This week in your failed Congress

Act 1, pizza is a vegetable!  Your Congress properly lobbied by various food industry groups and faced with some common sense from the Agriculture Department who set standards for publicly funded school lunches has declared that pizza is a vegetable for purposes of school lunch standards since it includes two tablespoons of tomato paste.  OK, Common Sense likes pizza and ate one last night.  They are tasty and are high on the comfort food list.  They are also, as anyone with any experience and a lick of common sense knows, mostly bread and when not well made starchy beyond belief.  On a positive note it's good to see that congress did something even if it's plainly stupid and not in the interest of good nutrition for school students that need good nutrition.

Act 2, a not so super "Super Committee."  Lets start with a bit of history.  Some months ago House Republicans created a crisis refusing to raise the nations debt ceiling.  After much political posturing it was raised and a Super Committee created to cut spending and raise revenues.  As anyone with a lick of common sense should have expected given the committee makeup the committee Republicans refused to raise taxes (Common Sense notes that it is NOT a tax hike when a temporary tax cut passed to soften the recession is allowed to expire on its planned expiration date) while the committee Democrats proposed a mix of tax increases and spending cuts.  The committee failed to reach any agreement.  As a consequence a number of social and military tax cuts will automatically take effect in 2013.  The House Republican response is to propose a law with would undo the military cuts.

Common Sense is beyond fed up with Congress.  Congress seems to be able to engage in "pizza is a vegetable" foolishness to support the interest of the commercial food industry, it is utterly unable to address the single most serious issue facing the United States government.  It's long past time when each of us needs to act to change Congress, particularly those Representatives that block reasonable revenue increases and expense cuts.  That's just common sense.

Related articles

• Congress pushes back on healthier school lunches (AP)
• SNL's Seth Meyers Mocks Congress for Saying Pizza is a Vegetable (crooksandliars.com)
• Pizza A Vegetable? 11 Other Things That Aren't Either (PHOTOS) (huffingtonpost.com)
• USDA's healthy school lunches turn into starchy, tomato-ey... (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• Who is to Blame for the Failure of the Super Committee? (usnews.com)
• Debt Reduction Super Committee Fails To Agree (politics.slashdot.org)
• Super committee: So close, yet so far (business.financialpost.com)