First News of 2013

Headline: ALABAMA wins title as Number One Football Factory in the US of A!!! Yay!!!

And in other news, the President has nominated John Brennan to head the most dysfunctional agency in the US Government, the CIA, aka the Counter Intuitive Agency.  The CIA is perhaps best known for missing the fall of the Soviet Empire; other biggies include failing to give hints as to the takeover of Iran by religious terrorists in the late 1970s, and for being clueless about the guys planning to crash into the World Trade Center.  So, Mr. Brennan will have his hands full as soon as the dysfunctional Congressional republicans  finish sucking their thumbs in the corner of the Senate floor and get on with his confirmation process. With Mitch (one-term) McConnell in charge of the Republican senators, it is at best uncertain when republicans will be allowed to rejoin the Congress.  Mr. McConnell is still smarting a bit after he failed in his effort to push his colleagues over the fiscal cliff without parachutes.

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of War will also engender some hate mail from the republican chicken hawk contingent, but that surely cannot be regarded as news, in any sensible definition of that term.

And this just in. Global giant Bank of America has just announced formally that it is getting out of the banking business altogether. Willie Sutton III, the company spokesman, laughed as he made the announcement. " Yeah, we finally realized that we have no clue how to run a bank any more. So, we are planning on focusing instead on what we do best--on-line gambling. We have applied for a gambling license, so Las vegas, watch out."