ichael O. Leavitt, the president's pick for head of the Environmental Protection Agency celebrated his first day on the job Thursday, with the promise to "eliminate the environment by 2010, and completely mine the Earth's precious core."

When questioned by reporters if eliminating the environment should be the aim of the EPA, Leavitt shrugged and said, "I gotta do something. I wasn't put here to sit on my butt."

Leavitt was a controversial choice for the four remaining liberals in the U.S., with a history of "fuck the environment" environmental policy in his former position as governor of Utah. Accusers point out Leavitt's passing of laws preventing lawsuits against agricultural polluters and his opening of Utah wilderness to build government roads through. Leavitt, contrastly, points to large sections of forest in California and makes bets on how fast they'll go up in flames if ignited.

The EPA's new leader arrived the day after the agency announced they were dropping 70 investigations of coal-burning power plants for disobeying local or national ordinances for output of pollutants. Leavitt confirmed Thursday it was part of the EPA's new policy, "I didn't see it. Did you see it?"

"The enviro-nuts out there can complain all they want," said Leavitt, munching on a California condor egg salad sandwich, "but tell me this: Did you see anything? I didn't see it. I wasn't there when they supposedly dumped all this smoke into the air. Who's to say it even happened?"

"Mmm," added Leavitt, "it's endangered-licious."

Critics accuse the White House of putting crony Leavitt in charge of the EPA in an effort to pussify the agency, part of an ever-growing trend by the Bush administration to save money and gain political favor with polluting companies by relaxing environmental laws. Leavitt has been denounced by environmental advocates before for his various outrageous plans to increase government income at the expense of the ecology. Some of his plans include lighting the Statue of Liberty's torch with real fire and allowing companies to blot out the sunlight so Americans can pay a surcharge to get it back.

Among Leavitt's most outspoken plans is to drill for fire in the Earth's core, a plan which he says could increase national income grossly and create exciting new areas of energy industry, and which opponents say will cause the Earth to collapse on itself and annihilate the human species.

"Where do we get heat from?" questioned Leavitt when he spoke at an alternative energy resources conference last month. "From coal, from gas, from the sun. We're almost out of the two and the other one is so far away we can't reach it. Coal comes from the Earth, right? Well, I'll bet you anything it's even hotter deeper in the Earth. We can take liquid magma, hot Earth core, and it can probably heat your home for a good two or three years."

When dissenters claimed the process of gutting the planet's innards would destroy all living things, Leavitt disagreed. "I say it's cheap energy. You say it's the apocalypse. The fair thing to do is let me try it and we'll see who's right."

"It's high time somebody did something about the environment," Leavitt said Thursday, at his inaugural conference. "We've been around for years and it just keeps getting worse. Everyone else may be tip-toeing around the obvious, but it's high time we destroyed it. And I'll be the one to do it, mark my words."

tories of voter apathy in this off-year election have more merit following Monday's vote in the Senate for an $87.5 billion budget for Iraq reconstruction. The spending package passed with a 5-1 ratio, but only received an estimated 6 votes among the Senators in attendance.

Using the cop-out, or "strategy" known as a voice vote, the Senate skipped the usual procedure of recording who votes for what in the record so as not to embarrass apathetic Senators and possibly damage their chances for re-election or campaign contributions.
Using the voice vote, a verbal "yea" or "nay" or "no fuckin' way nay," Senators kept their names off an official record as being for the Iraq war or against it, so in due time when the majority of the populace reaches consensus on the wisdom of the war they can finally tell us how they really felt.

Some theorize the miniscule number of Senators voting had more to due with disillusionment and disappointment in Congressional legislation, rather than a despicable show of cowardice and political tightrope-walking. For the Senators, the "seniors" of the D.C. school, they've been around the block and seen how the game is played, and their cynicism is manifesting itself in voter apathy.

"It doesn't really matter anyway," said 39-year-old Hunter Whepley (D-SC), "no one ever listens to me. It's not like one vote in the Senate ever made a difference anyway."

The words express what many feel is an unwritten truth in the Senate: Voting is for nerds. Actually, it is a written truth, if you check out the men's room in the Capitol building. But instead of being the attitude of underachieving legislators or a handful of stoner congressmen, many point to the voting record as proof the Senate no longer thinks voting is cool.

"I'm not saying anything against voting," said Montana Republican Rooton Hardsandal, "but when was the last time anybody even passed any good laws or anything? You can't change nothing. The president just does what he wants. The states all do what they want, you can't make a difference. And those assholes in the Congress, they'll vote for anything you put in front of them. Gaylords."

Pennsylvania Senator Eli Keith expressed the lack of power many Senators feel.

"Sure, you can 'yea' or 'nay' a bill until the cows come home, but you know it's got to get approval from the House, and then the dorkwad president has to agree to it. And by that time, like, a hundred riders have been attached to it making it so it's illegal to smoke frogs or something, whatever some jerks in the back think is funny. Then, if you actually do show up, and nobody does, all the other Senators hear about it and get on your jock about it. I don't really care what everyone else thinks, but I don't want to be the only guy voting besides Robert Byrd. That old fossil votes for everything. I guess when you actually get Medicare you give a shit whether it passes or not."

Some peppy strategists on other congressional committees have proposed ideas to win bored Senators back to voting, including a Senatorial "Rock the Vote" special on C-Span, with guests like Nelly and Coldplay, or luncheons with motivational speakers like Tony Robbins to espouse the virtues of showing up to vote. The problem, according to Senators who wished to remain anonymous, is all those ideas are super-lame, and organized by king dinks of Dinktopia, doing more against voting than for it.

Anyone who receives a decent volume of correspondence from the American public will be convinced of one of two things. One is that the American public is retarded. The other is that the English language is retarded. A small subset may conclude that both are true, which is a mean but highly defensible position.

Unless you live on the campus of a major American university, or are rich enough to never have to shop at Wal-Mart, it is a dangerous proposition to believe the bulk of humanity inherently stupid, because the only way off that cruise ship to hell is a Winchester round in the mouth. It is a far better thing to point your stupid-blaming finger elsewhere, and in the case of mainstream America's inability to compose a coherent sentence or spell "comeuppance," the ripest target for pointing is indeed our very stupid language.

As anyone learning English for the first time can attest, it is clearly a language designed by a wretched and miserable people. Spelling holds no bearing on pronunciation, each letter makes several different sounds without rhyme or reason, and there are no accent markings whatsoever. The letters "X" and "C" are completely redundant. Words that are spelled entirely differently (won, one) are pronounced the same, yet have different meanings. Other words are spelled virtually the same but pronounced in wildly different ways (tough, though, thought). And we wonder why people moving to our country can never seem to master the language or make a decent Burrito Supreme.

Why is this, when people the world over who have vastly inferior weapons-making technology to ours still have languages that work fine? How did we manage to screw the pooch so completely in this most basic of tasks? The answer is the English language's roots as a bastard tongue that was never intended to be taken seriously in the first place.

English originated in 600 AD when some guys who were stoned were fucking around, making up words, and it soon spread as a way for little girls to alienate their parents while they were having sleepover parties. In short, it was the Pig Latin of its day. Over the years, more people in the lower classes began to use the language, since it was seen as a cool and antiestablishment way to communicate, more "street" than the stuffy proper languages of Europe. For hundreds of years there was no proper spelling of any word in English, writers spelled everything any damned way they pleased, but eventually the fad grew too big and the squares found out about it.

One giant square, Richard "Big Dork" Mulcaster of London, took it upon himself to devise a standardized spelling of English words. The socially maladjusted Mulcaster sought to prove his intellectual superiority by arranging the spelling of words not phonetically, but rather by extrapolating their historical origins. This was precisely the kind of thing that got him his ass kicked daily back in school, and for good reason.

Mulcaster, a back-of-the-closet homosexual, was terrified of homophones (words pronounced the same), and this greatly influenced his spelling scheme. Thanks to Mulcaster, virtually any combination of letters in English can be pronounced any way the writer likes, to avoid the possibility of spelling two different words the same way and being exposed as gay.

Between 1066 and 1400, England was ruled by the Normans, an insane clan of men who all had the same first name. They demanded that everyone speak Norman French, the same half-assed dialect American tourists speak when visiting Europe. By the time Henry IV reclaimed England for the English in 1399, the only people who remembered the English language at all were hilariously senile, and their vague remembrances became the foundation for modern English. But even then the language was not done being molested: In the 1400's the printing press was invented, and printing presses were run only by foreign immigrants who didn't know constant exposure to lead-based inks gives you cancer. Since printers were paid by the line, they frequently padded out words with extra letters to make their layouts more visually pleasing and profitable. In time, these skylarkings became standard English spellings of words since nobody cared and it was raining all the time anyhow.

This hideous amalgam of modern spelling had become standardized by 1700, with the first dictionary appearing in 1755. Between 1750 and 1850 both Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster attempted to make some sense of the English language, but in the end only succeeded in adding more words, including the noun "noat" for a midget-sized ark and the verb "franklin'" for being blown off a toilet in the middle of the night by a bolt of lightning.

Shorthand inventor Sir Isaac Pitman, drawn to spelling reform by the nonsensical spelling of his first name, developed the Phonotype alphabet in 1842, which succeeded in inspiring all manner of freaks to come out of the woodwork and develop their own alphabets. When the writer George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, one condition of his will was that a new English alphabet be developed in his name, which led to the creation of the Shaw-script, a hilarious new alphabet that looks exactly like a Word document accidentally converted into Wingdings.

Subsequent attempts at "fixing" the English alphabet have been dismal failures, since even simple spelling reform makes words look goofy, and anyone who's spent twenty years learning to spell English sort-of correctly isn't about to chuck all that just to make things easier on little kids and immigrants. And so, th status kwo of th Inglish layngwaj lumbrs forwrd unchaynjd, az it haz sins 1755.

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