Parliaments Are for Dummies: Vice President Biden celebrated Independence’s Eve last night in Iraq, where he gave a shockingly gaffe-free speech praising the huge mess normal difficulty the Iraqi Parliament has had forming a government and choose a Prime Minister. The process has been ongoing since the March 7 elections, in which no party won a strong majority.

What’s More American Than Being Broke?: Russian math genius and impoverished recluse Grigori Perelman officially turned down the $1 million prize he was awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute for solving the Poincaré Conjecture in 2003. Meanwhile, the state of Illinois is also ignoring money, to the tune of $5.01 billion in current debts. The state has been the long-term victim (it hurts so good!) of a melting pot of “blue state convictions about social safety nets and a red state aversion to taxes.”

Literally Anyone: can get married, including banned-for-life former figure skater and erstwhile boxer Tonya Harding, who exercised her inalienable right to the pursuit of unhappiness in Clark County on June 23, marrying a man from the area.

Have You Left No Sense of Decency?: Please, please, please do not celebrate by tweeting the Declaration of Independence. Twitter is a sacred medium, and must be reserved for bitching about inane problems.

Save it for the Professionals: Jefferson was a hack, not that it matters.

We Can’t All Be Spider-man: A Port Angeles man was bit by a non-radioactive spider and got extremely sick, developing deadly MRSA. The man could not afford the usual, most effective treatment for the bacterium because he had cancelled his too-expensive insurance. Only four and a half more years until universal healthcare!

RIP: The American Novel.

Liberty or Death?: Glenn Beck strikes one more blow for ignorance, launching a new “university” for paid subscribers to his website. In addition to Beck, “faculty” include an evangelical pseudo-historian and other theologians theocrats.

Blind Justice: People obsessed with Lady Gaga’s terrifyingly ginormous eyes from the “Bad Romance” video are copying her look with circle lenses that optometrists say could cause vision problems or even blindness.

Oregon Trail Reenactment Gets Real: Seven cases of Salmonella infection have been confirmed in Sasquatch attendees.

10 replies on “The Morning News: Red, White, and Booze”

  1. I wonder if Tonya Harding will make another sex tape with her new husband?

    Also, the Guardian article on the death of the American novel was a bit pedantic, I thought.

    Also also, Happy Independence Day!

  2. You’re calling Jefferson a hack because he accidentally wrote “subjects” in a draft of the Declaration, wiped it out with his thumb, and then wrote “citizens” over the smudge? You’re nuts. That’s way more badass than just writing “citizens.”

  3. I”m sitting at Union Square drinking a doppio from Il Caffe.

    It’s bright and sunny. I am wearing a red shirt, faded beige pants and bluish New Balance shoes.

    I am the Last American.

    There are no iPads here. Only netbooks. Everything is a sham, if you see beneath the camouflage.

  4. More appropriate to your surroundings, @3:

    Honey, it’s all drag. Cop drag, priest drag, wrestler drag, geek drag, drag drag. It’s all drag.

  5. Here’s a happy fourth of July to all of you and to think about what freedom really means, and why its so easy to take it for granted and the danger of doing so.

  8. So let me make sure I have this….. Jefferson composes the greatest document in history and will be remembered forever, and he’s a hack, and when your internship runs out and you’re either writing a blog no one reads or working for I Can Haz Cheeseburger, you’ll still consider yourself a writer. Got it.

  9. @8: Don’t count on TJ being remembered forever, what with Texas taking him out of their history classes. Fucking Dumbfuckistan.

  10. We Can’t All Be Spider-man…

    Instead of focusing on expensive solutions that they immediately refuse to anyone without insurance coverage, perhaps, doctors and hospitals could learn to be more practical. …I dare to dream.

    For example, instead of denying the use of an essential wound healing device like a wound vac machine, which are expensive machines that cost a patient about $100 per day to use (give or take other, added charges), perhaps we could fund brilliant projects like this one from an MIT student who has developed a $3 manual, wound vac machine.

    Here’s the link:
    MIT Student Develops $3 Cutting-Edge Healing Device, Field Tested in Haiti – April 14, 2010 (FastCompany.com)

    http://www.fastcompany.com/1616025/mit-s…

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