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.

London, August 29, 2009 -- Ice cream trucks, the ubiquitous roaming purveyors of frozen dessert products that infest suburban neighbourhoods around the world, announcing their arrival using strident, uniformly irritating off-pitch melodies, have been found in a recent study to be a leading international cause of insanity.

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.

Washington, D.C., October 5, 2006 -- Republican national committee chairman Ken Mehlman announced today that a special form of ballot will be issued to illegal immigrants across the United States in time for use in this November's pivotal mid-term elections.

The ballots, dubbed "Provisional Targeted Ballots" by the GOP, will allow illegal immigrants to actively participate in the "great and noble experiment that is American democracy", according to Mr. Mehlman, before being deported back to their homelands in boxcars by members of the Republican Guard (Immigrant Deportation Division).