Wal-mart pushes for increased Government funding for Necromancy

Wal-Mart, the US retail giant, has begun lobbying for increased government funding for the much-maligned and ignored science of necromancy. Necromancy is the age old time-honored practice of breathing back life into corpses in order to raise them from the dead.

Wal-Mart has always been in the forefront of the American Necromantic movement, having devoted a lot of resources and manpower to lobby Congress into providing monetary assistance for this ancient artform. In spite of being one of the most profitable corporations currently operating in America and possessing enough liquid assets to buy all of Sweden and give it to China as an anniversary present, Wal-Mart is under pressure from rising health care coverage costs for it's employees. Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart's vice president of corporate strategy, said "Wal-Mart can no longer afford to provide health insurance to it's employees. And so, our first reaction was to just stop hiring employees who might show any signs of falling sick in the future. Recruiting officers were given strict instructions that if the applicant so much as sneezed during the interview, his application had to be discarded."

However, after facing opposition from employee unions, Wal-Mart then came to the conclusion that the only way it could eliminate health care costs altogether was to hire an army of zombies, raised from corpses of dead Wal-Mart managers and cashiers, who would be able to resume work at their previous places of employment on less than minimum wages and with no health coverage whatsoever. "Dead people do not get sick. That is a fact of life. And in that sense, this is a revolutionary new concept", said Mr Ruben about this new plan. "It is expected to quadruple our earnings this quarter. If you own Wal-Mart stocks, you should be popping open champagne bottles. Unless of course, you are a zombie, in which case, you should be cracking open skulls."

President Bush has succumbed to Wal-Mart's unrelenting demands and announced a policy of government backing for a new Necromantic Research Institute, based in New Orleans, Louisiana. The first corpse to be revived, is reportedly going to be that of Robert Novak, the conservative anchor of CNN's Crossfire.

In unrelated news, Apple Computer reports that in it's unending quest to reduce everything down to the size of something able to fit in an ant's anus, the miniaturization of the Ipod might have led to a magnification of it's flaws.