My threat to rejoin the GOP

I’m quite serious about it. I just filed for social security yesterday so I’m not exactly an existential threat to the Grand Old Party. I’ve said so many disparaging things about the current occupants of the party that I can’t exactly expect to be met with open arms but what the heck. I seem to enjoy making a target of myself.

I suppose returning to it would be a little like a gay child returning to the family that made it clear they didn’t like queers but as they say, blood is thicker than water especially after it coagulates. Hey, scabs precede healing right?

I’ve never had a visceral distaste for Democrats. To any new readers of the blog I’ve made that comment before with the metaphor of that great old movie Best of Enemies. If I had my druthers I’d prefer to remain the best of enemies with Democrats rather than a refugee among them.

One of the things I read in the paper recently reinforced that. It was the startling figure that Minnesota had 750,000 active or retired public employees. That’s a fifth of the working population. They live on tax revenues and that includes retirement pay. Is it any wonder that the health plan alone, never mind pensions, almost brought the City of Duluth to its knees.

As much as I detest Wisconsin Governor Walker’s method of cutting off public employee unions at the knees I can understand his drive to do this. Public Employee unions with the right to strike they won fifty years ago or so are powerful. I knew it going into the Duluth School Board and endured it while there. Even now I seem to be the object of considerable antipathy by a lot of Duluth’s teachers.

I find it ironic that our teacher’s current woes in Duluth are largely of their own making. They could have had the rival Edison public schools as part of their domain, at least in part, had they not decided to destroy it. They wouldn’t be suffering in nice new schools with 35 kids in a class had they not thrown in their lot with construction unions and the Duluth Chamber of Commerce to support the Red Plan. The bond payments for that are coming out of Duluth classrooms even now. Frank Wanner, the guy who told me Senator Bob Dole was a fascist, remains the President for Life of the DFT or whatever its called now that its part of Education Minnesota. Heck, Bob Dole looks like a saint by the standards of today’s GOP, an acerbic saint to be sure but a saint none-the-less.

I think there was more that I was going to write but I have to run an emergency errand. That will have to do.

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