Bucks for balls
In a move symbolic of Kentucky public-education politics, Gov. Fletcher ripped (vetoed) Higher Education a new one, making more money available for basketball. Louisville got $75 million for the new basketball arena, but the governor denied $73 million that would have gone to support academics at U of L (and $312 million statewide). Further symbolic of Kentucky politics, the Cats took a much smaller hit than the Cards, winning the veto Dream Game $23 million to $73 million. Afterwards, everybody held hands, swayed and sang “My Old Kentucky Home (’Tis Stupid but the People Have Hoops).” Everybody, that is, but U of L president James Ramsey, who reprised his previous pro-arena hissy-fit with one threatening to walk away from the whole project.
The circle of death
Defense contractor BAE announced plans to build a second plant in Louisville that will employ 90 people, who will build magazines for the DD(X) destroyer, which is a warship that will fire guided ammunition in the name of the United States of America and its military-industrial complex, which provides good-paying, high-tech jobs to God-fearing, fun-loving Louisvillians who will build magazines to blast the bejeesus out of anybody who thinks they’ve got a better god or a better ideology or a better government or who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and whose blasting requires the need for more ammo and more magazines and more destroyers, forever and ever, amen.
Huddled masses yearning to prune the forsythia
Immigrants in Louisville and all across the nation took the day off work Monday to protest U.S. immigration policy and show that A) immigrant labor is critical to the U.S. economy and B) immigrants have assimilated enough into American society to blow off a Monday and spend the day complaining. A few days before, President Bush demanded that all immigrants learn to speak English, just as all our forefathers learned to speak Shawnee. The local Latino population was divided on whether to protest or to simply wait another decade or two until they were the majority and could just deport all the honkys back to Europe.
BY JIM WELP
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