Washington, D.C., January 24, 2007 -- President Bush's 2007 State of the Union address bumped into an unexpected snag with the "rapturing" of approximately 150,000 Fundamentalist Christians yesterday, Washington sources said.

Remains of raptured former Bush supporters

New Orleans, August 9, 2006 -- In the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush warmed and reassured the hearts of Americans with the solemn promise that Senator Trent Lott, whose house had been lost in the hurricane, would receive a new, fantastic house built "out of the rubbles", on the porch of which the President would look forward to sitting.

Sioux City, Iowa, October 12, 2030 -- The recently-formed Midwest Commission on Giant Hamster Flu (MCGHF) reported yesterday that an additional 39 men and women have succumbed in the past month to the latest outbreak of Giant Hamster Flu, or GHF. This brings the total GHF-linked death toll to over 400 for the first three quarters of the year, a 49 percent increase over 2029.

Officials of the MCGHF are now characterizing the outbreak as a serious pandemic with the potential for widespread contagion, although no cases of GHF spreading from human to human have yet been reported.

Washington, D.C., March 12, 2006 -- Vice President Dick Cheney, a leading advocate of the use of torture in the so-called "war on terror", successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique this month by allowing himself to personally undergo a one-week program of "coerced interrogation", the compassionately conservative term for the practice. During the week, the Vice President proved the value of torture by unwillingly confessing to a wide range of infractions, some of them quite surprising.