Prodigal Son

Hi all, you may not remember me, but I'm back. I wish I could say I was on a whirlwind global tour financed by a travel magazine, but the truth is I was declared an enemy combatant by the Bush administration and I've spent the last few months in a CIA detention center in an unspecified Eastern European country. I was kept awake by Toby Keith "music", had delicate parts of my body subjected to electric shock, and was forced to do things I'm not proud of with a glowstick and a shop vac. Needless to say they did not get any actionable intelligence out of me, and I was eventually released thanks to the hard work of my ACLU attorneys.

Anyway, you may have heard that the Bush administration recently signed a deal with India to assist them with their civilian nuclear facilities. Never mind the fact that India has refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the deal could heighten tensions in the region, with both Pakistan and China. The most interesting part of the deal is that the act was sponsored by non other than George Felix Allen (shown here at the signing, standing right behind Condi with a stupid grin on his face). Perhaps we misjudged the man. He couldn't possibly be a racist, he trusts 1.1 billion macacas with nookular technology.

MnPass

Sitting on the expressway, barely creeping forward at a speed of less than five miles per hour, I am stuck behind a rusty 1985 Chevy Impala. Every time it moves, a puff of black smoke erupts from it's low hanging tail pipe. A Mexican woman in a 1993 Geo Metro sits to the right of me, singing along to some pop song in Spanish. Suddenly, a brand new BMW SUV flies by me on the shoulder, doing at least 60 mph. Normally, that would have made me angry, but today, it got me thinking. Hey, I'm rich too, why should I have to sit in traffic like the rest of these poor slobs? This is America. Doesn't my wealth entitle me to special treatment?

Well, thank God for the MnPass! Now, for a moderate fee, I no longer have to wait my turn. I can drive ahead of all the poor people in a special lane reserved just for special people like me. All I need to do is put a transponder in my car, and a fee of between one and eight dollars will be charged to my credit card each time I drive in my special lane.

You are wondering, what is there to stop just any insignificant commoner from doing this, making the special lane just as congested as the rest? Well, obviously you need a decent credit rating to get a credit card, which keeps out a lot of the riff-raff, but the best thing is that if traffic starts to slow down in the rich-person lane, the fee goes up. That way, the worse traffic gets, the more the poor peasants will be forced to get out of my way, and move into the regular lanes, which I like to call the "back-of-the-bus" lanes, because it's just like the good old days, when they had to give up their seat in the front of the bus. The fee keeps increasing until enough of the insignificant commoners get out of my way so that I can get up to a consistent 50 mph.

God bless America!