ollowing the assassination of Afghan Vice-President Abdul Qadir by armed terrorists Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai immediately took over the role of Vice-President within a few short hours of the incident.

"As of this time, I am now second in command of the country of Afghanistan," Karzai said to a small gathering of reporters in the presidential bunker.

When pressed by western and Middle Eastern reporters alike on the logic of stepping down to fill a position below you, Karzai did not respond. He ended the press conference when persistent inquiries as to who is now the president of Afghanistan came up. Reporters were shuffled from the bunker by burly guards, one of whom we swear used to work at Studio 54.

The late Qadir was an important part of the rebuilding of Afghanistan's government. The veteran Pashtun warlord was believed a stabilizing influence and supporter of U.S. action in the country, and with him gone, that stability is now in question. With Karzai unintentionally demoting himself to a secondary position, it may be up to the U.S. to call upon a new president and then responsibility placed on the people of Afghanistan to "elect" them in a fair election, like the kind that put George W. Bush in office.

With the future of Afghanistan again under pressure, advice is coming in from strange circles.

"This never should have happened, and measures should be instituted to prevent it from happening again," said CEO of WorldCom Inc. John Sidgmore. "I may not know assassinations and domestic terrorism, but I know power structures and fire coming up from below. You never want to have just one person beneath you on a pyramid. I suggest at least three, maybe up to ten Vice Presidents to create that solid second floor. That way if things start crumbling underneath you from the bottom up, you've at least got a few more bodies in the way before you hit the ground."

The president was also reached for his obligatory quote.

"It's a sad day for the Afghanistanian people," said the president, then nodding to affirm what he had said. "That guy they lost was a valued member of our foreign department. It's a sad day for his family and the people who liked him, of which I understand there are many. The people who don't like him are having a happy day, but their happy day will turn into a sad day when we catch up with them. And that will be a happy day for us."

When questioned about Karzai's decision to step in for the fallen Vice President, Bush's resolve was tempered and cautious. "It's a very brave step, although we will wait and see if it was good or not. I have a vice president. I know that I would be terrified if something happened to him, and with his heart running like a '69 Impala, that possibility is always lurking in the shadows."

esponding to a week of heavy rains and severe flooding that has destroyed more than 200 homes and forced the evacuation of thousands of residents, Texans statewide have banded together to take back their state from Mother Nature. Seeking to live out the meaning of their state creed, "Don't Mess with Texas," Texans have waged an all-out war on the storm systems that have pummeled their state in recent days.

"First, it started out with some hooting and hollering, just letting off some steam after my house got washed down the river with all my guns still inside," explained New Braunfels resident Stymie Rauch. "Then when my pickup got washed away too, that struck me as personal and enough was enough so I gave them rain clouds a good what-for. I'll admit, there was some blue language involved that you aren't likely to hear at a nun's funeral. But them rain clouds knew what, they had it comin."

Inspired by Rauch's example, other New Braunfels residents swore and threw rocks at the clouds from the roofs of their homes, which were each comfortably stocked with several cases of lite beer and battery-powered television sets in case of a longer-than-usual flood.

New Braunfelite John Richard Stubing elevated the protest to an armed conflict when he begin firing his shotgun into the sky, signaling that he was mad as hell and also out of Frito dip. Neighbors cheered from their rooftops and an unknown hillrod waved a Texas state flag in support from a rowboat he was piloting up Honeysuckle Lane.

Word of the New Braunfels resistance movement spread like Billy Ray Cyrus haircuts across the state and within hours groups of armed Texans were wading through the streets and brandishing firearms in several Central Texas towns. Clever commemorative tee-shirts were printed up in record time featuring the cloud-mocking catchphrase "G'on Now, Git" and by nightfall country singer Toby Keith had released a timely single entitled "Mother Nature Ain't No Mother of Mine (The Pissed-off Texan)."

By Saturday, calls had been made to former Texas governor and current U.S. president by default George W. Bush to dispatch the U.S. nuclear arsenal in response to the clouds' aggressions against the people of Texas. Current governor Rick Perry publicly supported the use of nuclear force and all other necessary holy hell to send a message to the storm front. Perry summed up the state government's position as "Be you a cloud or be you from Amarillo, you know that when you rattle the big dog's cage, that big dog just might give you a bite for your troubles. Look out, weather."

Some Texas activists, however, were not content to wait for the wheels of government to get around to turning. Saturday afternoon, Patrick Scott, the president of cable television's The Weather Channel, was kidnapped from his Atlanta home. A letter described as "sort of like a ransom note" was discovered at the scene, though only the phrase "We gotcha by the balls now!" has been released to the press.

Meanwhile, residents across the state waged war on Mother Nature into the evening on Saturday, pulling down trees with pickup trucks, stomping on flowers and spraying aerosol products straight into the sky. A man was arrested near San Antonio for feeding chili to penguins at the zoo and a grassroots movement took hold among Texans who defiantly refused to cut up their six-pack rings before discarding them.

However, by Sunday a soggy and hung-over Texas awoke feeling plum tuckered out and noticeably less defiant. Talk had turned to the wisdom of passive resistance in the struggle against Mother Nature. Sunday conversations were dominated by discussion of magazine-drying techniques and boasts of homes to be rebuilt bigger and better in the exact same spots, only with game rooms and hot tubs this time around. Other Texas discussed the feasibility of developing waterproof bubble-domes to cover houses or outfitting trailer homes with pontoons.

Meteorologists had previously predicted a few more days of heavy rain for Central Texas, followed by dry weather, but are now withholding their Texas forecasts until Patrick Scott is returned safely.

Leland was a flea who was enchanted by the unlimited possibilities of life. He roamed the earth, bounding like, well really like nothing other than a healthy flea, because when you take relative size into consideration there really isn't anything on this earth or any other that jumps anything like a flea, you'd have to have some kind of super-engineered hybrid kangaroo or something with titanium knees to even get close, because even if you shot a regular kangaroo that high out of a cannon, you'd have a serious mess of kangaroo eggs over-easy when it hit the ground.

And that's just if it was a female kangaroo. A male kangaroo would spank his nuts so hard on the ground you'd hear the bark in Antarctica. And that's only if they landed on their feet, otherwise you'd just have a big kangaroo-shaped hole in the ground with some kangaroo jambalaya at the bottom of the pit. Yikes. That's the part they never show in the cartoons.

So really, I don't know how fleas do it, but those sumbitches can jump. And Leland was no different. He liked nothing better than bounding across the land, or carpet, or a dog's back or wherever he actually was bounding. That's the problem with being that small, really the downside of the coin to being able to jump like a freakin' madman without hitting the ground at pulverizing speeds, is that you're too small to really see or comprehend where you are in the big picture, if you're out in a field or if it's just some coyote's ass hair, you just aren't in a position to know. And that has to be a bummer because you can get all of these romantic concepts about where you're hopping around, all poetic and whatnot, and it can turn out that you're actually stuck in a discarded sweat sock or wherever.

But although he wouldn't have known better himself, take my word for it that Leland was in nobody's sweat sock, and he really was out bounding through some romantic field in Italy or some romantic place like that. He loved nothing more than bounding along and feeling the wind whipping through whatever it is that fleas have instead of hair. I mean, I can't imagine that they actually have hair, since that would require a scalp and I can't even wrap my mind around the idea of fleas having skin at all, that just seems wrong. What have they got? Armor? I imagine it's some kind of bug thing where their skeleton's on the outside and they're just bug paste on the inside, some kind of freaky nightmare like that. So I guess Leland had ridges in his skeleton-armor or little bumps or something he could sense the wind with, and it pleased him.

Leland spent his days bounding along, enjoying the breeze and biting things that were too big to really even see him and definitely too big to bite him back. He wasn't sure why he liked biting things, it was some kind of flea tradition that dated way back and he wasn't really the kind of flea to rock the boat on the whole biting issue. So he hopped around and enjoyed the breeze and bit things, and did his best not to get eaten by anything bigger than him. It was tough, since really virtually anything could eat him, he was pretty small and wasn't possessed of horns or poison or any kind of effective porcupine-quill-type defenses. The bigger question was what would actually want to eat him intentionally, and what kinds of things eat fleas at all.

He wasn't sure. Birds? Possible, but that would have to be one eagle-eyed damn bird to see him hopping along and swoop down out of the sky to grab him. That didn't seem terribly likely. Maybe an anteater? That seemed somewhat more likely but those things always looked pretty slow and you never exactly saw one of them flicking its tongue out at lighting speeds to snap up a bug like a frog would.

A frog! Now that was definitely something to look out for. Man, you always forget about the frog.

Leland hopped about and looked around for frogs for the rest of the day. Then he died because fleas don't live all that long.

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