Top 10 Overhyped Stories of 2010

1) Tea Party candidates. We heard way too much about their personalities and not nearly enough about their policies…because they didn’t have any policies to speak of, except a general anti-government bias. Yet they still wanted to be part of the government. Who were the bigger fools: the Tea Party candidates, the media that covered their every fart and sneeze, or the idiots who voted for them?

2) Financial reform will protect you from evil banks. Wrong. You have no protection from evil banks. Who do you think runs this country, anyway?

3) Healthcare Reform will make your healthcare costs skyrocket. It’s not the reform bill that’s doing that; it’s the delay in implementing it that’s given insurance companies the permission to jack up premiums now, before the law takes effect.

4) Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is still in force in the US military. In fact, the courts issued an injunction on the enforcement of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this summer, and the military has largely given up on it. Yet Congress can’t pass a bill to repeal it. It’s the policy that died a secret death. Kind of ironic, don’t you think?

5) Taxpayers are making money on the bank bailouts. Not when the government is still pouring money into Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and GMAC. Oh, and GM still hasn’t paid back its bailout money, but it nevertheless went ahead and bought a subprime loan company to take the place of GMAC. Business as usual in the corporate welfare state.

6) Ban on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It was announced by Obama right after the BP oil spill in April, but his underlings in the Interior Department didn’t get the memo. Approvals for drilling permits went on as usual all throughout the summer until the ban was officially “lifted” several weeks early.

7) Airport body scans are “confidential,” and pat-downs are making airline flights safer. With the posting of thousands of body scans on the Internet straight from a federal courthouse scanner in Florida, the “confidential” claim was proved ridiculous. And with only a few airports using the new body scanners and pat-downs, any claim that these screenings are making us “safer” is an outright lie.

8) Iranian nukes and North Korean attacks. Both are natural consequences of our aggressive, expansionist foreign policy. If they’re really such big problems, why don’t we do something about it, for example: sideline Hillary Clinton, hamstring the CIA, and bring the troops home. There, problem solved.

9) I-1077 would’ve imposed an income tax on all Washington residents. Uh, no. It was a tax on couples with income over $500,000 per year and singles with income over $250,000 per year. If the state legislature had voted to extend the tax to all Washington residents, we would have repealed it via initiative. Duh. That’s how the political process works, people.

10) The Candy Tax was a tax on food. No, no, no, no, no. And I got so sick of the TV commercial with the woman who makes organic candy bars whining about paying the tax. What does she think we are? Suckers? Well, I guess the majority of us are…or else we really like our suckers!