LEAVE IT TO PEEVER

Clean up city hall

– Bumper sticker of the week: Annoy Fox News: Vote against Bush.

– Quote of the week: "Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment." Mohandas Gandhi

– The most dangerous men in the United States:

1. George W. Bush: a.k.a. Dubya, George Jr. A prime example of social promotion, George passed up his highest level of competence at about age 10. It’s been downhill for mankind ever since.

2. Dick Cheney: This guy knows more scumbags on both sides of the Atlantic than any other 20 dangerous people combined. He feeds on oil. You can see it seeping out of his ears. If there’s oil there, he wants to own it.

3. John Ashcroft: He’s about two bricks shy of a load. This is a Missouri product, which should just about say it all, although I will have to say, they kicked him out in 2000. They voted in a dead man instead.

4. Donald Rumsfeld: One of the good-old-boys who keeps showing up every time a Republican wins the presidency. Bush wouldn’t fire this guy if he himself had humiliated Iraqi prisoners. Rumsfeld is one of those guys inside the inside circle. Bush would go before Rumsfeld would.

5. Paul Wolfowitz: Another long-time insider. This guy is so far right he has lost touch with reality. He’s tied into a Hitler admirer who taught at the University of Chicago. This guy is one of the more seriously dangerous.

6. Karl Rove: This is Bush’s mouth-piece and brains. He devises all the nastiness that emanates from the White House, which is fairly pervasive. He would sling mud at his own mother if he thought it would help the cause.

7. Clarence Thomas: This is the one whitest black man I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t like or support anything that isn’t extremely far to the right. He put a new twist into affirmative action, it’s called kissing the white man’s butt to get ahead.

8. Anthony Scalia: Another right-wing Supreme Court member. This guy is so biased to the right that he couldn’t possibly be capable of making a reasonably unbiased opinion. He is reportedly a member of the Opus Dei, a Catholic right-wing secret society. And he’s a good buddy of Cheney. I suppose they pray together while duck hunting.

9. Asa Hutchinson: A bit more capable guy, but he wholeheartedly sells out to the right-wing. As head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, his main activity was to end the insidious use of marijuana for medical purposes. He’s now the Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security. Stand clear of the borders.

10. Jerry Falwell: It’s hard to believe anyone takes this guy serious. He’s nuttier than a fruitcake. An old racist, Falwell finds fault in anyone who doesn’t think or look like him. He’s a first-class moron.

11. Rush Limbaugh: As above

12. Shawn Hannity: As above.

– Weeds, trash, junked cars. Clean-up Galesburg: Let me begin by saying that now is not the time to tighten up our ordinances having to do with lawns, trash, brush piles, junked cars, or doing anything unreasonable concerning businesses trying to operate in Galesburg. i.e. fence heights, distance of structures from the road.

I do totally agree that the citizens of Galesburg should take pride in our community and should do everything within their means to keep their properties up.

But it is currently a difficult time. The economy is bad. In Galesburg, worse. A lot of people can’t afford to do much of anything. We have probably at this point a 20% unemployment rate, with another 20% underemployed, both destined to get worse. We have a lot of seniors on fixed incomes trying to stay in their homes. We have people with disabilities on fixed incomes, trying to stay in their homes. The city cannot expect these people to continue to pay higher and higher real estate taxes and special assessment taxes and get virtually nothing for their money. In a dying town, it is the city administration, the council, and the mayor who are inflicting the final blows.

Neighborhood watch groups, if they want to be any help at all, should do just that, offer their help to their neighbors. This would plant the seeds for better communication, neighborhood cooperation, community empowerment, and work to revitalize our city, not divide it. It is the city administration, city council, and mayor’s responsibility to see to it that these small, in the scheme of things, rather trivial issues do not explode into major divisive events. It was the same with the burning issue. With the slightest bit of common sense and compromise, all of this could be avoided, and we could use our time on more productive discussions that the city desperately needs to undertake. It looks to me like we need to clean up city hall.