The Week in Review

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 5: Harry Reid, Harry Reid. What to say about Harry Reid? Week in Review shrugs its powerful, Soloflex-sculpted shoulders. Yeah, there's something about the blandly avuncular U.S. senator that just makes him impervious to serious assessment or pointed criticism, much as, say, a book about Searchlight is impervious to a state of wakefulness. So let's just stick to the facts: The longtime politician was sworn in as Senate minority leader Wednesday in a white male cultic ceremony that didn't involve goat-humping, toga-wearing or ass-spanking, but did involve--eeew!--shaking the hand of Dick Cheney (which is, when you think about it, the spiritual equivalent of humping a goat). Will Reid prove to be a stubborn partisan obstructionist? A steadfast leader for the Dems? Or will he roll over and sell out to the Republicans? And will this Week in Review item end in a suspenseful, rhetorical-question riff?!

THURSDAY, JAN. 6: Imagine the asshole in the shiny new Humvee GlobeStomper 5000X behind you firing warning shots from his hood-mounted machine gun because you're going a mere 70 on the freeway. Yeah, infuriating. Now imagine that same asshole in his Humvee firing warning shots while also rubbing his testosterone-lactating man-teats with $100 bills. Super infuriating! That'll happen under a plan unveiled by Gov. Guinn Wednesday, a proposed $300 million tax kickback that would take the form of DMV registration fee rebates. Because of better-than-expected tax revenue after the rancorous 2003 Legislature, Guinn floated the idea as a way of saying "Thank you, Nevadans"--no, no, no, not you with the '87 Toyota Tercel. The guy behind you with the new Jaguar S-Type. Yeah. Thank you.

FRIDAY, JAN. 7: What does syndicated commentator Armstrong Williams think of the No Child Left Behind Act? The same thing he thinks of dancing naked in a whirlwind tube of grea$y government ca$h: He likes it! The company owned by the prominent black conservative commentator was paid $240,000 by the Education Department to wax rosy about the controversial piece of Bush domestic agenda, records revealed--an act critics said was tantamount to bribing the press. Bitch-slapped by the Associated Press on Friday, Williams admitted he had Left No Dumb-Ass Impulse Behind in accepting the money. "I wouldn't do it again, and I learned from it." Detention slip upside da head!

SATURDAY, JAN. 8: If Elvis were alive today, he would be 70. He would also be 300 pounds, would have named his four chins the Wobbling Chelvi and would feed them a loving diet of bananas and Demerol. Okay, Elvis may be dead, but we can dream. Fans across the nation celebrated the King's would-be 70th birthday Saturday with drug-filled cakes, overzealous memorializing and, of course, more Elvis impersonators than the planet can currently support. Sorry, Elvi. It is with much regret that we must ask you to stop breathing immediately.

SUNDAY, JAN. 9: The next time a rat seems to be giving quizzical looks at your girlish peals of terror as you ineffectually swat at it with a broom, that's because, well, he's probably thinking about how he can do you one better and fashion a primitive shotgun out of that broom using only a rubber band, some chewing gum and a pencil. In other words: Rats are smarter than you think. Researchers in Spain reported that rats can actually use the rhythm of human language to tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese--a surprising discovery with far-reaching implications for...um...bilingual speakers of Dutch and Japanese, we guess.

MONDAY, JAN. 10: "You're fired! You're fired! You're fired! You're fired!" No, that's not Donald Trump in a toupee-flipping sneeze fit, it's a CBS exec giving four employees the boot over the network's "60 Minutes Wednesday" report about Bush's National Guard service. Four high-level execs were axed over the report that alleged Bush had strings pulled to log his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard, based on a memo that turned out to be about as genuine as Laura Bush's vacant, icily maternal grin. CBS: 0. Self-satisfied Bush sneer: 1. Arbitrary invocation of magical fist to punch Bush sneer: 1.

TUESDAY, JAN. 11: The tsunami that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives is taking an even graver toll: It's making George Clooney upset. The actor is in a tiff with Bill O'Reilly over what will happen to funds pledged in a celebrity telethon for tsunami victims. Lashing out in an e-mail at the phone-sexing host of "The O'Reilly Factor," Clooney challenged O'Reilly to become a presenter at the event, asking him to "put your considerable money where your considerable mouth is." Let's hope he didn't follow that up with, "And here's my home number...feel free to call anytime, even if it's 3 a.m. and you're in the bathtub, throbbing loins smeared with chocolate syrup."

--ANDREW KIRALY