And our hired killers used to be so honest...

Do your best to feign surprise at today's Washington Post article about two ex-Blackwater employees who have come clean about the private security firm's systematic defrauding of the US government during its time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two former employees of Blackwater Worldwide have accused the private security contractor of defrauding the government for years with phony billing, including charging for a prostitute, alcohol and spa trips.

That's right, kids. Why stop at the occasional unprovoked massacre when you've got a shot at some full-bore war profiteering? And as much fun as peppering unarmed mud people with automatic weapons fire and embezzling hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money might be, think of the chicks...

The Davises assert that Blackwater officials kept a Filipino prostitute on the company payroll for a State Department contract in Afghanistan, and billed the government for her time working for Blackwater male employees in Kabul. The alleged prostitute's salary was categorized as part of the company's "Morale Welfare Recreation" expenses, they said.

This, for me, is the truly revelatory portion of the article. As far as I'm concerned, prostitutes are now 100% tax-deductible. And just in time for this year's filing period!

Broken News: AMERICANS ARE DEAD IN HAITI!!!!!!!!

PORT AU PRINCE-In what was initially thought to be a minor geological event notable only for its proximity to the United States, reports made almost a week after the fact revealed something so shocking that America, and indeed the world, must now stand up and take notice.

According to reports filed by the US media, a minimum of 17 Americans were killed during the quake that may or may not have damaged areas outside of where these specific Americans were staying. Upwards of 5,500 Americans are also missing, feared dead as a result of events that we are now allowed to consider important.

“My God, the toll that has been wrought on America has been incalculable,” observed Red Cross spokesman Erica Paymer.

“Here we all were, thinking this was a minor curiosity of little importance that might allow for some pundit posturing or celebrity tax write-offs. But thanks to the vigilance of an American media that incessantly mentions 17 dead Americans, we now know the true toll of this horrific event.”

In addition to the dead Americans, there are also a number of other dramatic inconveniences to America as a result of the Haitian catastrophe. Initial reports point to a precipitous uptick in Wyclef Jean sightings, as well as some sort of correlation between the Haiti event and a decrease in backup supplies of food and water held by relief organizations.

In fact, several aid workers stationed in Miami noted that pallets of bottled water traditionally reserved for filling Super Soakers or moistening MRE’s consumed when nobody felt like driving to a nearby McDonald's had mysteriously disappeared.

Flights bound for Haitian resorts and connecting flights to other South American resorts have also been canceled due to an apparent increase in other kinds of airplanes flying into the Port-au-Prince airport for some as-yet undefined reason. But all of this pales in comparison to the hardships the earthquake has caused to cruise ships docking nearby.

“They cut our jet ski time in half and canceled the glass-bottom boat ride and never told us why,” lamented Helen St. Croix, a passenger on the Carnival Cruise Ship The Aristocrat. “Honestly, it was just a bit of ground rumbling, tragic though the deaths of those Americans were.”

“The worst bit was at the evening luau. We barely had enough local staff to dig the pig out of the fire pit and there weren’t nearly enough waiters. I had to get my mojito myself. You don’t think this earthquake thingy dingy affected people other than Americans… do you?”

This sense of dread seems to be growing more common amongst both the moneyed elite partying on the beach and those watching this tragic jet ski situation unfold back home. While most are content to believe that those brave, selfless dead Americans are the only story here, others are beginning to search for different story angles.

“You know, I keep trying to lead these searches for injured or missing Americans amongst these curiously piled heaps of concrete that seem to be everywhere. But all of these mocha-colored chattering and screeching obstacles keep getting in my way. I wonder what the hell they are,” wondered a puzzled Jim Ridgels, field correspondent for CNN Headline News. “It’s the damnedest thing.”

Others have more solid ideas about what is going on.

“I have come to learn that those annoying, intrusive figures Ridgels refers to are the native inhabitants of this island,” observed MSNBC journalist Stig Danforth. “Apparently they were also near the areas where American lives were claimed and were themselves also affected.”

“It is most important to realize that these swarthy humanoids are very much like us and deserve our compassion. That is why I have taken it upon myself to interject myself into their poorly organized rescue efforts. Viewers seem to like that I am helping these poor creatures. They're like children! Some might say ‘Stig, aren’t you just hampering these relief efforts in an attempt to gain face-time for yourself and taking away from the real story here?’ And to that I say, no. The story here is the dead Americans. The secondary story here is me and other enterprising journalists creating an air of goodwill for ourselves and filling airtime by being shown helping these poor, disadvantaged mud people that have been unfortunately drawn into this event.”

“Understand?,” he angrily finished.

But whether or not these stories of people other than Americans being affected are true or just the wanton exaggerations of fame-seeking journalists, one thing is clear: this is an uniquely American tragedy.

The country, for now, is expected to pay attention until such a time as stories of dead Americans stop coming out of this shapeless, faceless landmass which we don’t know the location of or are even completely sure exists. That, or until the Super Bowl kicks off. Whichever comes first.

Your new "security"

In a bit of good news, today the US finally lifted it's longstanding travel ban on anyone with HIV or AIDS from entering this country. For those of you counting at home, that's one more list we're off of where our only companions are extremely repressive and regressive regimes. Funny how often we find ourselves on them.

Hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if the day that we were patting ourselves on the back for tolerance on one type of passenger we announced that we were also going to declare anyone darker than an albino Irishman was to be considered suspicious? Funny I should mention that...

Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.
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Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States.
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The changes will mean that any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States.

That's right, if you want to come to the land of milk and honey, we get to cup your balls first. Just to be sure. But only if you're in violation of Homeland Security's new color alert system. Right now it's at 'Eggshell White', meaning everyone gets searching in order to make everyone feel better. Soon it'll be reduced to 'Khaki' and then 'British Tan', so just us white people can feel better when we see pat downs and increased security for those "dangerous types". You know the ones I'm talking about. Ethnics.

Now I know what you're saying: "Aren't passports easy to fake? Aren't terrorists smart enough to get around this? Has any terrorist ever actually hopped on a Saudi Arabia-to-US direct flight with C4 in his boxer briefs? Wouldn't it be better to pump money into getting uniform shared databases so that information can be shared and pieces could be connected, like what didn't happen in the Detroit case? Why don't we take things seriously for once? Isn't this just more of that 'illusion of security' shit we've been going through since 9/11? Stuff that just makes us feel better but doesn't actually protect us?"

Yes, yes it is. I have an interesting response to that: Shut up. Sure, none of this will make a difference. Sure, it's kind of racist and probably harms our relations with Muslims more than it protects us from them. Sure, this is all empty theater. But it looks good and makes us feel good, so we'll take that in lieu of real safety measures. Thankfully our leaders are content to follow our lead and only deal with security and terrorism in terms of empty gestures, rhetoric, politics, and tough guy posturing.

At least they didn't decide to make us all take our underwear off at the scanners as well. There's at least that.

No foreigners

The Sarah Palin "I wroted a word book" tour goes ever on. This time stopping at America's own monument to consumer culture: the Mall of America. If you'd like to see Sarah in person and maybe even report on it, they just have one request: no foreigners.

But the mall also was banning foreign reporters, permtting "only English speaking press." That's not a common requirement.

Mall officials, calling the proposed guidelines a mistake, apologized to Palin today for "an internal miscommunication" that was "inadvertently distributed."
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"That should never have been in any kind of press release," said Tina Andreadis, a publicist for HarperCollins, publisher of Palin's hot-selling memoir. "That's not the message the governor wants to send out.''

Actually, judging from her various speeches on immigration and foreign policy, "no foreigners" is exactly the message she wants to get out. But the apology for accidentally exposing her expressed wishes was nice.

It's just a shame that they're banning the only people that could possibly appreciate the Palin signing and come away mentally unscathed: those who experience it through a nearly intractable language barrier, secure in the knowledge that she can't do anything to ruin the country they're actually from.

Broken News: Sanford immune to impeachment under arcane SC statutes

COLUMBIA, SC--With the media's attention firmly fixated on revelations that Gov. Mark Sanford's clandestine trip to Argentina was made to visit his mistress, thereby dishonoring himself and his party, few are examining the potential legal repercussions of his actions.

One of those few is Dr. Darlene Williams, a scholar of South Carolina's constitution and author of Yes, We Can Read: A Brief Introduction to South Carolinian Governance.

More surprising than the fact that someone can actually earn a PhD through such research is Dr. Williams' claim that by virtue of his extramarital offenses alone, Gov. Stanford cannot be forced from office by the state legislature.

"There is literally a codicil in the state constitution that specifically prohibits impeachment of a governor who was found to have traveled to Argentina for any purpose, including and especially fornication," said Williams. "You can look it up."

Indeed, upon further investigation, this organization uncovered a section of the South Carolina constitution that does precisely that. After defining the title itself, as well as the qualifications and responsibilities the office of Governor entails, the constitution goes on to state the following:

SECTION 19. Subclause 11.: Any Governor absconding unannounced to South American locales for activities pertaining to the ribald wetting of ones genitals and wanton acts of fuckery shall be immune to punitive action on the part of the state legislature or the populace.

SECTION 19. Subclause 12: The rights specified in SECTION 19. Subclause 11. shall exclude the country of Suriname and Guyana until such a time as the legislature decides their countries are no longer comprised of assholes.

According to Williams, this language was quietly inserted by the legislature at a midnight session not long after the conclusion of World War II.

"As we all know, South America was a popular refuge for Nazi war criminals in the years following the Allied victory. While South Carolinians fought bravely alongside Americans from every other state, well, let's just say that they didn't necessarily object to all of Hitler's, um, 'solutions'..." Williams said, while making "quotey fingers" and winking.

Gov. Sanford was unavailable for comment at press time, although Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer swore he had no prior knowledge of the indemnifying clause.

"Listen, I consider myself fairly well-versed in my state's constitution," said Bauer. "I know that there's a section on accepting federal aid for highways and hurricane relief while rejecting it for everything else. I know that the Three-fifths compromise can still be implemented in times of statewide emergency. I know that our leader must must not only swear an oath to a higher being but also legitimately believe in said power. And I know that when-- I mean, if, we secede again, that power over the state militia reverts to the Vice President of Philip Morris USA. But this? I had no idea."

When asked if there is language in the state constitution explicitly preventing a Governor from being removed due to dereliction of duty -- one example given was deserting a post that commands state and national guard forces -- or, in simple terms, abandonment of office, Bauer tugged at his collar and screamed "Christ on a cross, what is that!?" before running from the podium, diving into a waiting car, and heading for the "Appalachian Trail."

The other two South Carolina constitutional scholars in existence point to possible legal proceedings taking place under Section 16-15-60 of the South Carolina Code of Laws which explicitly make adultery illegal and punishable by a $500 fine and up to a year in prison. But, as to that point, Williams is unsure that South Carolina law even recognizes South Americans and those of Latin descent as legally valid human beings.

"It's really unclear, as the Constitution only ever mentions a Governor taking a white woman abroad to fornicate with," said the Dr. while poring over an original copy of the state Constitution scrawled on the back of a yellowed whiskey label. "There are a lot of references here to, "southern hemisphere mud people," as well as what constitutes fair trade for one in livestock. Also some crude plans to set South America on fire, but no mention of either Latin or South Americans possessing rights or legal recognition of any sort. I think the Governor is in the clear on this one."

Added the other scholar, "Unless he violated Section 16-15-120 in the Code of Laws pertaining to Buggery. That thing's ironclad, be it a 'mud person', 'comely goat', 'traveling gypsy minstrel', 'alluring fruit and/or vegetable', or 'regular white citizen' that gets buggered."

Until such a time as these complex legal issues are worked out, Governor Sanford is expected to be found sleeping on a couch in his office, "hiking", and pretending to be really sorry that he used South America as his personal sexual playground.