What with all the drama about the enormous budget crunch, Phillipe + Jorge hope to offer our esteemed leaders a very solid solution, supported with excellent financial counseling from our old pal, Swiftie.
It is a melancholy thing to walk through Our Little Towne and elsewhere in the state and then see the streets, the roads, and house doorways crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in dirty T-shirts, backward-turned baseball caps, and baggy pants, importuning every passenger for a handout. They don’t compose a useful voting bloc, so the hell with them.
A very knowing Irishman of our acquaintance assures P+J that a healthy one-year-old child, engorged by grape soda, is a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled. We make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
We therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the 120,000 children already counted in the state, 20,000 may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which are more than we allow to sheep, cattle, or swine. And our reason is: these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our current Generation X savages. Therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve four females.
The remaining 100,000 may, at a year old, be offered in sale to persons of wealth and beneficiaries of enormous tax breaks throughout the state. The mother will be advised to let them suck plentifully in the last month, powering some Dunkin’ Donuts down their throats, so as to render them fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
R.I.P., Jerry Shapiro
Most of the media reports about the tragic death last week of Gerald “Jerry” Shapiro, in a house fire on Lauriston Street on the East Side of Providence, accentuated his importance to his religious community at Temple Emanu-El. Shapiro was also a very important figure in the community of blind and visually impaired folk in Vo Dilun. Jerry was greatly admired and respected in a number of communities, and his is an irreplaceable loss.
A little truth, please
Attention, Governor Carcieri, Anchor Rising aficionados, Easy Ed Achorn, and all you people out there who cling to a vision of the past that is, let’s see, how to say this — a lie.
As the state inexplicably fails to follow through on a few basic steps to boost federal Food Stamp enrollment (thank you, Gary Alexander), we’d like to make this point:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that, since the mid-1970s, the gap between rich and poor has just grown and grown, and the uber-wealthy and powerful corporations pay far less of a percentage of taxes than they did in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s.
We recognize that the capitalist/free market (and what a bogus word that is) system has always been essentially rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful. It’s a reasonable bargain and a good system — if there really is opportunity and balance. Yet the opportunity and balance is going, going, gone, while these clowns still argue that we have to bend over further for the rich.
Carcieri would have you believe the poor are sitting on the money, and that the rich will take off if they ever have to pay their fair share of taxes. We say, what planet will they move to? Are you making under $100,000 a year and having trouble figuring out how to afford to send your kids to college? Of course, you are, but if we only destroy the unions and blow the rich even harder, we’ll all magically have great opportunities. This scenario, of course, is tied to a certain time — when hell freezes over.
If the tax breaks for the rich strategy actually created jobs, don’t you think we’d have all the facts and figures? So take this one to the bank: getting the data on how many jobs were created in recent years, when we started giving the wealthy even more tax breaks, won’t be produced for a long, long time.
Gary Sasse is a good man, and we have no doubt that he will do his best to secure this information, but we suspect he’ll need a crow bar to pry it away from the powers that be.
