Weekly Comments Archive
Archived Issue
Sunday, August 14, 2011
ISSUE #668
Bachmann and Paul clean up in Iowa

COLUMBUS: Iowa Republicans held a big fund-raiser, also known as the Straw Poll. Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, kinda running as Iowa’s “Favorite Daughter” candidate,  rounded up over 4800 of her childhood friends and won the poll by 150 votes over Ron Paul of Texas. Just 17,000 bonafide Iowans drove to Ames to vote for a Republican for President. That may sound like a good crowd, but three times as many will drive there for a football game.
I know a few farmers in Iowa, and I bet any one of them could have gotten 5000 other farmers to take the day off and go to Ames and vote for ‘em. Well, another farmer, this one from west Texas, announced he’s running. Rick Perry says Texas is due another President.
Gov. Pawlenty got creamed in the Straw Poll and put himself out to pasture. He spent a million dollars for 2000 votes, and figured at that price he couldn’t afford enough votes to beat Obama. Other candidates want his 2000 supporters, but so far no one has offered anywhere near what they cost him.
President Obama heard his name mentioned so many times in Iowa he wants to see what the ruckus is all about. He’ll fly in on Air Force One and trade it for Greyhound One to tour along the Mississippi River in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. What those folks want to hear is which of his programs he will cut to reduce the deficit, and which regulations he will forego so business can expand and hire more people. But what he’ll likely talk about is a new stimulus package, including a plan to install a gigantic culvert for the Mississippi to run through from St. Paul to St. Louis.
In Philadelphia, the mayor has cracked down on teenage hoodlums who are copying the violence and destruction going on in England. Police caught more than 50 one night, which sounds more impressive than it is. See, it ain’t hard for a policeman to outrun a guy carrying a 60-inch flat screen TV with his pants down around his knees.
The Obama health care bill got sent to the Supreme Court. A friend in Las Vegas asked for my opinion on being forced to buy health insurance. The quote below answers that question, sort of.

Historic quote by Will Rogers: (following a gall bladder operation in 1927)
One day I was a-laying in the hospital (recovering) and I just happened to have the only bright thought that had come to me in weeks.  “Say, this thing I’m doubled up here with comes under the heading of ‘sickness’.”  For wasn’t I getting well from an operation?
So I thought of those policies I had been paying on for years. This sickness is going to turn out all right, at that. I began to think how I could stretch it out into what might be termed a slow convalescence. So I was grinning like a moving-picture producer who has just thought of a suggestive title for his new picture. So when my wife called again I broke the good news to her.
I says, “If we can get a bonafide doctor to say that I have been sick and couldn’t spin a rope and talk about Coolidge, we are in for some disability.”
Well, I notice the wife didn’t seem so boisterous about this idea. Then I got to thinking: “Maybe I haven’t been sick enough, or maybe I haven’t got a bonafide doctor.”
Then the truth did slowly come out; she told me the sad story of cutting down on the insurance. It read like a sentence to me. She said my physical condition had misled them. Of course she said there would be some salvage out of our short-sightedness, but that the operation would be by no means money-making. Whereas if the original policies had prevailed I would have reaped a neat benefit.
So if you want to stay well, just bet a lot of rich companies that you will get sick. Then if you can’t have any luck getting sick, have the policy cut down, and before six months you’ll be saying, “Doctor, the pain is right there.”
 (From “Ether and Me”, 1927)

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