In a spontaneous gesture of conciliation, the government of North Korea surprised the residents of Pueblo, Colorado by returning the spy ship the USS Pueblo to its namesake. The North Korean Navy captured the American spy ship when she was on a routine signal intelligence patrol in the Sea of Japan during the first weeks of 1968. She has since been in North Korean hands…until yesterday, that is.

It is evident that residents of the southern Colorado town were not expecting this gift. Pueblo resident Roy Echevarria granted an interview commenting, “Okay, so last night we all went to sleep, and next morning, BOOM here we have an old-ass navy ship with a bright, pink bow wrapped around it, messing up the view of our riverwalk! How in the hell did this get here? We’ve heard of North Koreans going out and kidnapping people and shit, but this? I guess the drunks at the alehouse will have something to talk about now. As for me, I can’t wait to get rid of this rust bucket.” This is certainly going to be the prime issue of Pueblo’s first every mayor-elect, with some residents even suggesting that the ship should be a place for the election run-off as a polling station.

In the Pueblo, a sticky note and a can of North-Korean style fermented cabbage labeled, Kim’s Kimchi, was found. The sticky note read,”Dear United States, here’s your ship back. We’re done playing with it but we’ll keep the vacuum tubes–fine technology you capitalist, imperialist exploiters of the masses come up with. Please enjoy some of our private-label kimchi. We’ll see if it sells well at Trader Joe’s–it’s probiotic.”

In other news pertaining to the US Navy, the 47,000-ton battleship USS Iowa will leave the port of Los Angeles for its permanent new home in Des Moines where she will undergo gender retrofitting, after which she will be referred with the pronoun xe.

In a dazzling display of weapons-grade stupidity, imbeciles and ideologues from both Left-wing and Right-wing persuasions got together to hash out where exactly double standards ought and ought not to be applied. Meeting at a capacity-filled Moby Arena this weekend, these dimwits filled the parking lot with short yellow school busses. In little over an hour, the retards confounded your intrepid reporters, who would rather have gotten endoscopies than have covered this pageant of willful stupidity and obfuscation where cognitive dissonance magically ruled the day.

Opening the moronathon, mediator Roger Duff implicitly clarified members’ abject ignorance as being voluntary, and not the result of genetic misfortune, “Whether we’re of the right or the left, we can all agree on one thing: we don’t speak for ourselves- we let our ideology speak for us. We may even be individually intelligent, but we forfeit our right to think and instead allow our political obligations and our ideals to take over our better senses.”

Speaking for the left, a recent transplant from the suburbs of Boston, was Kennedy Michael. In a distinct non-rhotic (that’s when you don’t pronounce the ending, and occasional medial ‘r’ in wuhds) mid-Atlantic English, Mr. Michael began, “As true leftists, we repudiate the 1%, but we love Jared Polis and think it’s okay for Bernie Sanders to buy a multi-acre estate in Vermont. After all, he bought it with his own hard-earned money, right? We also believe that the rich should pay more taxes than anyone, but it’s just fine for Jared Polis to incorporate his multi-million dollar businesses in the Caymans, or the Isle of Man or wherever, as it saves him money, and we won’t call him a tax-dodger. But it’s not okay for Donald Trump or Mitt Romney to do so, because they’re 1%-ers!” Applause roared from the left-end of the arena as he continued. “We also believe that science is real, and we ought to teach that in our schools so that our children can have a brighter future… except when it comes to gender, which is a social construct, because we don’t necessarily believe in DNA. We’ll go ahead and teach our kids that there are 114 different genders and counting! How do I know this? Well, that’s what my colleagues at the Gender Sciences Department of Harvard say, and that’s good enough for me.” Moving on to the subject of the #MeToo movement, Kennedy Michael proceeded, “Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are incorrigible sexual predators, and we need to believe it when women accuse a man of sexual impropriety. But when it comes to Bill Clinton? Uh… I don’t think Paula Jones is telling the truth. Besides that, all the stories of Clinton cheating and stuff, that’s just his personal life, right?”

Speaking for the right, Warren “Spud” Douglas was no less non-sensical. “We believe in hard science when it comes to gender. All this baloney about gender being a social construct is unscientific, but the earth is only 6000 years old, and scientific proof of that can be found in the Bible!” Thunderous roars of applause erupted from the right-side of the arena as Spud continued, “As representatives of true American Conservatism, we must practice small government, charge low taxes and have a balanced budget. Therefore, we want to expand the military to be an even more global force than it is already, and we want the government to get their dirty, tyrannical hands off of our Medicare, ‘cause we need it. Where should the money come from? The mint, duh!” He paused. “I think there’s one in Denver. In any case, America’s probably got a FICO score of almost 700, so no problem there.” Commenting on the #MeToo movement, Spud added, “Allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are just that: allegations. As for Donald Trump’s cheating on his wife with a porn star while she (Trump’s wife, not necessarily the porn star) was pregnant? Well, that’s just his personal life, and we have no business in that, nor does the press. But Bill Clinton is an immoral adulterer and a serial sexual harasser- just ask Paula Jones.”

The conference ended with a convivial cocktail hour, and with both sides agreeing on how wonderful and useful double standards are, but no clear agreement was reached on where and how to draw them.

Greetings, loyal Focopolitan Tribune readers!  This is our first of hopefully a series of interviews with candidates for political office.  We thought we’d start with a doctor whose office we hope you will not visit anytime soon; a doctor whose job is not to cure you, but to determine how you died: our coroner, Dr. James Wilkerson.  Yeah, coroners are elected.  We were curious as to why, so we asked.  We were also curious about a bunch of other things.  Check this out…

Ludwig Schnee: Dr. Wilkerson, you’re the coroner.  Why is the coroner elected?

Dr. Wilkerson: Well the coroner actually originated in feudal England, and they were the crowner, and the crowner determined when somebody died, when a landowner died, how much they owed the king: the crown.

LS: So they owed money after they died?

Dr. W: It’s an estate tax, depending on how they died.  For instance if you committed suicide, you forfeited your estate.  It didn’t matter if you had ten wives and a hundred kids, it all goes to the king.  So they became powerful officials for the amount of money and property and stuff they moved.  Obviously they could be biased to one group or another, so I think they became elected to be fair- to let everybody have a chance of getting the crowner they wanted.  The other reason to elect people is to get the people we want and the ideas… and actions we want people to take.

LS: By the way, how’s the campaign going?

Dr. W: The campaign is good this time, the last time I ran…[the office of coroner] was the only Republican primary in Larimer County.  There were a couple other [offices] had Democrats running against them.  But this was the only Republican primary last year.  So, since it was the only race, everybody wanted to talk to me.  Everybody wanted to do debates, and stuff.  So I was constantly…  My whole evenings and sometimes my weekends were used up with that.  This time, because nobody’s running against me, I still go to some events, people still want to hear from me, but it’s not as stressful.

LS: So nobody’s running against you?

Dr. W: Nobody’s running against me.

LS: Do you expect to win?

Dr. W: I hope so.

LS: Like by what margin?

Dr. W: I suppose there could be people writing in.  I don’t know if they still allow write-ins on the ballots or not.

LS: I was gonna ask you ‘tell me about your opponents in this election.’

Dr. W: So, I don’t have any opponents.  The first opponent I had, she had a bookstore and she was a bodybuilder, and that was the one I had in the first time. And then for a brief time period, I had somebody running against me but she dropped out, and she was a yoga instructor, I think.

LS: So, a bodybuilder and a yoga instructor!  Are there any formal qualifications for to be a coroner?

Dr. W: To be a coroner: you have to be 18, a resident of your county and a non-felon.  Those are the requirements to be coroner.

LS: Wow!  That sounds like a little bit of a low bar, but could you tell us your qualifications?

Dr. W: Sure.  I’m a forensic pathologist.  So I went to medical school and then did six years of post-graduate training and I’m board-certified in forensic pathology, anatomic pathology and clinical pathology.  I trained in the military.  I did autopsies all over the world.

LS: So you’re a vet?

Dr. W: I am a vet.

LS: Since when is a doctorate of veterinary medicine a requirement for your position?

Dr. W: No, I’m a veteran.

LS: Oh, okay.

Dr. W: Not a doctor of veterinary medicine.

LS: Oh.

Dr. W: An MD.

LS: Not a DVM, got it.

Dr. W: And I’ve done about 7500 autopsies.  To give you a perspective, the Budweiser Events Center holds 7200.  So I’ve done a lot of work.  I’ve been in leadership positions in the hospitals, when I used to work in the hospitals, so I’ve learned from that; and this is a fairly small office, and it doesn’t have a whole lot of leadership challenges.  So, that’s my qualifications.

LS: Sounds quite like a lot of qualifications, sir.  Finish the following sentence: Republicans make better coroners than Democrats because…

Dr. W: Well, Republicans tend to be more conservative and not spend as much money on things that they don’t really need.  We try not to spend money… so… I think that might be the one thing… I don’t think that it’s really much of a partisan office.  ‘Cause I take care of Democrats, Republicans, whoever dies.

LS: You take care of the dead.

Dr. W: It doesn’t really matter what their political standing is.  And I try to treat all families with respect and treat ’em all the same.  You know, even though doing the autopsies and presenting things in court, and finding the cause and manner of death is the basic thing you do, the most challenging thing is notifying the families, and then keeping up with the families [of the deceased] and telling them what we found and asking them additional questions, so we try to do that with just one individual.  We try to notify in person, and that one individual will go to the autopsy, find out what happened, tell the family, ask any more questions and then work out a report and follow it through to the end.  And so taking care of the living is probably the most important part of the job and the most challenging.

LS: I can imagine that.  Tell us about the medicine you practice.  Do you have problems dealing with Medicare and Medicaid?

Dr. W: No.  Actually, when I first started out in the army, I did hospital pathology and forensic pathology.  In the army, obviously we didn’t have it [Medicare and Medicaid].  But I was in private practice for nine years and since I was the leadership guy, I had to deal with all of that; the insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid, and it’s no fun.  It wastes a lot of time.  At one time, I had 17 employees in a lab and four of them were there to deal with insurance.  And Medicare the first time you bill ’em, automatically they say ‘no.’  So you always have to bill them again, at least one more time.  And that’s just the way they work.  We don’t take insurance.  The counties pay for autopsies on a fee-for-service basis.

LS: Are there many therapeutic misadventures in your line of work?

Dr. W: Well, probably not, because they’re already dead.

LS: Oh…

Dr. W: We don’t have to stop the bleeding, nor do we have to worry about infection, nor do we have to worry about getting everything back together exactly how it started out.

LS: Were you in my position, what would you ask you?

Dr. W: You could ask me some of the things that we see that are not funny, but that could be amusing.

LS: So, tell us one thing or another…

Dr. W: One of the favorites is “Here, hold my beer and watch this…”  Whether it be a driving feat, or jumping off of a cliff into the lake feat or things like that.  Now they don’t end up funny, obviously because they come to us, but that’s kind of one of the things we see. “Hold my beer and watch this…” is a standard pre-death motion.

LS: Thank you Dr. Wilkerson for taking the time to talk to us.