#773 Sept. 22, 2013
COLUMBUS: Football is off to a good start and has never been more popular. Meanwhile, Congress is coming to the end of the fiscal year, and has never been less popular. Could it be because the average football coach is smarter than the average Congressional leader?
Congress is facing a pile of decisions, none bigger than whether to fund the entire government. Democrats want to fund 100% of it; Republicans want to fund about 95%. The big disagreement is over the Affordable Care Act and who gets blamed if millions of people dependant on the government don’t receive their payments October 1. When your government runs through Ten Billion a day and you threaten to shut off the spigot, it gets attention.
A lot of that spending is right there in Washington. Yes, the rest of the country is kinda suffering through hard times with high unemployment, but Washington is booming.
President Obama says he will not negotiate any changes with Republicans. Of course that’s after he already made a bunch of changes in the original ACA. He said it wasn’t a tax, but the Supreme Court says it is. He allowed big companies and certain unions to delay it a year, but not small companies or individual families. Congress and their staff members are exempt, and so are IRS employees, including thousands of new ones who will enforce the healthcare law. If it’s so great, why do the people who wrote the law, and those who will enforce the law, want to make sure the law does not apply to them? Those folks should be the first ones to sign up.
In Kenya, more than a hundred people were shot at a mall by an Islamist terrorist group based in Somalia. And, unbelievably, some of the Islamic killers are Somali-Americans. How disgusting is it when we allow Somalis to come here to escape the terror at home, and they turn against us.
Miss New York got selected as Miss America. She’s a lovely, talented young woman, very deserving, but some folks didn’t like it because she’s an Indian-American. If you confuse Indian-American with American Indian, blame Christopher Columbus. When he landed in 1492 he was more than ten thousand miles short of reaching India but that didn’t stop him from claiming the natives were Indians. Since there were no geography teachers around to correct him, we’re stuck with the name.
Historic quotes by Will Rogers:
“After a football (soccer) game in Lima, Peru, five were killed. Up here we don’t kill our football players. We make coaches out of the smartest ones and send the others to the Legislature.” DT #1389, Jan. 5, 1931
“Today minds are not on politics, they are not on national affairs, they are on football. Millions of football fans are going to football games. Mind you, I think it’s a great thing.” DT #726, Nov. 23, 1928
“No matter how hard times are you can always find enough to attend a football game. Football should prosper. It has given more employment to the young men of this country than any other industry.” DT #1352, Nov. 23, 1930