Potpourri du Jour

Locally, Mayor Sam "The Phantom of the Locker Room" Adams has found enough money to replace the old, boring MUZAK you heard while "on hold" during attempted calls to City offices with new boring music as performed by "local" bands who would otherwise doubtlessly languish in their parents' garages without the influx of taxpayer funding.  Thanks for the leg up, Sam.  And I mean that, sincerely.  As in a male dog lifts his leg.

And beleaguered Roosevelt High School just received a 7.7 MILLION dollar promissory note from the Federal government.  Cash it quickly, Rough-Riders:  it's "Obama Money."   Now the school can afford the best multi-cultural poly-lingual gender sensitivity counsellors that money can buy, and two or three new textbooks as boot.  I feel all warm and fuzzy now, don't you?

Nationally, the US Postal Service is once again a bit short on funds, and is making a two-billion-dollar rate hike, the seventh in ten years, at an increase rate just 50% faster than the price of gasoline.  The raise is needed because of the downturn of snail-mail volume since the rest of the planet discovered e-communications which do not require trucks and union contracts in order to succeed.  Did I forget to mention that 80 per cent of USPS' costs are "wages and benefits?"  And that there are currently some $90 BILLION in "unfunded liabilities?"  Unfunded liabilities, for those of you who attended beleaguered public schools like Roosevelt,  are "rubber checks:"  promises to pay current debts with monies derived from illusory fantasies of future incomes.  In this case, the shocked USPS officials discovered that there has been a drop of some 36 billion pieces of mail delivered over the last few years.  Odd that there has been no proportionate drop in the number of employees, no?  And, for my friends who depend upon their USPS pensions:  there may be some bad news headed your way, kind of like the bad news the Teamsters got when three out of five of their past presidents absconded with the union's pension funds.  Only Jimmy Hoffa, it appears, will remain as a concrete part of the foundations of the union movement in America.

Internationally,  the Taliban is very near to caving in and ratting out Osama bin Laden since Stan McChrystal got the axe for telling the truth about his boss Secretary LePetomaine, and David " Live Prisoners, My *$$!" Petraeus is riding in to town on his own "Blazing Saddle;"  Iraq is fast becoming a vacationer's paradise, except for a few insignificant roadside bombs and cell-phone operated IED's and the occasional RPG into the US embassy which is, by the way, the Largest embassy in the known world; and little Georgie Soros has announced his intention to pay off pal Obama's multi-trillion-dollar deficit so "all the little people in America can get good jobs, like in Greece."
-Or not.