Current Corn Field Crises

1. The Village of Smuglye-on-Lake  is angry with the federal government.  Washington census snoopers report a 2010 population of less than 350 compared to the 2000 figure of more than 450.  This will result in a massive loss of federal dollars which we might be able to use, for instance, to help enforce the new cat law. This statute makes it a criminal act to feed any cat for which the SOL resident cannot prove ownership.

(I am working on a suggested ordinance to require common-sense registration and and regulation of cats, feral and domestic. It's for the children.)


2.  Our largest newspaper mourns the possibility of reduced federal block grant programs. For one thing, cuts would defund rehabilitation slush pots for a neighborhood in Des Moines where "In 2001, 45 percent of the houses in the neighborhood had conditions rated "below normal" or worse...: 

Nine years and $2.7 million later, the neighborhood boasts "... the proportion of properties in "below normal" or worse condition is down to 24 percent. 

Some kind of a Garrison Keillor moment exists here. My reading of Pascal, Pythagoras,  Obama,  and other great number thinkers suggests that normal is that mathematical point  on a continuum at which about half of whateverthefreak you are counting lies above and half below.

I was pretty lame in arithmetic class, so I may be wrong. But if I happen to nail it here, it seems to me that federal grant money disrupts the entire mathematical underpinning of our universe, and we are about to face a drastically altered reality.

Why, in such a parallelish universe we might even have a left-wing American leader -- elected on an anti-war, anti-intervention platform --  lobbing cruise missiles at starving camel drivers and keeping the Gitmo jail open and okaying military tribunals for former starving camel drivers.

Speaking of the CIA and Muslim leaders...

From our Oldies but Goodies file, William F.Buckley in 1957:


The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.
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Whence Libya

I vowed not to make cracks about a Libyan "exit strategy."  The concept has become beyond parody. But that was before our great wire services began consulting one Henry Guiana,  a "close advisor to the French President."

A reporter asked him how long the war in Libya would last. He replied "a while."

That's good to know, especially since Gallic history allows us to quantify the term.

 "A while,"  in French war talk is a period of time equal to the one beginning June 17, 1940, when French Marshall Philippe "P'tui" Petain turned his back to Hitler, bent over, dropped his trousers, and sighed, "take me."

And ending early June 6, 1944 when Major Cleveland Lytle and three companies of his U.S. Second Ranger Battalion visited the famed French tourist attraction known as  Pointe du Hoc.

So, if we turn this little war over to Paris (and it looks like we might), we can look forward to announcing a pullout along about April Fools Day, 2015.

Elsewhere in the war, we bombed Muamar's tent after checking with the CIA to ensure he was elsewhere.

On the Bernanke front, at $1.5 million per, we're a little over $150 million in the hole if we want to replace the Tomahawks in time to help out the valiant Yemeni freedom fighters.  Check the green ink inventory, Ben.

The first great WTF? moment of the Libya War spin:

At the Pentagon, Navy Vice Adm. William E. Gortney underlined that strikes are not specifically targeting the Libyan leader or his residence in Tripoli. He said that any of Gadhafi's ground forces advancing on the rebels were open targets.

The President orated himself blue in the face that the goal is to remove Gadhafi. So naturally we shoot at people other than Gadhafi.
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