Typically, the only way to damage the image of a breast cancer awareness organization would be to prove that it had once strangled several puppies and then damaged many priceless works of art by flinging said puppies at the art. (Flinging the puppies at art is essential, as merely strangling puppies could be justified simply by shouting “We save lives!” to distract people and then wildly brandishing pink ribbons at them.) But Susan G. Komen for the Cure—an organization renowned for giving those with breast cancer hope that anything is possible—has indeed shown us all that anything is possible by causing a deluge of anger without even strangling one puppy. The outrage resulted from Komen discontinuing funding to Planned Parenthood for their breast cancer screenings, with the rage mainly spread by the many women who use Planned Parenthood for healthcare services and by pro-choice advocates.

Before these events unfolded, Komen was perhaps best known for its sponsorship of strange, sadomasochistic events called “Race for the Cure” in which apparent masochists endured grueling foot races that could make even a breast cancer patient wince and be glad the chemo prevents her from engaging in such self-destructive, painful, and irrational behavior. Komen was also known for plastering pink ribbons everywhere, and some have argued that Komen is less a breast cancer charity than a factory for ribbons. They’ve put their little ribbons on cereal boxes, football jerseys, car bumpers, cans of soup, soup itself, dog houses, dogs, wild animals, domesticated animals, mules, etc. In their efforts to raise awareness of breast cancer, they have drowned our country in breast cancer awareness. Whether you’re eating a bowl of soup, visiting a petting zoo, knitting, or participating in a healthy game of shuffleboard, you cannot avoid being reminded of breast cancer. Even if you’d rather not think about breast cancer for one second, there is no avoiding these dreaded pink ribbons, which lurk around every corner on every object to constantly remind you that terrible things, like cancer, happen in this godless, empty universe that is devoid of purpose or meaning and that ultimately death awaits us all. And sometimes you’d rather not have these thoughts while petting a goat at the petting zoo. But Komen, with its surplus of pink ribbons, does not care if your child is crying and terrified of getting breast cancer in an uncaring universe because it was reminded of death by seeing a pink ribbon pinned through a goat’s skin. All they care about is that their organization is known, that it gets donations, and that people for some reason think that cancer can be cured by running marathons. However, owing to Komen’s disastrous decision to defund Planned Parenthood, Komen is now best known for taking away healthcare services from the underserved and needy—the women who rely most on Planned Parenthood—rather than for being a ribbon factory that sponsors charity runs. Now the only race Komen will be sponsoring is the Komen Race Away from This Organization for the Cure half marathon, a race for which record speeds are expected.

When the news first broke, Komen insisted that the decision was not politically motivated. “We decided to defund these baby-murder factories that train women to become slutty whores for totally apolitical reasons,” said a Komen spokesperson. “Our organization had recently instituted new rules for funding eligibility, which were: 1) The organization could not be under congressional investigation, 2) the organization could not have murdered countless babies in a holocaust of the unborn, and 3) the organization could not pass go and could therefore not collect $200.” However, the reason given for defunding Planned Parenthood, that the organization was under congressional investigation, was quickly challenged by everyone online who happened to run a blog or a podcast, which was ostensibly everyone. It was noted, for example, that Komen gave money to Penn State, which is also under investigation as a result of the infamous Paterno/Sandusky debacle in which it was revealed that Penn State secretly offered coaches a Minor in minors. It was also revealed that the current vice president of Komen, Karen Handel, is a failed politician with a known pro-life stance and grudge against Planned Parenthood, preferring parenthood to be completely unplanned because after all, it’s not as if something as important as bringing a new life into the world is a decision that should be made with lots of planning, and is instead a decision best made while drunk and lustily throwing yourself at a guy you just met in the parking lot of the bowling alley.

As these facts emerged, Komen was roundly and swiftly criticized all over the Internet. Even worse, after suffering a terrible blow to its image among pro-choice advocates, Komen then reversed its decision and decided to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, thereby pissing off the pro-life contingent that had been their only remaining supporters.

For now, Planned Parenthood will receive the funding from Komen, but it isn’t clear that this will continue in the future, owing to the fact that Komen is run by pro-life fucktards who may pull the funding at any time for silly politicized reasons that ultimately harm women’s health. Komen’s funding of Planned Parenthood could also be jeopardized by the fact that in another six months Komen will probably have no money left to give out as funds, and will instead be out on the street pandhandling, assuring passersby that they just need some spare change, even pennies will do, so they can catch a bus and visit their five very ill children and in no way will this money be spent on liquor or their terrible addiction to ribbons.

Some people, usually sociopaths without any sense of empathy and libertarians, claim that the government can’t do anything right. They insist that any project, no matter how simple, somehow becomes irreparably fucked up should any bureaucrat or government funding touch it. This probably partly explains why some libertarians don’t want to see any federal funding for abortions: no one likes a botched abortion.

Being a liberal, I find the assumption that governments automatically ruin everything to be a bit overstated. Governments ruin things no more or less than Wall Street bankers who bring down the entire U.S. economy. However, even my steadfast belief in the role of government is sometimes tested. The food pyramid, for example, is just one such government hack job that continually flusters me and forces me to question the wisdom of government intervention.

You see, the food pyramid is among the worst symbols ever devised. And this is including the Nazi symbol. Charles Manson and his followers must have thought they were being rebellious and inflammatory when they tattooed swastikas to their faces, but the effect would have been more chilling had they simply tattooed the food pyramid to themselves.

When I was a child, the pyramid was a hopeless monstrosity trying unsuccessfully to promote healthy eating habits. It did so with the image of a bland triangle with horizontal divisions, with the bigger lower base representing the larger quantities of grains, vegetables, and fruits we children should have been eating, and the smaller divisions toward the top representing the tastier, less healthy foods like dairy and meat that we were already eating. At the pinnacle, though, were fats and oils, with the warning to eat them sparingly. The design was busy and confusing. Instead of making me think about eating healthy, it made me think about pyramids. And then Egyptians. And then mummies. And then mummy curses. And then I got scared and ate candy because that’s what I did when I got scared—I found solace and comfort in fats and oils. Not only that, but it seems apparent the designers had never seen a Christmas tree or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which were also triangular objects. In Christmas trees, for instance, there were only crappy ornaments at the bottom, but the kickass light-up star (or sometimes a less kickass, but still better than the lower ornaments light-up angel) went at the top. Similarly, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, basic survival necessities like food and shelter were at the bottom, but items more important for a meaningful and fulfilling life were located at the top, like self-actualization and happiness. But the food pyramid inverted this tried-and-tested method in which things at the top of triangles are better than things at the bottom. At least, it attempted to invert this long-standing precedent. Instead they put grains and healthy shit at the bottom, and fats and oils and cheese at the top. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the essential stuff for survival was at the bottom, but the stuff that gave you happiness and purpose and meaning—the fats and oils and cheeses—were at the top. But the government panel that created this graphic did not consider this possible misinterpretation. They had inadvertently emphasized these unhealthy items as perfect and delicious, the pinnacle of all foods. They had unintentionally created a graphic that appeared to be saying, “Here is a pyramid with the tastiest foods put into order for you, where the tastiest ones at top are the best, and fuck those vegetables and grains at the bottom. Those are just there for support. Kind of like how the bun and the lettuce are just support teams for your meat. Now would you like some fat and oils on your burger?” And even though it said to eat oils and fats sparingly, few people in America knew what that word meant. This was America, after all. The only words we know here are money and pie. And also incoherent chants of USA! USA! USA!

To rectify this, no doubt, the food pyramid was subsequently redesigned. Instead of having  horizontal divisions, which led to the inadvertent thought that items were arranged from top to bottom by tastiness, they used vertical divisions. And instead of filling the pyramid divisions with an endless number of words and pictures that explained each division, they just left the divisions totally blank. In short, they took it from one inept extreme to the other. The overly wordy, confusing prior pyramid had been replaced with a pyramid devoid of any context or explanation whatsoever, with an unlabelled color code and a picture of a weird stick figure with weird praying mantis arms apparently trying to climb to the top of the pyramid where the fats and oils used to be. It didn’t seem possible, but the new design was an even bigger monstrosity than the old. The following image is almost an exact replica of this new and improved food pyramid, as drawn by me:

Anyone who glances at this image instantly recognizes what it means: that whoever made it is retarded. No, I can’t even say that, as it is an insult to people with severe mental disabilities. It looks as if it were made by a paraplegic dog whose mouth was stuffed with an assorted color of paints and then made to spew it everywhere. Far from resembling a food pyramid, it instead looks like a lone figure bravely ascending a mountain of homosexual vomit. This is worse than thinking of Egyptians and mummies and mummy curses. Instead it conjures up images of festive, proudly-gay vomit that has been converted into an escalator for stick figures with troublesomely enlarged appendages. And nothing makes me hungrier for oils and fats than constantly being forced to think about the gays vomiting in such a manner that poorly-drawn men can climb atop it.

Given the long and sordid history of the food pyramid’s attempts to convince children to eat healthy foods and successes in making children binge eat in fear of mummies and gay vomit, the Obama administration has rightly taken it upon itself to remedy this disaster by creating a new image that will better represent the facts of healthy eating.

Michelle Obama has already made a point to fight against childhood obesity with the Let’s Move! campaign. Savvy children are already finding loopholes for that, though. Because eating involves moving one’s mouth and hands, and because the campaign slogan only mentions moving and says nothing about eating less, several thousand kids have taken the slogan to mean they should move more by eating more potato chips. Still others have confused it with meaning they should move to a different city, perhaps one well known for its fatty, unhealthy food and from which the Obamas hail: Chicago. In short, the program has not reduced childhood obesity yet. It is no wonder that the Obamas are now trying to spearhead a revitalization of a campaign that attempts to educate people about healthy eating through images of pyramids. (And is it just a coincidence that they would be so intent on revising an image that depicts pyramids, which are found in Africa, just months after Obama had released a fake birth certificate attempting to prove that he was not in fact born in Africa? Hmm…)

The new logo has not been released yet, but inside sources have said it will be in the shape of a plate, with portions sectioned off representing the various food groups. I predict it will look something like this, given past efforts and the previous debacle of the food pyramid:

Holy shit, that’s beautiful. However, this is my own design. The real design, seeing as how the government is designing it, is likely to be an abomination equal to or greater than the original food pyramid, eating shellfish, and/or gays marrying each other. And it will probably have many of the same problematic misinterpretations. For instance, it sort of resembles a pie chart, which will make people think of one of three things:

1. Pie. Apple pie. Chocolate pie. Peach pie. Key lime pie. Pizza pie. Basically any kind of pie. And basically any kind of pie is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want this image to evoke, because any kind of pie is unhealthy and would be filled to the gills with oils and fat, if pie had gills. Thankfully it doesn’t have gills. There are too many oils and fats in pie for the gills to fit. There is no room left for the pie to breathe underwater.
2. Pi. Also known as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Also known as 3.14159265… okay, you get the idea. It is not good for children to be thinking of pi, because it will make them obese. For one, it has infinite digits, so it makes kids think they can eat infinite pies. For two, it has to do with circles, and circles are round and beautiful, leading children to rationalize their growing obese pot bellies as beautiful when in fact they are disgusting.
3. Hannah Montana. Kids will think of Hannah Montana when they see this new design for nutritional eating because they are always thinking of Hannah Montana. They fucking love that Hannah Montana. I think they should somehow try to incorporate Hannah Montana into the design to make it better and to pre-empt this thinking of Hannah Montana. Then the kids will be like, “I just thought of Hannah Montana. And now Hannah Montana is in this plate depicting healthy portions of nutritional foods to eat. That would be informative if I weren’t now thinking about Hannah Montana again.”

In summary, I am not optimistic about the prospects of this redesign convincing children to stop eating, provided there is no Hannah Montana themed element in the design. Instead of wasting time and energy and money on such crude designs, Obama should be spending money on scientific research into how to make vegetables taste like cookies. Kids eat too many oils and fats not because of failed food pyramids misleading them or failed infographics or pictures of plates. They eat oils and fats because they taste like cookies. So they should just make vegetables and fruits taste like cookies, and then also use science to make cookies taste like vegetables, and then make a picture that says “VEGETABLES TASTE LIKE COOKIES AND COOKIES ARE GROSS AND TASTE LIKE ASPARAGUS AND WILL MAKE YOUR URINE SMELL WORSE THAN USUAL.” And then they can put that on a picture of a plate or something. That will be the only way to make kids eat healthy.

Osama Bin Laden may not have been the only one to take it in the face at his Abbottabad compound. US officials have reported that an “extensive” amount of porn was found at the hideout. And as any typical male knows, “extensive” can be quite a lot. I suspect that for every thumb drive loaded with a terror plot, they’ll find 99 loaded with “plots” that are often forgotten when interrupted by random sex scenes.

Of course, no information was released concerning the nature of the pornography. This information could make a world of difference, as standards of pornography vary wildly across the world. Was this Muslim pornography, for instance? Muslim pornography is typically much tamer than Western porn, featuring titles such as Girls Gone Slightly Less Respectable, where money shots are instead replaced with the ecstatic removal of a hijab. In the more hardcore Muslim porn, women not only remove their hijabs, but are also permitted to speak and act freely…sometimes even in the presence of a stranger of the opposite sex! Thus, we should not be so quick to judge Bin Laden based on the presence of a few thumb drives labeled “Porn” and effaced with poorly drawn images of boners. In Muslim countries, even The Golden Girls could be labeled porn. Those hussies have the nerve to show their hair and ankles!

However, it is far more likely that Bin Laden was in the possession of old-fashioned American porn, the best damned porn in the world. If there’s one thing Americans still manufacture correctly, it’s porn. (And if there’s one thing that the Japaneses surprisingly do not copy and make better—and in fact make worse and highly more disturbing and tentacle-laden—it’s porn.) It makes you wonder what kind of porn Osama liked. Was he an ass-man? Did he like MILFS? Did he prefer cumshots or creampies? If the attacks on the Twin Towers were any indication, it seems clear that he at least enjoyed double penetration. (Too soon?)

Honestly, though, this should not be news. Anyone with enough money to live in a place with electricity has porn, and those who can’t afford electricity take solace in livestock. Osama, for his part, who probably spent a good deal of time in remote areas and caves before making his way to the compound in Abbottabad, probably partook in both. This would certainly explain, for instance, the great number of talking barnyard animals that frequent children’s shows, as well as their subtle resemblance to the bearded terrorist leader. Still, though, almost any man who has the misfortune of having Navy SEALS descend upon him and shoot him in the face will inevitably leave behind a hefty collection of pornography. Thankfully, most men with pornography are not self-professed religious leaders who disclaim sexual acts and immorality.

Republicans were furious before Wednesday night’s poetry readings sponsored by Michelle Obama and the White House, but for strange reasons. Most people despise poetry because it is tedious and makes no sense, but it was clear that this couldn’t be the source of the Republican party’s ire, seeing as how several of their candidates have perfected the ability to be tedious and make no sense much better than any poet, Gertrude Stein included. No, the Republicans were angry because they felt one of the featured poets was too offensive. Of course, many Republican representatives from the southern states had initially become angry at the event because it promotes book-learnin’ and creativity, two of the greatest enemies of conservative politics, but when Karl Rove and Sarah Palin focused on a particular guest as offensive rather than the whole of poetry, the other Republicans quickly fell in line with this much more reasonable excuse to find offense with anything the President does.

The event featured actual poets like Billy Collins and Rita Dove, as well as normal people who make their living in a way that makes sense, like singer Aimee Mann, comedian Steve Martin, and rapper Common. Of these guests, there was one wild and crazy guy that Republicans naturally found offensive: the black one. Granted, Rita Dove is black, too, but she’s a poet, and most people don’t believe poets actually exist, or if they do exist it’s only in a strange metaphysical sense that would be shared with unicorns, leprechauns, and the current balding King of France. Republicans are commonly offended by black people, especially when they become Presidents, because they do not share common ground and listen to crazy jungle music, which is not common in rich white person circles, so no one found it uncommon that the Republicans would be offended by Common, whose skin color makes him look like a common criminal. But come on, it’s Common! He’s about as gangsta as Will Smith. (Republicans will not understand this reference because they are all uniformly terrified of Will Smith and quickly cross to the other side of the street when they see him walking toward them, scared that he’s up to no good and will start making trouble in the neighborhood, leading to an eventual change of residence in which they are forced to live with their wealthy uncle in Bel-Air.) Republicans just wanted to stop another black man from getting into the White House.

Karl Rove called Common a “thug,” claiming that Common rapped about assassinating George Bush and committing violence against police officers. Indeed, none of this can be denied. In his poem, “A Letter to the Law,” Common speaks about abuse of power, from police officers who kill the innocent and disproportionately focus upon African Americans and crimes more prevalent in that community, to Presidents who start unjustified wars under false pretenses that lead to the deaths of millions (e.g., he raps, “Burn a Bush, cuz for peace he no bush no button”). Clearly, it is offensive for Common to demand an end to police brutality, and instead he should just sit down and shut up and pick some cotton while allowing police officers to needlessly target his community and beat him senseless. It is also clearly offensive that Common would call for the burning of Bush, because it is obviously not meant as a metaphor evoking the burning bush of the Bible, nor is it meant merely as an indictment of a war that killed millions.

Sarah Palin echoed Rove’s sentiments on Twitter, linking to an article critical of Common’s inclusion in the night of poetry, and then quickly commenting on any other thing that happened during the day in a desperate attempt to retain relevancy and attention.

Conservatives are rightfully angry about this issue. The White House is a place only for luminaries who have actually committed atrocities, like George Bush, dictators in Third World nations supported by America, and CIA operatives who have tortured innocent people. People who have only merely recited poetry about violence are not welcome, particularly if that recited violence is justified with something other than imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Plus he’s black.

With the death of Osama bin Laden, millions of Tea Party conservatives erupted into cheers, mistakenly believing that President Obama had been killed. After a long and absurd association of President Barack Hussein Obama with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden because of similarities in their names, it was little surprise that news of Osama’s death would confuse conservatives. In fact, the delusion was heightened by the realization that all of the things often associated with President Obama—like Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and the prospect of American socialism—were also long-dead.

In the wake of this momentous news, Republicans have been scrambling to find ways to minimize Obama’s role in Osama’s death. Tea Partiers refused to believe Osama was really dead because no one could prove it was really him by producing his long-form birth certificate. Mitt Romney took the religious route, calling it a miracle and attempting to give all the credit to God. Ron Paul simply ignored the news, continually ranting about the Federal Reserve instead. And Michelle Bachmann screeched an incoherent succession of slurs against Obama: “Socialism! Brown person! National debt! Libya! Nazis!”

More exciting than the death of Osama, of course, is the elation in knowing that reporting of the Royal Wedding will finally be bumped in favor of this much more important news. Now we can finally stop asking, “Did you see all the funny hats?” and start asking, “Did you see Osama’s funny hats?”