It's not funny anymore.. It's just very sad .. Sad for the American people... Is this the best we can do?

Joe knows how to make headlines, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Jobs is a 3 letter word. J O B S jobs there...

But the vice president's latest gaffe — dozing off Wednesday during President Barack Obama's federal budget speech — is a blunder familiar to many of us.

Sleep deprivation has become a "societal epidemic," and nodding off in public is "absolutely a problem, but it's so commonplace, we're not as worried about it as we should be," said Dr. James Wyatt, director of the Sleep Disorders Service and Research Center at Rush University Medical Center.

Here are a few other high-profile cases of nodding off at the wrong time, by no means an exhaustive list:

•Former President Bill Clinton has dozed off during several public events, including a 2008 tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and at President Ronald Reagan's funeral in 2004. Hillary Rodham Clinton also struggled to stay awake while sitting next to her husband at Reagan's funeral.