A Pinata of Greenbacks

The City of Asheville boasted on its web site today another instance of its role in expanding the federal government into welfare statist realms expressly forbidden, if anybody would care to read the Law of the Land. Anyway, the recipe for expanding the federal deficit and justifying remote-control, hyper-administrative intrusion into personal responsibilities is the usual exchange of incantations mumbled in Synergese for high sums offered by alphabet soup.

According to Hal David:

Twenty houses in a row:
Eighty people watch a TV show.
Paper people, cardboard dreams,
how unreal the whole world seems…

Can we be living in a world made of papier mache?
Everything is clean and so neat.
Anything that’s wrong can be just swept away.
Spray it with cologne, and the whole world smells sweet.

Ice cream cones and candy bars,
swings, and things like bicycles and cars…
There’s a sale on happiness:
You buy two, and it costs less.

Can we be living in a world made of papier mache?
Everything is clean and so neat.
Anything that’s wrong can be just swept away.
Spray it with cologne, and the whole world smells sweet.

Read the papers. Keep aware
while you’re lounging in your leather chair.
And if things don’t look so good,
shake your head and knock on wood.

Can we be living in a world made of papier mache?
Everything is clean and so neat.
Anything that’s wrong can be just swept away.
Spray it with cologne, and the whole world smells sweet,

like papier mache.

One may get the impression Sylva is reaching its carrying capacity for legislation this week. The Smoky Mountain News reports the town has found by outlawing parking for certain people on a couple main streets, the cars didn’t magically evaporate. As a consequence, parking jams are occurring other places. To make matters worse, the downtown area is riddled with so many crosswalks, drivers can’t tell which ones are real, and so the commissioners voted to sacrifice a precious parking space to put up a sign indicating pedestrians will be using a particular one. Saith the reporter:

Fix a problem, create a new one. That’s how the cookie has crumbled lately in Sylva.

You Have to Pass the Ordinance to Find out What’s in It

A few months ago, the Town of Sylva passed an ordinance to prevent business owners and employees from parking on two main streets. Those who disobeyed were given $50 tickets. Dodie Allen, a candidate for state house, got one of the tickets on her campaign van and turned the situation into a publicity stunt. Researching Allen’s claims, Steve Gray, owner of the Sylva Herald, discovered the very language for which the ordinance was written had inadvertently fallen by the wayside in a crockpot of legalese. To make matters worse, the town commissioners spoke in politically-correct gobbledygook, avoiding identifying nouns, when they had to officially set a public hearing date for a revised ordinance. To make matters better, Town Attorney Eric Ridenour offered to pay all tickets issued without the law out of his own pocket.

My compliments to Quintin Ellison for another fine article.