Though Georgian officials blame the speed of the track and IOC officials fault the inexperience of the luger, Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigators now believe that Kumaritashvili’s crash was caused by a design flaw in the sled.

Since 2004, federal regulators have received complaints of 34 deaths in accidents linked to sudden acceleration problems in Toyota models, mostly hybrids and small SUVs. Kumaritashvili’s is the first death linked to the company’s popular IceRunner luge model.

Sources inside the RCMP’s Nordic Traffic Division tell Carbolic Smoke Ball that a “fairly common sequence” of “thigh squeezing and buttock clenching” can cause the sled’s runners to accelerate uncontrollably.

“No amount of unclenching humanly possible could have slowed that luge,” said RCMP Chief Inspector Sidney Blatchford, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The fault is in the engineering. And with those bastards at Toyota.”

Inspector Blatchford added that it was “sweet justice” that no Japanese luger finished higher than 30th in this year’s competition.

FAA calls on-time performance of flock of birds that brought down plane ”unsatisfactory”

NEW YORK – A US Airways jetliner crashed into the frigid Hudson River yesterday after a collision with a flock of birds disabled its engines. The plane then struck a small iceberg, which the FAA has officially ruled as the cause of the accident, and proceeded to sink. Witnesses reported that the plane’s band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as the aircraft disappeared into the icy waters.

All passengers were rescued, except for a stowaway named Jack Dawson, who inexplicably insisted on submerging his body in the sub-zero waters while his girlfriend, a teary-eyed Kate Winslet, straddled herself on a lifeboat. Ms. Winslet allegedly left a priceless necklace aboard the plane. 

US Airways spokesman Noah Swayne said that the airline was “amazed” that the plane’s seat flotation devices actually worked. “Never in the history of commercial aviation have we used those things,” Swayne chuckled. “When a plane crashes, let’s be honest, usually everybody dies. We always thought those seat flotation devices were a joke.”

Officials say the rescue was orderly, with frequent flyer passengers being plucked from the river first.

The passengers were charged $5.00 for the seat flotation devices, oxygen masks and life jackets, in accordance with US Airways’ new policy to “charge for everything.” 

Male passengers reported rampant shrinkage due to the icy waters. One man said he was “happy to be rescued and all that, but I’m mortified by the thought that all the female passengers must be snickering about my penis behind my back.”

Several hours after the crash, an old woman on a small boat in the vicinity of the wreckage was spotted tossing a necklace into the river.

WASHINGTON, DC - Long before he befriended atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, chanted “death to Kennedy” at Dallas movie theaters with his best buddy Lee Harvey Oswald, or went fertilizer shopping with his protege Timothy McVeigh, Barack Obama was an eight-year-old errand boy who planted bombs for Williams Ayers’ subversive Weather Underground in the late 1960s. 

Ayers chuckles every time he hears Obama say that he was only eight-years-old when Ayers did some despicable things. “What he forgets to mention is that he was right there with me.” Ayers calls Obama “the best ‘planter’ in the entire outfit. I couldn’t have done it without him.” 

Wily beyond his years, Obama could always manage to get his little blue tricycle past any guard in any government building. “He’d look at them with those big innocent eyes and ask them if they wanted to hear him sing a negro spiritual. Sometimes he’d do a little tap dance for them, you know, pretending he was a miniature Sammy Davis, Jr. They’d all smile and say, ‘Ahh, what a cute little black kid’ and just let him pass. Nobody ever seemed to notice the dynamite strapped to his handlebars.”

Celebrated film director Martin Scorsese confirmed that his crime classic “Goodfellas” was originally written to tell the story of Obama’s role in the Weather Underground from a young age. “But then Denzel Washington dropped out of the lead and we replaced him with Ray Liotta, so we changed the Weather Underground to the Mafia. But as originally written, the first line in the film was Obama saying, ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a domestic terrorist.’  When Ray [Liotta] was signed, we changed ‘domestic terrorist’ to ‘gangster.’”

Ayers lavished Master Obama with toys and candy, and the boy carried out the group’s dirty work with glee for several years, until he hit puberty. “Let’s face it,” Ayers said candidly, ”a cute little black boy can get away with anything, but a black teenage male — well, he might as well have a sign around his neck, ‘Arrest me, I’m a criminal.’ That’s not the kind of person I can have representing my organization.” Obama was demoted to washing dishes in the Weather Underground mess hall, out of sight, away from the action.  

The proud young man bristled at the assignment and decided to part company with Ayers. Just as his bitterness was starting to eat away at him, he joined a new church and adopted the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as the father figure missing from his life.

Obama denies that his years working with Ayers were anything but “innocent child’s play.” In any event, he says that the boy who planted those bombs no longer exists. “Have you never heard that your skin replaces itself every seven years?” Obama asks. “Well, that little boy has been replaced several times over by now.” Besides, he is quick to add, he no longer owns that little blue tricycle, “so I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Barack Obama’s ties to domestic terrorists run far deeper, and are far more disturbing, than he’s been willing to admit. We uncover the shocking truth about how much the Democratic nominee for president hates the government he wants to lead and the country he hopes to change. 

Third in a Four-Part Carbolic Smoke Ball Investigative Report.

WASHINGTON, DC – Long before he ever went fertilizer shopping with Timothy McVeigh, Barack Obama befriended two other subversive, disaffected conspiracists who would soon become America’s first couple of domestic terror and espionage.

Obama met Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in July of 1943 at a dinner party to honor Rashid “Wiz” Khalifa, the controversial Palestinian scholar and hip-hop artist whose breakthrough single, “Start Snitchin’,” was the first big hit for PLO Records. At the party, hosted by NKVD Record Mogul Alexandre Feklisov, Obama and the Rosenbergs formed an uneatable Charades team, trouncing every team that dared to challenge them throughout the night. “We were unstoppable,” Obama wrote in his best-selling book, Sounds Like…Memoir. “We got each other’s clues right away, and answers would pass between us as if we could keep no secrets. I knew then that we would be two words, one syllable each: good friends.”

After that fateful night, Obama and the Rosenbergs made regular appearances at dinner parties and fundraisers and later at The Russian Tea Room in New York City, taking on all challengers and never once losing a game. The trio’s finest moment came in a 1944 exhibition match, when they defeated the reigning National Charades Champions, a team consisting of Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy, and Judge Irving Kaufman. “I had a feeling they might hold a grudge,” Obama wrote in one of his memoirs.  

Though he’s been more forthcoming about his relationship with the Rosenbergs than he has with any of the other incendiary figures and domestic terrorists in his checkered past, Obama still bristles at the suggestion that his character or his candidacy are compromised by his long-time association and competitive-parlor-game affiliation with two people convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for passing classified atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were like a crazy old aunt and uncle who sometimes committed treasons you wish they wouldn’t,” Obama said in  ”A More Perfect Execution,” his recent landmark speech on anti-Semitism. “But I could never disown them. And, since they’re dead, they’re not advisors to my campaign, so I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Monday, Part 4:  Eight Was Enough.
 

Second in a Four-Part Carbolic Smoke Ball Investigative Report.

WASHINGTON, DC – Thirty years after he last went to the movies with Lee Harvey Oswald, Barack Obama befriended another shy, quiet, profoundly angry young man who would soon become one of America’s most infamous domestic terrorists.

Obama met Timothy McVeigh in the Garden Center of a suburban Illinois Home Depot in May of 1993, a little less than two years before McVeigh carried out what was then the deadliest peace-time attack in US history. The two struck up a conversation over perennial bulbs and mulch, then ran into each other again at a God Damn America Rally co-sponsored by Trinity United Church of Christ and the Northern Illinois Militia. By the end of the night, after an especially spirited debate over the use of religious symbolism in The Turner Diaries, the two had become friends.  

Obama long refused to talk about, or even to acknowledge, his close friendship with the late Oklahoma City bomber, but recently declassified ATF and FBI documents suggest the two spent countless hours together playing basketball, discussing Constitutional Law, and shopping for ammonium nitrate fertilizers. Obama liked to trash-talk “Timmy V” on the court, telling him repeatedly to “Give it up, because white men can’t jump.” “That’s alright,” McVeigh would respond, “because black men can’t be president.”

Despite some political and ideological differences, the two shared common bonds: tall, wiry frames, big, funny ears, and a belief that without radical redistribution of wealth and violent destabilization of bureaucratic power, the United States government would continue to oppress its citizenry. McVeigh and Obama served together on the advisory boards of several extremist movements, including the Agents of Change and the Weather Overground, before helping each other launch the careers that would make them famous.

McVeigh suggested that Obama should run for the Illinois State Senate. Obama suggested that McVeigh should, on a road trip to Texas, stop off in Oklahoma City to admire the “stately architecture of the Murrah Federal Building.” “Who knows,” Obama reportedly told McVeigh, “it just might inspire you.” Within four years, Obama had earned a seat in the Illinois’ state senate, and McVeigh had earned a seat on the Indiana Federal Penitentiary’s lethal injection table.

The two friends traded letters and occasional phone calls in the six years between McVeigh’s arrest and his execution, but the last time they saw each other was a rainy Saturday afternoon in April of 1993, when Obama helped his friend load five-thousand pounds of fertilizer into the back of a Ryder rental truck. “He said he wanted to plant the seeds of American destruction,” an FBI report quotes Obama as saying. “I told him to be sure and water them with hope.”   

The friends communicated one last time in May of 2001, when McVeigh invited Obama to attend his execution. Obama sent his regrets, telling McVeigh, “I wish I could, but I have a big fundraiser that night. Good luck anyway!”

Seven years later, on the verge of holding an office the legitimacy of which his good friend once hoped to undermine, Barack Obama still doesn’t like to talk about “Timmy V.” When he does, his voice betrays a wistful mix of nostalgia and dismissiveness. 

“Timothy McVeigh was like a cousin to me,” Obama said recently. “He did a despicable thing when I was thirty-one, but he will not be a part of my administration, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Tomorrow, Part 3: A Communist Organizer
 

First in a Four-Part Carbolic Smoke Ball Investigative Report.

WASHINGTON, DC – A newly uncovered footnote from the Warren Commission Report reveals that twenty minutes after he murdered President John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald met Barack Obama, the man he often called “my brother,” at the Texas Theater in Dallas. 

The two friends sat together in their usual spot, fifth row center, and watched “War is Hell,” starring Baynes Barron, their favorite actor. Fifteen minutes into the film, both men stood up, raised their fists in the air, and shouted: “Death to Kennedy! Death to Kennedy!” Oswald then asked Obama if he “felt like popcorn,” and Obama volunteered to get some at the refreshment counter. While Obama was in the lobby, police entered the theater, struggled with Oswald, and arrested him. 

“Lee! Lee!” Obama cried as Oswald was led out the theater in handcuffs. “Tell me how it comes out,” Oswald shouted to him. It was the last time the two friends ever spoke. Oswald was charged with murdering the President and, two days later, was gunned down by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Oswald’s death shattered Obama, who had launched his political career in Oswald’s Moscow living room two years earlier. The two men served on numerous committees together, and they made time to see a film together at least once a week, making sure to interrupt each one with their “Death to Kennedy” chant. 

Years later, on the campaign trail running for the very office his good friend once helped to vacate, Obama has yet to provide details about his relationship with Oswald. Nor has the Illinois Senator sufficiently explained the favorable comments he’s made about Oswald over the years. Obama is, however, quick to point out that he was not aware Oswald had killed President Kennedy until “very recently.” 

“Lee Oswald did a despicable thing before we went to the movies one time,” Obama said. “He will not be a part of my administration, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Tomorrow, Part 2: Oklahoma, Not O.K.