SUMMER SLUMPS and HURRICANES

Summer is pretty dead news time in macon.

Of course right now our Mayor, Ec. Jack Ellis is off on one of his famous junkets to Africa, this time, the Dark Continent.

He will be gone ten dats. Part if the trip is ‘official’ in that he has some kind of business in some ‘sister city’ whose name and exact location escape me. It’s only a rumor the fellow has what may be described as a ‘Hootchie Mamma’ waiting for him over there supine on a bed of straw within a mud and wattle hut. Jack has far more expensive tastes than that.

But he’s gone having signed the budget despite threats to use his line-item veto power on what the Council to the budget he first proposed.

And, in a surprise move, taxes and fees are going up again. 2005 will be remembered as a year that screwed the small business man. His fees and licenses are going up again. And that but three weeks after we voted ourselves a penny extra sales tax. Now the school board is flexing its newly acquired power to tax. That nearly useless body of limp-wristed guardians of the young and immature now wants us to jump through another SPLOST hoop, raising the sales tax to 7% in Bibb County.

Everybody is talking SPEND. Nobody is mentioning the ‘S-Word’, that’s ‘save’ by the way, not the other S-Word, the one with excremental meaning, popular with young old and virgin Catholic nuns, if such things there be anymore.

Almost nobody, that is. Stebin Horne and Cole Thomason can be counted on to vote against some of the really stupid expenditures The Mayor and City Council are so fond of cramming down our throats. But the majority taxes on, preferring to continue business as usual including the sanctity of city jobs.

City jobs are anything but sacrosanct. They need to be cut down through retirement or just plain old firing. You know, get rid of some dead wood….save some dough. Balance the budget fairly across the socio-economic spectrum of the community.

After we get rid of the current school board, we should do some wholesale housecleaning of the gang of fifteen.

And they wonder why we call them ‘sphinctocrats’.

RECALL ELLIS is off and walking in its third effort to get their fire-the-mayor’s-ass off the ground. Three strikes and you’re out, ladies. As we observed earlier, your efforts are ‘racial’ in nature. We don’t mean ‘racist’, before you get your granny knickers in a wad, but ‘racial’. What you are doing can only set back recent gains made in improving race relations in our corner of the Peach State.

HURRICANE DENNIS is heading for Gulf Shores…or the Florida Panhandle. Brother Rob and his little family are in Florida right now. Hope all is well with them. Macon might be facing serious flooding. Happened in 1994.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT In Dublin (Georgia) this weekend the annual REDNECK GAMES are being held. This is the tenth year for the games....something like fifteen thousand people are expected to visit the small town over a two day period. Featured contests include playing horseshoes with toilet seats and a convivial wallow in a mosh pit of thoroughly soaked Georgia red clay.