Maybe there’s hope
Speaking of what government does, how’s this:
When two unshaven men wearing camouflage pants and plaid shirts walked into Cappy’s Chowder House in Camden on Thursday afternoon, owner Johanna Tutone thought she was about to feed a pair of hungry duck hunters.
After the men presented badges identifying themselves as federal fish-and-wildlife agents and said they had come for her 150-year-old stuffed gull, Tutone concluded it had to be a prank.“I thought they were joking,” she said. “I thought any minute someone would come up the stairs and say, ‘Gotcha!'”
But the men were serious. Based on a complaint they had received from a customer, they told her they had come to confiscate the stuffed Greater Black Backed Gull that has been perched upstairs in her restaurant for more than 20 years, mounted under glass and surrounded by an ornate frame.
But, maybe, people are paying attention:
A quarter century after the Reagan revolution and a dozen years after Republicans vaulted into control of Congress, a new CNN poll finds most Americans still agree with the bedrock conservative premise that, as the Gipper put it, “government is not the answer to our problems — government is the problem.”
The poll released Friday also showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans perceive, correctly, that the size and cost of government have gone up in the past four years, when Republicans have had a grip on the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.
Discretionary spending grew from $649 billion in fiscal year 2001 to $968 billion in fiscal year 2005, an increase of $319 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Queried about their views on the role of government, 54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought it was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Only 37 percent said they thought the government should do more to solve the country’s problems.
It’s a pity the Reagan revolution died when Republicans suddenly found themselves in charge.
October 31st, 2006 at 12:44 pm
The Reagan Revolution is still alive and well. Every time a previously-American job gets shipped overseas, a Reaganite gets his wings…
October 31st, 2006 at 4:20 pm
When someone complains about the Federal Fish and Wildlife people will someone come and cart them away?
Osama Bin Laden, the M13 Gang, Drug Cartels, Mad Mullahs and the Norks are small potatos as a threat to liberty compared to folks like the federal Fish and Game people.
October 31st, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Nope, it’s nothing that Reagan did or didn’t do, it’s simply what Bush didn’t do. He has TOTALLY failed to remove the Clintonians from the Federal Bureaucracy, or at least promote right-thinking people to lead the various sections of the bureaucracy. He stopped with the Cabinet and maybe one or two layer below that, at the most.
I’m here to tell you that unless you replace at least the upper 5 echelons in EVERY bureau, the leftover echelons from the previous administration will continue to produce their poison work. There’s so much paper coming out of these offices that some of this type of horseshit gets by the few Bush appointees who are supposedly there to stop it.
Bush will go down as a total failure in this regard.
We REALLY feel it out West, because out here, it’s just as if the Clintons were still in the White House, as far as envoro-whacko horseshit from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and National Parks Service goes.
November 1st, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Thirty years ago they tried that with my then father-in-law. A very nice man, by the way. They wanted his stuffed owl that had sat on his family’s mantel in one home or another for almost 100 years. He apprised them of the fact that he still knew how to shoot and they could just go try to steal somebody else’s stuff. Back then, there weren’t near as many ninja wannabes, so they left him alone. Were he still alive today I assume they would surround his modest home and burn him out. I’m glad Floyd hasn’t lived to see what has become of his country.
However, his attitude lives on.