Q: Could you please explain the recent historic tobacco settlement?
A: Sure! Basically, the tobacco industry has admitted that it is killing people by the millions, and has agreed that from now on it will do this under the strict supervision of the federal government.

Q: Will there be monetary damages assessed?
A: Yes. To compensate for the immense suffering caused by its products, the tobacco industry will pay huge sums of money to the group most directly affected.

Q: Lawyers?
A: Yes.

Q: Will the federal government also receive large quantities of money?
A: Of course.

Q: How will the tobacco industry obtain this money?
A: By selling more tobacco products.

Q: What if consumers stop buying tobacco products?
A: That would be very bad. That would mess up the economics of the whole thing. The government would probably have to set up an emergency task force to figure out ways to get people smoking again in order to finance the historic tobacco settlement.

Q: If the government really wants people to stop smoking, how come it doesn't just make cigarettes illegal?
A: Because people would smoke them anyway.

Q: Then how come the government makes crack cocaine illegal?
A: That is an unfair comparison. The tobacco industry is merely selling a deadly product; the crack cocaine industry is guilty of something far far worse.


The Ant and the Grasshopper
The Original Version:
The Ant works hard in the blistering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The New Liberal Version:
It starts out the same, but when winter comes, the shivering Grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, and ABC show up and provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to film of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Then, a representative of the NAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on NightLine and charges the Ant with "Green Bias" and makes the case that the Grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the Grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's not easy being green". Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News and tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the Grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited during the Reagan summers. Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the Ant has gotten rich off the "back of the Grasshopper" and calls for an immediate tax hike on the Ant to make him pay his "fair share".
Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act" RETROACTIVE to the beginning of summer. The Ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.
Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the Grasshopper in a defamation suit against the Ant. The case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single parent welfare Grasshopper moms who can only hear cases on Thursday afternoon between 1:30 and 3:00 P.M. when there are no talk shows scheduled. The Ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the Ant's food while the government house he's in (which just happens to be the Ant's old house) crumbles around him (since he doesn't know how to maintain it). The Ant has disappeared in the snow. On TV, Clinton is standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "Fairness" has dawned on America.

** story provided courtesy of George Blasing at Dinosaur World dinoworld@email.msn.com