Black Friday Humbug
These assholes standing out in the cold and dark for days waiting to save a few dollars on the magical Black Friday amaze me. First off, most people have to actually work for a living and do not have the luxury of fucking off for days or weeks living in a tent outside of some Walmart or Target waiting for the blessed day to arrive. Secondly, when these said assholes get on television telling the reporters how they “saved a thousand dollars,” my follow-up statement to them would be, “Well, it must be nice to have an extra thousand to spend on a load of horseshit like this, because the vast majority of working-class Americans are probably watching this crap on television and wondering what they’re going to be eating tomorrow.”
Screw this holiday shopping shit. It’s nothing more than a way to enrich the coffers of multi-billion-dollar companies and mesmerize ordinary citizens of this nation into believing they are going to have to run up thousands of dollars of debt, otherwise 4-year-old Billy and 7-year-old Jennifer are going to grow up unloved and disenfranchised and ultimately evolve into serial killers living on the streets and drinking cheap wine out of brown paper bags while the more fortunate child prodigies who received the latest video game and cell phone and $100 pair of tennis shoes go on to run General Electric and Microsoft and vacation in the south of France. These days, Christmastime is little more than a way for companies that employ slave labor work forces to grind out a few extra hundred billion between now and Dec 25.
Robert Zoeller, Fern Creek
At Your Discretion
Louisville appears to be split right down the middle on the subject of the Metro Council’s discretionary accounts. The public wants them abolished, but the Metro Council members want to keep the money.
How to resolve the impasse? State Rep. Tom Burch of Louisville has proposed a simple solution with a bill he recently pre-filed in the Kentucky House of Representatives — BR-121. Burch and his colleagues in Frankfort know that appropriations of the Kentucky General Assembly have “purposes specified” and “procedures prescribed” under KRS 48.010. So, why not extend that requirement to appropriations of the Metro Council? What’s good for the goose is also good for the gander.
Let the Metro Council members continue to call this money “discretionary accounts” if they want as long as it’s “distinctly specified in the budget ordinance.” It looks like we have a loophole in the state law. Let’s close it.
Tom Louderback, Highlands
Tea Bag The Tea Party
For the good of our country, it is important that both major political parties nominate their best candidate to run for the presidency. In a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times, John G. Taft, former Ohio senator Robert A. Taft’s grandson, bemoaned where the extreme Tea Party has taken the Republican Party. I do not believe past GOP stalwarts Sen. Taft, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan would embrace the uncompromising, self-destructive agenda of today’s Tea Party. The Tea Party’s contempt for and unwillingness to work with our twice-elected Democratic president severely damages a once-true Republican Party, and, in the process, greatly harms the country. I hope Tea Party candidates are soundly defeated in the crucial 2014 mid-term elections.
Paul L. Whiteley Sr., St. Matthews
Hey, Washington
Please forward this message to the bigwigs in Washington: The Iranians will give up their nuclear weapons when someone pries them out of their cold, dead hands.
P.S. Don’t bother telling the Israelis. They already know.
John Gamel, Saint Matthews
