Sunday, August 21, 2011

PAUL RYAN'S TOWN HALL MEETINGS








Last spring Congressman Paul Ryan was booed when he met constituents at town hall meetings. Voters were unhappy with the Republican budget which Ryan engineered. The plan would extend tax breaks for the wealthy and phase out Medicare.

This summer the congressman is trying to avoid that kind of confrontation by charging admission to his town hall meetings. People who want to talk to him will have to shell out $15. That will keep out some of the riff raff and troublemakers. At the same time it will raise a little cash. How come the Republicans have all the good ideas?

Possible Democratic candidate Carl Perrin, while no admirer of Representative Ryan, likes his idea of charging for town meetings. Although Perrin has not yet committed himself to entering the presidential race, he did want to hear what the people were saying. He rented a hall and invited his supporters to come and ask softball questions. Instead of charging $15, he asked for only $5, assuming that most people were cheapskates, like him.

It didn’t work out. Only a handful of people arrived, some of them came because they thought he would be handing out cheap beer. Those people left when they learned it was going to cost $5. In all, the on-again, off-again candidate collected only $25, all of it from family members. He still has to pay for the hall he rented. If you would like to help, you can contribute to Perrin’s Paypal account.

Monday, August 15, 2011

FREEDOM OF CHOICE


Now that Michelle Bachman has come out ahead in the Iowa straw vote, people are going to have to start taking her seriously. In the debate before the poll, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty suggested that Bachman’s accomplishments in congress have been pretty meager.

The charge is so unfair! Last spring Ms. Bachman introduced a freedom of choice act. Not freedom of choice for women, but freedom of choice for light bulb buyers. The intent of her bill was to halt the phase-out of incandescent light bulbs in favor of the compact fluorescent light bulb. Fluorescent bulbs use a lot less electricity than incandescent bulbs. The intent of the phase-out was to reduce emissions created by power plants. As for that, Bachman said, any connection between human beings and global warming was, “voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax." No doubt when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, the room was illuminated by incandescent bulbs.

So let’s not hear any more about Michelle Bachman being an intellectual lightweight, a flake. She looks forward to a day when "Everyone will have a gun, nobody will have an abortion, no one will pay taxes, everyone will go to church, and there won't be any more pinko liberal teachers in school."