North Korea threatens to detonate nukes and we sigh. The CIA admits to running secret prisons in Eastern Europe and we shrug. Another school shooting? Yawn. But illicit sex-hubba, hubba! We’re ears like Ralph Malph. That was the case again this week, when Florida Representative Mark Foley admitted to sexually harassing a 16-year-old Congressional page in 2005, and several more previously. A 2003 incident has been preserved for posterity on the Internet and contains salacious tidbits such as the ones we will relay below:

…Well, actually, let’s not and say we did. It’s pretty gross. What’s alarming is not so much that a man in his fifties is instant-messaging teenagers in a lewd and gratuitous fashion (have you seen the internet lately?). What’s more surprising- saddening- is that a sworn member of the United States House of Representatives, a man with everything to lose and nothing to gain by trolling Yahoo! chat for the unspeakable, is using IM-speak that would embarrass any twelve-year-old. 4realz! We pay these sub-normals how much to do what, exactly?

People are still bugging over what the Pope said. A fatwa, a sort of Islamic hit like the ones placed on Salman Rushdie and Nagoub Mahfouz, was declared on Benedict XIV by the Lashkar-e-Toiba of Pakistan. Yeah, OK. Killing the Pope. Tell us how that works out for you. Also, a plane was hijacked in Greece en route to Turkey in protest of the Pope’s words.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Benedict made a rather impolitic comment a few weeks ago, quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor saying: “Show me just what (the Prophet) Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Muslim community responded by freaking out, even though the Pope stated very clearly that he was not condoning the words, but merely using them by way of rhetoric.

We here at TWIS can settle this situation right now. Introducing Representative Mark Foley of the fine state of Florida, who has this message: “WTF? XOX and b kewl, mmk? Plzthx LOL!”

The Supreme Court reconvened, with issues this term including deportation and death-penalty hearings. The court will also hear a partial-birth abortion case. None of that is important. What is important is that the Court refused to hear a case concerning Texas’ sale of sex toys shaped like human genitalia. As the Associated Press reports,

“An adult bookstore employee in El Paso, Texas, sued the state after his arrest for showing two undercover officers a device shaped like a penis and telling the female officer the device would arouse and gratify her.”

Once, long ago, a baby boy was born to a loving mother. Never did she know that, decades down the line, that same baby boy, when a grown man, would be imprisoned for displaying a rubber dildo to undercover police officers. We all have dreams. We are sorely disappointed by the Court’s decision not to try the case, however, if for no other reason than that we really wanted to see what the evidence table would look like. Thanks for nothing, you jerks.

Let’s move away from sex and into pointless violence. There have been three school shootings in the past week, most notably the one in Pennsylvania Amish country. The mind boggles at the sheer bloody idiocy of this sad story; some schlub, in revenge for something entirely non-Amish in nature that happened two decades ago, decided to mow down a bunch of schoolgirls. He chose the Amish because he knew there wouldn’t be much security at their school. “‘It just goes to show there’s no safe place. There’s really no such thing’,” said a local bookstore clerk. All other words fail.