Dick Cheney

• Vice President to:      George W. Bush - Republican, from Texas.
  
  
  • George W. Bush served from 2001 - 2009. He is 62, years old, as of January, 2009.
    
    
• Dates Served: Cheney served as Vice President from 2001 to 2009.
• Political Party: Cheney is a Republican, from Texas.
  
• Born: 1941.
  
• Age: Cheney is 67, as of January, 2009.
  
  
• The presidential opponents during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns were:
  
  
  • 2000 - Al Gore - Democrat - Incumbant Vice President
    
    
  • 2000 - Ralph Nader - Green Party - Consumer Advocate from Connecticut
    
    
  • 2000 - Pat Buchanan - Reform Party - Journalist from Virginia
    
    
  • 2004 - John Kerry - Democrat - Senator from Massachusetts
    
    
  • 2004 - Ralph Nader - Green Party - Consumer Advocate from Connecticut
    
    
• Campaign issues:
  
  
  • During the 2000 campaign:
    
    
    • This year the issue was the legacy of Clinton. On the one hand he had presided over the 8 most prosperous years in the nation's history. On the other hand his Administration had produced enough tabloid scandals to put Jerry Springer to shame. The Democrats ran Vice President Gore as their candidate, who pledged to continue the previous administration's economic legacy but behave in a more conventional manner. Bush, son of the former Vice President, was the Republican candidate and pleged to "bring honor back to the White House". It was difficult to come up with any real divisive issue. This campaign was one of the most civil in memory, in direct contrast to Bush's father's campaign 12 years ealier. In their debates, Bush and Gore were so polite that they almost appeared to be going steady. They even wore matching ties. There was little mud slung this time around, and both candidates agreed on most issues of substance, except for when it came to their traditional party platforms, with Bush favoring reduced regulations and tax cuts, and with Gore favoring using the new budget surplus to shore up existing programs and strengthening environmental regulations. Ralph Nader made a stronger showing this time around, serving as a thorn in Gore's side and siphoning off valuable support from the far-Left in a very close campaign. On election day the popular vote went to Gore, but the Electoral vote was a toss-up, eventually going to Bush by a very slim margin after several very wacky weeks.
      
      
  • During the 2004 campaign:
    
    
    • This year there was only one issue: Terrorism. Despite a continued lackluster economy and slow job-growth, many voters felt that national security was the most important issue and more people felt comfortable keeping Bush in the White House. The Democrats ran John Kerry as their candidate, a sitting Democrat Senator from Massachusetts, who ran on a platform of fighting Terrorism more effectively than the Republicans had done up to that point, and pledged to pursue more moderate domestic policies, such as resuming federal funding for Stem Cell research and rolling back Bush's tax-cuts for the wealthy. Bush ran on a platform of strong leadership on the world-stage, pledging to continue to fight Terrorism with impunity, and the usual references to Traditional Family Values, without being too specific. He argued that his tax-cuts had reduced the pain of the Recession and that he had more tricks up his sleeve to kick-start the economy. The wave of same-sex marriages in San Francisco and Massachusetts the previous year didn't help the Democrats, since this didn't play well in Middle America. The Democrats tried to get mileage from the fact that Bush was apparently pseudo-AWOL during his own military service during the Vietnam War, as opposed to John Kerry's distinguished service during that war and his three Purple Heart medals. The war in Iraq had become a quagmire, with no relief in site, and the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was still on the lam and taunting America on video. During the debates Kerry performed like a pro, with Bush displaying low scores for his debating skills. Kerry's campaign was effective, producing polling statistics very similar to the previous election, with both candidates running in a dead-tie right up to Election day. Ralph Nader ran again, this time as an Independent, serving once again as a thorn in the side of the Left, but he barely registered with voters, spending most of his time bemoaning the corruption of both parties. But voters decided to stick with what they were used to in Washington. Voter turnout was the highest since the first Nixon election of 1968. On Election day, when voters were asked what their primary concerns were this Election, the most common answer was "traditional values". Apparently voters felt Bush would carry the flag of tradition more strongly than Kerry, and Bush won the election with 51% of the Popular vote, to Kerry's 48%. A close election, but it redeemed him of the stigma of illegitimacy from the previous election 4 years earlier.
  
  
• Notable Facts about Dick Cheney:
  • Cheney is the baldest Vice President in 68 years, since Vice President Charles Curtis. The office of VP is usually a shaggier institution.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Methodist. Dick's comments on religion are almost non-existant. He seems to prefer talking about torture much more about his religious beliefs.
    
    
  • Cheney began his political career by serving on several minor to mid-level posts in the Nixon Administration, such as White House Staff Assistant.
    
    
  • When Nixon resigned in 1974, Cheney served on Gerald Ford's transition team.
    
    
  • In 1975 President Ford appointed Cheney his White House Chief of Staff, at age 34 becoming the youngest person to serve in that role.
    
    
  • In 1978, after the Ford Administration moved out of the White House, Cheney was elected to the US House of Representatives, representing Wyoming for 6 consecutive terms, from 1978 - 1989. (Since Wyoming has only one Representative, due to their relatively sparse population, Dick was The Man).
    
    
  • During President Reagan's 2 terms in office, Cheney served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
    
    
  • In 1989, when George Bush won the Presidential election, Cheney was nominated his Secretary of Defense, a post in which he served for 4 years, till 1993.
    
    
  • In 1991 Cheney was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor by President Bush, for his role in running the Gulf War against Iraq.
    
    
  • After President Bush left office in 1993, Cheney moved down to Texas, a state who's big oil companies appreciated his role in saving their oil supply in the Persian Gulf. From 1995 - 2000 he served as Chairman of the Board and CEO of an oil-services company named Halliburton Co. Later, while in office as the nation's Vice, Cheney was sued by the Conservative watchdog-group Judicial Watch in July of 2002. They charged that while he ran Halliburton, the company engaged in accounting fraud by artificially inflating their earnings and deceiving their investors, while at the same time Cheney collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company.
    
    In March of 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Cheney's old company Halliburton - by pure coincidence - was awarded one of the contracts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil-fires and help rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure after the US rescued the Iraqis from Saddam. So when you can't run your business in a responsible manner, you can always rely on a Republican federal government to give you a handout from the taxpayers' pockets.
    
    
  • In ######, 20000 Cheney packed up and moved back to Wyoming, since he was being considered as a possible running mate for the 2000 Presidential campaign by George W. Bush, and the Constitution is vague about the legality of a President and his Vice coming from the same state. Shortly afterwards he was promptly named by George W. Bush as his Vice Presidential running mate.
    
    
  • As of 2004, George W. Bush is America's 43rd President while Cheney is America's 46th Vice President.
    
    
  • Cheney's health was an issue in the first campaign, having had 4 heart attacks prior to becoming Vice President: the first one in 1978 (age 36), the second in 1984 (age 43), the third in 1988 (age 47) which included a quadruple bypass, and a fourth, mild one in 2000 (age 59) while on the campaign trail. He had a 5th, mild heart attack in 2010 (age 69).
    
    
  • In his capacity as Vice President, Cheney has been given much more power than his VP predecessors. In fact, Bush himself has compared his working relationship with Cheney as similar to that "between a CEO and a Chief Operating Officer". Although, he didn't specify who was who in their case...
    
    
  • On October 28th, 2005, Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby (nicknamed "Scooter" for some reason) was indicted by a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA agent during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. He wasn't indicted for the actual leak, but was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice during the investigation. It was the first time an active White House official had been indicted in 130 years, when President Grant's Vice President Schuyler Colfax had been indicted in 1875 for accepting bribes in a Stock Market scandal. Scooter's indictiment hit uncomfortably close to Cheney, and since the investigation wasn't over yet, Dick began sweating a bit more profusely than before, especially after Scooter was found guilty over a year later, on March 6, 2007.
    
    However, Scooter had no fear that there would be any actual consequences for his actions, since President Bush commuted his sentence on July 2, 2007. Just shy of a pardon, it excused him from any prison time, but still required him to pay a fine.
    
    
  • On February 11th, 2006, Dick Cheney accidentally shot a hunting buddy with a shotgun. He was on a quail-hunting trip at a ranch in Texas (presumably he was hunting the bird, and not former Vice President Dan Quayle) with a lawyer named Harry Whittington and a third person. According to witnesses, Cheney was aiming his rifle at a flock of birds who were flying low to the ground and didn't see that his friend was standing in the grass directly in front of him. Cheney pulled the trigger and hit his friend in the face and chest with shotgun pellets. The injuries were not serious and he was taken to a nearby hospital by Cheney's collection of doctors who followed him everywhere. He was the first sitting Vice President to shoot anyone since Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in 1804.
    
    
  • On February 26th, 2007 Cheney was the target of an assassination attempt while visiting Afghanistan. A car-bomb exploded outside of the Bagram Air Base in that country, in which Cheney was staying, preparing to meet with the president of Afghanistan the next morning. At about 10:00 AM Cheney said, "I heard a loud boom". He saw a large plume of smoke from outside of the base and he was moved to an underground bunker for a while. The explosion was supposedly orchestrated by Taliban fighters who were trying to kill Cheney (and was probably not an attempt at revenge for his earlier quail-hunting incident). The explosion killed 23 people, including several American soldiers, but the Veep was unhurt. He was safe to resume his quail-hunting.
    
    
  • Since leaving office, Cheney has spent his time publically defending his (I mean Bush's) Administration. Bush has almost vanished from the public stage, but Dick is surfing the lecture circuit speaking for the previous 8 years. Dick argues that if they made any mistakes at all it was that they were too meek and soft, and they should have been even more extreme. Dick probably has a hard time spelling the word "humble"...
    
    

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• The outgoing Clinton Administration staff removes the "W" key from all computer keyboards in the Whitehouse.
  
  
• Russian space station Mir crashes into the ocean near Fiji on March 23, 2001. The crash was deliberate, with the Russians scuttling their station to focus more on their part in building the International Space Station.
  
  
• US surveillance-plane and Chinese fighter-jet play bumper-car in the skies over the Pacific ocean, resulting in the jet crashing and the US plane making an emergency landing on Chinese soil. The US crew is kept in China as "guests" for 11 days and then are sent home. The Chinese also "inspect" the US spy-plane during their stay, free of charge.
  
  
• On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked 4 commerical airliners and deliberately crashed them into prominent buildings, killing thousands: one plane was crashed into the Pentagon, one plane each into the two World Trade Center towers in New York (where the final offical death-toll was 2,752 people killed in the 2 towers, of which 1,152 people were never found), and a fourth plane into a field in Pennsylvania as a result of passengers fighting them. Dick Cheney quickly disappeared from public view, spending a lot of time in secure and undisclosed locations, in case anything should happen to his boss. The US and several NATO member nations launched a massive posse and rode into Afghanistan to bring justice to the Islamic miltants hiding under rocks in that country.
  
  However, bin Laden was never captured. He managed to slip away and disappear. He layed low for the next 3 years, releasing a few audio-recordings every now and then, calling the faithful to arms. He resurfaced in a new videotape in 2004, on October 29th, just days before the US presidential election, demonstrating that he was more slippery than a greased pig, and equally hard to catch. But President Bush shrugged him off with little visible concern, since he was too busy rebuilding Iraq into a western-style democracy, but having a few unexpected problems.
  
  
• During an interview in 2002, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, displayed his downright Bushian command of the English language, when he answered a question with this reply:
  
  
  "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." (Now we know...)
  
  
• In March of 2002 Britney Spears breaks up with Justin Timberlake. The nation is stunned.
  
  
• On December 5th, 2002, South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmand turned 100 years old while in office, becoming the oldest relic ever to inhabit the halls of Congress.
  
  At his birthday party, Mississippi Republican Senator Trent Lott commited political suicide by publically stating that the country would have been better off if it had elected Thurmond President during his pro-Segregation Presidential campaign in 1948. Everyone from the President down to the Senate door-man wagged their fingers disapprovingly at him. After a few weeks of repeated apologies, all falling on deaf ears, Lott withdrew his name from the list of candidates for Senate Majority leader. He blamed "certain parties, within the Party" for his demise, probably referring to the Bush Administration's attempt to improve its image amongst black voters, by trying to distance itself from any symbols of the Old South and any associated segregationist legacies. (However, proving that no sin goes unforgiven, Trent resurrected his political career 4 years later, when he was re-elected by Mississippi to the Senate, where he became Minority Whip in 2006, during that year's mid-term elections).
  
  
• In the Fall of 2002 the Bush Administration pressures the UN to order weapons inspectors back into Iraq to look for "WMD"s (the over-user term, Weapons of Mass Destruction). Meanwhile, US military presence is steadily built up in the countries surrounding Iraq, putting the squeeze on Saddam. Some argue, that with the stagnant economy, the buildup is simply Bush's own Weapon of Mass Distraction.
  
  By March of 2003, nothing clearly incriminating was found other than a few empty chemical-warhead cannisters, perhaps due to Saddam hiding his weapons, or maybe he actually got rid of them, just to yank at Bush's chain. Regardless, on March 19th Bush ordered a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, with a surprise missle-attack on Baghdad and a massive column of American, British, and Australian tanks, numbering in the thousands, crossing the Kuwaiti border and headed for Baghdad across the desert.
  
  The rationale given by the President for the attack changed periodically from the need to fight potential terrorism (despite any clear connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda), to Iraq's neighbors needing our help defending themselves (despite those same neighbors telling America to go away), to the need to liberate Iraqis (despite America not showing any intention of freeing any other non-oil-possessing oppressed masses in other dictatorships across the globe). However, in the initial weeks of the invasion, public support for the war by American citizens hovered at around 75%.
  
  Meanwhile, North Korea resumed building nuclear warheads and openly threatened to use them agains the US. But the President chuckled in amusement at "their innocuous political maneuvering"...
  
  
• January 17th, 2003, the last surviving widow of a Union Army Civil War veteran dies: Gertrude Janeway of Blaine, Tennessee, age, 93. (She had married her veteran husband back in 1927, when she was 18 and he was 81).
  
  The last Confederate Civil War widow died a little over one year later, Alberta Martin in Alabama, on May 31st, Memorial Day, 2004, at age 97. (She had married a Civil War veteran when she was 21 and he was 81).
  
  
• On July 18, 2003, the Time Lady - Jane Barbe - died. She was the voice that was heard when calling the phone number that told you what time it is. With her passing, many Americans began arriving late for appointments.
  
  
• On July 22nd, 2003, several months after the end of heavy combat and still unable to locate Saddam, American soldiers did find Saddam's two adult sons, Uday and Qusay, hiding out in the town of Mosul, Iraq. But they refused to be taken alive and engaged in a dramatic fire-fight between US forces from their house, and were killed when the Americans eventually fired ten anti-tank missles into the house. But few tears were shed over their deaths, due to their notorious reputations for cruelty and murder. But despite photos of their bodies being released to the media, some in Iraq didn't believe it, believing that at least one of the bodies was a body-double.
  
  
• Five months later, on the night of December 13th 2003, 9 months after the US annexed Iraq, Saddam Hussein was captured alive, literally hiding in a hole in the ground near a farmhouse. 600 US soliders found him when they raided a small town outside of his home town of Tikrit, Iraq, and found him hiding in a so-called "spider hole", big enough for one person, along with some rats and mice. He was pulled out of the hole without resistance, despite carrying a gun, and looking a lot like the Unabomber. He actually spoke English when he emerged, saying "I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq. I want to negotiate". Iraqis cheered in the streets and Bush's popularity ratings promptly rose. But still no WMD's.
  
  
• On January 14th, 2004, President Bush called on America to plan to return astronauts to the moon. He called for a detailed vision for returning to the moon by the year 2020, including the building of a permanent outpost to support long-duration stays on the surface. He also called for more ambitious plans to send astronauts to Mars, some time after the moon. His plan was apparently inspired by NASA's successful Mars-rover landings that same month, in which 2 rovers began driving around the surface of Mars drilling holes into rocks. When he discovered that NASA had no serious plans for manned-missions into deep space, focusing instead on hard science, he called on NASA to change their priorities.
  
  His vision was met with mixed response, even from within NASA. No one had a clear idea of what the cost would be, but the price of $100 Billion was thrown around a lot. Former-astronaut John Glenn said that NASA's priorities should be the collecting of scientific data, like from deep-space probes, and that there was no compelling reason to send humans into deep space again, beyond the drama of the idea. But NASA proceeded to draw up plans to follow Bush's vision, relying primarilly on spare-parts from the Shuttle program to design new moon-bound space-ships.
  
  
• President Ronald Reagan died on Saturday, June 5th, 2004 at the age of 93, after a long battle with Alzheimers. Reagan had lived in seclusion for the previous 10 years, after publicly revealing his diagnosis. So he had left the public stage long before his death, but his death was still strongly felt in the country, due to his enduring legacy. He was the longest-living president in American history.
  
  
• On June 22, 2004 Dick Cheney displayed his talent for wholesome language by getting into an argument on the Senate floor with Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. After some heated words regarding Leahy's criticism of Cheney's ties to Halliburton, and Cheney's supposed anti-Catholic bias, Cheney told the Senator to "Go f*ck yourself !". This was on the same day that Congress had passed legislation increasing fines for broadcasters who used profanity on the air. A few days later, during an interview on Fox News TV, Cheney admitted to the "F-bomb" and said that he felt good having said it. Apparently this sort of language was to be considered immoral on TV or radio, but was considered a positive example in the halls of Washington.
  
  
• On July 12, 2004, the Senate released a report called "The Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq", which assessed the strength of US intelligence on Iraq's supposed weapons' programs prior to the invasion in March of 2003. The Senate's conclusion was that *all* of the intelligence on Iraq was false and and without any reliable basis. Senators claimed that, had the Senate been shown the same intelligence data that the White House had seen prior to the invasion, it would never have voted for the War. The White House's standards for reliable intelligence was far lower than the Senate's, apparently.
  
  Meanwhile, the number of American soldiers who died in Iraq after winning the war rose to 4,000 by March of 2008. The number of Iraqis killed since the invasion was estimated at anywhere from 30,000 to 600,000. The cost to the American tax-payer to build democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq ran a monthly cost of a mere $12 billon *each month*, becoming the most expensive war in history. (The first war with Iraq, by Bush I, was a bargain at a mere $61 billion for the entire adventure). Most of this money came from the US government borrowing money from banks in China. China basically became the ATM Machine for America's wars.
  
  By July of 2010, long after Bush and Cheney had walked away from their fiasco, the cost of both wars surpassed 1 Trillion dollars. Bush and Cheney continued to insist that American soldiers were sacrficing their lives to protect America from clear and present "Al-Qaeda-like" dangers in Iraq, despite the absence of any clear Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the American invasion. Presumably, American soliders were sacrificing their lives primarilly so that Iraqis could vote. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea, both nuclear-capable countries who continued to threaten America, were dealt with politely at the negotiation-tables.
  
  
• On August 8th, 2004, the California socialite Paris Hilton lost her dog, a Chihuahua named "Tinkerbell", and offered a reward of $5,000 for its safe return. The nation held its breath in fearful anxiety.
  
  A week later, on August 18th, Tinkerbell was found unharmed, at her grandmother's house. The nation breathed a collective sigh of relief.
  
  
• On October 5th, 2004, Rodney Dangerfield died of complications following heart-surgery, at the respectful age of 82.
  
  
• On October 29th, only 4 days prior to the Election, Osama bin Laden made an appearance, via a video-taped speech released to the Arab media. It was his first video-appearance in almost 3 years, disproving those who suspected he was dead. He delivered his speech seated at a desk and reading from a prepared manuscript, in an almost dignified tone, a far cry from his previous dramatic call-to-arms of the faithful. He warned Americans that their security didn't rest on any one Presidential candidate, but on their willingness to fear Islam and not meddle in the affairs of Muslim countries. He claimed responsibility for the attacks of 9/11 and claimed that he started planning the attacks back in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. (Presumably his rationale was that Israel staged the invasion with American support). He explained that his ultimate goal was to bankrupt America, "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah". Yet, Americans shrugged him off with apparently little interest.
  
  
• On November 10th, 2004, Yasser Arafat died. The long-time leader of the cause for Palestinian independence died in a Paris hospital at the age of 75, after several years of illness, most of it spent in confinement by the Israeli army, in Ramallah, the West Bank. However, his exact cause of death was never revealed, with his French doctors stating simply that he died of "a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unknown ailment". This led to many conspiracy theories pointing to death by anything from poisoning to AIDS. His full medical records remain sealed, as of June 2010, five and a half years after his death.
  
  
• On December 26th, 2004, one of the largest earthquakes in history struck under the Indian ocean, near the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It measured Richter 9.1 (with the largest earthquake ever measuring 9.5) and lasted for 10 minutes (most quakes last only a few seconds). It produced immense tidal-waves that radiated out in all directions around much of the globe, striking the coasts of Malaysia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Africa, even crossing the Pacific ocean and finally dissipating at the coast of Mexico. Every seismometer on the planet detected it, with the vibrations radating around the entire globe. The number of people killed was never known, with estimates ranging from 220,000 to 320,000 people killed throughout South Asia. The number of Western tourists killed was 2,400, with 543 from Sweden alone. Entire islands were wiped out, sweeping all inhabitants into the sea. It was the largest natural disaster anywhere in the world in over 50 years.
  
  
• On January 14th, 2005, the European Space Agency landed a spaceship on one of Saturn's moons, Titan. The probe, named Huygens, had hitched a ride onboard NASA's Saturn-probe Cassini for the previous 7 years, and had detached itself from the mothership 2 weeks prior to landing. The landing marked the farthest distance from Earth any man-made object had ever landed, over 2 billion miles away.
  
  
• On April 2, 2005 the 264th Pope, John Paul II, died. He was the 3rd-longest serving Pope in history, with a reign of 26 years.
  
  The longest-serving Pope was Pius IX who served for 31 years, from 1846 - 1878. The second-longest-serving Pope was the next Pope after him, Leo XIII who served for 25 years, from 1878 - 1903. (Technically, Peter, the first Pope, is considered to have reigned the longest, for around 34 years. But early church records are unclear, so it depends on who'se counting).
  
  
• 17 days later, on April 19th, a new Pope was elected, John Ratzinger of Germany, who took the name Benedict XVI. Ratzinger had long been Pope John Paul's right-hand man, so his election was not unexpected. However, Ratzinger was quite a bit older than John Paul II had been when he was elected, age 78 compared to JPII's age of 58, making Benedict XVI's reign likely to be a relatively brief "transitional papacy". The Vatican likes to recycle their Popes more frequently than once every 26 years.
  
  
• On May 31st, 2005 - after 31 years of silence - the idenity of "Deep Throat" from the Watergate scandals finally revealed himself. W. Mark Felt revealed publically that he was the secret source nicknamed "Deep Throat" in the early 1970's, during the Watergate scandals that brought down President Nixon. Felt, by now 91 years old, had been the number-2 man at the FBI under Nixon and he had become disgruntled after being passed over by Nixon when the successor to J. Edgar Hoover had been chosen to head the FBI. He was also angry at the way Nixon was meddling in the Watergate hearings, so he decided to squeal to the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. After many prior denials over the years that he was Deep Throat, he finally admitted that he was, and was confrimed by Woodward and Bernstein, laying to rest a long list of guesses as to who the mystery source might have been. Felt said he only now decided that his actions had been dishonorable, and decided that 31 years was a long enough time to wait. He died 3 years later, on Dec. 18th, 2008, at the age of 95.
  
  
• On August 29th, 2005, the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico were hit by a powerful Category 4 hurricane, named "Katrina", that caused massive damage and killed 1,800 people. The hurricane slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi and, a day later, storm-surges caused by the hurricane ruptured the levees around the city of New Orleans in multiple locations, causing massive flooding of the entire downtown. The entire city was ordered evacuated, but thousands were stranded in the midst of chaos, hunger, and vigilante crime-sprees throughout the city. It was America's worst natural disaster in 100 years.
  
  
• On September 2nd, 2005, Gilligan died, America's most famous cast-away. Actually, Bob Denver died, from complications following cancer treatment. He played the role of Gilligan on television's "Gilligan's Island" for a mere 3 years in the mid-1960's, but for the rest of his life he never failed to show up in public wearing the same Gilligan sailer's hat and remained the Skipper's "little buddy" into his last days. (The Skipper, played by Alan Hale, had died back in 1990, while Dan Quayle was Vice President). The death of Gilligan was a much bigger loss on the American cultural landscape than the death of the mere Supreme Court Chief Justice William Renquist 2 days later.
  
  
• On October 24th, 2005, Rosa Parks died at the age of 92, after a long illness related to old age. Her refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama in 1955 set off the entire Civil Rights movement of the late 1950's and 1960's.
  
  
• On December 10th, 2005, Eugene McCarthy died. A former Democrat Senator from Minnesota, McCarthy had run for the Democrat ticket for President against Lyndon Johnson in 1968, campaigning on an anti-Vietnam War platform, and only narrowly loosing out to then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who lost the election to Nixon.
  
  
• After countless centuries, the most important of all questions in Philosophy was finally solved on May 26th, 2006. The question was the age-old problem of "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" This mother of all philosophical conundrums was finally solved in Nottingham, England, by a geneticist, a philosopher, and a chicken-farmer. This team of self-proclaimed "eggsperts" on the subject concluded that an organism's genetics exists before the organism does, thus the genes that make up a chicken would've had to have existed prior to any chicken. One day, a very long time ago, some precursor to the modern chicken layed an egg with some kind of genetic mutation. The genes in that egg hatched to create the first true chicken, causing its genes to propagate into the next generation, on up to modern times. Thus the egg came first.
  
  Now that the ultimate task of Philosophy had reached it's completion, Philosophers around the world eagerly began looking for new jobs.
  
  However, a mere 4 years later, on July 14, 2010, philosophers around the world breathed a sigh of relief when another team of eggsperts reached the opposite conclusion, suggesting that it was actually the chicken that came first. A different group of geneticists identified a protein that chickens use to create egg shells, implying that at one time, long ago, some protein in an unsuspecting chicken mutated and created the first eggshell, prior to being layed. In this case, the chicken would have come first.
  
  This was great news to philosophers everywhere, since nothing guarantees job-security like Big Questions with ambiguous answers.
  
  
• On July 7th, 2006, Syd Barrett died at the age of 60, from complications of diabetes. One of the original pied-pipers of the Psychedelic music era in the mid-1960's, he was musically active for less than 5 years, prior to succumbing to mental illness, but during that brief time he created the rock band Pink Floyd and set the stage for mixed media, dramatically combining music and visual effects for maximum psychedelic effect. He was one of the first casualties of psychotropic drug-use, which apparently triggered schizophrenia, forcing him to withdraw into a quiet life of gardening and doing nothing for the next 35 years. Despite dropping out of society so early, his legacy lived on for decades as a shadowy mad genius, so far ahead of his time that the world was not yet ready for him. This was probably an over-statement, but it made for good Rock-mythology.
  
  
• On August 24th, 2006, the downsizing trend in the business-world extended to the universe, when the planet Pluto was officially downsized. The International Astronomical Union - a body of astronomers with special powers - met in Europe to re-define a bunch of astronomical terms and categories. This was necessary since the previous several years had seen several new bodies discovered in the Solar System, including several objects around the same size, and one even bigger, than Pluto. These bodies were called by several different names, but not "planet", since this word was traditionally reserved for the 9 bodies every child memorized in school. To complicate things, Pluto has several moons, one almost the same size as Pluto itself, making it sort of a dual-planet system. So a re-definition of words was in order. But this quickly became an emotional issue, since the word "planet" had long-ago embedded itself into popular language. But despite a lot of passionate speeches, the decision was made and Pluto was officially demoted to the status of "Dwarf Planet". As a result, there were no longer 9 planets in the Solar System, only 8.
  
  
• On November, 7, 2006 the mid-term elections were held, in which a bunch of seats in Congress were up for re-election. The result was a major shift in power. For most of Bush's Presidential term all 3 branches of the Federal government were dominated by Republicans, but on election-day the Republicans lost their majority in 2 of those branches, with the Democrats winning a majority of seats in both the Senate and the House. It also resulted in the first-ever woman to serve as Speaker of the House, since the head of the Democrats in the House of Representatives was Nanci Pelosi, from San Francisco. The day after the election Bush fired his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had been the main architect of the invasion of Iraq. The war in Iraq was the main complaint of voters, and Bush decided it was time for a change. Although this change came 24 hours too late for the Republican politicians who lost their seats. The President now faced the prospect of governing in an environment dominated by his opponents, which hadn't been the case during wartime since Richard Nixon had to deal with a Democrat Congress during Vietnam in the 1970's.
  
  The spirit of change swept across the country, even reaching into the home of Britney Spears who, like the American voters, kicked out the incumbant in her district. In her case she handed divorce-papers to her rapper-husband "K-Fed" on election day. (K-Fed's new nickname became "Fed-Ex"). She later decided to celebrate, by shaving her head, as all voters do after elections.
  
  
• On December 30th, 2006, Saddam Hussein was executed in Iraq. He was hung for the crime of having ordered the execution of many residents of a village where he had survived an assassination attempt many years earlier. With the death of Saddam, peace, Democracy and brotherly-love spread over the entire Middle East ...
  
  
• On February 8th, 2007, the socialite/model Anna Nicole Smith died, at the age of 39, in Florida. This occured only 2 days after a female NASA astronaut had tried to murder a woman in Florida, in a sordid love-triangle scandal. Just off the coast of Florida, in Cuba, Fidel Castro was reported to be recovering from surgery. The nation suspected a secret connection...
  
  
• On April 20, 2007, for possibly the first time ever, the Catholic Church retracted a theological doctrine. For centuries, the Catholic Church had taught that babies who died without being baptized could never enter heaven. Since baptism washes away the original sin that all babies are said to be born with, babies who died unbaptized entered the afterlife still stained with original sin, and thus could never enter the presence of God. Originally it was believed that these babies went straight to Hell, as was argued by St. Augustine. But during the Middle Ages the Church came up with the idea of Limbo, a 4th state of the afterlife, somewhere between Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, where all such babies existed in a state of Bliss, but forever separated from God. Prior to his death, Pope John Paul II ordered an investigation into possibly retracting this doctrine, since it had no Scriptural basis. This study was concluded under Pope Benedict, who approved it, placing Limbo in the trash-heap of Church history.
  
  
• On Monday, July 30th, 2007 the Swedish film director Ingman Bergman died, at the age of 89. He was widely considered the greatest film director ever, with his films providing a stark contrast in the difference between Art and Entertainment, the latter being the primary output of Hollywood (Entertainment makes a lot more money than Art ever will). It would be a long time before the likes of him are ever seen again.
  
  
• On March 19, 2008 the British author Arthur C. Clarke died, at the age of 90. Clarke was perhaps one of the most famous science fiction authors and predicter of future advances in science. He never failed to remind people that he once wrote a short story in 1945 called "Extra-terrestrial Relays", in which he described the idea of a man-made satellite in orbit around the earth, which could be used to bounce radio signals from the earth, to be relayed to another spot on the earth, sort of like a mirror in space. This later came true when the first satellite was launched, so he therefore took credit for having invented the satellite. One of his best-known novels was "2001: A Space Odyssey", in which he described his vision of human evolution, both past and distant future. His strongly-held aetheistic views were solid to the end of his life, when he left written instructions that his funeral was to be without any religious element of any kind.
  
  
• On October 3, 2008, President Bush signed a bill passed by Congress which handed out $700 billion of tax-payer money to failed Wall Street banks, who were in danger of going out of business due to spending too many recent years issuing loans to people who could not pay them back. Since they had made bad business decisions, they asked the government for welfare checks, arguing that if they went out of business the entire national economy would fail. It was the single largest Corporate Welfare payout in history, dwarfing the mere $285 billion bailout of the Savings and Loan industry by Bush's father, back in 1989.
  
  
• On November 4th, 2008, the Presidential election took place and the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, won the election. He was the first African-American to ever be elected to the highest office in America. He won by a wide margin, and the country was filled with waves of historical significance. But he would not take office for the next 2 months, until January 20th, 2009. So he had a honeymoon period in which to prepare for his new job.