The YES MEN strike again!

Earlier in the week, the Yes Men published and handed out a fake NY Times paper. It had wonderful headlines like "Iraq War Ends – Troops Return Immediately" and "Ex-Secretary Apologies for WMD Scare" and "Maximum Wage Law Succeeds" (for CEOs) and "Treasury Announces 'True Cost' Plan" and Nationalized Oil to Fund Climate Change Efforts" and "UN Passes Weapons Ban" and "Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge".

They passed out 1.2 million papers, drove them to prearranged pickup locations, and thousands of volunteers passed them out at subways and on the street. Articles in the paper covered the ending of wars, the establishment of national health care, the end of corporate lobbying, and a maximum wage for CEOs. They post dated the paper for July 4, 2009 and included a speech by President Obama saying "Yes, we REALLY can". Even the ads are great – one is Exxon promoting their new energy policies, with the line 'Peace can also be lucrative'.

One sad story they included was this:

Last to Die

Two proportional monuments — one to the Iraqi dead, 300 feet high, and one to the American dead, 15 feet high — are unveiled in Baghdad, and a five-year-old boy whose lifespan coincided with that of the Iraq War is remembered. By J. FINISTERRA, PAGE A5

Another good one was this:

Evangelicals Open Homes to Refugees

Up to a million Iraqi exiles — nearly half of the total — will find sanctuary in Christian homes across the U.S., vows the National Association of Evangelicals. Other denominations are expected to follow. By W. WILBERFORCE, Page A7

Imagine! Christians actually acting like Christians!

They had a special corrections section with this announcement:

Portraits of Grief

From September 14 to December 31, 2001, the New York Times published "Portraits of Grief," daily obituaries of the victims of the September 11 attacks. We are proud of this coverage, which won several awards. Tomorrow, the Times begins part two of the series with obituaries of the civilians and soldiers killed between 2001 and today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two soldiers, and one hundred civilians, will be very briefly memorialized each day, adding a full fold-out page to each edition. The series will continue for thirty years. (Estimates of the number of Iraqis who have died violent deaths since the 2003 invasion vary from 100,000 to well over one million. The Times apologizes for consistently using only the low end of this spectrum of estimates.)

And they had Tomas FRIED MAN pen a special column for his termination at the paper. Here's a clip:

The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write. I know, you're thinking I'm going too far. I haven't always been wrong about everything. I recently made some sense on global warming and what we needed to do about it, for instance. But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform. In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it's time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself.

…… To err is human, but to print, reprint, and re-reprint error- mad humans like me is a criminally moronic editorial policy.

You can look at a copy of the paper (in PDF form) at this link.

And a web page for the paper is here.

The Yes Men are fantastic! I love this action!

Photo: This photo shows a spoof edition of The New York Times announcing "Iraq War Ends," part of a hoax executed by pranksters. An elaborate New York Times spoof hit the streets of New York on Tuesday announcing not just the withdrawal of troops from Iraq but a raft of other US liberal fantasies. (AFP/Emmanuel Dunand)