A Half-Assed Nation

We apologize if we seem a bit rushed today, as some members of our staff are headed to a very important event this weekend - which means we won't be publishing a Friday edition tomorrow.

Even if we are cutting short our publication schedule this week, we try to never half-ass what we do for you. As we've mentioned many times over the years, we firmly believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well - an axiom that sadly not everyone in America still believes in.

From the half-assed investigation of the ricin-poisoned letters in Mississippi, to the half-assed gun safety vote in the Senate - which now appears to be seriously harming some Senators - America seems to be filled with people who seem more than proud to do less than enough.

Our bass-ackwards U.S. transportation system is a perfect example of that problem right now.

When the sequester began to loom back in February, we said then - referring to hard facts from Ezra Klein, Ed Kilgore, Chris Hayes and other knowledgable pundits - that the outcome of sequestration was not going to be good, and that the resulting effects of the across the board cuts were not going to make Americans happy.

This was also what the Obama Administration was saying back then, even though many members of the media only half-assed their coverage of the President's warning. In fact, when the sequestration began and furloughs of government employees started trickling in, Republicans and most media pundits on the political right cheered, acting as though they'd won some great battle in Congress.

Of course, now that Americans are having to wait in ever-longer lines at the airports, and most Americans aren't exactly enjoying it the way journalist Neda Semnani recently suggested, Congress is starting to hear a lot more jeers than they are cheers.

As the members of Congress wait at the airports today (since they can no longer catch military flights home), we hope the jeers they hear from their unhappy constituents aren't just half-hearted grumbling about how things could be better in Washington, but aren't.

Instead, we hope those members of Congress - trapped in long metal tubes for hundreds of miles with unhappy constituents - receive full-throated denunciations of their half-measures and their half-assed work schedule. We also hope their pilots (who are also angry) announce the flight delays as a growing number of pilots have begun to do: "We'll be leaving an hour late now, thanks to the incompetence of our government."

If we had more time today, we might talk about how the House Republican leadership half-assed another vote yesterday to help improve the ACA, or how the interagency efforts surrounding the Boston bombing suspects was half-assed over a year ago.

Unfortunately, we've got to head to the airport a bit early today, since only half the number of air traffic controllers are on duty.

[Half-hearted cheer] Hooray for America.