Have I Got A Line For You!

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Watching Kevin McCarthy finagle his way into wielding the Speaker’s Gavel was a barn burner. Stayed up late Friday night watching the whole fiasco. It will be interesting to see what secret deals and greased palms happened to get those final votes? Putting term limits on these elected officials is long overdue. Some argue that’s what elections are for. May have been true in the 70’s, but there is so much money poured into campaigns these days that people like Mitch, Nancy and Jerry get elected again and again. None of them know what middle class is, let along governance. They sure don’t represent “We The People.” We aren’t the highest bidder even though they confiscate 30% of 300 million people’s income each year in Federal income taxes. They’d rather take the special interest money and put the rest of us over a barrel or under the snow plow.
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Meanwhile, President Biden made it down to the border but El Paso was “cleaned up” before his arrival. One of the border agents said he might as well have landed in Des Moines, Iowa. What’s the point of visiting the border after a 48 hour clean up? Sounds like a trip with no purpose. This reminds me of the Red Cross visiting Terezin, Czechoslovakia during WW2. That sight was cleaned up to fool the world too.
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I’ve been re-reading Sinclair Lewis’s 1930 books about Small Town America and have found them again, most interesting. I’d also like to re-read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” about work in the Chicago meat packing houses and what folks endured. This caused an uproar at the time it was published. Remember how the West Bottoms in K.C. used to smell on hot days from the packing houses? All gone now.
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Here’s something I didn’t know but learned this morning. Back in 1932 the smallest team of mules in the world was owned by Cliff Fewell of Calhoun. The pair weighed 300 lbs. One was black, the other a dappled grey and their names were Amos and Ruby. The mules were bred in Vermont, the mother being a small Shetland pony and the father a Mountain jack. Mr. Fewell trained the pair to do all kinds of things, including pull a cart full of children, count and answer questions with a nod or the shake of their head.
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Enough of this mind wandering all over the place. Time to close up shop for the day. Take care old buddy.
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Til Next Week:
J.M.W.