he White House announced a daring new plan this week to address the nation's ballooning health care costs, which are crippling employers and causing otherwise sensible Americans to talk about national health care like dirty fucking socialists. By making poor health a law-enforcement issue, Washington hopes to get tough on the sick with bold mandatory sentencing for citizens convicted of harboring cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

"It's time to stamp out this national cancer," announced President Bush to a menagerie of stuffed animals standing in for reporters who thought the subject of the press conference tipped off an obvious gag invite. "And that's a convenient metaphor, or Similac, because I'm actually talking about cancer. And diabetes. Uh, heart disease… what are some of the other ones? The shits. Definitely got to stamp out the shits."

The new "War on Illness" will integrate aspects of several national programs aimed at ending GDP-draining sickness, including "Get Tough on Cancer," "Zero Tolerance for Juvenile Diabetes" and "Not in My Neighborhood: StrokeBusters." Supporters hope the new initiatives will sweep America's streets clean of the sickly and infirm, and keep future generations safe from the social decay caused by sick people.

"If you choose to get terminally ill, well, that's a mistake you're going to regret," crowed Judge Thomas Redbone in support of the plan, posing with an impressively oversized gavel. "No longer can we tolerate this blight on our neighborhoods or the threat it poses to our children."

Under the guidelines of the new plan, a first offense for harboring cancer, diabetes, pneumonia or other Class 5 controlled illnesses will trigger a mandatory five-year sentence, with repeat offenders coming out of cancer remission to receive life without the possibility of parole. The death penalty remains a possibility should the disease be diagnosed as fatal. Even more controversial is the plan's call for strict "Three Strikes and You're Out" sentencing for perpetrators of mental illness, to deal with wayward individuals lacking the willpower or strength of character to stay sane.

While predictably receiving criticism from the sick and terminally liberal, Bush's plan is already garnering widespread support from Americans tired of worrying about their kids falling victim to this societal scourge, and those who worry they themselves could one day be robbed by a sick person desperate for health care.

"It's a tough law, but fair," conceded June Striber, a former cancer sufferer now in remission. June hopes that with God's help, she'll remain on the right side of the law.

Critics question how Bush intends to implement the plan without addressing the problem of our nation's already overcrowded prisons. The president quelled these concerns with news that the incarceration overflow will be handled by converting schools closed due to recent education cutbacks into prisons, as well as GM factories shuttered due to overseas outsourcing and museums no one was visiting anyway. According to the president, even further room for sickly inmates can easily be found in abandoned K-Marts and in failed dot-com office space nationwide.

he world of professional spelling garnered national attention this week, as well as controversy, when under-age spelling wunderkind Anurag Kashyap went first in the National Spelling League draft to the Anaheim Syllables. Kashyap is the youngest wordsmith to ever skip college and high school to go straight to the pros.

Pro spelling has had to face criticism from those who claim the major leagues have gone after younger and younger wordsmiths ever since the formation of the National Spelling League in 1998. Detractors claim the NSL is luring away some of America's brightest young minds from academic careers that could help them in the non-spelling world.

Mere mortal Kashyap was selected from among 150 other stellar spellers for a lead position on California's Anaheim Syllables, a major contender in the Eastern division of national spellers. In previous drafts, students as young as 15 have skipped completion of high school and college to enter professional league spelling, but Kashyap, a "spelling monster," according to sports writers, will be foregoing high school and college in entirety for a 3-year $18 million contract.

"People raise hell when an athlete, or even a mathlete skip college to go pro," said Kashyap's coach, Oxford Associate Professor of Spelling Chip Bustero, "but these are Anurag's prime spelling years. He's only got another few years of language mastery before the memory starts to go. Every year he puts off going pro he not only loses that salary, but all the lucrative endorsement deals. Nike is thinking about going into notebook and paper production—Anurag's just the kind of brainiac they're looking for to promote those products. And we're already in talks with Bic and Pilot. Whoever's got the deeper pockets can lock in a deal now, before he really puts professional spelling on the map."

However, opponents among the living argue that word jockeys like Kashyap not only lose college opportunities and training for careers outside the spelling world, but other prospects, like being a part of the 2008 Olympics spelling team. Spelling Coach to the American Olympic team Ruben Fartstarter expressed worry about the future of Olympic spelling if other star Englishologists like Kashyap lose eligibility.

"We were beginning to make real headway in the 2004 Olympiad. Then Hattie Page and Yukio Konichi both go for top dollar to the Seattle Suffixes and the Pittsburgh Homonyms, respectively. We're losing top talent and the word nerds of tomorrow aren't even going to college teams anymore. We were ranked third to England and Australia last time, which means we're only beating countries that don't speak English. Can you imagine a few under-scoring amateurs getting up on a stage in front of the whole world and misspelling 'misspell'? We'll look quite the fools."

The potential scandal comes at the worst time for the new professional sport, following accusations over the last few months that some of the sport's most notable stars have been taking spelling-enhancing drugs. The damaging allegations came in the form of a book by 19-year-old retired San Francisco Palindromes speller Anita Watt, I Before E Except After Steroids. Also in the book are damning accusations of excessive alcohol use and well-known spellers taking cocaine, even during the 2004 Olympics, including harrowing descriptions of all-night "speed-spelling" matches.

Every one of you are cordially invited to attend the wedding of Rockwell T. Finger and Rutherford Ginger Baker this Sunday, at the Flatbush Mall of 'Merica. Invited, of course, as long as you actually receive one of those little cardboard notes saying you can come. They all should be in the mail by now, according to Ginger. They are handwritten, so we can save all the money for the honeymoon in Haiti. We are going there to save money for buying something we really want, like solid gold dollar-sign rims for our automobile.

If you haven't received an invitation, it probably means you're shit out of luck. We'll be sending out the shit-out-of-luck cards tomorrow, to verify to everyone. There are a lot of those. But fewer guests mean more catered food for us and our eight or nine close friends we invited.

Unfortunately, someone—I think that no-goodnik Omar Bricks, or probably one of those other many, many no-goodniks who work here, posted our wedding invitation on the commune bulletin board. Ginger doesn't believe many of them will come to the wedding anyway, since I'm generally hated here at the office, but we're serving fried baloney and hosting square dancing (with a real caller!) so you can imagine I'm fearing a rush of uninvited guests. Damn, I didn't want to have the squad dancing caller! Like putting an open bar at a wedding. But an old friend of mine from the Russian mob was available, so we decided to ask him.

It occurs to me only now I probably shouldn't have contacted the Russian mob again at all, given they have tried to kill me in the past for turning state's evidence against them. Let alone invited them to the wedding. I was so excited I didn't think clearly when I made up my list. Oh, well. Hopefully they'll be the sentimental sort and let our murky histories with each other slide. It's a joyous occasion, after all.

My betrothed and I have decided to write our own vows. We got off to a rocky start, but I think it's going exceptionally well now. At first, I admit, I sort of confused the vows with New Year's resolutions, promising her I would cut out chocolate and lose ten pounds by Christmas. But she corrected me, and didn't even use violence—what a woman!

So then I wrote the vows I'm using. I promise to take her in sickness and health, as long as the health outweighs the sickness by an 85% margin. I also promised to buy her a little red wagon for putting things in and dragging them from place to place; I wanted one so badly when I was a kid, and I swore then that no wife of mine would ever do without one when she was hauling groceries home from the store or doing other work-oriented wife things. I also promised her ten cents on the dollar, should we ever divorce, which I think is a pretty fair deal. You try reading that in a mall full of loved ones and see if there's a dry eye in the food court. I doubt you could find one.

Also, she doesn't know this, but I snuck a peek at her vows, too, even though she wanted to keep them secret. If you'll excuse a little bragging, I also edited them pretty cleverly. Hers went on a little too much, talking about searching all her life for a man who really understood her and would treat her like a princess, blah, blah, blah—stuff everyone's heard before, and pretty cliché. I cut a lot of that down, and I also snuck in some sexy rejoinders, just to keep the crowd from falling asleep. Like, "I also pledge to be your eternal love slave, you handsome beefstick. I vow to do the nasty nightly." Not that I want nightly nasty. The wedding's just a show for the audience anyway.

So once again, I hope to see each and everyone of you there, because I love you all like my family. That is, if you're one of the selected few who are related to me. The rest of you just ignore all that, and whatever you do, don't come to the wedding.

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