A lighthearted look at issues of the day:

This is graduation season, or the time when years of hard work earns you the reward of sitting in a long, boring meeting and balancing a piece of cardboard on your head.
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Congratulations! Here’s your diploma. Your first student loan payment is due Friday.
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Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS division that apparently didn’t like conservative groups, invoked the Fifth Amendment last week to avoid testifying about this before Congress. Thousands of audited taxpayers now have a new strategy.
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Members of Congress were clearly upset at Lerner’s decision not to testify. For one thing, politicians can’t imagine someone actually not wanting to speak when a camera is present.
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Lerner told Congress she had done nothing wrong, just before she said she wasn’t going to say anything more. In retrospect, we all would have been better off if Bill Clinton had used this strategy in the Monica Lewinsky matter.
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Not long after this, the IRS released a statement saying, “We have no knowledge of an employee named Lois Lerner.”
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Two would-be criminals in Fresno got caught last week because one of them accidentally “pocket dialed” 911 while breaking into a car. Isn’t that always how it goes? You can station lookouts on all sides but forget about who is listening in your pants.
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Some emergency dispatch centers say about one-third of the calls they field are from phones accidentally dialed from within pockets. It’s a good thing first responders are there to save our rear ends.
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Authorities rank “pocket dialing” criminals right up there with the ones who brag about their exploits on Facebook or Twitter. It’s enough to make you lose faith in the rising generation of thugs.
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Apple’s CEO had to explain to Congress last week why his company took pains to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The hearing almost coincided with that of IRS official Lois Lerner, who was asked to explain why the IRS has been abusing its power. Apparently, no one saw the irony.
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Apple is in trouble because its CEO feels U.S. corporate tax rates are too high and its stockholders are demanding the highest possible returns. When he used the words “thrift” and “profit,” senators had to recess to find a dictionary.
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Fox is starting a new reality show in which real workers at real companies have to decide which of them should be fired. Apparently, some television networks haven’t caught the vision of how the economy needs companies to create jobs, not destroy them.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.

On Second Thought is a weekly feature that takes a lighthearted look at current events.

President Obama has once again vowed to close the prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, if only he could find the darned key.
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Rumor has it he asked the former president for it during the opening of Bush library, but W. said he thought Dick Cheney still had the keys.
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Congress and the president have decided not to furlough air traffic controllers after all. Instead, they just won’t pay them.
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Five years after the Great Recession, home prices finally are spiking upward again. That means Congress can once again take the money it spent helping people avoid foreclosure and divert it to helping poor people get homes they can’t afford.
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Boeing officials say the company is working on a plane that would have the longest range of any passenger jet. The trick is designing a galley large enough to hold the amount of peanuts and pretzels needed to keep people alive from London to Honolulu.
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The Defense Department announced last week it won’t permit any religious proselytizing in the military. In other words, it may be true there aren’t any atheists in foxholes, but anyone trying to press the issue could get court martialed.
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Americans were infused with hope last week that strong leadership would emerge to vanquish the stubborn ideologues in Washington and save the nation’s long-term economy from ruin. But then they learned Iron Man is fictional.
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If Washington wrote its own superhero movie, the House version would have Austerity Man battling the evil forces of Sequestration and the Deficit Hog. The Senate version would have Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to … the Deficit Hog.
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Social media is filled with sophisticated, modern, Information-Age consumers who know they can trust crowd sourcing more than the mainstream media. That’s why, not long after the Boston Marathon bombings, the Czech embassy had to release a statement instructing Twitter and Facebook users that, contrary to what many people were posting, the Czech Republic is not the same as Chechnya.

Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.

Politicians in Washington thought they could scare us with long lines at the airport. Ha! That’s like scaring Britons with fog.
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Inconvenience at an airport? This is news? That’s kind of like fruitcake at Christmas — inevitable, distasteful, hardly a surprise, but something you have to endure to get to grandma’s house.
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Besides, Americans don’t worry about canceled flights because they relish food vouchers for greasy restaurants and a night at a bad hotel without luggage.
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It was interesting to see how quickly Congress acted when airline passengers started complaining. If we could somehow tie rising air fares to the growth of the national debt, our problems soon would be solved.
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Federal officials, meanwhile, are trying to explain why they arrested an apparently innocent Mississippi man for sending ricin-laced envelopes to the president and members of Congress. At least his name wasn’t Richard Jewell.
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Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o wasn’t picked the first round of the NFL draft last week. Maybe coaches worried he would chase imaginary ball carriers.
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Given the questionable, and sometimes illegal, exploits of some athletes off the field, being true to a fictional girlfriend shouldn’t be a concern.
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Former president George W. Bush learned this week that his poll numbers are up. If the key to popularity is to not say much for four years, I don’t think a lot of politicians have it in them.
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Meanwhile, the approval rating for Congress fell to 13.5 percent. Apparently, not saying anything is not the same as not doing anything.
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Imagine bringing Alexander Hamilton back from the dead and trying to explain to him how a false tweet nearly started a panic on Wall Street last week.
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The market went into a brief selling frenzy when someone hacked into the Associated Press’ Twitter account and tweeted that the White House had been attacked and the president hurt. This happened because computers were selling in a sort of autopilot mode. Apparently, computers are not levelheaded in a crisis — something to remember in case your toilet overflows in sight of your laptop.
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Wall Street investors are really computers? So it’s true what they say about those financiers being heartless.
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In other aviation news, Boeing is set to begin delivery of its 787 soon. But unless Congress solves sequestration, they won’t actually get clearance to take off until some time in 2015.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.