(2007-02-01) — A day after a Turner Broadcasting guerrilla marketing campaign for an adult cartoon put Boston on full terror alert, the company said it would reconsider other “edgy” marketing plans it was about to launch.

Turner had placed dozens of battery-operated light boards displaying an obscene gesture throughout each of the 10 major U.S. cities. A series of Boston bomb scares sparked by the devices forced authorities to shut down roads, bridges and a section of the Charles River yesterday.

An unnamed spokesman for Turner said the company would now review plans for the following guerrilla marketing campaigns designed to “generate buzz” about the cartoon.

- Renting a 747 painted with the show’s name and flying it past skyscrapers in major cities
- Hiring young men to show up in malls, on buses and other heavily-trafficked areas who would suddenly whip open their coats to reveal a special vest with blinking lights, and begin shouting the theme song of the show.
- “Abducting” strangers, blindfolding them, forcing them to their knees and then broadcasting their videotaped “confessions” that they love the cartoon.
- Hiring young men to suddenly stand up on buses and airliners and loudly declare that the new cartoon is “da bomb.”
- Planting hundreds of improvised advertising devices (IAD) that would suddenly flash, make a loud noise and scatter thousands of promotional fliers all over the road or sidewalk.
- Mounting a “viral” marketing campaign in which dozens of journalists would each receive an envelope containing a white powder along with a note daring the recipient to hold his breath until the debut of the new cartoon.
-Calling the White House, Pentagon, Supreme Court and other famous places and claiming to have planted a “dirty bomb” on the front steps, which turns out to be a paper bag full of dog droppings with the show’s logo stamped on the bag.

“These promotional gimmicks are designed to appeal to the kind of adult who would stay up late to watch cartoon characters who use foul language and obscene gestures,” the Turner source said.

In related news, Turner reported that overnight ratings from Boston showed TV viewership got a big boost thanks to the panic that forced citizens to remain in their homes. The company’s CNN division also saw a large increase in viewers eager to follow news of the bomb scares.

(2007-01-15) — President George Bush, under pressure from the Iraq Study Group to open negotiations with Iran, today named a lead negotiator whom he said is already on the way to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Jack Bauer, a freelance intelligence contractor and former agent with the Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU), has been dispatched to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s office for a “diplomatic listening session” aimed at determining the best way to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and shipment of arms to terrorists in Iraq.

“For some reason, people like to talk to Jack Bauer,” said Mr. Bush. “He’s a straight-shooter, good at establishing mutual understanding and I think he and President Ahmadinejad will come to a rapid agreement on terms favorable to global peace and security.”

Although Iranian government officials said no negotiations with the U.S. had been scheduled, Mr. Bush described the talks as a “unilateral diplomatic initiative that will be under way before they know it.”

(2006-12-30) — Reporter Bob Woodward said today he would soon allow his Washington Post editors to publish a secret interview he did in 2005 with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in which the dictator questioned U.S. President George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

Mr. Woodward, who recently permitted his employer to publish a similar covert interview with the late former President Gerald Ford, said Mr. Hussein agreed to the no-holds-barred chat on the condition that the transcript be embargoed until after he “retired from public life,” which he did earlier today.

“I have always thought that President Bush did the right thing when he ordered the invasion,” Mr. Hussein told the star reporter. “However, I never understood why he made WMD such a big deal. Those canisters are so easy to hide and ship, and the lab just looks like any other lab after we scrub it.”

Mr. Hussein said if he were a U.S. president he would not have “wasted 12 years negotiating toothless resolutions” in the United Nations Security Council, but would have extended the Iraq no-fly zone “border to border, and also made it a no-drive, no-walk, no-breathe zone until the Baathist regime fell.”

“If Bush’s father had tried to take Baghdad in 1991, we would have run like a herd of goats from a pack of wild dogs,” he said. “I’d be living in peaceful seclusion in Geneva now, working on my memoirs with Judith Regan, and trading old war stories by email with the exiled former leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and so on.”

Mr. Woodward said he would not comment on rumors that he will soon publish interviews with singers James Brown and Lou Rawls, cartoonist Joseph Barbera, actors Don Knotts, Jack Palance, Glenn Ford, June Allyson, Dennis Weaver, Shelley Winters and Jane Wyatt, as well as Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin and sportscaster Curt Gowdy, all of whom died in 2006 and may have been secretly critical of Mr. Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

HT: Powerline

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(2006-12-19) — First Lady Laura Bush, implicated in a scheme to cover-up news about surgery to remove a cancerous lesion from her shin, today cited the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling as legal precedent for her covert activities.

Mrs. Bush, under increasing pressure from reporters to explain why she didn’t hold a news conference to announce her impending medical procedure, said, “The Constitution, as interpreted in Roe v. Wade, guarantees a woman’s right to privacy regarding her own health.”

“It’s my body,” she added, “and I have the legal right to do with it as I please without notifying any authority.”

On a personal level, the First Lady said she had no regrets about removing and disposing of the squamous cell carcinoma.

“It was a parasitic bundle of cells,” said Mrs. Bush, “and allowing it to continue to grow would have interfered with my lifestyle.”

(2006-12-18) — House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, said today that one of the first acts of the new Democrat-majority Congress would be to rescue the bankrupt progressive radio network, Air America, and merge it with NPR.

Air America insiders told The New York Times that the network was “top-heavy with management, inept at selling ads, unwilling to make program compromises that veered from the liberal message and overstaffed with more than 100 employees when two dozen would have sufficed.”

“In other words,” Rep. Pelosi said, “Air America represents the heart and soul of our great Democrat strategy for transforming government. It’s a model that deserves, in fact requires, preservation by the taxpayers.”

The new, government-funded Air America would be merged with National Public Radio, operate as NP Air, and resolve any staff redundancies by creating additional positions with identical responsibilities.

Air America talk host Al Franken will retain his show on the network, Rep. Pelosi said, “unless he decides to return to his career as a comedian, run for the U.S. Senate, or both.”

(2006-12-17) — Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, today announced he is “humbled and grateful” to be named Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year‘ for 2006.

“When I picked up my copy of Time at the newsstand,” said Sen. Kerry, “and saw my own image looking back at me, I thought ‘Of all the great people in the world this year — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Kofi Annan, Kim Jong-Il — how can it be you, John?’”

The presumptive runner-up for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2008 said he had not yet read the Time cover story because “modesty restrains me.”

“And yet,” Sen. Kerry added, “in a way, my whole life has been moving toward this moment when the people of this nation and their leaders would say, ‘You’re the one, John’. There’s a sense of destiny, and you can’t fight that.”

In related news, spokesmen for Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards said both would appear at separate news conferences later today to reflect on their feelings after being named Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ for 2006.

(2006-12-04) — The Iraq Study Group report, available at major bookstores and the White House on Wednesday, will recommend a 12-step plan to get Iraqis to rise up and take control of their country, according to the panel’s regularly-scheduled daily leak.

The new plan would accomplish the main objective of the U.S. military presence in Iraq — a graceful exit.

An unauthorized draft copy of the classified report, released to al Qaeda through the The New York Times today, draws on the popular 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a strategic template.

“It really redefines military intervention in terms our society will find more tolerant and sensitive,” said an unnamed source. “We start by admitting that America is powerless over Islamic terrorists and that the Iraq war has become unmanageable.”

The Iraq Study Group has come to believe that “a power greater than the U.S. could restore sanity to the situation,” according the draft of the report. “We call upon President Bush to make a conscious decision to turn our foreign policy over to the care of a higher power, in this case Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

(2006-12-03) — Just a day after The New York Times released to al Qaeda a classified memo from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld regarding options in Iraq, the paper has printed the text of a second top-secret memo from Mr. Rumsfeld to President George Bush.

While the first document dealt with potential tactical adjustments in fighting terrorists, the second offers deeply personal insight into Mr. Rumsfeld’s emotional state in the hours before his so-called “resignation.”

Like the first memo, this one presents a starkly different picture of the man the world knows only from his tough-talking Pentagon news conferences.

Below are a few excerpts from the text of the second Rumsfeld memo which was written the morning after Democrats took control of Congress…

“As you know, Mr. President, this job been an emotional rollercoaster for me. Seems like only yesterday Paul Bremer said “We got him” and then you, me, Cheney and Condi danced till dawn. Ah, yesterday…all my troubles seemed so far away.”

“Of course, reality set in when we learned that it would have been cheaper just to buy the oil from Saddam, than to overthrow his government.”

“I’m now up to two packs a day of Kleenex…just weepy all the time…Why is this happening? What’s wrong with me? I can barely stand to look at myself in the mirror, and I only tolerate it long enough to shave, mask and moisturize.”

“Mr. President, I admire your resolve and I want to believe it when you tell me that victory against Islamic terrorists is better than defeat. But then I read The New York Times or watch CNN and I just want to curl up in the fetal position and rock, and rock, and rock.”

“I’m sure you realize that the options I outlined in my last memo were really just a cry for help from a man at the end of his rope. I no longer know what ‘the course’ is, let alone how to ’stay’ it.”

“I’m beginning to think maybe Jack Murtha is right that the only way to win in Iraq is to intentionally lose, so at least we can say we accomplished what we were trying to do.”

“I can hear my mother’s voice saying, ‘Pull up your socks, Donny, and give it another go’. But my inner child tells me to just pull the quilt up over my head, and listen to the soothing sound of Rosie and the girls on The View.”

Sign me…Perplexed at the Pentagon

(2006-11-30) — As copies of the still-secret Iraq Study Group report recommending a “gradual but meaningful” reduction in U.S. troops leaked from security-cleared officials to the news media, President George Bush said he’s hoping to get his own copy of the report for Christmas.

“I’ve asked Santa Clause and Laura for one,” said Mr. Bush, “but if they don’t get me an Iraq Study Group report, I’ll order it at dubya dubya dubya dot Amazon dot com, on the internets.”

The president added that he’s about to release his own report calling for a “gradual but meaningful reduction in the number of traitors within our government who leak information to the enemy through the news media.”