Year in Preview, Part II (with Reader Mail From the Party of Love)

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Happy Day after New Year's! I hope your post-celebration headaches have all subsided, because here it comes - the Year in Preview, Part II:

July: Members of the so-called "Birther" movement, in an apparent change of tactics in their crusade to prove that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, file a federal lawsuit to nullify Hawaii's admission into the Union. "If Hawaii was never a state," claims prominent Birther Andrew Martin, "then Obama wasn't born in America. So there." The lawsuit cites as grounds for invalidating the admission that there is no specific provision in the U.S. Constitution allowing admission of an archipelago as a state. "Besides," one paragraph reads, "the whole place is full of foreigners."

August: In an eerie echo of last year's Chilean mine disaster, 27 mine workers are trapped by an explosion at the bottom of a mine in Alberta, Canada. In contrast to the Chilean disaster, however, no major U.S. network or news organization sends reporters to camp out outside the mine, and the story is relegated to the back pages of most major newspapers and magazines. "Trapped miners are so last year," explains newly appointed NBC News President Michael Bay. "We need to go bigger. Got anything that's still actually on fire?"

September: Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a former health care company CEO who promised to run the state more like a business, announces that he has solved the state's budget crisis by selling it to an Indian corporation. "It just wasn't cost-effective to remain part of the Union anymore," Scott explains. Millions of shocked Floridians are given pink slips and ordered to clean out their homes by close of business before being escorted to the Georgia border by state troopers.

October: Self-proclaimed investigative journalist Andrew Breitbart releases a YouTube video that he claims shows Attorney General Eric Holder telling an NAACP meeting that "I hate America, love socialism, and wish all white people were dead." Conservative talk-radio hosts and TV commentators immediately demand Holder be fired. Bowing to the pressure, the Obama administration announces Holder's resignation "to spend more time with his family." Closer review, however, reveals that the video is a clumsily edited montage of words from various speeches, as evidenced by the fact that in the 10 seconds of the video, Holder is seen wearing five different suits in front of six different backdrops. "Well, we did edit the video," Breitbart admits. "And no, Holder didn't say any of those things. But that's not really the point. The point is that the Obama administration are the real racists."

November: Right-wing blogger and anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller goes ballistic when she finds out that the menu for the White House Thanksgiving dinner features crescent rolls. Noting that the flags of several Muslim countries contain a crescent symbol, Geller declares the dinner to be "yet another in a long series of capitulations to Islamofascism." Geller's campaign to restore what she calls "freedom biscuits" to the dinner is interrupted, however, when she runs off the stage shrieking in terror during a nighttime torchlight rally after looking up and seeing the moon.

December: Fred Phelps and his tiny flock at the gay-hating Westboro Baptist Church announce their plan to randomly protest pre-Christmas appearances by Santa Claus because, claims Phelps, Santa delivers presents to kids whose parents are (or might be) homosexual. The first demonstration, however, is disrupted when hordes of children charge the protesters and send them running for their lives back to Kansas. "I could've warned them," one parent tells the press. "My Brittany's a sweet little girl, but I'd walk into a threshing machine before I'd get between her and Santa."


Last week, in response to the first installment of predictions for 2011, an anonymous commenter on the paper's website added his own, which was that I would die in 2011 and everyone in my hometown would celebrate. Hey, you never know...

So I suggest that the Union Pines High School Band begin learning this song for the parade: