New Cabinet Position Recommended

Memo to President Obama
Re: New Cabinet Position

Dear Mr. President,

Before you give your first address to a joint session of Congress tomorrow, may I recommend an action that could solve many of America’s problems today.

I recommend creation of a new federal department and appointment of a Secretary of Penance. This agency could establish enforceable standards for determining when groups and individuals have paid the price sufficiently to atone for real or imagined past offenses against other groups and individuals. This approach would provide a centralized resource for determining:

1. How long classes of people entering the United States seeking opportunity must suffer hardship before entering mainstream society and economic life. (This would ensure equity with previous generational waves of immigrant hardship. Standards may differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants. We may also wish to consider different standards for classes of immigrants who insist on continuing to talk, dress or smell funny.)

2. The size of unpaid tax bills or duration of undocumented nanny service acceptable for people entering government-paid service. (Once again, a sliding scale based on the importance of the position will likely be necessary. This will be a high priority function of the new Penance Department inasmuch as the conservative Institute for American Truth and Righteousness now estimates that 8 out of 10 Americans will be employed by the government by 2012.)

3. The length of time Americans are allowed to loathe specific professions. (Wall Street brokers and bankers are a current high priority for standards development. Mortgage brokers, IRS employees and TSA screening agents should also be addressed soon. Because this is a Democratic Congress and administration, however, class action lawyers and labor union bosses will be exempted from loathing.)

4. The length of time Americans are allowed to loathe specific technologies. (Fossil fuels are up here first, although development of the regulations may be slowed by regional power shortages. Attention should also be given to the proliferation of television remote controls, those Ziploc plastic bags where the zippers are hard to work, and "child proof" prescription bottles. Andy Rooney would be an ideal undersecretary for this Division of the Department.)

5. Steps necessary for celebrities to take after being charged with a crime. (This will likely be the most complex matrix to be developed by the new Department. Allowances must be made for both the type of crime -- substance abuse, prostitution, physical violence, indecent exposure, racist comments, etc. -- and the type of criminal -- for instance, is he or she really, really hot?)

Congress and the news media will resist this change, of course. Congress will see it as an infringement on its Constitutional duty to vent hypocritical outrage every day Congress is in session. (That's 32 days a year, according to the liberal Council of Whiners Wanting More Laws.) And the news media will fear having nothing left to print other than Climate Change induced weather and mass killings by deranged National Rifle Association members. This opposition will be overcome, however, when all parties realize the economic stimulus benefits of creating 123,000 new government jobs that journalists are ideally qualified to fill after their newspapers all go out of business.