Weekly Review

By Claire Gutierrez

An American cattleman.

Polls showed that the level of public support for health-care reform was plummeting, a result of both Democratic capitulation--as when Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D., Mont.), after a year of preparation, released a proposal that lacked a public option--and a Republican campaign of lies regarding “death panels,” the cost of medical care, cuts in Medicare benefits, and “rationing.” President Barack Obama indicated that the White House may give up on Congress and draft its own bill; he also telephoned representatives who support the public option, including Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.), to talk about the bill. “I didn't come away from this discussion feeling that we were dead,” said Grijalva. The president scheduled a health-care speech before a joint session of Congress, and FOX News announced that it would not air it. A fight at a pro-health-care rally near Los Angeles ended when a pro-reform protester bit off the finger of an anti-reform protester.^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7} FOX News host Glenn Beck wrote that he had deciphered the secret code of the Obama Administration: “OLIGARHY,” he wrote on a chalkboard, pronouncing it “oligarchy.”⁸ Encouraged by Beck and fearful of socialist indoctrination, conservative parents planned to keep their children at home on Tuesday, when President Obama will encourage the nation's students to do their homework.⁹ The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent,¹⁰ and David Wahl, a 52-year-old employee at the New Flyer bus factory in St. Cloud, Minnesota, who sat behind Vice President Joe Biden when Biden insisted during a town-hall meeting that the company would benefit from the stimulus plan, was let go.¹¹ Dozens of alpine cows threw themselves off a Swiss cliff.¹²

More than 90 Afghans, including 40 civilians, were killed when NATO launched an air strike on two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban.¹³ Officials in Afghanistan found that hundreds of thousands of votes were cast for Afghan President Hamid Karzai at 800 fake polling sites. “If Karzai is re-elected,” said one tribal elder, “people will leave the country or join the Taliban.”¹⁴ A new species of giant rat was discovered in a Papua New Guinea volcano,¹⁵ and scientists were working on making single-cell slime molds into robots.¹⁶ Colombian President Alvaro Uribe returned from Argentina, where he met with other South American presidents and caught swine flu, and the United States, facing a swine-flu-vaccine shortage, released videos that feature Elmo from Sesame Street encouraging people to wash their hands.^{17 18} Police in Australia were investigating an adolescent girl and two boys for child pornography because one of the boys used his mobile phone to film the girl losing her virginity because she wanted to have sex before the Large Hadron Collider was turned on and the world ended.¹⁹ The Catholic church recommended that before sex married couples recite the Prayer Before Making Love, which asks God to “clothe us in true dignity”;²⁰ and, to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in Vermont, Ben and Jerry's changed the name of Chubby Hubby to Hubby Hubby. ²¹ Art conservators restoring a seventeenth-century painting by Poussin uncovered an erect penis,²² and at a Dutch museum a moon rock from the first manned lunar landing was discovered to be petrified wood.²³

Argentina legalized the personal possession of marijuana,²⁴ and Zambian President Rupiah Banda evicted two hundred primates from the State House after a monkey peed on him during a press conference.²⁵ The wife of Japan's next prime minister said that her soul once rode to Venus on a triangular UFO.²⁶ After sixty years Ikea switched its typeface to Verdana from a customized version of Futura, provoking global outrage. “Look, I know this isn't world hunger,” said a Romanian design consultant. “But if a company like Ikea can make this mistake, you have to wonder who is going to lead when it comes to design.”²⁷ A Detroit man admitted to chopping up the body of a homeless man and stuffing the parts in his freezer, saying that he had stumbled upon the corpse and didn't know what to do with it;²⁸ two Florida men were convicted of gang raping a woman and forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son;²⁹ and a court hearing in Cincinnati was halted when the defendant, a 66-year-old man charged with robbery and kidnapping, squeezed out his colostomy bag onto a table and ate the contents.³⁰ The Andromeda galaxy was expanding by cannibalizing other galaxies.³¹