News Roundup

• From the "Bless His Heart" Department - President Obama has pledged to stay in Washington DC over the Christmas holidays if Congress is still in session to work on a tax bill.  Apparently, in this time of economic and social strife, the President is willing to make the great personal sacrifice of not jetting off to a tropical paradise on the taxpayers' dime in order to do the job for which we pay him.  Let me be the first to support the canonization of Saint Barack the Martyr, he who gave up a couple of weeks on the beach in order to be available to sign his name on a bill.
•  From the "Sausage Factory" Department - A representative of Egypt's military has asserted that the Egyptian parliament will not be the final decider on any changes to that countries constitution.  The military seems to believe that Islamists, who seem to be gaining a majority of votes in recent voting, don't truly represent the people of Egypt.  I predict celebratory fire from the election to start impacting on Egypt's military headquarters in five, four, three.....
• From the "No Kidding" Department - A new study finds that a large number of young women binge drink early in their college career, and 59% of those report that they are sexually assaulted in some way after getting drunk.  This is the kind of research that I have to look at sideways.  If you don't know that college students drink to excess, and that college boys have been known to take advantage of a drunk college girl, you have been living under a rock.  I want to see a study that shows that if young girls are taught how to effectively de-testicle an attacker, even when drunk, would the number of sexual assaults on campus go down?  Maybe we should have studies to see if parents teaching their daughters to not drink to excess or to always have a trusted friend stay sober to protect inebriated friends has an impact on the number of girls who are violated.
• From the "Like a Steel Trap" Department - Former Senator and New Jersey Jon Corzine is expected to say that he doesn't know where the money his former company, MF Global, took in from investors ended up.  Let's see, you're given billions of dollars by investors, you do yearly independent audits of your books, you're smart enough to have been elected to the United States Senate and the office of governor of New Jersey, and you want us to believe you have no idea where all that money went.  This is kind of like a man telling his wife he has no idea how all the glitter got into his hair when he went out drinking with his friends.