Congressional Pet Peeve

Should US Olympic uniforms be made overseas? Did Roger Clemens take steroids? Did the New Orleans Saints pay players to injure the competition?

All those questions have one thing in common: Congressional time was spent on them.

The answers to the questions (no, probably, and yes, respectively) are mostly irrelevant for the pet peeve I'm about to cite. My number one pet peeve regarding Congress is when it spends time debating/investigating/etc things that are much too minute for its scope.

We've got 8% unemployment, kids who can't read, an enormous national debt, a social security system that isn't sustainable, homeless veterans and diseases that need curing to name a few. And with all that going on Congress wants to talk about Olympic uniforms?

If we were all clothed, fed, sheltered, educated, healthy and perfectly safe, then maybe these petty issues would be worthy of Congress (or maybe we would demote Congressional service to a part-time gig and save ourselves some salaries but alas I digress). However, not the case.

So please Congress, if you happen to stumble upon this little Blogger blog, reassess what the hell you are debating. Fix the issues that matter and then deal with our various sporting events.

(And because I'm feeling quite opinionated this evening, in regard to the Olympic uniforms, sure, they should have been made in the USA. However they were made by a private company, Ralph Lauren, in partnership with a privately-funded nonprofit, the United States Olympic Committee and thus the manufacturing was the prerogative of that partnership. The idea of a bill that would require the uniforms to be made in the USA, while maybe constitutional [or maybe not, I honestly don't know], is ridiculous. What about good old fashioned free enterprise?)

(Perhaps Congress and I are not so different in that we have strong opinions. At least I'm kept in check by having no more prominent a soapbox than a personal blog. Which is not funded by tax dollars and is not responsible for the well-being of 311 million people.)