The Niles Star

As we prepare to bid adieu to not only 2009, but also the Uh-Ohs, that decade of wretched excess and distracting reality television from which we have yet to awaken, the guy who started it all is out of prison. Naked Richard Hatch, the first "Survivor" millionaire, didn't pay taxes on his prize.

By admin

John Eby: We better resolve to face reality, not watch it on TV

Published 12:19pm Monday, December 21, 2009

As the decade wheezes into a spent heap, desperate housewives lined up to trade on their dignity for a shot at riches and fame, or at least the kind of notoriety which can provide a comfortable C-list career, is like an out-of-control game of Crazy Eights. Octomom. Octoparents.

The divorce is final, the fork plunged in the 10-year marriage of Jon and Kate Gosselin.
Richard and Mayumi Heene were desperate to land another reality gig, so they concocted a huge hoax, convincing a riveted country their son had been carried away in a saucer-shaped balloon. When Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the Virginia polo promoters, strolled into President Obama’s first state dinner, their eyes were on a bigger prize – “Real Housewives of D.C.”

We end the year the way we spent the Sixties, when the Beatles were a boy band, reading Tiger Beat. Doonesbury, which has been around almost as long, seems reinvigorated. Since Tomcat’s confirmed mistresses are “nocturnal hospitality workers,” Woods only dates women who sleep during the day, giving the golfer’s sex scandal a “vampire angle.” There are so many confirmed mistresses they vote to unionize and are in talks to package them as Tomcat’s “Magical Mistress Tour.” Garry Trudeau says comedy writers fear layoffs as nearly 2,000 Tomcat jokes write themselves.

With big things going down like our economy, climate change – it snowed so hard on Washington that Congress worked on a Saturday! – and health care reform, it doesn’t seem like a good time to be dozing. While we sleep, the federal government spends tax money it doesn’t have like drunken sailors, running a $1.4 trillion deficit this past year.
Remember that in 2010 when they run on their records and you re-elect them. In 2009 alone, the public debt grew 31 percent from $5.8 trillion to $7.6 trillion, rising from 41 percent to 53 percent of gross domestic product.

The debt is projected to rise to 85 percent of GDP by 2018 and 100 percent four years beyond that. So if climate change doesn’t get you, Washington will.

Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget, told Washington Post columnist David Broder that “the cushion is gone. If the same thing (a severe recession) happened again, we wouldn’t be able to borrow to deal with it.”

Congress isn’t listening, of course. It, as usual, ducks responsibility by hiking the debt ceiling again.

Populist artful dodger Sarah Palin is out there going rogue on climate change.

She’s undergone more of a makeover than Madonna to appeal to Tea Party followers.
Palin, as governor in September 2007, saw Alaska ravaged by “coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires … Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural and economic issue important to Alaskans.”

“Alaska’s climate is warming,” Palin wrote to Alaskans in a July 2008 newsletter. “…Many experts predict that Alaska, along with our northern latitude neighbors, will warm at a faster pace than any other area, and the warming will continue for decades.”
Fox saves its self-righteous scorn for ACORN because it’s sure not bellowing about the law-breaking Bush administration when 22 million missing White House e-mails surface.
The Bush White House failed to install an electronic record-keeping system, as required by two federal record preservation laws. Oh, and they lied when they said no e-mails were missing to subpoenas for lawsuits filed by two groups.

Too smart for our own good: Cities around the country installed energy-efficient traffic lights only to discover a dangerous downside: bulbs don’t burn hot enough to melt snow. Signals crust over in storms. Drivers who can’t make out red lights run through them and cause deaths.

Federal workers owed the government more than $3 billion in back income taxes in 2008. That makes the $18 million Notre Dame paid to make Charlie Weis go away so it could double Brian Kelly’s Cincinnati salary for $2.5 million a year for six years look like chump change.

Citigroup said Dec. 14 it is repaying $20 billion in public bailout money. Wells Fargo has yet to pay back its bailout.

Quips, quotes and qulunkers: “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”

— President Obama Dec. 13 on CBS’ “60 Minutes” – over a year after the $787 billion stimulus package. Obama meets with bankers Dec. 14 and alternately pleads with them to increase lending and reminds them the collapse of the financial system had been “of their own making.”

Lonely Star State: Laredo, Texas, may be in a league of its own among big cities – a population of almost 250,000 and no bookstores. When B. Dalton closes next month, the nearest bookseller will be 150 miles away in San Antonio.

John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby @leaderpub.com.