Careful with that Fingerpointing

I actively dislike that we can consider ourselves, with reason, to be the Crown of Creation, and yet do and are as stupid as the day is long-. Having spent a year  in Greenland above the Arctic Circle I'm here to tell you their summer days are 24 hours of non-stop daylight.

I mention that because I am just as inclined to reach for the cheap thrills, and the low-hanging fruit-the line of least resistance news items when I believe/hope no one is watching (to include me I guess). It happened yesterday wandering through a headline compilation (see you later, aggregator!) that included a peg to the recently passed IRS filing deadline, that was tied to a much larger issue.

Congress is grunting and groaning like they will seriously attempt to 'lift the tax burden' from our shoulders, my fellow 99%. Pigs will fly and Elvis, himself, will return with PB and banana fried sandwiches before any of us have a 'fair tax code' but we love hearing that siren song. Thankyewverymuch. It's a Presidential election year, all the seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs as are a third of the Senate seats. Of course Congress is looking at tax code reform. They've been accused of being many things; stupid is never among them.

I gave serious thought to clicking the link and reading the story, since I still have a job and earn an income ("too much" say the people I work for) so, to a large extent, I have a dog in this hunt, but then, just below appealing to every single base instinct, there was this: "Lindsay Lohan: The Judge Said No Clubs and Coachella Ain't No Club!" Almost gave my clicking finger an embolism nailing that one.

I don't even care about this person and could probably not tell you three movies, or anything else, she's ever been in. She's Professionally Famous, As Seen On TV. She doesn't do anything and she doesn't have to. She attracts eyeballs every time her name shows up in a story. If I were the Grain Price Control Authority (sounds cool doesn't it? I imagine the silk tour jackets are killers.) I would start carpet bombing major and minor media outlets with press releases entitled: "Lindsay Lohan Has Nothing to Do with this Story."

See? It almost worked. You clicked on it and then went 'waitaminit! Where's the pictures? What kind of a Lindsay Lohan story is this?' And then your remembered to read the whole headline and realized the error of your ways. We do it all the time, everyday.

Taliban battling Afghan National Army (btw, Zabihullah, if the attacks were such a "success", whose guys were face-down dead in the dirt eight times over? Care to wager after a month of such 'successes' we'd see  the end of all of this?) or should we catch up on Khloe Kardashian? The slaughter of innocents that is Assad's Syria or dig how ripped Paris Hilton looks in whatever it is she's wearing. Pick an event, any event-you can find the polar opposite pablum in less than a minute and that's what most of us will choose. And then we sit around and wonder 'how come Fox News is so popular?' Tell me about the rabbits, George.
-bill kenny