Political Spoof and Political Satire Section

[Jarfly]

I am beginning to think Milton City Council should be renamed a Confederation of Dunces. If it weren’t for one or two of the members bringing up the average, I would say they have the collective equivalent of Tickle Me Elmo’s IQ.

If you haven’t driven down Main Street within the last week, you may not be aware of the hack job done on the Bradford Pear trees, which our city dunces authorized. Or did they? Councilman Holbert said he wishes they’d been cut to the ground because they make a mess in the Fall when they shed their leaves. Donna in the Water Dept. said she has gotten a passel of calls about the rape of our healthy trees. Gerald Clagg said there is nothing prettier than Bradford Pears blooming in the Spring and he is sad they won’t be blooming this year. Well, sadness cannot make up for the damage that has been done.

We all know trees can be hazardous, but towns that care about trees should have a certified arborist inspect the trees and recommend the appropriate work. It looks like the mayor gave the inspection job to Asplundh, which ultimately profited from the tree removal. This is the company AEP uses. They send a front man out claiming to be a student studying to become an arborist and he assures homeowners he will advise Asplundh to cut around wires for aesthetic purposes. Then, one day when you aren’t home, Asplundh comes and cuts your tree in half or tops the entire tree leaving your property looking like a herd of Brachiosauruses trampled through your yard leaving total destruction in their wake.

It is too bad some of the business owners and residents along Rt. 60 did not object. Even the former mayor probably knows what is a real estate truism... properties on “beautiful” tree-lined streets are worth more. We now have a bunch of unscrupulous men who cannot appreciate aesthetic value making decisions to callously scalp trees just because they love revving up heavy equipment, power tools and other noisy, fossil fuel-guzzling big boy toys that destroy things.

If you sit in on a council session, it is painfully obvious that the mayor doesn’t always know what he is presiding over. This administration is a continuum of the past administration. There is one resolution after another for this and that. A resolution is nothing but a way for the mayor and councilmen to wrap halos around their heads while they sit on their hands and do nothing.

Our mayor and some of the councilmen ran on a platform promising change from our past dictatorial city government. What we’ve gotten is the same old bureaucratic bull chit masquerading as leadership and inattentiveness and self-promotion disguised as good government. That is why I say we have a Confederation of Dunces.

It is inexcusable for councilmen to say they have been uniformed. “I didn’t know they were going to scalp the trees.” “I didn’t know the mayor was going to demote Gregg Mullins.” The fact that they do not know what is going on and don’t care to ask shows that they do not take their jobs seriously.

Milton once had the potential for becoming a picturesque, well-groomed, comfortable little town. The butchering of the Bradford pear trees is a good example that no one cares about the city’s appearance. If our city leaders can allow this to happen, don’t be surprised to awaken one morning to some absurd and surreal scenario taking place at the Morris Memorial property.

The Confederation of Dunces does not carefully deliberate on anything. If the mayor hears a complaint more than once, he will say he is tired of hearing about it and wants an end to it, “once and for all.” The mayor says he wants more businesses to bring in more B&O taxes to pay policemen proper salaries. Does that mean he is willing to overdevelop the crap out of the existing green spaces around Milton? If so, he is no different than the former mayor.

[miltonwv]

I had a dream that I passed a wooden Indian standing in front of a cigar store, and his wood face bore a strong resemblance to the face of Dr. Tweel.
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[Patrick L.]

My recent trip home was marred by this hack job on those trees! Looks terrible! Who's the idiot in charge of that fiasco?

[Susan Maslowski]

[Susan Maslowski]

Do you remember when they found the census worker hanging in a tree in Kentucky with the word ‘fed’ scrawled across his chest? The Associated Press said rural Kentuckians are wary of anyone representing the federal government and that is why he was killed. I didn’t buy the story then and thought the man tried to cleverly disguise his own suicide.

Now, I’m not so sure, especially after being paid visits by TWO census workers within the past week. I’m suspicious, too.

When the final census count is in, it will be interesting to see the results for Milton. After mailing in the TWO census questionnaires I received, I still had a visit from a census taker last week, who insisted he was here, because I failed to send back my information form. This guy reiterated the U.S. government uses census to know the composition of the nation’s population and to track their needs and told me a person can be fined for not completing the Census questionnaire, so I stood for 10 minutes and answered census questions again. When he asked me to spell my name M-A-S-L-O-W-S-K-I, he said, “I KNOW YOU. YOU are on the Milton message board.”

And, then, when he looked at my name again, it must have dawned on him, “that name is foreign.” He asked, “Are you Hispanic, Asian, or Other?” Then he asked some more questions that I don’t remember being on the original forms I sent in.

“Are you an illegal immigrant? Are you a criminal? Do you sell kidneys on the black market?" That’s when I got a little suspicious.

The Census worker who came to my house was wearing a badge, but I did not let him come inside. I may be old, but I’m still aware there are scammers out there who pose as Census workers to defraud the public. When he asked for my Social Security number, I made up the last three digits, just in case, even though I know you are not supposed to give fraudulent information on your census form.

This Census worker asked for $5, the amount it costs the government to do the survey when people like me don’t return the questionnaire. That didn’t seem quite right either.

Yesterday, I looked out the window and there was another man with a clipboard asking my husband questions in the garden. How many times are we going to be counted? Who are these men?

Here’s a word of caution. In case one of these Census workers show up at your house, he should have, in addition to his badge and clipboard, a handheld device and a Census Bureau canvas bag and should be able to produce a second picture ID when asked.

I am still wondering if these Census workers are real, and whether I will be recorded at all. But that could be a good thing. If they have no record of me, I could fall off the grid, evade my taxes, buy and sell pot and traffic firearms across state lines, while those of you who are counted have to pay for police to come and find me, and how can anyone find me, if I don’t exist?

[Patrick L.]

I answered one q on my form... How many people are living in the household. After that, they need not know. And if they come to the house asking, then I'll tell them to kindly step off my property before I get back from the closet with my rope. Jerks.

[Patrick L.]

I'm gonna give you till the count of TEN to get your ugly, yella, no good keester off my property, before I pump your guts full a lead, one, two, TEN! bang.bang,bang,bang,bang!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAaa keep the change you filthy animal.

[Jarfly]

Ms. Tracy thinks she knows the truth behind Christmas Tree-gate. If this leads to Lord Tomcat Canterbury’s downfall, it can be placed squarely on the heads of Boss Betty and Ms. Philly Hyphenated-Smith. It isn’t widely known, but these best friends became “Deep Throat,” the informational source for miltonwv.org.

How could such a big azz Christmas tree be in April Dawn Park one day and gone the next? Well, when Boss Betty and P H-Smith were setting out for the Journeymen’s Christmas concert, they saw E. Lie White and his cohorts milling around the Great Dragon. They were up to no good, but the girls thought nothing about it at the time and they went on their merry way. (It isn’t widely known, but Boss Betty has had a crush on the Journeyman’s lead singer, Big John, for a very long time, and she wasn’t going to let anything cause her to miss the concert.)

The next day, Boss and P H-Smith were dog walking and decided to rest a bit and have a smoke at one of the picnic tables under the pavilion at April Dawn Park. While sitting there, they heard voices coming from the men’s room and realized they had just overheard some closely guarded secrets about the mysterious theft and vandalism that took place the night before.

The girls decide to become the Bobbsey Twins and use “Merry Days Indoors and Out,” as their guide to uncover incriminating bits about the Christmas Tree-gate.

As the girls puffed away, they listened to the muffled conversation inside the men’s room. They heard a husky voice say, “She was a beauty. I’ve never seen anything so symmetrically shaped.”

“You should have known,” said an angry voice.

Then the unmistakable voice of the little big man said, “it’s all over the news and the media is making a whole big bunch of noise about it. I had to do something and I had to do it quick.”

“It’s in the news,” whispered P H to Boss. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out. So the two ran to Boss’s house and pored over the newspaper.

“Here, I think I’ve found something,” squealed Boss.

It says:

[Jarfly]

Hi there.

I haven’t been on here for a while, but thought with the election coming up and all, it might be time to put my two cents in. Milton has become, to put it mildly, something of a dump. It has been going downhill for about 8 years now. The mayor trapped all the cats and now there are rats running all over the place. You would think this place was the United States equivalent to the Karni Mata Hindu Temple where rats are worshipped as God.

Milton is smack dab between Huntington and Charleston, kinda in between rural and suburban, with none of the nicer qualities of either. You can’t really call Milton West Virginia’s poster child for beauty, at least not like Lewisburg.

After a lot of complaining about Milton’s “official” website, some civic minded person decided to start another website for the town, so people would know what is going on. The website is MiltonMayorReallySucks.com. The domain name pretty much says it all.

Now, I’m not gonna’ comment on whether the mayor sucks or not, but I will tell you he can’t take the heat. He’s thrown hissy fits over street signs and reading ordinances out loud. I hear he wants council to pass a resolution Tuesday to shut down MiltonMayorReallySucks.com. He even has the city attorney working on going after the site owners, and this is at the taxpayers’ expense.

That just shows how smart the mayor is. That website probably had about a dozen hits a day, but now that the mayor is raising such a stink, the story has been written up in the Cabell Standard, Herald Disgrace, and miltonwv.org, and it is busier than a 3-legged cat trying to cover chit on a marble.

There are a lot of ways to piss people off, but hiring the city attorney to shut down the citizens’ right to exercise free speech isn’t going to gain the mayor too many votes in this election. All I can say is you might want to check out MiltonMayorReallySucks.com before council passes a resolution to shut it down.

[Jarfly]

Several candidates have been wondering why their signs on the right-of-way on Smith and Mason Streets have been disappearing. Well, a video has surfaced on YouTube showing a man and another person pulling up the campaign signs. I say another person, because the second person is so close to the first you almost think it is a shadow.

Someone in this election is playing a shady game, removing these campaign signs. Those signs don't come cheap.

The YouTube video was taken with an infrared video camera hidden in the steeple of a nearby church by the Neighborhood Watch. They had heard about a certain candidate having issues with stolen and vandalized signs. The camera was set at just the right angle to capture the culprit and his shadow swooping in and snagging campaign signs.

After the YouTube video surfaced, Milton Police Officer Dusty Bordan went to talk to the individual who was clearly visable on the tape. The person defended his actions and said he didn't do anything wrong, he was merely removing signs that were obviously placed at the wrong address, because the people who owned the house were not supporters of the candidate whose signs he took. He went on to tell Officer Bordan that the use of the video was 'dirty politics' and the posting of the video on YouTube was just a distraction from the issues.

When the Cabell Standard got word of this caper, they sent a reporter to talk to the presumed suspect captured on the tape. An unidentified spokesman came to the door and said the suspect knew what he did was wrong and the video (that includes audio) proves it. The conversation on the video includes talk of worries over being seen by a former mayor who lives across the street, and keeping low and not leaving fingerprints.

I hope the reporter asked why, if the suspect claims he wasn't doing anything wrong, he was worried about fingerprints? According to the law, stealing a person's signs is what is called 'dirty politics', not posting the video of it on YouTube.

The next time, this person ought to consider wearing a mask and gloves. Just a thought!

Hey, if anybody has a link to the video, post it here.

[slugger]

ha ha

whoever did it probably got some free cuopons from shonets

[miltonwv]

I had a dream last night that RuPaul and Ann Coulter had a hormonally challenged political debate on the role of "gender and politics". Being as many people think both of them to be of dubious gender. The debate was a cross between a bar-room brawl, and one-hell-uv-a catfight.

Such antics have not been seen since boy george debated with Tammy Fay Baker, back in the day when the "tea party" was called the 700 club.
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