Just over five years ago, the city of New Orleans suffered one of the worst disasters in American history. Everywhere you looked you saw garbage and human bodies- like the morning after Mardi Gras, but worse. Far worse. Things got so bad, in fact, that President Bush had to pose for photographs standing very near underprivileged children just to prove Kanye West wrong. Since that time, though, things haven't gotten much better, and residents now fear that the city may forever remain below Mogadishu and Kabul on the livability index.

Thankfully, that's all about to change. A group of incredibly well paid athletes have won a championship in the city's name. Their helmets even bear the same fleur-de-lis residents use to lure tourists into pricey jazz bars.

A year ago, engineers said that bringing the city's many near-abandoned neighborhoods back up to code might take ten to fifteen years and billions of dollars that may never materialize. Here we are on the other side of a momentous football game, happy to report that this rebuilding effort is complete. Go ahead and move back into your mold-infested homes, New Orleans. A team named after you just won the Super Bowl.

And people say sports are meaningless.

The bracing salt air, harrowing encounters with death, and mountains of paperwork; they're all a part of a life at sea in the human resources department of Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge.

And yet, it's not nearly as glamorous as it might seem. It takes a lot of work to keep a team of fifty desperate men and a monkey working smoothly together and following prescribed safety procedures. Believe me, it takes serious people skills to effectively run an HR department on a ship full of blood-thirsty killers. Worst of all the crew, referred to as "deck associates" in our official memoranda, have no idea what I do or how I contribute to the operation.

When I say I work in HR they usually just stare at me with their one good eye and say "H-Arrrrrr, ya say? Are ya makin' fun of the way I talk, sonny Jim?"

At that point, I usually just drop the subject.

A decade ago when President Bill Clinton introduced Don't Ask Don't Tell, it seemed like a tolerant, reasoned approach to gays in the military. It was as if the Defense Department said, "Hey, you're an alright guy and all. I won't ask if you're gay as long as you just don't tell me about banging dudes because all that dude-banging talk makes me feel weird inside."

But it didn't turn out to be so tolerant or so reasoned.

In the intervening years thousands of soldiers have lost their jobs, and more importantly during a period of dual wars, we've lost them. Don't Ask Don't Tell has robbed the military of nearly all of its interior decorators not to mention interpreters fluent in gay, skills that will certainly come in handy if we ever decide to invade Northern California, which Republicans in Congress keep hinting that we will.

In the aftermath of his arrest on trespassing and attempted wiretapping, right-leaning activist/journalist James O'Keefe says that he and his attorneys will be filing a lawsuit against the federal government claiming that it actively discriminated against him because he happens to be a an insufferable douchebag.

"If a non-douche had entered a federal building under false pretenses and attempted to bug a bunch of phones, nobody would have said a word about it," said O'Keefe. "But God forbid someone like me do the same thing. It just goes to show how oppressive the federal government is. They can't do this to me."

As a Douchebag American, O'Keefe has had to endure persecution all his life. O'Keefe says that he gets pulled over all the time for speeding and swerving in and out of lanes without signaling. His only real crime: driving while douchey.

As the anti-tax, anti-immigration, anti-literacy Tea Party movement begins to mature into a legitimate political party, many of its supporters are wondering where it should go from here. The movement's leadership (an odd use of the term since claiming to lead the Tea Party movement is like twirling a baton in front of an advancing mudslide and calling it a parade) now say that that next step is to move away from protesting in the street and start protesting under a roof-- for a fee.

The resulting backlash has taught us something very valuable. As it turns out, there is only thing Tea Party members hate more than President Obama and the vague concept of taxation: other Tea Party members.

Tea Partiers have become so focused on their own hyperbolic rhetoric and their own interpretation of the anger fomenting around them that they can't seem to stand hearing anyone else describe it because it just sounds stupid coming from someone else's mouth or on someone else's poorly spelled protest sign. It's like a hipster walking into a hipster bar and decrying "oh, God! It's full of hipsters. Let's get out of here." In many ways, Tea Partiers are essentially the Right's hipsters. Just replace the skinny, ironic T-shirts about bands they don't listen to with very sincere XXL ones with slogans that praise the wisdom of documents they've never read and you've pretty much got it.