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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

GOOD LUCK TO THE LEMMINGS

January 19, 2004 by cmackie

Der Gropenfuhrer has assembled what columnist Jim Washburn calls a Dynamic Oligarchy to
rule California’s lemmings. “The beauty of Dynamic Oligarchy,” Washburn writes, “is that it works where it’s needed
most. … If you’re an ‘unfit’ member of society struggling to meet your meek goals, it zeroes right
in on you.”


Washburn recalls seeing the Grope “crush a car with a wrecking ball” during his campaign for
governor. “I’ll never tire of his quote at the time, which ranks with Thomas Jefferson and Tom
Paine’s best: ‘In movies, I played a character that if I didn’t like something, I destroyed it!
I viped it out!‘”


That’s just what he’s doing to education, health care and social services. “How did we know
that the special interests Arnold was complaining about were our kids and our poor and ailing
elderly?” Washburn asks. Nobody says the Grope’s job is easy. But his so-called solutions to
California’s fiscal problems are heartless and no better than those of his predecessor, Gray Davis.


And how about George Pataki, New York’s governor? He doesn’t want to be left out of the
running for heartless. To save New York state all of $9 million, he plans to cut assistance to the
poor who are physically disabled. “In a state budget of more than $90 billion, the
total savings would be minimal but at least 26,700 families could be affected,” The New York Times reports this morning.


The report noted that those households “would lose $90 per month on average,
according to an estimate provided in the proposal. For a family with a fixed monthly income of
only several hundred dollars, that loss could have a significant impact, advocates for the poor
said.”


Nice, huh? That piece of cheery news comes just in time to celebrate
today’s federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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