Vice President Joseph Biden today said that he cannot announce his decision about whether to run for president because once he makes that decision public, “no one will ever, ever care as much about anything I decide in the future.” However, in a nod to the general sentiment that he’s being “kind of a d-bag” for dragging this out, Biden said he will make his decision known “soon.” Biden and top aides say that in coming days, or maybe weeks, he will place a special invitation on a piece of foil inside a candy bar sold somewhere in the US. The person who finds this invitation will visit the Vice Presidential Mansion, where Biden will whisper his final decision into the lucky winner’s ear. Biden said a relative of his is a “huge” Johnny Depp fan, and Depp’s portrayal of chocolate bar maker Willy Wonka is one of her favorite performances. “I think adults and children who can’t vote will be equally engaged by my innovative method of announcing,” Biden said. “I’m a pretty brilliant guy, and this is another example of my brilliance. I’m a heck of a guy, I tell you, a heck of a guy.” News analysts proclaimed that Biden must be running based on this attention-getting maneuver. Other analysts said it’s clear he is not running, since the maneuver would only play up his negatives. All the analysts started buying more chocolate.

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In a dramatic shift, Canadian citizens have elected a biped to be the country’s prime minister. American members of the Tea Party said they would be angry about this development if they paid attention to anything Canada does but there’s no time for such foolishness when the United States has to put the full faith and power of its government behind moves to discredit reputable scientists, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and Miley Cyrus’ tongue, and when state legislatures across the US must develop more and better ways to disenfranchise poor people. In related news, somebody named Jim Webb told several people he was ending his presidential campaign but starting it, too.

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Unable to sign meaningful legislation himself, President Barack Obama is getting other people to sign stuff. The White House announced on Monday that 68 major companies had signed the “American Business Act on Climate Pledge.” As the name of the pledge indicates, this obliges the corporations to act like they care about creating a sustainable environment for future generations. The signatory companies will have to do things like issue press releases about incidental improvements in environmental performance, put green badges and labels on their products, and pay several dedicated sustainability officers to fly around the world and attend conferences. President Obama plans to use the support of so many large corporations for a meaningless agreement to put pressure on nation–states to sign onto a meaningless, unenforceable agreement at the upcoming Paris climate talks. Encouraged by so much successful signing, President Obama later met with representatives of the NFL Players Association and MLB Players Association to propose that all professional athletes sign on to a new “American Role Model Good Behavior Pledge.” He then visited the nearby Word of the Lord Apostolic Church and watched more than 25 teenagers sign purity pledges. When a small crowd gathered, the President encouraged more young people to sign the pledge, telling them, “Believe me, it just feels good to sign something.”

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Vice President and now likely Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is blasting Amazon for its crackdown on fake reviews. “Falsehoods are the backbone of both written and verbal communication,” Biden said. “Without words that are fraudulent, how will we ever accomplish anything?” Biden also condemned Savannah State University, in Savannah, Georgia, for its recent efforts […]

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High-ranking officials in the United Nations have become despondent at their inability to quell the conflict in Syria or to keep tensions between the US and Russia from escalating. They are preparing to announce a bold new initiative to turn things around. A new Office of Moral Property and Distribution will be created to auction off the moral high ground in any given dispute to the highest bidder. Once this possession of right is established, it will be much easier for the international body to take action and be sure it is on the side of justice. The new approach is expected to reduce by 90% the time spent on deliberations in the General Assembly and Security Council. The auctions are based on the highly successful sales of wireless spectrum and other public goods in recent years. “We’ve long known that the UN has complete ownership of moral high ground in international affairs,” said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “We just didn’t know how to turn that into any form of useful action. Now there’s a way.” The World Trade Organization and other regulatory bodies are looking into applying a similar approach to the commercial sphere and allowing companies to buy moral high ground on issues like employee rights, sustainability, and customer privacy. In other auction news, members of the US House of Representatives are considering a reverse auction for the role of Speaker of the House, in which members will have to bid what they’re willing to pay to avoid having to take on the leadership role. The lowest bid will be automatically elected.

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House Republicans announced a new direction for the Select Committee on Benghazi. After receiving criticism that they had been misusing the investigative powers of the panel to advance political interests by focusing on Hillary Clinton’s email server, the head of the panel, Trey Gowdy, and Speaker John Boehner announced today that they will turn their attention to looking into the fate of Amelia Earhart. “We’re confident we will get to the bottom of this mystery,” said Gowdy, “and find that Hilary Clinton was to blame.” The committee has an ambitious agenda after solving this mystery, including finding ways to blame Clinton for the unsolved theft of 13 masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the sexual misconduct of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and the murders of Jack the Ripper. In related news, a House member did not tell a lie yesterday. The Smithsonian was contacted in order to document the occurrence.

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Volkswagen’s US chief executive, Michael Horn, today admitted that he had known about the company’s manipulation of emissions test results as much as 18 months before the company informed regulators–let alone customers–about the issue. But he pointed out that he knew about a lot of bad things even before that. He said he knew that the grinding injustice of income inequality had been building for decades, and yet he had not stopped enjoying the fit of his $5,000 suits. He says he always knew that honesty was the best policy, yet said nothing condemnatory or even slightly negative when he learned that Vice President Joe Biden, back when he was Senator Joe Biden, had plagiarized a speech about the environment. Horn also related an anecdote about how he once noticed that his wife’s hair was sticking up in the back, making her look like she “was just doing something lying on her back,” and yet he let her walk into a cocktail party with all their friends. He admitted that he learned way back in grade school that Germany had played a part in wars that killed millions of people in the last century, and yet he had taken no action and, in fact, on several occasions had failed to correct his father when the elder Horn claimed that the Nazis had some good ideas. Horn also discussed how he believed that he was born into this world and had lived every hour of his life with a dim, possibly pre-verbal awareness of the fallen state of man and the creeping tendrils of evil that reach into every soul.

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With pharmaceutical companies increasingly reluctant to sell their products to prison systems for use in executions, another segment of American business is offering to help. The Association for Convenience Foods and Motor Fuel Retailing Retailers says that convenience store employees are often “made deceased” during armed robberies, and association member stores are offering to allow death row inmates to work night shifts at their properties in order to facilitate proper and efficient killing. Convenience store owners in Arkansas, Missouri, and Michigan propose making their locations available to correctional facilities for a flat fee of $5,000 per night. The death row prisoners would be trained in how to use the cash register, restock shelves, and project a sour attitude. When an armed robber appears, the inmate would be required to mouth off, including calling the robber a “pansy” if he doesn’t immediately fire his weapon. A medical technician will be on hand to determine if the shot was fatal, and if it wasn’t, the prisoner will simply be required to ingest a days-old hot dog to finish the job.

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A small miracle occurred in Chicago this week. Something truly unexpected that brought relief and joy to city residents. It hasn’t happened in years. Some residents thought it wouldn’t occur again in their lifetimes. A high-ranking public official was held to account for gross corruption. The former chief of the Chicago Public Schools, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, pled guilty to criminal charges for steering city contracts to a former employer in exchange for kickbacks. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who appointed Byrd-Bennet, courageously took responsibility for wearing the wrong tie today. He acknowledged he should have known to wear the red one with the diagonal stripes, not the one with horizontal stripes, a design that caused some people to make an unconscious association with those old-fashioned prison uniforms. Byrd-Bennett could be sentenced to up to five years of watching last night’s Democratic presidential debate. Indeed, the debate is also being used as part of a new gun control scheme. Instead of background checks, potential gun buyers just have to watch the full two hours of debate while consistently maintaining a smile on their faces. Anyone who can do that is deemed responsible enough to own a firearm.

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In education news, students and faculty at the University of Iowa are being told to go blank themselves by the state’s board of regents, who selected a macaroni salad to be the school’s next president. The salad is slated to take the academic reins—despite having no hands—in November even though its dressing is watered down, it lacks vegetables and protein, and completely lacks, in fact, any nutritional value. The regents continue to support the pasta dish, and have issued a statement saying if Iowans care so much about education, they should have demanded that the governor appoint regents who were qualified. The University of Iowa has a history of world-class scholarship, instruction, and research, but the regents appear to be intent on destroying all that. In meetings earlier this month, the UI faculty, the graduate student government, and undergraduate student government all voted no confidence in the regents to adequately govern the state’s public universities. The faculty further declared that even a vegetarian taco would be be a better president than this “junk-food macaroni salad.” Investigations into how a cold pasta dish came to be chosen to lead a university are being considered. The salad itself had no comment.

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The US military delivered 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian rebels overnight. However, sources inside the Obama administration are acknowledging that a purely military approach to the conflict is already a failure. As a result, in an innovative program, the administration is engaging other departments of government to try to resolve the conflict. Each department will be given munitions to distribute according to their proven, successful methodologies. The education department, based on the results of Race to the Top, will give machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers to the top 10% of high school graduates in Syria. Agriculture has proposed stockpiling weapons in warehouses in Iowa and paying warlords not to use them. Treasury is piloting a program in which Syrian bankers with adequate capital bases will be given nuclear warheads they can detonate if their cash flows are threatened. They are calling this a variation on too big to fail.

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The US military delivered 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian rebels overnight. However, sources inside the Obama administration are acknowledging that a purely military approach to the conflict is already a failure. As a result, in an innovative program, the administration is engaging other departments of government to try to resolve the conflict. Each department […]

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