Would everyone please go running out of your house screaming in utter hysteria right now for any of these reasons:
• You are no doubt ravaged by the faux pandemic of swine flu and about to die.
• You are about to be attacked by Asian longhorn beetles that mistake you for a tree.
• Ah, anything that has to do with homos getting married, getting stalked on Craigslist, or waterboarding — your choice.
It's overreaction time in America, boys and girls. Just find anything to panic about and you're almost guaranteed face time on national TV. What a bunch of nancies we are turning into. What the hell ever happened to the Marlboro Man or folks whose motto was "You've come a long way, baby?" (Oh, yeah. They died of lung cancer. Oops.) The swine flu insanity is the most laughable, given that all of 20 people in a nation of more than 300 million were stricken and it was declared a "national health emergency." Paging Tom Ridge, king of bullshit scare tactics regarding terrorists, or our ol' pal Chicken Little.
Would that the public had such outrage over the fact that we are bailing out the very people who put us into a financial tailspin. And Phillipe and Jorge aren't buying into the great tea party extravaganza which was simply an ad for Fox News. The righteous indignation of the likes of Bill "Loofah Boy" O'Reilly and the unspeakable Sean Hannity required a great case of amnesia for anyone who fails to remember how, like Rush Limbaugh and Jim Cramer, they were pom-pom-waving cheerleaders for all their rich friends on Wall Street throughout the Bush administration.
Time to go see if we can find a dead mouse in our Happy Meal. You'll hear the shrieks and the phone call to our lawyer.
It blowed up good
Well, you have to hand it to The Don, Governor Carcieri. When he blows something up, he blows it up good.
P+J of course refer to the absolute dismantling of the state's Economic Development Corporation, which The Don took the torch to for its failure to develop almost anything in the way of new business initiatives for the state.
Our peerless leader had already jettisoned the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, which your superior correspondents thought was doing a pretty good job, but what the hell do we know? Former EDC director Saul Kaplan obviously saw the handwriting on the wall when he hightailed it recently, handing off to another Saul, this one named Mike, to have the trapdoor opened under him. Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
P+J did get a chance to catch The Don's ear last week, and suggested that if he is indeed going to restructure the EDC, that he might include an enviro-friendly and -knowledgeable type on his list of appointees. With green jobs and alternative energy moving to the fore, there are a number of people we believe know the issues well and would be very qualified to serve, as the future of our environment and economy have been and always will be inextricably linked — if people would just make that connection a little more clearly and forcefully.
Hello, Scott Wolf.
