That's not InfiCleverness -- that's an
actual headline from a
leading newspaper. (Just as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have become leading journalists in a so-sad-it-makes-us-laugh world, The Onion is now
One Of America's Great Newspapers America's Finest News Source.)
Congress, corroded by extremists generated and protected by exquisitely gerrymandered districts, has become dysfunctional, to the point of enacting conflicting sta
tutes. One set of statutes requires expenditures; another statute forbids adequate funding for those expenditures.
The likelihood that the average American understands the relevant issues, history or logistics resembles the chance that Ashley Harlan Roethlisberger will not soon hear her new husband end a quarrel with "Well, what the hell did you expect?", but this ignorance has not prevented a strident public debate -- focused on dogma rather than solution.
Military expenditures have been ignored by that debate, confirming the disassociation from substance. The United States confronts several threats, but they are almost entirely self-inflicted. We blundered into Iraq and drifted in Afghanistan, stressing our military and our economy senselessly. Our struggling economy is taunted by rating agencies not because foreign creditors are holding a gun to our head but instead because we are playing Russian roulette with credit markets. Our most important foreign policy problems derive from not from menacing foreign powers but rather from our decades-long failure to address wasteful dependence on imported petroleum.
We will know someone is serious about solving our nation's problems when military spending (and policy -- how many American soldiers must be in Germany or Japan to provide adequate defense for the United States?) becomes part of the discussion.
Until then, politicians will look to the
fringes of
declining political
parties for
inspiration, while reasonable Americans
look to
Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and The Onion for news and
insight.
Infytune: Bad Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Infytune: Who'll Stop The Rain, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Here's a tip (what a concept, eh, Ben?) for anyone discussing the prospective return of Plaxico Burress (who spent a few years in Pittsburgh before spending a couple of years in jail) to the Steelers:+vBLpmQfVqJw~~_3.JPG)
erging evidence that the Tea Partiers did not merely talk crazy.
s of the Republican Party have added Republicans to the targeting list of Americans who must be crushed by the mindless weight of counterproductive conservative dogma.
ith respect to a few questions concerning the proposed refinancing of InsolvenCity debt:
en does his business with a young lady . . . to the P-G tweeters, it resembles a general "crime scene," but to us it sounds more like the bathroom of the Capital City nightclub (left) in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Pat Thetic (right), and Pittsburgh-based Anti-Flag (stars of the Pittsburgh G20 Soundtrack) will join this season's Warped Tour for one show -- at that shed at Star Lake, this Friday, July 22.
cultural wingnuttery -- will provide the setting for Ben Roethlisberger's wedding to Ashley Harlan.
ing-an-underage-drunk-girl-atop-a-toilet-with-his-private-police-force-watching-the-door partier) Ben Roethlisberger -- a gentleman who insists on the best for 'all his bitches' (probably because he plays for sweet baby Jesus) -- has selected a Lhuillier wedding gown, an event dutifully noted by the local newsgatherers.
egard as a coup for the designer is instead a paltry endorsement, against the background of Ashley Harlan's taste in grooms (artist's depiction of wedding night, left).
lthy car dealer, but then we noticed his stirring declaration that "success is a testament to the blood, sweat, and tears that went into decades of hard work and sacrifice by God-fearing people who believed that if you worked hard and kept the faith, anything could happen." Mr. Kelly describes himself as "someone who has had to pay his own way his whole life."
nsistent theme: Dr. Avila is a strange man unsuited for public office.
was still an emerging concept, our nation experienced and recovered from a criminal presidency, and the Republican Party was sane.
Pittsburgh Public Schools administrators along Ninth Street.
hich Casey Anthony (right, mourning her daughter) was emphatically demonstrated to be a "lying, no-good slut" (those are her lawyer's words, by the way) who partied while concealing the grotesque circumstances of her daughter's death -- means one thing, for sure:
yer funds on a license plate surveillance system for police cars from several municipalities.
xture at The Decade during that club's noctural reign, has died, at 61. Foster (second from left) joined the Igniters in his teens, then played with The Silencers, and the Iron City Houserockers before moving to Florida.
