Today in Headlines - Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Sobelman's Pub and Grill in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has caught the attention of local news media over a new item being offered on it's famously artery-clogging roadhouse menu. The vile concoction basically consists of a "bloody mary," served in a gallon jug, topped with a complete country fried chicken, as well as sausages, prawns, pickles, asparagus, mushrooms and two bacon-wrapped jalapeno cheeseballs served on skewers.  This grandiose monument to gluttony is being echoed in another part of the country where a small New Jersey bar and grill is serving a particularly "hoggish" beverage called "The Orange Tide."  Which consists of a full Snooki head, fried, accompanied by various grease slathered nibbles dipped in a light bronze tanning solution.

The ever tumultuous political group known as the Tea Party is in dire straights this week as Senate prospects are quickly drying up, compounded by a steady steam of scandals which are greatly testing their already waning national appeal.  The question really becomes, how many more election seasons does the Party have under it's bible-belt?  Known Tea Party backing Super PAC's are expending their resources at a phenomenal rate, and yet, are yielding very little in terms of real world results at the polls.  In a panic, conservative activists are pursuing a new message aimed at cultivating a future voter-base among the young and the hip.

73-year-old, Los Angeles resident Andres Carrasco was recently deemed the victor of a grueling court battle with California-based corporation, Adriana's Insurance Services, Inc.  Mr. Carrasco accused one of Adriana's employees of assaulting him during a sales call gone horribly wrong, for which the company has paid out a settlement of $21,000   Though, to add insult to injury, the insurance company transferred the payout to Mr. Carrasco's attorney in the form of sixteen five-gallon paint buckets filled to the brim with quarters, dimes, and pennies.  When asked what he would do with his award, Carrasco offered that he was mulling the idea of leasing a massive windowless vault from a local business magnate, Scroog McDuck, who apparently died of nickel poisoning earlier this year.

Due to the vast misuse of the word "literally", well known publishing company Merriam-Webster has recently amended it's standard american dictionary to accommodate the more common expression, which closely parallels the proper usage of the word "figuratively."  Now that linguists are beginning to sanction this new second sense lingo, other restatements have been proposed in an effort to keep up with the ever-changing nature of American-English dialect.  For instance, the word "kitsch" now means "hipster irony", "Kardashian" equates to "talented", and "Muslim" translates into "terrorist."  

A seemingly progressive transparency program initiated under the new Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, is coming under fire after a scathing report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) showed that only 2% to 7% of the spending data allocated under the effort is "fully consistent with agencies' records."  In fact, a total of $619 Billion was determined to be unaccounted for throughout 302 individual federal programs.  In the wake of these revelations, the administration is transferring all future responsibility for the program into the capable hands of the Bureau of Fiscal Services, headed by former optics researcher turned mass criminal, The Invisible Man, who stated, quote "if there's one thing I know, it's transparency."