In a television event that he hopes will rival the Superbowl for drama, risk and outlandish Bud Light commercials, Barack Obama will today host Health Care Reformapalooza 2010

The live TV summit on healthcare will pit the GOP Obstructionists and against their main rivals the Democrat Dead Horse Beaters in a fearsome battle to reform healthcare in America.

The long contested match will feature some of the biggest names from both sides, with perpetually retiring/not retiring John McCain set to lead the GOP against the rookie Obama in his first season as starting Commander-in-Chief.

The GOP are expected to stick to a tiresome game plan that will frustrate the Democrats and eventually grind them into defeat, while the Democrats seem to be hoping that the big stage will cause the Republican players to crumble under the pressure.

Pre-match mind-games have led to the GOP suggesting the the venue for meeting, a table, is an unfair shape and suited to the needs of the Democrats. Speculation that the room was modeled on those where the infamous death panels would be held are unconfirmed.

A leading Democrat told that he expects his team to come out guns blazing; “What i’m hoping is that Big O starts shooting down Cantor, McConnell and Boehner with the same cockiness he had at the GOP retreat, except this time Biden’s thrown in on the side droppin bombs too. At this point it’s more important that Obama yells at the GOP instead of actually accomplishing something in his remaining three years.”

Supporters of the two teams gathered early outside of Balri House and unfuled banners encouraging their teams. One enthusiastic fan had hand sewn a twelve foot banner that read ‘WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO REALIZE DEMOCRATS ARE THE DEVIL?’

Fox Television commentator for the event Ed Stevens had this to say: “This is a big one. A quick, seat-of-your-pants six hours of Barack Obama going toe-to-toe with people who have no interest in his agenda and simply want to see him look impotent on the field. If you want the excitement of watching a man’s political goodwill expertly suffocated by a team of die-hard veterans who know every trick in the book, and you have six hours to spare on a Thursday afternoon, then this is the game to watch.”

US scientists have claimed that people who sleep for over fourteen hours a day and try to take several naps between meals are more likely to be alert and able to absorb information than those who spend the majority of their nights in the throws of violent night terrors.

The study revealed that those participants who took a four hour mid-afternoon cat-nap after a cheese-heavy meal and the re-run of a Hollyoaks episode they had already watched four times on the various Channel Four offshoots, were able to perform better in cognitive test than people who had arrived at work before dawn in order to guilt their employers into not making them redundant as happens in their circadian nightmares.

The study tested the participants ability to enter simple, repetitive data into a spreadsheet for several hours and found that that those who were newly rested were able to complete task more efficiently, accurately and calmly than those who had spent the previous night battling furious unexplained body temperature fluctuations while watching the sky grow steadily lighter.

“In the data-entry task,” said Dr Charles Flaker, who led the study, “we found that those who had spent the afternoon getting a little shut-eye after a morning of involved sitting and eating were able to complete the task swiftly and without complaint. However those who has been deprived of sleep found the task difficult and often began to display signs of violent frustration. In numerous cases test computers were hurled across the room before the participants layed down on the ground clawing at their eyelids in what seemed like a desperate attempt to induce sleep.”

Flaker, reporting the results at the AAAS conference in San Diego, said: “What is undeniable i that once someone takes a nap, they are suddenly less tired. Being less tired means they sleep less. Less sleep means they are more efficient. So they do more work. Once you let them nap again they whole thing comes round. It’s like a cycle. Maybe we could name the cycle after the process, and perhaps allow a certain period of time, maybe when its dark to allow people experience these rejuvenating effects. Buts that’s along way off.”

The British Winter Olympic Curling team has said in a statement today that the recent revelations regarding chief sweeper Mike Berry’s affair with skip Dean Subway’s former fiance will not affect the team’s perfomance at the Vancouver games in the coming week.

Tabloid headlines all week have been speculating as to whether the teammates will compete together in next week’s competition, as details of the sordid encounter between Berry and the father of Subway’s child, Vanessa Long, come to light.

However, Subway told the press today that he was willing to put the team above the private issues he has with his teammate; “While Mike may not have much moral aim when it comes to crossing the far-hog line with his cock, he certainly does know how to call the line and weight of a guard shot, if you know what i mean. Curling is bigger than the frivolities of maintaining dignity. If you’d asked Sandra Schmirler the Curler whether she would have dropped out for the sake of a teammates quick dip in a post-pregnancy free guard zone, she’d have explained that skipping is more thrilling than most forbidden of infidelities.”

Berry, the captain of the British team, previously made headlines for viciously attacking a member of the Swiss Curling squad five years ago at the World Championship. Berry is said to have repeated smashed the Swiss team member’s head with a curling stone after a disagreement regarding Berry’s positioning of his foot against the hack. Berry apologised after, but suggested that the Swiss team reassess its position on cross-bodied delivery.

In an interview with a Sunday paper Berry said while he regretted his affair with Ms. Long curling culture was to blame for his actions suggesting that the International Curling circuit was like an “all you bang buffet on ice.”

“The fact that, on hammer, i can make a stone move an extra quarter inch on a takeout throw and position it center guard in the four-foot zone is very arousing to women within the sport. When it comes down to it what i did with Dean’s baby mother is like the four-rock rule – when there’s too many stone’s in the hole, one has to go.”

Britain is ten times worse that your most dismal view of the country, the Tories have claimed. Despite facts to the contrary, The Conservative Party have released information, with no factual basis, that suggest the only cure for Britain is to set the entire place alight and watch as the evil burns.

A campaigning document entitled Labour’s Two Nations, released alongside a new poster campaign, has taken a leaf out the most effective propoganda by exaggerating everything awful in the country and suggesting that without extreme measures the china on the mantelpiece is more than likely to disappear into the staff’s underpants.

In the document the Tories assert that almost every girl attending a public school carries both chlamydia and a child, while claiming on the average day it is more likely that your face will be stabbed than not stabbed. In addition it is claimed that a significant rise in robberies means that you are more than likely to be missing something that you left the house with today.

Chris Grayling the Shadow Home Secretary who was recently rebuked for taking crime statistics out of context, said yesterday at the launch of the camapaign manifesto, “If one takes two sets of completely unrelated numbers, compiled using completely opposing methods over a thirty year period, it is clearly viable to suggest that at least half the people in this room will be murdered before the day is out.”

As a solution to the ever-rising tide of crime that the party claims will eventually turn the country into a scene from the alternate time-line in Back to the Future 2, the Tory manifesto outlines the reclamation of what they call ‘Broken Britain’ by “moving the poors to Burnley, setting the place alight and re-populating the Northern part of the island with clones made from the DNA of David Miliband and a thoroughbred racing horse.”

A Judge in a Netherlands court today ruled that the cheese served with McDonald’s burgers was effectively worthless, stating that the faux-dairy product’s ingredients, nutritional value, personal benefit both in terms of health and taste and the unsightly neon-lacquer colour equated to an nonchargeable item.

The judge, acting in a wrong dismissal case against a woman fired for giving a colleague a free slice of cheese on a burger that had been rung up as cheese-less, declared that the act had no bearing on the performance of the McDonalds outlet and could not be regarded as stealing because the cheese “wasn’t worth the guff of a cow’s milk nipple.”

The Leeuwarden district court ruled that instead of dismissing the waitress, the restaurant chain could possibly have prevented further free cheese giveaways by pointing out that the cheeses’ primary ingredients are PVC and the discards from an MDF wood factory.

Reena Frauleanenin, speaking on behalf of the court said yesterday, “The dismissal was too severe a measure. It is just barely a slice of cheese. In fact the physical make-up of the product said to have been given away without permission is actually closer to the knee-high boots i will be wearing to my local marijuana coffeshop/sadistic group-sex meeting this evening.”

The official written judgement of the court stated that following the awarding of compensation to the waitress, it would not longer consider the stealing of McDonald’s cheese a prosecutable crime. The ruling is said to have sparked chaos around the country with outlets of the popular burger chain being overrun by customers demanding cheeseburgers for the price of hamburgers.

A McDonald’s Holland spokesperson told us this morning that there had been at least twelve cases where cheese had been ’stolen’ following the ruling; “This stuff doesn’t just fall from the sky. We have to break down several million tons of vinyl records and then mix them with the highly volatile plastics used to make the magnetic yellow esses you see on fridges all over the country. We stood-by as Holland legalised marijuana and euthanasia, but de-criminalising the theft of American cheese is just silly.”

Next season when you’re watching Celebrity Big Brother, pretending not like it because Heat says its no good these days and you don’t want to upset the bland, but more self-confident people you call your friends, and you announce that “watching this is like Hell,” you will, in fact, have a point.

The new Big Brother house has been revealed by production company Endemol this week, and the new set has been crafted to resemble Hell. The house will feature macabre sculptures, animal skulls and a kitchen inspired by a hospital morgue. Producers are hoping that the house, like hell and in a sense like most of the previous Big Brother houses, will imbue the contestants will a deep sense of shame and guilt.

Much of the design of the new house is said to have been based on Dante’s Inferno and the famous line ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ Suggestions that the production team had hoped to follow Dante’s exact description of Hell by creating a special circle of torture and depravity specifically designed for Jews is said to be wide of the mark.

The redesigned house includes a large living room area with fur rugs, gilded panels, ornate lamps and upholstered couches. Meanwhile the kitchen is decorated with outsized insects in specimen jars which executives at Channel Four are hoping the contestants will either try to eat or fuck in the hope the a cannibalism/necrophilia/bestiality combo will boost ratings.

“It really would be the last taboo,” said a producer, “Can you imagine some obscure and delightfully unhinged celebrity thrusting away at a dead lizard with embalming fluid flying against the camera. That’s BAFTA stuff right there.”

British Airways, reeling from the recent announcement that its cabin crew plan to strike for twelve days over Christmas, has begun legal action against the Christian Church, in the hope that they can suspend the religious holiday.

It is understood that the tactic is designed to nullify the threat of the festive walkout, by obtaining a legal delay on the celebration of Christ’s birth, and pushing the date back to the middle of February when they hope to have completed the implementation of cost-cutting measures. The hope is that once the religious legitimisation of an end of year work break is removed, employees will be forced to return to work, and will be unable to take their currently crew-less flights.

It has been suggested that BA are to argue to the the High Court that the tradition of Christmas is based on nothing but the mythical teachings of mistranslated book compilated from the ramblings of men who genuinely believed it was possible for a women to become pregnant without any help from a man, despite all scientific evidence ever pointing to the contrary.

BA hopes that by pursuing a claim that Christmas could reasonably be based on something that probably never happened they will be able to bring about a postponement of the celebration, until a time which better suits their economic slim-lining plan, when they will withdraw their claim that Jesus is neither the son of God nor born to a virgin, apologise to the Christians, confess, have their sins forgiven, say a few hail marys, and begin discounting flights in time for ‘Christmas in Spring.’

The British Medical Council has today apologised for misleading everyone about the impact of Swine Flu. In the biggest turnaround in rhetoric since Bill Clinton finally admitted getting sloppy dome from an accommodating White House intern, the BMC has stated categorically that it is ‘incredibly unlikely’ that we will all die from the pandemic that, until recently, they had claimed was the early calling card of the apocalypse.

The full statement follows:

The BMC offers the following apology, first and foremost, for causing such a panic, when, considering the state of affairs in the economic world, where we have recently lost the Arabian Disneyland of Dubai to the recession, we’re fairly sure everyone could have done without being told that they were likely to die horribly and en-mass, due to a flu pandemic that wasn’t really a pandemic.

The BMC would like to apologise for its bumbling of basic information, and the elevation of colour alerts that convinced people to hoard mass quantities of sweetcorn and sharp spades in preparation for the armageddon and subsequent cannibalistic world that we convinced everyone was inevitable. According to a recent study, it turns out, and we say this sheepishly and with regret for our previous panic shrieking statements that suggested killing sick people on sight was the only way anyone would survive, that Swine Flu is unlikely to do significant harm or cause widespread death. In fact, a couple of aspirin and good nights rest seems to work better than the previous recommendation that one should eat as much Tamiflu as one could get their hand on, and submerge themselves in a cold bath every four to eight minutes. This method has, in fact, been proven to be counter-productive, and may have been the cause of our initial misunderstanding of the effects of Swine Flu.

While we accept much of the blame for the fear, panic and the feeling of finality that led you to purchase a 64 inch HD plasma you couldn’t afford, the BMC would also like to point out that the British media, in their own special way, magnified the effect of our mis-judgement. It by no means helped the situation when the red-tops encouraged people to descend into Dante’s ninth circle of Hell in response to the outbreak. At no point did we suggest drinking the blood of babies or a 35% corporation tax would help stem the spread of the disease.

In conclusion we can now categorically state that Swine Flu is unlikely to bring the human race’s tenure on Earth to a premature end, unless of course the virus mutates, becomes airborne and starts killing Mexican children again, in which RUN FOR YOUR LIVES, THE HORSEMEN ARE UPON US.

People on bikes, the bain of people not on bikes, are set to have their cycling ways curbed by a new set of motorist-empowering laws. Under the new legislation, any member of the public is legally permitted to use the much heralded ‘clothesline’ technique to stop those whom they feel have breached the security of their twelve ton SUV.

Westminster Council is preparing to deploy enforcers in a hunt for so-called “Lycra louts” who, it is claimed, are the single reason for all traffic in London. And sure enough, council workers were outside their offices this morning in their numbers taking down cyclists one-by-one by inadvertently raising their arms in a ”yawning’ gesture. “I’m glad to be of service cleaning up London’s roads and soon-to-be redundant cycle lanes,” commented one enthusiastic civil servant. “It’s a good feeling to be doing one’s civic duty, but is an indescribable buzz to be taking the smug smile off of a courier’s face. We’re fixie-ing the problem that they’re causing.”

Anna Scarvey, chairman of Westminster’s scrutiny committee, which has put together the proposal, told Cultsha, “We’re always getting complaints from single mothers in empty 10-seater mini-vans who feel slightly perturbed by the encroachment of cyclists doing all types of cycling. And they wear headphones which makes makes the effect of a shout of ‘two wheeled c**t,’ combined with a loud horn, much less effective”

While mass-murdering car drivers have never faced such a widening of penalty enforcement powers, the move has been exclaimed as necessary to halt to rise in bike related incidents that are said to plaguing the Westminster area. In the past six months, the council has claimed to have had to deal with over four complaints of cyclists looking smug while moving swiftly through heavy traffic, as well an an accident in which a man crossing between cars was hit by a cyclist wearing only a full florescent suit and headphones.

“These cy-killers as i like to call them,” said anti-bike campaigner Don Cheadley, “Are ruining it for everyone. Everyday members of the public are being forced to not cross roads without looking, while drivers have to incessantly check their normally redundant side-mirrors before opening their doors. Also most people like to use that area where the bikes lanes are to indicate to the car in front that they are the better driver and that they may ram them if they don’t immediately make way. The sooner I have the right jam poles in their spokes while moving, the better.”

Interestingly, the Westminster council’s radical policy flies in the face of Major Boris Johnson’s pro-cycling stance. However, not to cause a stir Boris has resigned himself to defeat in the face of popular middle-class sentiment, promising to only sport his one-piece lycra suit on sweaty, mid-summer tube journeys in future.

In a recent survey European couples have said that the conception or birth of a child around Christmas time is the last thing they would put on their list to Santa.

The poll revealed that given the choice between a newborn, and an X-Box with one controller and the definite chance of a red ring of death in the first three months, parents around Europe would choose the X-box. In a further question almost 90 percent of couples claimed that they thought a piece of coal would bring more stability to their relationship.

Father of one Steve Evans told us today “Every Christmas is ruined after i wake up from a booze-catalysed dream in which i live with a 6-foot blond with whom i have an open relationship and am solely concerned with the maintenance of my 68 inch plasma screen, to the reality of the screaming, vomit machine I was ‘blessed’ with one 25th of December. Fuck fucking Santa Claus.”

The results of the survey coincide with a claim from the leader of Britain’s Jewish community that the continent’s population is in decline because people care more about shopping than the sacrifice involved in parenthood.

The Rabbi told an a religious think tank that most people considered children less important than the frivolous delights of the ice cream factory at a Pizza Hut, because consumer society had taught them to ignore responsibility and instead pursue their dreams of learning to fly like a bird.

“The couples of Europe are more interested in making a name for themselves in the competitive eating circuit, than in creating another life. However if we continue in this vein, the indigenous religious population of Europe will die out leaving only neo-Darwinians capable of forming their own opinions without relying on a old books filled with stories about drinking blood and floating men with wings.”