoke and mirrors, it wouldn’t take such a beating in the first place. It’s counterintuitive. Once you start faking your reasons for something, and faking what you really think, to keep people from hating you, you demoralize your own strongest members. If conservatives would be shameless in putting forth our intentions and our reasons, we’d actually be stronger. It’s hard to knock down someone who doesn’t feel embarrassed or socially shamed when you accuse her of thinking what she actually thinks.”

So far, The Honest Conservatives’ numbers are small, but reports are that they are gaining supporters by the hour. The last few likes on their Facebook fan page occurred in just the past hour, for example.

Clarence Thomas has founded a new organization for people who have been, in his words, “Clarenced” by political opponents. Thomas was accused of sexual harrassment, during his confirmation hearings to the US supreme court. Thomas says the group isn’t limited by ideological differences, but is joined by a common experience of questionable allegations that they’ve used sex as a tool of misogyny. Thomas says this is a technique designed to galvanize the emotional core of a society – namely, women – against males who trouble various powerful interests. Other founding members of the organization, called Gender Stigma Survivors, include Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, charged with twice having sex without a working condom (something Assange says would virtually criminalize membership in the NBA and NFL), and IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn, charged with sexually assaulting a hotel maid who seems to have been caught lying to prosecutors, and making an awful lot of money through drug money laundering. Strauss-Kahn maintains that this is part of a campaign on behalf of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President who Strauss-Kahn says has always been a CIA asset. The new group intends to offer comfort, defense, and support to men who are “politically targeted by charges that they have been sexually unpleasant”, a charge Thomas says would at some point convict nearly any man who has actually had sex, except maybe David Beckham. Thomas’ group is a spinoff of the Sex is Not Dirty campaign, a Facebook initiative that suggests one reason sexual stigmatization is so powerful a political tool, is that most people still think of sex itself as a kind of crime – at least if they themselves are not having it.

The FBI arrested a military veteran in Arlington National Cemetery this morning, for trespassing. Officials said they were concerned the soldier was a danger to himself and the country he fought to protect, and that it was the first time they’d ever thrown a soldier *out* of the military cemetery.

The man, identified as Lance Corporal Yonathan Melaku of nearby Alexandria VA was found to possess a backpack, which prompted a call to the bomb squad, because bombers have been noted to use backpacks. Also, Melaku has a beard, and bombers often have beards. He was also wearing a cap, a jacket, and other suspicious items.

The backpack contained what the FBI called “materials of concern”. The materials, tested in FBI labs, were determined to be “inert”, and eventually were found to be a ham sandwich and a fruit rollup, though officials say they will continue testing. When asked why a ham sandwich should be of concern at all, an FBI spokesman said – “There’s good research on this. Ham is known to contain nitrates. Nitrates have been used by bombers.” The backpack also contained what some at the FBI are calling “Muslim literature,” though it may be specifically just an Algebra textbook.

Actually the second person of Muslim descent, appearance, and religion doing bizarre things in areas of military or national historic significance this week, Lance Cpl. Melaku was asked what the hell he might have been thinking? Melaku responded, “I just felt that it was a smart idea to, you know, pack up some stuff in a backpack, park my car in the bushes, and sneak into Arlington during off hours – you know, just for shits and giggles.”

Update 3:15pm: FBI indicates ham sandwich contains up to 2lbs of nitrates – more than previously thought.

Update 4:45pm: FBI indicates ham sandwich is actually a 5lb bag of ammonium nitrate.

Update 4:55pm: FBI denies a ham sandwich was ever found in Melaku’s backpack, but confirms the fruit rollup was there, and contains Mono and Diglycerides that could have adversely affected the health of Americans, had it been consumed.

Ginger “G-strap” Lee, the exotic dancer (some say she’s a “stripper” and there’s nothing exotic about it) and porn actress, former star of “Greedy Sluts I”, “Greedy Sluts II”, “Sausage Vixens”, and “Meat Muskets the Musical”, was reportedly offended by text-messages from Congressman Anthony Weiner that referred to his “package” (a euphemism, Lee said, for “something I find offensive”). Lee also said she found Congressman Weiner’s name offensive, because it’s a euphemism for his “package”.

Lee is defended by Gloria Allred, the feminist discrimination attorney who specializes in high-profile cases that are usually settled in denominations of $1000, instead of ones, fives, and tens, which is what Ginger is normally used to. Allred was reportedly looking for a new gig after the Tiger Woods affairs, where she represented a number of alleged mistresses, including another pornographic actress, Joslyn James (despite helping draft 1985 L.A. County anti-porn legislation which, sources close to Allred say “didn’t pay as well”). Allred and the offended Lee “somehow found one another” an enthusiastic Lee said, “you know, like a flesh pistol finds a happy holster”.

Lee said she’s indignant, because she found the congressman’s remarks demeaning to her as a woman. “I just feel words like ‘package’ are an affront to me as a strong, independent female, with a meaningful career and contribution to society, and I won’t stand for it.” Attorney Allred said, “It’s one thing to have something like that inside you, perhaps from dozens of complete strangers, and to get paid for it, but to have to listen to it alluded to by someone you know, for free – it’s just outrageous, and I think it’s damaging. Definitely, there’s some damage. We’ll be seeking damages.”

Ginger called Congressman Weiner a bad example, and is reportedly looking at properties in Beverly Hills, and “putting out feelers” one P.R. representative said, for possibly more substantive film roles, like the lead in “Lolita 2012: Argmageddon”, and the part of the rejected lover in “Scorned 3″, a made-for-DVD “soft-core” erotic film. Meanwhile, various press reports have begun referring to the congressman’s spouse as “his pregnant wife”, which journalism insiders say is setting up the next set of stories, as the soon to be bankrupt public servant will likely have to pay his own spouse first, a divorce suit being necessary for her to avoid becoming penniless at the behest of newly minted spokesperson for women, Ginger Lee, and feminist icon Gloria Allred.

Sarah Palin visited Fort Sumter today, where exactly 150 years ago the opening battle of US Civil War occurred. Palin, commenting before a Charleston SC film crew, said “This was an important war, because it freed the South from the slaves, and kept the slaves from taking over the North and taking the North’s guns away.” There were murmurs from the crowd, many of whose ancestors fought in the War between the States, but they were silenced in apparent confusion when Palin went on to say, “It’s a good thing, too, because we needed those guns to lick Russia and stop them from purchasing Alaska just a few years later.”

The reported assassination of Osama bin Laden that began with a US military helicopter crash in a neighborhood in Pakistan, prompted one soldier involved in the raid to say “when we crashed there, we joked it was as good a place as any to find bin Laden. Who knew?” Later, the soldier denied making those remarks, and has not spoken further to the press. Officials have since indicated that a single tip-off call led to the raid, “not the fact that a helicopter crashed en route to the official staging ground.” The words “official staging ground” have since been retracted and replaced with “operational site”.

Bin Laden’s body has since been reportedly dropped into the ocean in what the White House is calling a “burial at sea”, though some have speculated that an imposter was deposited in the ocean, and the administration either still has the real bin Laden’s body, or the real bin Laden wasn’t actually present at the raid. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said of the action that, “we wanted to lay to rest any question as to whether we really got bin Laden, and getting rid of his body for good, buried those answers at sea. Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes.” The US State Department later issued a revision of Clinton’s statement, to the effect that “Keeping bin Laden’s dead body around could have been a threat to the security of the United States and this administration.” The State Department later retracted the phrase “and this administration”. As of this printing, both Clinton and the State Department deny making any statement at all.

Anyone in and around the alleged bin Laden compound in Pakistan has been arrested and are expected to soon correct their stories from the consensus ‘there was no one of importance living there – we thought it was a safe house for US intelligence assets’ (from an interview prior to the arrests) to support of the official report that ‘it was always a little suspicious – something was going on around here, but we never realized it was bin Laden’ (the same person seven hours later).

US officials, who prefer to be lumped together rather than identified for their various low level roles in US government, report that the assassination also averted another 9/11 like event – this time on trains, “because so many Americans actually use trains”. Meanwhile, officials, again choosing not to be named, have said “Any suspicion, talk of things being fishy, or just comic disbelief based on the absurdity of the official account, is unwarranted. Stuff like this happens all the time. You’ve seen that episode of 24, right?”

The parallels between the bin Laden raid and a few fictional television program episodes, analyzed in the Washington Post, is unfortunate for the administration in the wake of revelations that the US government has changed its account of the events several times just in the last 48hrs. First the CIA claimed bin Laden was armed and died in a firefight, using a woman as a human shield. Then the Pentagon admitted that the only shots fired were when the Seals charging the house shot and killed the woman and the courier allegedly responsible for providing the tip. The CIA later said that bin Laden was not armed, but had resisted by having a menacing attitude. The woman also has been variably presented as bin Laden’s wife, his daughter, and once as actually a male and bin Laden’s son. A made for TV movie called “Kill Bin Laden” is expected to come out with the final version of the State Department’s preferred story, and cement that in the public consciousness sometime in the Fall. Until then, “debates about the script are bound to happen” said director Kathryn Bigelow.

Pat Robertson, today, in a press release responded to ninety-seven tornadoes that struck 15 U.S. states over one week, beginning April 14th in Oklahoma, with North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi being the hardest hit, by reaffirming his view that God is angry. Robertson said that tornadoes are God’s wrath, rain is God’s tears, but thunder is just God passing gas.

When one reporter asked if that wasn’t “coke bottle from the sky religion that would have us cowering in caves and offering up our daughters whenever a comet flew overhead”, Robertson retorted, “Comets are sparks from God’s camp fire.” In a subsequent press release, Robertson went on to advocate sacrificing chickens to appease meteor shower deities and feeding virgins to volcanos to ensure an uninterrupted grain harvest during the coming tribulation.

Not to be outdone, Louis Farrakhan has issued a statement claiming the earthquakes are God’s judgment for poor treatment of black people, some Muslim fundamentalists are saying it’s God’s wrath for America’s invasion of Iraq & Afghanistan, and Sarah Palin has said that God sent the earthquakes because he’s the only who ever gets what’s she’s saying, and he’s tired of it being reported verbatim, which makes her look foolish.