About The wiregrass farmer. (Ashburn, Ga.) 1984-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 31, 2008)
Page 4 - The Wiregrass Farmer, December 31, 2008 Editorial & Opinion The WIREGRASS FARMER - Established 1902 Official Legal Organ of Turner County 109 Gordon Street • P.O. Box 309 • Ashburn, GA 31714 Telephone 229-567-3655 email wiregrassfarmer@yahoo.com THE WIREGRASS FARMER (USPS 487-460) is published every Wednesday by Ashburn Newspapers, Inc., 109 N. Gordon St, Ashburn, Georgia. Periodicals Postage Paid at Ashburn, Georgia. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Wiregrass Farmer, 109 N. Gordon St., Ashburn, GA 31714 STAFF Bob Tribble, President • Ann Knight, General Manager Ben Baker, Editor • Linda Sellars, Sales Director Robin Tillman, Office Manager SUBSCRIPTION RATES Senior Citizen discount in county only $20.00 Inside Turner County, $24.00 • Elsewhere in Georgia, $32.00 Outside Georgia, $40. Overseas rates on request. OUR POLICIES Signed letters to the editor are welcomed. Please limit letters to 500 words and include a name, an address and phone number where the writer may be reached during the day. Addresses and phone numbers will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. All letters become prop erty of the newspaper. Liability for an error will not exceed the cost of the space occupied by the error. We cannot be responsible for the return of pictures or materials unless a self-addressed stamped envelope is included.The deadline for LEGAL NOTICES is Monday NOON before Wednesday’s publication. Holiday deadlines will be announced at least one week in advance. A Cowboy, Congressman And New Year’s Goals Better late than never Since your hometown newspaper had plenty of letters to the editor last week, we ask to be excused for not publishing something that needed to be in print. Thank you. Thank you to all the people who gave up their holiday (and the coming holiday) to make it a lit tle safer, a little more fun and give everyone a lit tle less to worry about as we celebrated the holi days in whatever fashion we wanted to. To the men and women in law enforcement, no matter the capacity - Thank you. To the men and women in EMS - Thank you. To the men and women in emergency dispatch ing services - Thank you. To the men and women firefighters - Thank you. To the men and women in hospitals, nursing homes and in other health care fields - Thank you. To the men and women on call during the holi days in case something happened - power going out, wrecks, etc - Thank you. If you are one of the many who gave up part or all of your holiday no matter what you did so the rest of us could have an easier time of it - Thank you. Better late than never - Thank you. • • • This is our opinion. We’d like to hear yours. Letters to the Editor welcome. YEAR (Continued from Page 3) ings from the City Council. The BP station had three cita tions in the past two years. None of the others had more than two. The Christmas Parade and Open House are set for Saturday. Week 3 Moultrie Tech won best overall in the Christmas parade. Thanks for much hard work by the fire department, Sycamore’s ISO rating goes from a 7 to a four. County Fire Chief Randall Whiddon said this should save property own ers money when it comes time to renew their insurance poli cies. The Ashburn Council con siders an ordinance aimed at making and helping parents do a better job of parenting. The Council will discuss the pro posed ordinance again in January. A raise for 911 employees working the weekend shift is tabled until County Manager Charles Kinney presents addi tional information justifying the increase and showing where the money will come from. Got an opinion? Let us hear it. Letters to the editor welcome! Your opinion is important! Write: Editor, P.O. Box 309, Ashburn GA 31714 or email <wiregrass farmer@yahoo.com> We do not charge to publish let ters to the editor. But, your letter must meet our publica tion requirements. Letters must be signed. We must have a phone number to call to verify the number. (Your phone number will not be published). Letters which do not meet our publishing requirements won’t be printed. Call 567-3655 for more information. The story is told of a cow boy who was herding his cows in a remote pasture when sud denly a brand new BMW came out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver was a young man dressed in a brown suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sun glasses and YSL tie. He leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd will you give me a calf?” The cowboy looked at the man, who obviously was a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, “Sure, why not.” The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his Dell notebook computer, connected it to his cingular RAZR V3 cell phone and surfed to a NASA page on the Internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation sys tem to get an exact fix on his location, which he then fed to another NASA satellite that scanned the area in an ultra high resolution photo. The young man then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facili ty in Hausburg, Germany. Within seconds he received an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image had been processed and the data stored. He then accessed a MS- SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with e-mail on his Blackberry, and after a few minutes received a response. Finally, he printed out a full color 150 page report on his hi- tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet From Where I Sit printer and finally turned to the cowboy and said, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.” “That is right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” the cowboy said. He watched the young man select one of the animals and looked on amused as he stuffed it into his BMW. Then the cowboy said to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your busi ness is will you give me back my calf?” The young man thought about it for a second and then replied, “OK, why not.” “You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government,” said the cowboy. “Wow! That’s correct,” said the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required,” answered the cow boy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are, and you don’t know a thing about cows. Now give me back my dog.” The cowboy was a happy person and enjoyed his herd of cattle. Can’t say that about the yuppie Congressman after he was outsmarted by the cowboy who was supposedly less intel ligent. Actually, the trick to happy living these days is to quit try ing to keep up. There is simply too much to keep up with, and people who try end up pros trate in dark closets, weeping because they still haven’t installed Windows 99 or can’t distinguish Sharon Stone from Julia Whatzername, Michael Ovitz from Michael Eisner or Lexus from Infiniti, says Russell Baker. As we begin the New Year it is a glorious time to be an American, but the glories come at you so relentlessly, so multi- tudinously that they will finish you off unless you ration the intake. Nikita Kruschev once said that the Soviet Union would bury us. He didn’t know that if left alone we could very well bury ourselves under our own riches. An old German proverb says, “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.” Make a list of everything you intend to accomplish in the New Year and write them down. Use that list when you talk to God asking for guidance and thank Him for your many blessings. We need to make that list because there is no way we can remember every thing we would like to accom plish during 2009. -o- Wishbone, Backbone, & Funnybone ... by Charles B. Perry Early one morning about two weeks ago, I was sitting on my back porch reading and thinking about the economic mess we are experiencing. I had just heard on the news that with all the taxpayers dollars already spent by the govern ment in helping Consumers retain their home mortgages, not one.. .no not one.. .single homeowner had been able to access those funds supposedly set aside for help.What? What in the heck is going on? I thought about how completely unnecessary it is for everything to be so complicated! But, then I remember that this crap was written by Congress and their bureaucrat buddies! Why don’t we...for a change.. .try a simpler, fairer method of stimulating the economy by letting the American people.. .not some bureaucrat ...decide where and how they spend their own money! Leave the money with the people and let it be their choice as to when and what kind of vehicle, etc. they wish to purchase. Maybe they don’t need a car, but could use this money to keep their mort gage current, pay their chil dren’s college tuition, credit card debt, or even put it in sav ing. How? It’s really very sim ple ! About $1.2 Trillion will be paid in individual income taxes for the 2008 tax year. The bureaucratic nightmare.. .along with Congress...have committed an estimated $7.7 Trillion to bailouts by the U.S. Treasury. In a few short weeks, Congress has committed to these bailouts six and a half times what Americans will pay in income taxes for the entire year! That’s ‘buffalo bagels’! It is too late to stop them from spending the first $350 Billion, but not too late to stop them from squandering the other $350 billion of the origi nal $700 Billion bailout appro priation. This remaining $350 billion would finance a ‘tax holiday’ for every working American for two months! Think about it...we could have a two-month ‘tax holiday’ from both income tax and Social Security-Medicare (FICA) tax. That means for all of January and February you would pay no federal income tax and no FICA tax which for most Americans amount to about 33% of their gross income. With another proposed $700 billion stimulus package, we could extend this ‘tax holi day’ for six months! Think about it.. .no federal tax or FICA withheld from your pay- check! That would mean no working American would pay a penny in income tax or a penny in FICA tax for the first six months of the year! No busi ness would pay a penny in matching FICA tax for the first six months of the year! You keep your money.. .spend it where you need it and not have the burden of all of the bureau crats deciding how and to whom they give your money to! Don’t you think that would be a revolutionary idea? Just let you keep your money to begin with! Imagine how many more people could afford to keep their homes, be able to pay down some of their debt, rebuild their retirement funds, or maybe find the extra re sources to start a new business or expand their existing busi ness. This novel idea is NOT a bailout plan.. .it is most defi nitely an economic growth plan...an economic stimulus plan that would stimulate the taxpaying American people! That would certainly be a big change from the big business, big bureaucracy, big politician model we have seen in Washington recently. This plan is simple, work able, and just makes common sense! Is it possible? It has about as much chance as a snowball in hell! Why? It is too simple, because of the smug, arrogant, egotistical group of men and women we call a Congress truly believe they know better how to spend your money than you do! Sad isn’t it? Until next time... Baker’s Dozen Christmas Well (deep subject for a shallow mind, I know), did you get what you wanted for Christmas? Did you give what other people wanted? I got a lot of what I wanted, which was to see family I don't get to see very often. Material gifts mean less to me these days than seeing people I gen uinely like, enjoy and care about. Getting to see Toby Edmondson from Iowa was a particular treat, since it'll be a few years before he's back this way again. Jane stayed at home this time so she could have Christmas with the family. But as to the material stuff and what others received, this year I hit a jackpot with my kids. No. Not that. No. Not that either. No. Stop. Tell you what, you quit guessing what I gave 'em and I'll tell you what I gave em. Fair enough? Thank you. Yes. I gave my kids the per fect gift this year. I gave them what is perhaps the most essen tial item a person can have and I don't mean money. Yes. I gave them ... DUCT TAPE! These are not your children. You are not raising them. You are not responsible for them. You don't have to have duct tape on hand at all times in case the children need to urgently tape something together because if they don't the world will come to an end. You do not have to worry about your kids making a cat carrier from duct tape, made from duct tape so the cat can't get away of course. You do not have to open your barn to find the industrial sized ginormous roll of duct tape you keep handy for every occasion only to find it has been reduced to about one inch of tape before it hits the spools and starts to take off the card board and so is useless. You don't have to find miles of duct tape used to hang posters, attach brothers/sisters to the back wall of the closet, repair shoes, make clothes for Barbie dolls and repair SpiderMan action figurines. You don't find wads of duct tape shoved into comers rather than a garbage can because the duct tape mysteriously stuck to the wall and started peeling the sheetrock covering so rather than strip the wall, the ripped sheetrock was stuck back (with more duct tape doubled over and shoved between the tear and the sheetrock) and the offending tape hidden. Yes. I bought my children duct tape! The rolls lasted about 20 minutes. Then they went look ing for mine because the cat escaped with SpiderMan and Barbie and was last seen trying to climb into the walls through the hole in the sheetrock.
