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Court to Bush: Quit Doing Whatever You WantFederal justices restrict powers of unstoppable president December 22, 2003 |
Washington, D.C. Snapper McGee Camp X-Ray "prisoners of war," left bored without due process or lawyers to talk to, have taken to playing "Duck, Duck, Goose".
It was a major change in recent legal policy. Riding the coattails of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, most courts and other administrative officials have endorsed a policy of "let the baby have his bottle," (Supreme Court v. ACLU, 7281). In the past year, especially around the second anniversary of the infamous terrorist incidents, the legal wind began blowing ...
n exasperated federal appeals court dealt a severe setback to the Bush administration this week, should they decide to obey it, by mandating the president could not arbitrarily label foreigners on U.S. soil enemies of the state and imprison them without due process. The court officials also implored the president, "Please, for the sake of everybody in the world, quit doing whatever you want just because you feel like it."
It was a major change in recent legal policy. Riding the coattails of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, most courts and other administrative officials have endorsed a policy of "let the baby have his bottle," (Supreme Court v. ACLU, 7281). In the past year, especially around the second anniversary of the infamous terrorist incidents, the legal wind began blowing in another direction. The president has been losing ground on his doing-whatever-he-wants agenda.
Court decisions have been turning against the president as early as May, when following the end of formal hostilities the president sought to throw a "victory kegger" in the former palatial estate of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The court sided with congress that the palace party would violate international war time code of conduct, infuriate U.S. allies, and be distinctly unpresidential.
The court also intervened when Bush declared several of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners guilty of heresy, and wanted them put to death on national television by celebrity executioner Lee Majors, the Six-Million Dollar Man. Bush attorneys, when defeated in the federal court, addressed reporters on the courthouse steps: "It seems to me like the courts aren't as against terrorism as they claim to be."
The latest defeat is the most serious, and it appears to legal analysts we didn't bother to consult that the tide is turning against the president in the long wake after Sept. 11. In a case brought by a brother of one of the alleged terrorist suspects, the constitutionality of keeping prisoners without due process for two years was challenged and the federal courts sided with the family. According to the justices, the president cannot go around all "willy-nilly" and hold people for years at a time without the benefit of counsel. The "willy-nilly" was added by the commune, for effect.
The court, in a written decision, also implored the president to take his authority seriously and stop misjudging the limits of his power.
"We understand the need for alacrity and effectiveness in dealing with terrorist bodies," said the decision, apparently misreading the president's mastery of the language, "but the president would do well to see his presidential powers more realistically. He should read the constitution, or have a friend read it to him. He may not have been elected by the populace, but he is still not a dictator for life, and should consider his powers accordingly."
The president reportedly did not take the defeat well, and insiders say he is consulting attorneys and historians about a plan to replace all current federal and Supreme Court justices with former frat buddies. White House press secretary Scott McClellan played it close to vest when addressing reporters.
" The West Wing made this job look like so much fun," said McClellan, shaking his head and lost in thought. "All I can say is, fuck that show." the commune news, too, has undefinable powers that no court can take away. Watch us test that theory this spring when the landlord wants to re-negotiate our office lease. Lil Duncan is the commune's sex correspondent. We mean White House correspondent. Sexy White House correspondent.
 | Shock and Awe: Bagel Sweeps "Yitmotties" for Umpteenth YearAmazing win of all 'You the Man' awards stuns no one December 22, 2003 |
edia bitch and shameless self-promoter Red Bagel surprised retards everywhere with a "shock and awe" sweep of his own commune awards, the "You the Man of the Year" things. Even my own surprised ass could not be reached for comment, it was that unexpected.
In addition to his regular "Yitmotty," which already had his name engraved on it before the voting started, Bagel swept all the extended bullshit categories and ended up taking home several of the awards, although all others were smaller, like if you got them in a Happy Meal or something. Those other categories included "Conspiracy Cracking," "Website Publishing," "Brave Adventurer," "Girl Beddin'," and every other thing Bagel thinks he does reasonably well except farting the Macarena song.
"It was a great hono...
edia bitch and shameless self-promoter Red Bagel surprised retards everywhere with a "shock and awe" sweep of his own commune awards, the "You the Man of the Year" things. Even my own surprised ass could not be reached for comment, it was that unexpected.
In addition to his regular "Yitmotty," which already had his name engraved on it before the voting started, Bagel swept all the extended bullshit categories and ended up taking home several of the awards, although all others were smaller, like if you got them in a Happy Meal or something. Those other categories included "Conspiracy Cracking," "Website Publishing," "Brave Adventurer," "Girl Beddin'," and every other thing Bagel thinks he does reasonably well except farting the Macarena song.
"It was a great honor, and a privilege, to be recognized in so many different areas," Bagel might have said, had I interviewed him. "Lord knows a man is only as good as his staff, and anyone can tell you I'm no good. It's lucky I took this thing home without somehow impaling on it or winding up in an emergency room with it shoved half up my ass.
"In conclusion, I am a blithering idiot."
Quite an impressive list of nominees were submitted by commune staff members this year, including George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Legalos the Elf, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Jackson, Great White, Jared the Subway Queer, Roy Horn, Arnold Schwarzenfelder, and Howard Dean. From the confidential vote tallying sheet, lifted from Bagel's office while he was off taking a dump, we can see Bagel voted for no one other than himself for any category. Big shockeraroo there.
"I don't know, Ted, is it just me? Has there never been a worse boss in the history of the world?" said an inside source at the commune. "The guy is just apeshit crazy and I think it's time someone did something about it. If we were in Nam or a Nam movie, we'd have fragged him years ago. Either way, I can't believe I'm still working here. Let's face it: Log any time at the commune—you know this—and you might as well put 'Unhireable' on the top of your resume. This entire office is like riding a Slip 'N' Slide to hell."
In response, I assured him, "At least you don't have to write the friggin' 'Yitmotty' shit again this year, Raoul Dunkin."
Among Bagel's other accomplishments in 2003, he exposed the conspiracy behind 64-bit processors, Kim Jong Il, the Columbia disaster, and SARS. Not stopping there, Bagel also printed extremely humiliating information about his staff, including a drag queen site featuring once-beloved commune reporter Ted Ted. Not that Bagel or anybody else has a spot-clean record and has never done anything at all embarrassing in their past, and a little heads up would have been nice so all friends outside of the commune could have been warned and shit. But thank you, Red Bagel, for fucking up so many lives with so few words. Imagine what the esteemed commune Editor could have done if he hadn't been gone for half the year on some pseudo-homosexual frolic with missing-and-assumed-dead columnist Sampson L. Hartwig.
"Yeah," added Ted Ted, "you the fuckin' man." the commune news is not the man, but an incredible simulation. Ted Ted is the commune office correspondent and his legs might have atrophied in all the recent months of not moving much, but he still has those adorable wings.
| Mark Buckles Some Sort of Cockwad Everyone kind of a little relieved Bob Hope finally dead Yale bombed, Harvard too drunk to walk home Study finds low I.Q. causes lead paint eating, not other way around |
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 December 22, 2003 Volume 58Dear commune:
I’m an idiot. Let’s just get that out in the open right now so there’s no confusion on the subject. Judge me if you will, and egg my minivan if you must, I won’t put up any kind of lame, face-saving argument to the contrary. As you may have guessed, I completely forgot to send out thank-you notes for the Christmas presents I received last year. Totally slipped my mind. Didn’t even think of it until last Tuesday, when I was shopping for a Christmas bone for my dog and I suddenly realized I was the one in the doghouse. Figuratively.
My immediate urge was to correct this oversight, posthaste. I even had a box of thank-you notes and a pair of wavy border-cutting scissors in my cart when it dawned on me that Christmas, this year’s version, ...
º Last Column: Volume 57
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Dear commune: I’m an idiot. Let’s just get that out in the open right now so there’s no confusion on the subject. Judge me if you will, and egg my minivan if you must, I won’t put up any kind of lame, face-saving argument to the contrary. As you may have guessed, I completely forgot to send out thank-you notes for the Christmas presents I received last year. Totally slipped my mind. Didn’t even think of it until last Tuesday, when I was shopping for a Christmas bone for my dog and I suddenly realized I was the one in the doghouse. Figuratively. My immediate urge was to correct this oversight, posthaste. I even had a box of thank-you notes and a pair of wavy border-cutting scissors in my cart when it dawned on me that Christmas, this year’s version, is less than a week away! So what should I do? Should I send out the belated thank-yous now, only to follow them in less than a week’s time with additional notes of gratitude for this year’s presents? What if they get the first one and think this means I didn’t get this year’s presents? What if they sent me the same thing two years in a row and they think I opened it early? That’s not very nice. Should I wait until after Christmas and send dual thank-you notes? Or would that just be rubbing it in their faces that I spent a whole year not appreciating their present? Or should I just consider last year’s gaffe water under the bridge and hope they didn’t notice? But then I might have to start pretending like I did send a note last year, should it come up, and that’s one web of lies that could prove sticky. Maybe I should just say piss on it and not send any notes this year either, rather than drawing attention to the fact I forgot to last year. I could even return to sender any notes I receive, like "What the hell is this? I don’t want your charity. Asshole." Yeah. It’s times like this I often ask myself that timeless question: WWtcD? What would the commune do? Larry Belfast
Lower Bend, MODear Larry:
Thank-you notes? Jesus Pete! No time to write, Larry, the commune has about 30 years of poor manners to catch up on and time is short! Last thing we want is to get crushed under a bus tomorrow and sent to Emily Post’s own personal version of hell. Quick, how do you spell bar mitzvah?
the commune
Editor’s Note: the commune is not responsible for any embarrassing misspellings or grammatical boners on the gravestones of your dearly departed. “the commune’s Gravestone Proofreading Service” was a woefully misbegotten brainstorm courtesy of commune stone-bleeder Gay Bagel, and we must stress that what goes around should come around specifically to him some time when the rest of us are all out of pistol range.º Last Column: Volume 57º more columns | 
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Quote of the Day“Speak when you are angry and you'll make the best speech you will ever regret. Speak when you are extremely angry and you'll really regret it—all stuttering and shit, like Porky Pig. And they'll just make fun of you. I know I would.”
-Ambruce FierceFortune 500 CookieStick it where the sun don't shine—that's the only way you'll be sure it glows in the dark. Does this look like medium rare to you? Take it back or there goes your tip. If you could ask God one question, don't make it, "Who farted?" Take a self-time out this week, but don't just waste it by yourself; extract the time itself from the timeline, so you can put it back wherever you want. Lucky legends this week: Sasquatch, the Jersey Devil, Abominable Snowman, and other Bigfoot rip-offs.
Try again later.5 Phrases Guaranteed to Get You Slapped| 1. | My testicles feel funny. Do they feel funny to you? | | 2. | You're very pretty. For a man, I mean. | | 3. | Why don't you go back to the kitchen and sit on this egg until it's hatched, bitch. | | 4. | If anyone wants to suck my cock, laugh awkwardly. | | 5. | Our greatest mistake as a country was fighting to keep Texas (Texas only) | |
|   Hussein Captured! BY roland mcshyster 12/22/2003 Ho ho ho, America, there are prostitutes all over the place here at the commune offices and this can only mean one thing: It's the holiday season. Yessir, nothing brings out the holiday spirit more than the commune's Beds for Hookers program, now it its third year of keeping whores warm and full of holiday cheer. You can thank noted philanthropist Red Bagel for that one, if you're a hooker with Internet access. However, the ladies of the night aren't the only ones getting into the spirit, as I have to admit I've enjoyed my share of assorted nuts roasting on an open flame and Jack Frost chewing on my balls this week. So though it's been said many times and many ways: Happy Hanukah, commune world!
In Theaters
Cold Mounta...
Ho ho ho, America, there are prostitutes all over the place here at the commune offices and this can only mean one thing: It's the holiday season. Yessir, nothing brings out the holiday spirit more than the commune's Beds for Hookers program, now it its third year of keeping whores warm and full of holiday cheer. You can thank noted philanthropist Red Bagel for that one, if you're a hooker with Internet access. However, the ladies of the night aren't the only ones getting into the spirit, as I have to admit I've enjoyed my share of assorted nuts roasting on an open flame and Jack Frost chewing on my balls this week. So though it's been said many times and many ways: Happy Hanukah, commune world!
In Theaters
Cold Mountain
Jude Law stars as a Civil War soldier who is left for dead by his compatriots after he comes down with a bitter case of the sniffles, only to blow his nose on the odds and heroically ride a train home to see his wife Nicole Kidman, who is crippled by her fear of the 1800's. The casting director struck a coup by landing Nicole Kidman for the role of Nicole Kidman, saving audiences from the mind-bending confusion of having to remember that someone fatter than Nicole Kidman is actually Nicole Kidman for about two hours, within the fantastical world of the film's reality. Renee Zellweger is endearingly puffy as ever in her role as Kidman's supporting actress, though her character's name isn't Zellweger because that would cause a confusing plot hole, since her dad is Donald Sutherland and she's not married. Whatever, the movie was slow.
House of the Sandy Frog
Jennifer Connelly is an alcoholic former Mouseketeer and Ben Kingsley plays the retired baseball mascot horning in on her turf in this by-the-book adaptation of the Twain classic. The point of the Twain story was that when you're an alcoholic it's easy to get confused and forget whether somebody's a retired baseball mascot horning in on your turf or a horny retiree-balling Turk basking in mace, but in the film adaptation such nuances are lost and it becomes about a girl with big boobs shooting an Uzi. Thankfully.
Mona Lisa Simile
After deciding that the title Julia Roberts is Ugly Like the Mona Lisa probably wasn't going to cause any fire code violations with people trampling over each other to get into the theater, the cats with the big wigs on at Columbia decided to rechristen this dingy with a moniker that would appeal to the highly profitable faux-intellectual chick flick set. Thus the highbrow name, which is unfortunately destined to confuse moviegoers who toked their way through High School English. To recap, a simile is a figure of speech using like or as to compare two unlike things (for example, "Julia Roberts looks like a reindeer.") This is not to be confused with a metaphor (as in Kafka's thriller Metaphormosis), which is when an analogy is drawn by literally substituting one idea for another (as in "Julia Roberts has those weird alien lips that ate my dog."). Unfortunately, this bit of semantic nuance is the most interesting thing about the film, which could have been accurately but less-profitably titled This Movie Sucks Like a Beijing Hooker.
Monster
Charlize Theron headlines the role she was born to play in this adaptation of Stephen King's harrowing short story, the tale of a strange creature who looks just like Ashley Judd but somehow isn't. Christina Ricci seeks to de-creepy her image by starring opposite the vaguely creepier Theron, hereby appearing comparatively normal within the film's world. And it works, sort of. It's a Stephen King adaptation, so of course there's some supernatural nonsense going on and shit glows, but primarily this is a film about what happens when your pod clone starts getting better film roles than you do.
Paycheck
Calling a spade a spade for once in its miserable history, Hollywood isn't even trying to fool you into thinking the actors had any personal investment in this project. You might be inclined to feel a bit of righteous indignation about that, until you hear that Ben Affleck has the starring role, and then it all becomes very understandable. Wasting good acting on a scene with Affleck is like getting dressed up to go watch kangaroo boxing. I'd tell you what the plot entails but if the actors themselves didn't bother to learn it I'm not about to do the heavy lifting for about one billionth of what they get paid. Screw that.
I'm afraid that's that, America. Though I wish this season could go on and on, I don't really mean that, it's just a romantic thing to say. The reality of that would likely be hellish. So let it go, America, turn the page and before you know it you'll be gorging yourself miserably on little chocolate bunnies and wondering what in the hell happened. Happy holidays.   |
