ne the most potentially controversial stories in recent years was successfully nipped in the bud by the Bush White House and its ever-faithful assistant, the national news media, as the ongoing story of former Cheney Chief of Staff Lewis Libby's indictment, the first of a sitting White House official in history, was relegated to page 3 by bored news directors and other major Republican-driven news stories.

Libby, called "Scooter" by his many enemies, is the first and likely only casualty of the under-covered story of a White House leak, in which the identity of a working CIA operative, conveniently the wife of Bush opponent Joseph Wilson. Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was outed as a spy by a conservative columnist, and his source was traced back to the White House. While liberals hoped the 22-month investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald would reveal the dirty tactic came from a source as high as presidential counselor Karl Rove, the most the Democrats could succeed with was a guy named Scooter. And the victory itself was short-lived.

As soon as news of the Libby indictment, a potentially president-destroying story, was announced, the Cheney Chief of Staff resigned and the White House began its onslaught of less important announcements, starting with the retraction of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, the nomination of mini-Scalia Samuel Alito, and more news from the clusterfuck in the Middle East that is Iraq. To seal the deal and firmly erase the recent memory of criminal charges against White House staff, the president released a string of obscene and bizarre comments guaranteed to push the story off the page—covered elsewhere in this edition of the commune.

Democrats and White House insiders alike were surprised by the effectiveness of the Bush administration's "Operation: Bury the Story."

DNC strategist Michael Fallusmore: "Damn, but they did it good. We were a little busy basking in the glee of what should have been a catastrophe for the Bush-ites and GOP. Then we woke the next morning and couldn't find a trace of it anywhere. The news media were suddenly much more interested in the predictable choice of a conservative white guy for the Supreme Court. Real shockaroo there. But still, you have to give them credit for weaseling out of the unweaselable. I guess all we can do now is hope some reporter finds that dead hooker in Karl Rove's Toyota."

An inside source at the White House, some Bush college buddy whose phone we tapped, agreed with the quick removal of the story.

"I totally can't believe it worked," said the source, then giggled as he did a line of blow. "I suppose it would have been a hard uphill battle if all the major media outlets hadn't bought into the importance of these other routine stories and decided to shrug off the boring details of criminal and possibly treasonous behavior inside the walls of the highest pockets of U.S Government. What? Yeah, I'm completely wasted, so what? I always talk like that."

The president did his part as leader of his party and platform to diminish the importance of the story to the news media and the American people, by dressing in ugly suits, appearing as unphotogenic as possible, and keeping his comments quite limited to make for lousy B-roll for the visually oriented media outlets. Bush responded Thursday to Libby's plea of not guilty to the charges.

"Yep, yep," said the president, quickly shuffling off to a birthday party of a friend being held at a Washington, D.C. Chuck E. Cheese.

urious French protestors continued to riot over the weekend, gently overturning traffic cones and unleashing salvos of pithy wit at assembled riot police across some of the roughest neighborhoods in all of Paris. The riots began the previous week in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb northeast of Paris, sparked by what officials believe was a disagreement over food.

“Those incorrigible police buffoons know nothing of fine chocolate!� said impassioned teenage rioter Jean Touloc, only in French.

The urbane French police were overwhelmed almost before the rioting even began, requiring the French Army to be brought in last week. The army surrendered four hours later, and plans were being drawn up for a transitional government when some joker switched out the treaty-signing pen with a novelty model that laughs electronically when you try to write with it. The rioters, perhaps correctly believing that they were not being taken seriously, stepped up their boisterous chants of “We beg to differ!� and their disorderly milling-about.

The riots reportedly got out of hand on Saturday, when protestors began hurling water balloons in the general direction of riot police. French officials, however, claim that the reality wasn’t as bad as these reports imply, since the balloons were actually filled with a very pleasant brand of spring water flavored with a spritz of lemon.

Police attempted to crack down on the rioting Sunday, bringing out a top-secret book of salacious insults on loan from the French armed forces. The crowds were clearly humiliated by these witty rejoinders, but in response began a menacing chant that translates as “You are wrong, we are right, let’s not argue, let’s not fight,� which spread like wildfire all across the Parisian suburbs.

Within hours, however, the chanting had escalated to the inflammatory “You’re not right, we’re not wrong, won’t you come and sing along?� and French officials were considering turning to the UN for help, the nation’s domestic situation cart-wheeling dangerously out of control.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the French state, president Jacques Chirac went on national television late Sunday night to beg for an end to the verbal violence, acceding to the protestors’ demands and stunning the nation by admitting that yes, perhaps there are some varieties of milk chocolate that are not entirely without their charms, reversing the government’s decades-old hard line stance.

The immediate reaction to Chirac’s broadcast was a positive one, with riot officials quickly retracting a statement made my one rioter hours earlier that the hats worn by the police were neither tasteful nor well-made.

“Really, there’s rioting, and then there’s going too far,� explained riot Treasurer Philippe LaRoc. “And those hat remarks were really full-well out of line. Let’s bring this all to a close before someone says something they’re really going to regret later.�

If you see someone crying on the street today, you'll know why: The pencil is dead. After serving as the writing implement of choice for hundreds of years, the noble pencil is now relegated to the bottom of the drawer, falling behind more popular instruments such as the keyboard, the ball point pen, the fountain pen, the crayon and the bloody stump. Rest in peace, lead brother. You have served humanity sort of well.

But what happened to this once-proud utensil?

By most all accounts, the simple, elegant pencil fell victim over the years to the fact that it sucked completely. Messy, impermanent, and hard-to-read, the pencil was all the things you'd avoid in a search for the perfect writing tool.

Before the invention of the pencil, early man would often write with a carrot, which was mostly useless, but tasted good. Other good-tasting writing implements, from cucumbers to elk penises, would pass in and out of fashion over the years.

In more modernly times, people wrote using one of two implements: either a sharpened feather dipped in mouse blood, or a stray piece of chalk, coal or random feces. In 1321, Crowburton Finley of England developed a tube of owl shit that could be squeezed to form a writing implement, which was a lot like trying to write a letter with a tube of foul toothpaste. The resultant text smelled even more like dead mice than the popular mouse-blood ink of the day, and was highly popular for writing hate mail and resignation letters. Finley's company would eventually fold, however, when it was revealed that he was stooping to unethical means to obtain the owl shit.

The pencil itself evolved from the stylus, which was a thin metal rod the ancient Romans used to control their PDAs. Before the invention of the PDA, Romans used the stylus to "write" on papyrus, which was only really good for looking busy since metal rods don't tend to make any marks on paper. Eventually someone got busted over this and the Romans had to move on to lead styluses which actually wrote, and this quickly made the Romans slow and stupid because of the highly toxic nature of lead. This development necessitated the invention of the PDA, but unfortunately by then the Romans were too dull and lead-poisoned to get the software installed and they soon went back to living in caves and throwing rocks at fish and squirrels.

Lead's eventual replacement, graphite, was discovered in a big hole in the ground in England in 1564, and people immediately began building houses out of it. Soft and brittle, graphite proved to be an exceedingly poor home-building material, but the people who lived in graphite homes were quickly recognized as excellent writing utensils because of the dark graphite coating all over their bodies. Eventually, a businessman in Sweden named Marvin Johansson become fed up with the high cost of hiring "bodywriters" and decided to cut out the middleman, literally, by inventing the first "pencil" made by wrapping a piece of graphite in bologna. Unfortunately, his first several prototypes were eaten by his son Marcus, who later came down with a little-known coal mining ailment known as "black bung."

Other, smarter, inventors did Johansson one better by wrapping graphite in things like kite string and Kevlar, creating less perishable and more bulletproof early pencils. Pencils of any kind didn't really take off until 1839, however, the year that the eraser was invented. Previous to that, people used breadcrumbs to erase their pencil writing, which was only marginally effective but passed the all-important deliciousness test.

The pencil as we know it today was invented by some Japanese guy in 1860, then stolen in 1861 by a German inventor named Eberhard Faber. Faber compensated for his unfortunately convoluted name by inventing things with every breath he took on this earth. As a baby he invented the diaper stick, which instantly converted any used diaper into a proud, shit-laden flag. Then as a small child, Faber invented the chalk hammer, which pulverized chalk into small, edible chunks perfect for inappropriate snacking.

As a young man, Faber would craft his proudest invention: the mechanical pussy. This was an enormous hit until Eberhard indignantly ceased production in 1855 after learning that thanks to a language misunderstanding, Eberhard's customers were all screwing his beloved clockwork cats.

Faber named his pencil the #2; banking on the psychological fact that people believe the first version of anything can't be that good. Faber also wanted to advertise the fact that his pencils were made with high-quality Chinese graphite, the best in the world, so he painted all the pencils he sold yellow, assuring his buyers that they were made by the proud yellow people of China. Hence the modern pencil was born.

The pencil enjoyed a long heyday of popularity, and remains today the implement of choice for any writing that is almost certainly going to be erased, such as math equations, crossword puzzles, and letters to your boss demanding a raise. However, the enduring popularity of the pencil can be attributed less to its merits as a functional writing tool than to the difficulty in finding a suitable replacement that doesn't suck just as lustily.

Early attempts to replace the pencil included the much-hyped erasable ball point pen, which consisted of a regular ball point pen fitted with hard rubber nub on the cap for tearing through the paper to obliterate the words you had written with the pen. These flopped, however, because due to the tiny erasure windows torn into the paper, schoolteachers would often end up reading assignments with words from the paper underneath interspersed randomly throughout the text, leading to the rise of the Dadaist movement, which annoyed everyone universally.

Today, most adults use either ball point pens or finger-paints, depending on whether or not they've had any nearly-fatal traumatic head injuries. Modern children do all of their communicating through cell phone text messaging. This development has also led to the grisly death of proper punctuation, but dat mi frens isa colum 4 anothr dai.

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