On Monday, February 9, 2009, the cold wave that swept the nation had dissipated; scattered snow squalls and winds still pounced on portions of the upper northeast and mid-central regions, but - for the most part - the bitter weather was over, and people returned to their normal winter routines.
Workers continued to rebuild parts of Washington, DC; New York City; Philadelphia and other eastern coast cities hit hardest by the hurricane almost a year ago. Los Angeles still lie mostly dormant, but there were some signs of reconstruction along what remained of the earthquake-ravished Pacific coast. In other areas othe country, new shelters were still being built to house people still living in tents, left homeless by O.U.T.R.A.G.E. bombs just over a year ago.
On the West Indies island of St. Kitts, the Presidential Triumverate worked with dozens of O.U.T.R.A.G.E. committees to come up with plans to ressurect the crippled United States of America.
At the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, DC, newly-elected members of Congress diligently put together the new law of the land, as mandated by the people over the past year. Thousands of laws would be repealed as fresh legislation would replace archaic, convoluted, inane laws enacted by an equally inane Congress over decades of political decadence. "The people" now would have a voice in virtually every legislative decision as the U.S.A. was transformed into an authentic democracy. New technologies made such mass participation a virtual reality, and all the fresh new faces in Congress recognized that they were there strictly to obey the people's commands. From this new Congress would emerge a new motive: that of serving the common good instead of cow-towing to the corporation campaign contributors, the industrial fat-cats, and the moneyed interests that had infected American politics for so many decades. "Pork" and "earmarks" would no longer even be part of the lanugage among public servants.
In Iowa, Mike and Donna Osborn, Bobby and Lovey Boyles, Bobby Cowles, Boo and Jo Warren and the rest of the Double B crew were busy bringing a legitimate supply of "pork" to market. Phil Baker was finally back home, and he sat in his study smoking his third pack of Marlboros and reviewing monthly production reports. Janie Baker was in the smokehouse taking inventory of whole hogs ready for shipment to overseas restaurant clients.
Back home again in Indiana, Jil Adams sat in her office feverishly working on plans for her Presidents' Day celebration, while her bevy of assistants studied logistical alternatives. Lynn, Michelle, Connie, Suzan, Sally and Cathy muddled through maps, trying to create an efficient 'route' for what would become a grand Presidential Parade across America. Doc was back home, helping with the plans. Eli was behind the bar; Dar, Hooter, Ryan, Bruce and Shorty all sat at the bar chugging two-dollar longnecks. Bob Ryan and Ron Oetting sat at a table guffawing and giggling over the same verbal graffit they always giggled over.
Just outside of Seattle, "Hammy" and Lynn were adding final finishing touches to their newly-refurbished lime green bus, which Hammy had managed to wreck twice. All that was needed were a few cosmetic touch-ups, and the bus would be on the roll again, continuing its road trip to promote the legalization of drugs.
O.U.T.R.A.G.E. 'cells' of volunteers around the country were working to assemble media kits, organize public meetings and motivate citizens to get involved with this new process of government. Most of the country's skies were overcast and gray, as people looked forward to an early spring and a new infusion of national unity. "Conservative" and "liberal" labels were pretty much avoided these days, as most of the general public began to recognize how those terms had only served to divide the country. "Red" and "blue" states no longer fractured the country into political pockets; we were all in this together now, committed to revitalizing the country, restructuring our patriotism, and embracing the concept of "Equilateralism" - a nation where all people are given true equal opportunity, regardless of race, creed or political persuasion.

No one noticed them hurling their way toward Earth at what could have been a million miles per minute. It was like one minute nothing was there, and the next minute there they all were! None of Earth's sophisticated radar facilities recorded anything unusual. Observatories observed nothing out of the ordinary.

The Earth shuddered.

The whole world was instantaneously bombarded by strange, oddly-shaped spherical aberrations, all roughly the size of Goodyear blimps. Hundreds - thousands of them kept coming from God-knows-where, and piloted by only God-knew-who. Because they struck with such silent instantaneity, few people even saw these colorless, noiseless 'aircraft' as they plunged to Earth and obliterated everything in their path. In less time than it took for you to hear your last heartbeat, you - and everything around you - was gone: skyscrapers; factories; retail stores; houses; restaurants; airports; military facilities; offices; bars; apartments; banks; houses....all were annihilated immediately. As was reportedly the case at the ports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II's final days, human flesh simply evaporated. But this time there were no fires, no smoldering ruins, no charred bodies lying in the streets, no survivors with grotesque disfigurements, no remnants of animal bones or human body parts. Everything was gone....completely, totally expunged from the Earth, as if nothing had ever existed there before. In the snap of a finger, every major metropolitan area on the face of the Earth had been absorbed into the atmosphere. Nothing was left but parched earth - as if the unidentified flying objects intended to expurgate the land, freeing it from all the cement, asphalt, stone, steel, glass, brick, neon and plastic with which man had desecrated the Earth's rich, black soil and green grasslands.

Within that very instant, every major urban region on the Earth faded to black. I

From Beijing to Zurich, every major metropolitan area on Earth had literally disappeared off the face of the map, decimated by an unknown force of unimaginable power. London, Paris, San Francisco, Rome, and every other power center in the world was gone......not just demolished, but GONE. Disappeared, as if they had never been. Every financial center, political and religious mecca, resort area, industrial region and military community on Earth had been reduced to...earth. Oil refineries, coal mines, natural gas pipelines and factories were gone......not just vacated, or lying in ruins....absolutely, positively GONE.
It was as if some kind of third-dimensional force has swooped down on the Earth and sucked away all the accoutrements of man's avarice, hubris and gluttony. Virtually and city with a population of more than 250,000 had evanesced as quickly as lightning could strike, had vaporized into nothingness as it had never even existed.

Within that very instant, every major urban area on Earth faded to black. It was 4:55 p.m. EST.

In Bloomington, Indiana on December 5, 1999, Byron C. Bangert addressed the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church about "the end of the world as we know it". Cataclysmic events were what would mark a "divine rescue operation" that would save the world from "going to Hell in a handbasket". Bangert drew much of his sermon from the Gospel according to St. Mark as well as writings from the books of Matthew and Luke. He noted how Jesus Christ had predicted "suffering such as has not been from the beginning of the creation....[and] after that suffering the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from Heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken..." In short, Bangert claimed, "the whole cosmos will be thrown into pandemonium and distress. Then, and only then, the Son of Man will come to gather the elect from the ends of the Earth".
Bangert's speech went on as he surmised, "I suspect that there would be a lot more apocalyptic talk and fear.....if it felt more like our world was abut to dissolve into unrelenting disease or unrestrained violence or unbridled chaos. Here we stand on the threshold of a new millenium....and there is little that seems to trouble us more....than possibly minor disruptions caused by the Y2K computer bug. The closest we get to thinking or feeling that maybe there is something really bad that could happen to us all is when we go to the movies".
He ended his sermon with a plea to his congregation: "In this season of Advent, pray for the end of the world as we know it. Pray for the end of violence and greed, wars and rumors of war, of famine and disease run riot, of false remedies and false gods, of hatred and betrayal within families and across our divisions of race and creed and clan. Pray that no one may claim special privilege due to ancestry or religious practice, and that no one will take advantage by means of official status or social power, and that those who have more than enough will give to those who need. Pray that all will have a place at the table, whether it be the table where decisions are made, or the table where meals are shared. Pray for the end of the world as we know it. As Jesus taught us to pray: God's Kingdom come! May all flesh see God's salvation! AMEN!"

Whew!!
This prophetic sermon was delivered four years prior to George W. Bush leading America into the most illegal, unjustified, unconstitutional, immoral 'war' in the history of the United States. If any three men at the threshold of the 21st century were to be reincarnate of the 20th century's Satanists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld would most certainly be the three with "666" etched into their foreheads underneath their receeding hairlines. This evilist trio had proven to be the most morally reprehensible malefactors since the days of Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler. U.S. soldiers had been conned into believing they were sacrificing their lives to bring democracy to Iraq when, instead, they were fighting to enhance the profits of firms like McDonnell-Douglass; Lockheed-Martin; Sikorsky; and those two newcomers to the Pentagon's war trough: the Carlyle Group and Halliburton, both of whom ahd direct ties to the Bush-Cheney White House. American taxpayers had been led to believe their tax dollars were being invested to achieve peace in the Middle East, when - in fact - our troops were put in harm's way so that Exxon-Mobil and other members of the 'Big Oil' coalition could harvest those rich fields of cheap, easily-accessible OIL and continue feeding America's addiction to the black gold that had made oilmen like Bush and Cheney fabulously wealthy. A gullible, contemptible, incompetent, lazy, arrogant, cowardly, corrupt Republican-led U.S. Congress was told that the U.S. needed to abolish 'weapons of mass destruction' from Iraq, then turned its back as the Bush-Cheney satiation for power and wealth disregarded the U.S. Constitution, ignored the UN Charter, and mocked the rules of the Geneva Convention. A new Democratic-led Congress, that - in its lust for power - promised an end to the 'war' in Iraq impotently stood by during its first year in office and did little to try and stop the sanguineous carnage.
Halliburton continued to accept government contracts to construct fourteen new, permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq without the bothersome need to submit a bid. The Carlyle Group gorged itself with billions of American dollars as it provided vaguely-identified 'services' to the Pentagon. Billions of taxpayer dollars had slipped through the cracks without anyone even seeming to be alarmed; one planeload full of American currency was 'lost' and nobody even went looking for it in 2005. The bile of fraud, waste, corruption, thievery, lies, distortions, abuse, mismanagement and mass murder didn't seem to annoy anyone, not even those who had taken solemn oaths to protect and defend the people of the United States of America.
If this bastardly series of outlandish events had been a movie, its titled would have been "The Devil's Advocate - II" and Al Pacino's character would have had to been played by

North Manchester, Monroeville and Columbia City are three small rural towns in northeastern Indiana that have little in common other than their rurality. North Manchester has become a quiet community, most know for being the home of Manchester College

Four days before Christmas in 1950, unusual events were going on in the world. Joseph Stalin celebrated his 71st birthday as collective farms, schools and factories joined the press is praising the Russian dictator. The son of a peasant shoemaker, Stalin had killed almost ten million of his countrymen before his reign of terror ended. Hattie Caraway, the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, died at the age of 72. Congress predicted that final passage of the three billion dollar "excess profits tax" would be delayed until New Year's Day due to many members of Congress already away for the holidays. The Senate wanted to reduce the tax ceiling on corporate profits from 67% to only 60%, and also wanted to adopt special "relief" provisions for "growing concerns", utilities, railroads, airlines and "a host of other companies".
In their first 18 days of heavy fighting with Chinese Communist troops, U.S. casualties mounted to 11,964 in North Korea. The toll for November 24 thru December 12 raised the number of American dead, wounded or missing to 42,992 since the outbreak of the Korean War. Other UN units, exclusive of South Korea, reported 1,011 casualties during the same 18-day period. Communist casualties for the same 18-day period totaled nearly 130,000 men.
December 21, 1950 was just another day in the life of most Americans, fatigued from the horrors of World War II, and now already weary of a "military police action" in a tiny country called Korea. Most knew little about the politics of the 'war' - and most didn't much care. Post-World War II babyboomers were being born in record numbers. Automobile manufacturers and home builders couldn't produce product fast enough to meet the pent-up demand of war-starved consumers. Television was taking attendance away from movie theaters. Amana introduced its "Radar Range" for cooking new "tv dinners" packaged and sold in the frozen food section of local supermarkets. Military veterans wanted new carpeting, furniture and household appliances for those young wives who waited for their return from the great war. Advertising became a new medium that tempted families with new gadgets, new experiences, and new "necessities". If your tv commercial could convince them they "needed" it, you could sell a million of 'em!

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was most noted for his creation of the American Interstate Highway system; he was less noted for an urgent warning that he'd impressed upon the public with little fanfare. The giant U.S. military-industrial complex, he said, could become a force that would have a vested interest in encouraging and promoting war. World War II had proven just how profitable 'war' could be; fifty years later, Eisenhower's predictions were startlingly accurate. As the Bush war folly dragged on in Iraq - and then spread to Iran - it was obvious that mammoth corporations were lining up to cash in at the Pentagon's war trough. McDonnell-Douglass, Lockheed-Martin, Sikorsky, General Electric, and a host of other large corporations saw billions of dollars in profits, even from the littlest military skirmishes. After the Korean Conflict, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and Desert Storm, most equipment was left behind to become nothing more than scrap. Pentagon officials brazenly ordered new equipment, commissioned state-of-the-art technologies that often never worked, and kept increasing reckless military spending even in times of peace. "Star Wars" projects during the Reagan years cost taxpayers billions of untold dollars for high-tech junk that never worked. The Air Force would junk planes after a military endeavor, usually scrapping them so that "enemies" couldn't obtain technological secrets. By the time George W. Bush stumbled into the White House, the military-industrial complex was eating up the largest portion of the government's budget.
While Bush slashed spending for education, environmental issues, public safety, health care, parks and recreation, and social welfare programs, military spending went unabated and unchecked. No one dared ask how much was being spent on the war in Iraq. U.S. soldiers saw their pay and benefits decreased; so many were refused treatment for psychological disorders caused by their war experiences that it prompted a Congressional investigation in 2007. Soldiers were cheated out of medical care as part of the Bush administration's cost-cutting programs. Meanwhile, Halliburton received juicy government contracts (often without a bidding process). The company was contracted to build fourteen new, permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq even though the administration kept promising an eventual troop pull-out. By the summer of 2007, many of the GOP leaders were turning their backs on Bush, demanding that he change strategies and start working on a timetable for leaving Iraq to Iraqis. Both Bush and Cheney at times defied Congress by claiming they would not allow that body of politics to interfere with running the war. Since Bush avoided the Constitution when he attacked Iraq, it wasn't surprising that he would not see it as prudent to leave the end result to any other branch of the government.
By the time O.U.T.R.A.G.E. bombs assassinated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and most members of Congress on January 17, 2008, the war was already off course. Bush swore he would not bow to political pressure. It was becoming obvious to even the most ill-informed that the Bush administration had only two of its own interests at heart: OIL and WAR PROFITEERING. Bush and Cheney were not going to let go until they had secured all rights to all of Iraq's oil, and until their favored government contractors (especially the Carlyle Group and Halliburton, both of whom had direct ties to the Bush-Cheney White House) were handsomely rewarded with outlandishly excessive profits. It didn't matter how many died.
Money, power and influence were

Cold blanketed most of the United States on Thursday, February 5, 2009. Not the kind of cold that was usual for mid-winter, but a bone-chilling, brutal kind of cold that seemed to come from far below the depths of Hell. More pronounced, of course, in the north central regions of the country, the sub-zero temperatures kept reconstruction teams from working in most areas decimated from the O.U.T.R.A.G.E. bombs more than a year ago. Even in the southern regions of the country, residents tried to avoid the brisk winds that reached into the mid-twenties in areas used to 70-degree weather in February. For the first time in modern history, there were reports of coastal waters along Fort Lauderdale being sheeted with a thin layer of ice.
The 'Great Depression II' continued to wreak havoc on local economies. Tens of millions of Americans were unemployed; the O.U.T.R.A.G.E. shelters and food banks were overwhelmed with people looking for help. Warehouses of national chain stores - no longer operatinal - were raided and food was distributed to those in need. The most startling component of this mass outpouring was that it wasn't just the "poor" folks you'd expect to frequent these facilities; more and more, it was "middle-class" and "upper-middle-class" citizens who suddenly found themselves broke, homeless and hungry. As ongoing as this problem was, most citizens agreed that O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had done a far better job over the past year than the supercilious Bush administration had done following the Katrina hurricane disaster. O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had coordinated efforts with local food banks, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries and thousands of local community service clubs to ensure a streamlined flow of assistance to all those in need. A volunteer army of millions of Americans was rebuilding homes, restoring infrastructures, and refurbishing public buildings as quickly as humanly possible. Los Angeles and Washington, DC were being rebuilt, although progress was woefully slow. Building materials were simply being confiscated from Lowe's, Menard's, Home Depot and WalMart warehouses all over the country. Factory inventories were being seized since those factories were no longer in production and their corporate headquarters had been blown off the face of the map.
Other O.U.T.R.A.G.E. experts were working on trying to resolve other issues. A convention of trade experts were engaged in a monumental effort to try and reduce America's $175 billion trade deficit. Due the ravished, weakened dollar, that deficit - mostly with China, of course - had ballooned to triple what it was in 2006.
O.U.T.R.A.G.E. scientists were trying to determine why global warming was causing gray whales to lose weight. This had been common knowledge for several years, but the Bush administration saw no need to concern itself with such trivial pursuits. It was preoccupied with war. As the whales lost weight, they also lost interest in breeding. Were fewer calves being born because there was less abundant food in the oceans? Or was the warming effects of the ocean promising to shoo one more species into extinction just because their habitat had been destroyed, thanks to mankind's industrial revolution? Either way, it was man's fault. If the water's temperatures were wrong for the whales, or if there wasn't enough food left to feed the whales, it was man's fault. If man's vehicle emissions, smoke-belching factories, and overall rape of the Earth and its atmosphere hadn't disrupted the natural cyclical order of global warming, perhaps gray whales would have naturally adapted to the new conditions over hundreds or thousands of years. But man's 150 years of "progress" had served only to speed up the progress on nature.....and hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals could keep up with such unatural change. Man had been a meddlesome quidnunc in the natural order of things, a busybody whose inventions of convenience and prosperity had ultimately inconvenienced the planet's timetables and touseled the prosperousness of normal Earthly cycles.
Money, power and influence had become man's mistress.

And, as is almost always the case, once the defloration of the mistress is completed, it's damned difficult to put that pandora back in the box.

Epimetheus learned that lesson in mythology; now modern man was about to learn the lesson all over again, thanks in part to pioneers like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, among many others.

Had, as Osama binLaden lamented in late November, 2008, God grown tired of us?
Could the human species have become so self-absorbed with pettiness that more intrinsic matters mattered least?
Did we not puzzle over the weird wretchedness of the world today?
Like a father weary of his young son's arrant behavior, had God given up on us again as He did just before he instructed Noah to build an ark? Was God fed up with our shameless materialism, consumerism, avarice and unabashed hubris?
Even after He created the universe, God put aside Sunday as a day of rest.
We mere mortals, on the other hand, chose to see Sunday as just another day of the week. A day which was not devoted to our faith and family, but to our businesses, our golf games, our cook-outs, our mistresses, our money, our drugs, and our pursuit of personal happiness. Could all the odd things going on in the world be signs from God - or from an intelligent designer, or an evolutionary 'big bang' theory, or 'nature'?
For all the time mankind has inhabitated this insignificant third rock from the sun, we have progressively removed ourselves further and further from the holiness of the Earth. We have traded sacredness for sanctimonious self-indulgence. And we fail to notice the subtle changes - perhaps warnings - that may very well be predicting our own doom.
Even today, in 2009, most of Earth's inhabitants pooh-pooh the theory that something called 'global warming' is about to destroy the planet as we know it. So we keep on building smoke-belching factories, driving gas-guzzling cars that spit out toxic vehicle emissions, and refusing to reduce, reuse, or recycle or refuse.
To most people, such attention to environmental issues is inconsequential; we're too busy admiring ourself in the new Bill Blass strapless gown we bought at $400 less than its usual price. We're showing off our newest $3 shirt that sports a $24 alligator on its breast pocket.
Unless we're a marine biologist, we don't seem to take notice when another giant squid crash lands on a remote beach. Isn't it odd that such an occurence - which apparently hasn't happened in centuries - now happens almost on a semi-annual basis? What causes the squid - who lurks in the deepest, most remote parts of the ocean - to suddenly wash up on the shores of our beaches? Is something going on underwater that we don't know about? Shouldn't we take more interest in such activity?
For the past forty years, the United States government has poured untold billions down countless rat holes, and American citizens are too busy worrying about Britney Spears' love life to pay any attention. The federal government has squandered taxpayer dollars an the ill-fated Vietnam War; the Watergate investigation; the "Star Wars" initiative; the failed "war on drugs"; the Iran-Contra affair; the short-lived Gulf War in 1991; the titilating Bill Clinton witch hunt; a paranoid "war on terror"; an unconstitutional and immoral war in Iraq; a Hitleresque Department of Homeland Security; a reckless immigration policy and numerous 'pork' projects and 'earmarks' so near and dear to unscrupulous politicians. Yet no one seemed to notice - or care - when the federal government would allocate $4 million for a teapot museum in North Carolina. Afer a brief uproar, an Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" still was built with taxpayers' money.
Years after Hurricane Katrina an impotent federal government had still not established housing for most victims of that tragedy. And most Americans only watched in awe as the "in-depth" television newscasts fed us a two-minute Pubulum of some poor slob still living on his roof. But when it came to New Orleans, most Americans had a bigger concern: when would Bourbon Street be back to normal, and what kind of a package deal can I get to go watch all the transvestities, street musicians and gay blades strut their stuff??
Americans uncomfortably avoided its poor, sick, disabled, underprivileged, disadvantaged, hungry, undereducated, mentally challenged, and homeless because it caused an inconvenient pang - a prick - in our collective consciousness. It was not our fault, after all, that these people don't live in $675,000 homes, drive new Mercedes roadsters, or own $2,000,000 stock portfolios. What about those kids who have never seen a tree, never thrown a football, never slept without rats crawling around their toes, never consumed a meal that didn't come wrapped in grease-splattered paper? Well, yeah....that was too bad, but what could we do about it?
God had given us the ability to be generous, to share with others and care for every species on the planet. But few of us ever took into account how important a rare Amazon frog might be to our own existence. Few of us bothered to protest the decimation of our rain forests, complain about luxury vacation resorts wiping out ecologically-valuable (and necessary) mangrove forests. Oil spills in pristine Alaskan waters didn't affect our lives in the middle of Manhattan.
It was national news in 2007 when a missing pregnant woman in Ohio generated an outpour to more than 1,000 volunteers to search for her body. Yet, a hundred times that many people squeeze themselves into football stadiums every Sunday to 'watch' a game and criticize a player's disastrous fumble (and what makes the sports voyeur think he could have played that game any better?). It's amazing how we won't get off our dead ass to help someone else, but we'll put ourselves through the trials of Hell to make our way to the 'big game' or show up at the Inaugural Ball.
We paid scant attention when a tsunami ripped away Asian communities because they were thousands of mile away from us. But we're obsessively enraged when someone scratches our car or throws a stone through our window.
The question was worth posing: has God grown tired of us? Has He finally thrown up his hands in disgust and said, "The hell with 'em! Let' em all drown in their own cesspools of self-gratification!" Were the hurricanes and earthquake that

On November 3, 2004, Common Cause reported that "the American public was relieved that the Presidential election was not tied up in recounts and lawsuits, and that the Supreme Court would not have to step in and appoint the next President. Many American believed - and the press reported - that the election has been orderly and fair. Unfortunately, they were wrong." In its membership recruiting campaign, the non-profit organization pointed out how the "election of 2004 was at least as marred as the disastrous election of 2000! From Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting system reported that George Bush had received 4,258 votes, but only 638 votes were cast - to North Carolina, where thousands of ballotswere lost when a computer ran out of disk space - all across the country the electoral process was riddled with problems." A survey was part of the Common Cause mailing, which encouraged recipients to join the "common cause" and "help fix our broken electoral system".
O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had spent millions of dollars on the most sophisticated computer programs, high-tech equipment, and built-in safeguards to protect against voter fraud, computer error or malfunction, and human tampering. The elections of Tuesday, November 4, 2008 had been perhaps the most honest and accurate voter tabulation in the history of the United States. Those O.U.T.R.A.G.E. volunteers who had helped create the one-of-a-kind computerized voting machines had even incorporated a whole system of checks and balances to assure that one voter only cast one vote. You didn't register as a 'Republican' or 'Democrat' or 'Independent' - you registered confidentially with your Social Security number and address; you provided a secret password before you voted. After your ballot was cast, a 'receipt' was printed out for two reasons: to verify that your vote had, indeed, been caast and recorded; and to show your employer in order to be paid for the time you took off to vote.
Voters were encouraged to keep those receipts and bring them along to the next election. It would serve as a back-up procedure to confirm you were the same voter who cast his or her ballot last time. All in all, it was as foolproof a system as mediocre human minds could devise.
Now that the elections were over, the O.U.T.R.A.G.E. teams who focused on voting issues were in the process of a new idea:
before it was time for mid-term elections, a federal lottery would be tied into the voting process. To encourage even more people to vote, Election Day would not only be a paid holiday, but each ballot would also be a 'lottery ticket'. A random computerized drawing would determine a broad range of winners who could - with their voting 'receipts' - claim cash prizes or special merchandise awards. In the old pre-Revolution days before January 17, 2008, pompous politicians would be prone to bellow, "Who will pay for this excess?" while they recklessly spent billions of useless wars, squandered billions more on worthless 'pork' or earmarks; and wasted billions more on needless and derelict programs that served only to increase the taxpayers' burden of supporting a bloated and unproductive government. With as much as 90% of the government excessive expenses being eliminated, O.U.T.R.A.G.E. believed there would be sufficient room in a new budget for a voter rewards and appreciation project. It would motivate people to vote and add some 'zip' to the otherwise tedious process. If and when it became necessary to fund the project, voters could be invited to 'buy' more lottery chances, just as they did in their state lotteries. Merchandise prizes, such as cars, television sets, etc., could be donated from manufacturers or retailers who wanted to play a part in encouraging voter turn-out.
All the 'bugs' needed to be worked out, and the O.U.T.R.A.G.E. volunteers were hard at work