April. The sweet smell of spring. Flowers. Blooms. Grass. Yard work. Clean the pool. Pick up a winter's worth of dog poop. The whole world is waking up. Well, sort of.

I should get April's flub for having gotten beaten so badly in the election. Every Republican in Ward 7 must have slithered off to the polls. I heard they had one final celebration at Republican headquarters that night. I could hear the sigh of relief in Vegas. The good old boys took the council. Good night, Irene. The fat lady has just about sung her last song.

Of course, the war in Iraq is still eligible for the Flub. What a joke. Unfortunately, many people are dying, which definitely is no joke. You couldn't write a better novel than what this war coverage is portraying. But it would have to be listed as fiction.

And it was tax time. April 15. Don't you just love it. We had the privilege of sending in an additional two grand. I wrote on the check that it was to be used to start a Department of Peace. I'm hoping they send it back. They fool pretty easily.

April's Flub goes to the State of Illinois. What a bunch of yo-yo's. We're broke to the tune of around 5 billion. That's a lot of broke. I smell a devious Republican plot unfolding. Over a 25 year period, Republican governors created the worse financial mess in Illinois' history. Now they expect Blah-goy-o-vish to fix it in one. Their solution is always the same -- let's tax everything under the sun but the working person, which is what would happen if they raised the state income tax and graduated it. But somehow that never occurs to them.

The state of Illinois has floundered without leadership ever since Otto Kerner was put in jail, some time during the last century. (In fact, Blah-goy-o-vish needs to be careful, the last two Democratic governors went to prison). All the legislators are scared they'll lose their jobs if they raise the state income tax, currently the lowest in the country. It's quite possible they would. The citizens of Illinois have a combined IQ in the neighborhood of 71. Generally speaking, no one's got a clue.

On the bright side, the Governor is about to rid the state of some long-standing political appointees who have been feeding from the government trough for way too long. Our ex-mayor was one of them, to the tune of around $80,000. That's not bad for a Republican who was out of work. Some guys were getting $90,000 a year for being on a board that no one was sure ever met. There's a job I could handle. I'd at least know if we met. We were way overdue for a Springfield enema.

I like the idea of selling a building you own and buying it back over the next 30 years for, of course, much more than it's worth. That's about as good an idea as my stockbroker had when he suggested I buy Enron.

Education is not going to get cut, at least not visually. The roads are going to get fixed, just you wait and see. And health care is a priority, especially if you can pay for it.

Ah, it's a new day. It's spring. The smell of manure is in the air, and it seems to be coming from Springfield. Blah-goy-o-vish gets his first Flub. That's giving him the benefit of the doubt after he gave Carl Hawkinson, a Republican, a brand new high-level administration job rather than me. Sorry Rod, but you're Flubbing has annoyed me rather quickly and has cost me a considerable amount of money.