(2010-03-10) — After telling a PBS talk show host that Democrats didn’t force Rep. Eric J. J. Massa, D-NY, out of the House because he opposes their health care reform bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today said she would drive to western New York state in an attempt to persuade Rep. Massa to return to Washington D.C.

Rep. Pelosi would neither confirm nor deny that she plans to lure Rep. Massa back by offering him the powerful chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee, a post which she said would be “a good fit”, since it was recently vacated by another New York Congressman under an ethics cloud.

“We can’t afford to lose a single independent-minded Democrat from this diverse coalition,” said Rep. Pelosi. “Our party’s strength is its ideological broadness. Unlike the Republicans, we don’t march in lock-step, and force members of our caucus to back an extremist agenda regardless of the impact on their constituents or their careers.”

The Speaker said her message to Rep. Massa would be simple: “We want you back…and we love you just the way you are.”

Mrs. Pelosi said this would be her second attempt to plead with Rep. Massa to come back.

“When I first approached him in the House locker room, he was too caught up in a towel fight with Rahm Emmanuel,” she said.

(2010-03-05) — In the wake of a House panel’s 23-22 vote to condemn the Ottoman Turk empire for its alleged genocide against ethnic Armenians, the United Nations announced today it would send a multinational peacekeeping force to 1915 to monitor the situation.

“The global community must take a firm stand against genocide,” said an unnamed U.N. spokesman. “Our response will be swift, measured and effective.”

Turkey rejects the genocide accusation, claiming instead that Armenian Christians and Muslim Turks slaughtered each other in the wake of World War I. The Turkish government today withdrew its U.S. envoy for consultations after the House panel vote, and he immediately boarded a streamship for the arduous transoceanic passage.

Meanwhile, cable dispatches from Constantinople indicate that the genocide declaration was the talk of the day among street vendors and passing camel caravans in the nation’s capital.

(2010-03-05) — Just a day after the U.S. House approved a measure that would spur job creation by offering tax breaks to employers who hire, the chamber takes up debate today on a measure that would offer tax credits to businesses that “make a profit, through some mechanism of creating revenue that outstrips expenses.”

“In an economy like this one,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, “Americans expect Congress to act quickly to overcome the natural inclination of fat-cat corporate leaders to maintain the status quo, to allow sales to drop, to linger in deficit spending, and to refuse to help our country by thriving in business.”

“If we can spur your firm to hire with tax rewards,” said Rep. Pelosi, “we can certainly get it to boost the bottom line with tax credits, but only for those firms willing to help our economy by making a profit.”

The Democrat-sponsored measure under consideration would offer incremental tax credits to business which generated so-called “profits”, with the credits increasing in parallel with profit margins. For example, a business earning a two percent profit would receive a matching two percent tax credit — a four percent profit would qualify the firm for a four percent credit.

“Businesses small and large that have stubbornly hunkered down and persisted in losing money will finally have a reason to sell more, to manufacture more, and to charge more for their products and services than it costs to produce them,” said Rep. Pelosi. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill won’t add a dime to the deficit, and will create, or save, a lot of something CBO calls prosperity.”

(2010-03-04) — In an effort to break through bipartisan opposition and public discontent with his latest health insurance reform proposal, President Barack Obama today called on the Senate to “take a final, straight up-or-down vote on the U.S. Constitution.”

“The real obstacle to approval of my health care reform plan is this ancient charter of negative liberties that says what the states and the federal government can’t do to you,” President Obama said, while standing among a group of physicians dressed in white lab coats and fellow constitutional scholars in white powdered wigs.

While the president didn’t use the word ‘reconciliation’ — a parliamentary maneuver allowing majority party leaders to pass bills without tiresome and time-consuming debate — he made his intentions clear.

“The Constitution deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that the Bush tax cuts received,” Mr. Obama said. “Once we break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, we’ll have no problem passing this historic health reform legislation.”

The president assured members of Congress that, “the American people expect us to lead”, and that few would miss the nation’s governing charter when it’s gone.

“It’s not like they have time to read the Constitution or the Declaration anyway,” he added, “what with all the great new shows on TV, and funny stuff on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.”

(2010-02-11) — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad marked the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran by announcing today that Iranian government scientists had succeeded in enriching to 20 percent purity both uranium and opium.

“Our centrifuges have been humming, hum, hum, hum, hummmmm,” said Mr. Ahmadinejad, smiling broadly before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of loyalists, who cheered despite being ringed by armed Revolutionary Guard soldiers compelling them to cheer. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is now a nuclear state, and a super-duclear state — a mega-huplear, kafuplear, snuplear state.”

Gazing off into the distant future, the president assured his people and the global community that Iran has no intention of building a bomb with enriched uranium, nor of using the enriched opium for anything other than peaceful purposes.

From Mr. Ahmadinejad’s high perch behind the podium, he told the crowd that they appeared to surge and sway before him “like a Van Gogh painting colliding with an Escher print on the set of Avatar to the tune of Terrapin Station…are you knowing what meaning I am saying?”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency said it he had carefully monitored the centrifuges at Natanz, from a “night spot” in Tehran, just a couple of hundred miles away.

“I was as shocked as anyone,” said the unnamed IAEA official. “Since sanctions have not restrained Iran from its nuclear ambitions, I’m dispatching a cable to New York presently recommending more sanctions.”

Examiner Columnist Scott Ott, editor of the world’s leading family-friendly news satire site, ScrappleFace.com, announced Thursday he was “stepping away from my important journalistic endeavors at The Washington Examiner in order to spend more time with the man who has been the inspiration for so much of my work, President Obama.”

[READ THE REST at Washington Examiner]

The National Organization for Women on Monday called on CBS to yank a pro-life Super Bowl ad featuring former Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow, and it started a campaign to demand that authorities withdraw Tebow’s Heisman Trophy and pull his National Championship ring.

[READ THE REST at The Washington Examiner.]