Rumors that Honey Boo Boo was competing in a nearby pageant coaxed me out of a Kentucky bomb shelter (read: abandoned coal mine) that I cleverly located by cross-referencing an episode of Doomsday Preppers with Google Earth.  Sadly, such reports proved unfounded, though I did notice, once my pupils adjusted to the light, that our great nation had not only survived the Mayan prophecy of spontaneous extinction but somehow had avoided plunging over the fiscal cliff.  Well except for those misfortuned investors who’s Apple stock is hurtling towards ground zero at breakneck speed.  The tech giant this week revealed that EPS fell for the first time in a decade as gross margins tumbled from 45% to 38%.  Worse yet, the company may be forced to restate (read: lower) Q4’s $13.08 billion profit as a significant portion of the gain was due to in-app purchases made on my toddler’s iTunes account that my wife had unwittingly linked to her credit card.  These are now in dispute.  And after listening to AAPL’s conference call with Wall Street, erstwhile bullish analysts were agog at the company’s desultory guidance for future phone sales (despite whispers of an iPhone6 production run) and the unwelcome prospect of reduced subsidies by AT&T; they were left to desperately cling to CFO Peter Oppenheimer’s stillborn explanation that because the iPhone5 rollout was faster than expected, revenue growth going forward would be uncharacteristically listless.

What did hew to form was the inability of Congress to meaningfully address the burgeoning budget crisis in Washington.  Sure, agreements were reached on taxation (you’ll pay more) and the debt ceiling (we’ll owe more), but the real work, slashing outlays, was forestalled by lengthening the fuse on sequestration.   Even the automatic cuts codified by the Budget Control Act of 2011 exempt Medicare and Social Security, each responsible for consuming a fifth of federal spending.  Interest payments, once rates rise from these Bernankein depths, could easily swallow another 15%.  Republicans, despite their parsimonious rhetoric, want to radically scale back any cuts to the Pentagon, despite the fact that we spend more on “defense” than China, Russia, France, Japan, India and the U.K. combined.  And to what end?  We just wasted more time in Afghanistan and Iraq than we spent in both World Wars and essentially got our asses kicked by a bunch of seventh-century throwbacks wearing robes and sandals, armed with little more than duct tape and abandoned munitions.  Perhaps we could have done a better job of shooting jihadists if we had surreptitiously lured Al Qaeda into a movie theater (by showing Leni Riefenstahl and Mel Gibson films) or gulled the Taliban into attending an elementary school (to ostensibly prevent female students from learning) because we Americans are practically experts at killing in those milieux.

But then again, who needs terrorists when we’ve got Boeing to threaten our air safety?  And the government concurs.  To wit: just as the FAA grounded the entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners, the TSA is removing all controversial “naked body scanners” from U.S. airports because, according to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, “ a concealed weapon is no match for a GS Yuasa lithium-ion battery in terms of bringing down our commercial aircraft.”   Production glitches, electrical fires and fuel leaks have continuously plagued Boeing’s bellwether offering, necessitating a handful of emergency landings and prompting suspicion that Yuasa was awarded the custom battery contract as a quid pro quo for securing orders from ANA and Japan Airlines.

Yet the mainstream media barely mentions such threats to the commonweal.  Rather, it is obsessed with Manti Te’o’s fictional girlfriend, incessantly combing over every phone call and e-mail in order to determine who said what to whom.  Yet I can’t for the life of me understand why this is newsworthy; my cousin Andy has been engaged in Internet relations with dozens of imaginary paramours ever since he dropped out of Dartmouth.  And other than his monthly Spankwire bill, it’s not really material.

With all the pomp and lip-syncing of the inauguration behind us, we can return our focus to President Obama’s obstructionist foil on the Hill, namely Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).  The House leader, to refresh, sports an iconic perma-tan that stubbornly confounds even the most seasoned beltway pundits.  Is it merely another manifestation of Mr. Boehner’s compulsive, nay, addictive, personality (recall: chain smoking, alcoholism)?  I think not.  I believe it is a feeble and disturbing attempt by the congressman to “blackify” himself.  (It would register as far less feeble were Mr. Boehner to sport an Afro and tracksuit instead of mirroring Don Draper.)  You see, despite ample evidence to the contrary, my hunch is that the Speaker is more cunning and acute that he is given credit for.  He is trying to capitalize on the fact that African-Americans, a half-century after Gov. George Wallace (R-AL) personally barred the doorway of Foster Auditorium, now receive preferential treatment.  Rather than resorting to reverse-discrimination lawsuits likeFisher v. University of Texas or Ricci v. DeStefano, he has decided to (clumsily) infiltrate the other side.

And who could blame him?  Ray Lewis is lauded as he prepares for his Super Bowl swan song despite presiding over a double murder.  Lance Armstrong, by way of contrast, has become a pariah for simply engaging in the same behavior as every other elite cyclist.  And now the International Cycling Union (which itself faces allegations of covering up unfavorable test results) has partnered with the World Anti-Doping Agency to offer clemency to every other rider on the planet in exchange for testimony related to blood doping and steroid use.   In simple terms, I, like Mr. Boehner, have no ambition to trade lives with Sugar Bear.  But that Shawty Lo, with all them baby mommas, now that shit be poppin’.