By John Semmens — Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent News
In a bid to simplify the race for who will be the next chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, former Bernie Sanders for President spokeswoman Symone Sanders advised melanin deficient aspirants to “back off. We don’t need white people leading the Democratic Party right now.”
Contrasting “the whupping dished out to two pasty-faced white dudes by the Barack to the embarrassing upset suffered by the ghostly Hillary makes it clear that the Party’s future lies with people of color,” Symone argued. She was especially anxious that “the ‘crazy yodeling white dude’ not be allowed to lead the Party into the weeds” and expressed her support “for someone like Ellison to take the reins.”
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn), an African-American Muslim from the communist wing of the Party, has already offered himself as a candidate for the DNC post. He is the second to announce his availability. Former Governor of Vermont Howard Dean, the “crazy yodeling white dude,” was the first.
Both of these men bring solid credentials into their bid to replace the scandal-plagued Donna Brazile as head of the DNC. Dean has called Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman and current senior strategic adviser, Stephen Bannon, a “Nazi.” Ellison, on the other hand, is the first openly Muslim member of Congress and a proponent of the theory that Jews were responsible for the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Symone gained some notoriety in a recent CNN appearance where she dismissed a video of Blacks beating a white man who voted for Trump as “a small down payment on the debt owed for centuries of abuse of Blacks by whites. Millions of Blacks received worse beatings from white slave owners for less cause. The white man in the video brought it on himself by voting for Trump.”
In related news, the Baton Rouge Metro Council voted 10-2 to offer a $100,000 settlement to the Black Lives Matter agitators arrested for rioting last July. The riot stemmed from a demonstration in protest of police shooting Alton Sterling as he reached for his gun during a confrontation with the officers. The riot featured vandalism, road blockage, and an assault on a police officer.
France to Pay Illegals to Leave
The government of France is offering a bounty of €2,500 to migrants who voluntarily go home to their country of origin. The €2,500 to cover air fare is only part of the deal. An additional €10,000 in financial aid is available to help them get set up on arriving home.
Didier Leschi, the head of France’s immigration office, called the payment “a bargain compared to the cost of sustaining these people via the welfare benefits to which they are entitled under French law. The €10,000 each will receive upon arrival is enough to fund a small business in their native lands.”
The “small business” Syrian refugee Muhammed al-Gougu has in mind is an immigrant travel agency. “As I see it, with a €10,000 stake I can smuggle about 50 refugees into France each of whom will qualify for his own €12,500 repatriation allotment,” he observed. “They each will pay me a fee out of their allotment. I will use my profits to expand my business.”
In related news, a study conducted by the Confcommercio group found a statistical link between increased immigration and increased crime. For every one percent increase in immigration there was a 0.4 percent increase in crime. Rather than seeing this as a problem, the Italian government pointed out that “according to this study only 40% of the additional immigrants are involved in the commission of crimes. That’s less than half of them.” A less cheery finding is that legal immigrants are twice as likely and illegal immigrants are ten times as likely as natives to commit crimes.
Voter ID Laws Rigged Election for Trump
The League of Women Voters called for the election of Donald Trump to be voided on the grounds that the election was rigged. Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters maintains that “state laws requiring voters to show IDs before they are allowed to cast a ballot unduly restrict the franchise.”
“The whole point of democracy is to allow the people to govern themselves,” Carson said. “Limiting the franchise to only those who can prove who they are narrows the base and excludes those who can’t or won’t agree to identify themselves. This conflicts with the principle of the secret ballot.”
Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. have no ID mandate. According to Carson, “this is the model the rest of the country should be compelled to adopt. Look at how many came to the polls in California where no ID has to be shown. Look at how big of a margin it was for Hillary Clinton in this state. Clearly, the mandate of the people is that she should be president. That she’s not is a badge of shame tainting our democracy.”
Whether a “no ID” system would validate or destroy the democratic process is a matter for debate. Critics of Carson’s perspective estimate that in California alone at least two million non-citizens were allowed to cast ballots. That the participation of ineligible voters might dilute the effectiveness of citizens’ preferences is a perspective shared by the 80% of Americans who support ID requirements. To Carson, though, “citizenship is an arbitrary demarcation. As President Obama has pointed out, non-citizens living in the country have a material interest in the outcome and they have a moral right to defend the time and effort they invested in infiltrating our borders from being negated by the xenophobic contingent who by accident of birth are citizens through no virtue of their own.”
Bureaucrats Order Destruction of Food Bound for Homeless Shelter
The attempt by Kookers Kare to donate 4,000 lbs. of leftovers from the American Royal’s World Series of Barbecue to a local nonprofit organization called Hope City was thwarted by the Kansas City Health Department. The food donation has traditionally fed thousands of homeless persons in Kansas City for decades without complaint or incident. This time, however, the donated food was ordered destroyed by the Kansas City Health Department.
“All of that food was uninspected, so that makes it from an unapproved source, it cannot be served to the public,” Operations Manager Joe Williamson said. “It doesn’t matter that both sides of the transaction were satisfied with the arrangement. It doesn’t matter that the homeless recipients relish getting these award-winning leftovers. The government sets the rules that everyone is obliged to obey. The fact that the disobedience on display here has been going on for years without our knowledge merely exacerbates the crime.”
Williamson insisted that “the culprits are being let off easy. We took their claimed good intent into consideration and refrained from assessing fines or recommending prosecution. Rather than lamenting our interdiction of their illegal scheme they should consider themselves fortunate they’re not headed to jail.”
Union Decries Trump Nominee for Department of Education
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education did not sit well with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on shifting control of education into the hands of students and their parents,” she complained. “This defies logic and can only lead to the destruction of the public education system.”
Weingarten dismissed the consumer empowerment concept as “a naive perspective for the delivery of as complex a product as education. Does a parent really know what’s best for her child? Can we, as a society, really afford to gamble with the future of our children? I hope the Senate will reject DeVos and demand that this vital post be manned by someone who has the same kind of expertise as every previous secretary since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.”
In nominating DeVos, Trump called her “a brilliant and passionate education advocate. Under her leadership we will reform the US education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families.”
DeVos says her advocacy of charter schools and school voucher programs “is aimed at employing the same consumer choice approach that has driven the commercial sector of our economy to ever higher levels of innovation and proficiency. The existing state-run education bureaucracy stifles innovation and has delivered a chronically deficient product. It’s time to try an approach that has worked elsewhere in our economy.”
In related news, the Silver Trail Middle School in Pembroke Pines, Florida has suspended an honor-student for using a toddler’s butter knife to cut and share a peach with a fellow student. A spokeswoman for the Broward Country school district defended the school’s punitive response as “simply following our policy on weapons.” The knife has been forwarded to the State Attorney’s Office “as evidence in case criminal charges need to be brought against the offender.”
Trump’s Direct Communication to Public Irks Major Media
Since winning the election, president-elect Donald Trump has broadcast a couple of brief messages directly to the general public over the Internet on his Facebook page. These communications have been denounced by some media talking heads.
Katy Tur of MSNBC called this “a disturbing end-run around the critical filter provided by professional journalists. It allows Trump to put his own ‘spin’ on the message and transmit it to voters before it has been vetted by those of us whose job it is to act as intermediaries.”
That Trump would seek a more direct path to communicate with Americans was probably inspired by the hatchet job the mainstream media did on him during the recently completed election campaign. So biased was the coverage that according to a Pew research study, 38percent of the general public gave the major media an “F” compared to a combined total of only 22% giving a grade of “A” or “B.”
Tur was unmoved by the Pew findings, claiming that “average people aren’t really qualified to judge us. We are the ones with journalism degrees. We are the ones with real world experience covering politics. The ignorant impressions of the man-in-the-street can’t be taken as a valid critiques of our work.”
A Satirical Look at Recent News
John Semmens is a retired economist who has written a weekly political satire for The Arizona Conservative since 2005. He says working on his satires is one of the ways he tries to honor the liberties our Founding Fathers tried to protect.
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