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The week of April 7 marked 35 years that humble has made this radio program for you. --- Around 1820 shows. He was a kid of 42 when he started driving to Orono every week to make this program.

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Rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 19, 2013

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1. My Mercedes looks good for a car that I bought 39 years ago. My brother said that should I ever sell it I should feel obligated to tell the buyer that it has worn out several dust covers.

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2. In the 1940’s there was a newspaper that always had a cartoon of Puck at the top of the front page. As I recall, he held a banner upon which was written, “What fools these mortals be.” Was it the Boston Post? An incisive remark on my Facebook page brought Seneca’s comment to mind. My friend said that elections are won by the inability of the losers to put up a good candidate. And there’s the rub. What constitutes a good candidate but well-shined shoes and the ability to hire a better marketing crew to smear the opponent? Perception trumps reality. You might recall that you first heard of Obama when he delivered a speech at some convention. To one political party he looked and sounded marketable. --- Their ideal poster boy. Unfortunately, Americans who owned small businesses or worked for an hourly wage later found that looking good behind a microphone and talking the talk is not walking the walk. You might recall that you first heard of Romney when he bought up American companies and then made himself hundreds of millions by either breaking them up and selling off the pieces or shutting them down here and shipping them overseas. To one political party he looked and sounded marketable. --- Their ideal poster boy. Unfortunately for the 58 million or so Americans who voted to shut down more of our factories and ship even more American jobs overseas, he did not win. Our thesis here is that the ideal candidate might not win the election or, if elected, might not do what the voters were promised. Being mortal, we will never agree on a definition of the ideal candidate for any office. --- Which hopefully does not remind you of your kid’s significant other.

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3. Did you see that the police are going to start strictly enforcing the Maine seatbelt law? Don't you have to wring your hands and gnash your teeth when laws are enforced which would interfere with your neighbor's God-given right to self-destruct?

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4. A couple of years before I was born, some good citizens in St. George, Maine burned a cross on the Wildcat grout pile not five miles from I now live. It is my understanding that the intent of the burning cross was to remind my father, and other paving cutters who had come here from Sweden, of their place. The Americans who control the purse strings are much more sophisticated than they were in those days, and now wanna-be citizens are held back by whatever legislation can be cooked up to do the job. We can hope that Senator King and Senator Collins will someday soon vote for immigration reform that will make it easier for the newcomers who work in Maine fields and orchards to become American citizens. Any American should be ashamed that conditions exist in Maine --- and probably in other states --- that make writing a letter like this necessary.

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5. How many friends have you heard say, "We should run government like a business." A recent video of a governor addressing a committee in a State House shows you how it is done. You just walk in and people move aside and you take over. Do we have Cutler, the spoiler, to thank for what we have in Maine today? The next time one of your friends says, "We should run government like a business," show them the video of that governor talking to that committee. And speaking of governors, did you hear that our governor is cutting the state income tax, a tax which hits those with the highest incomes, and some are wondering where he will make up the revenue? Wouldn't a sales tax, which hits the poorest people the hardest, be your guess?

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6. A well-to-do friend was in here the other day. We admired her new car and my wife Marsha said she'd like to trade in her Rav 4 with 214,000 miles on it because it frequently needed a new transmission or some other small repair. Our friend cheerfully said, "Well, start saving." There is no doubt but what people who have more than padding under their mattress have more than cotton between their ears and their words should not be taken lightly when it comes to matters of finance. "Well, start saving." Is this simple concept not a great breakthrough in eliminating hunger in this world? To curb starvation in Haiti, we have but to tell the hungry people, “Well, start saving.” An idea like that can’t help but quickly go viral on completely renanoed Haitian ipods and there will eventually come a day when Haitians will realize that if they want to buy food they’d jolly well better start saving. Because our dental bills for this month caused the overdraft on our checking account to kick in several hundred dollars at 14% interest, all we have to do to pay off the overdraft on our checking account is start saving. A wealthy person would very astutely point out that you can save by not paying big bucks to have broken teeth repaired in the first place. --- And anything now 77 years old would have been written off back in the Reagan years by anyone who thinks about these things. Look around and you’ll see that, although most of us are not yet hungry, missing teeth is no longer the defining characteristic of the front row at a Willy Nelson concert. More Americans are going to have to start saving.

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7. Someone said that unlike some governors, who stand out like Chaplin in a J. Peterman Owner’s Manual, the smiling President Reagan knew how to influence legislation. I liked President Reagan. Newspaper publisher Ray Gross pushed me through a crowd of newspaper people in the White House so I could shake President Reagan's hand. I still like President Reagan. I think of him as a man who was always smiling and telling funny stories. But Reagan used his charisma to stump for trickle-down economics and other things that really hurt democracy in America. You’d like an example? Wasn’t the deregulation of radio, which eliminated rebuttal and made Rush Limbaugh and countless others of his ilk possible, the cleverest thing Reagan ever did? Before Reagan, didn’t the airwaves belong to you and me and everyone else? But since Reagan's deregulation the person with the most money gets to buy the airwaves and control what Americans hear on the radio. And the American billionaires who bought the stations are the financial backbone of guess which political party? Yes, the Reagan I would like to have as a neighbor and friend also supported dictators in several small fruit-growing countries. --- But isn't that expected of any American President? And didn’t he smile and do it in a manner befitting a gentleman?

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8. Did you know that Santa Claus is richer than Daddy Warbucks? I’d really never given it any thought until I Googled Daddy Warbucks, Asp, Punjab, just to see what they’d been up to lately and learned that Daddy Warbucks is worth 27.3 billion. I was also surprised to see that this once aged icon is now only 52 and young enough to be my son. Would you be surprised to hear that Lex Luthor is only worth 10.1 billion although he went to MIT? Daddy Warbucks has a BS from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, so you might want to keep that in mind should you ever be pressed to help one of yours with an educational decision. You don’t even know who Charles Montgomery Burns is so I’ll tell you. He owns the nuclear power plant where Bart Stimson or is it Simpson works. He went to Yale, according to this web site I found, he is worth 8.4 billion and he bought the Frank Gehny-designed Springfield Concert Hall from the city and turned it into a prison. Dick Cheney was his mentor. Oh, Santa Claus is the world’s richest fictional person and if you want to consult my source to get the website so you can read more you can ask to get my weekly newsletter, The Whine & Snivel, and read about it there, or you can Google Daddy Warbucks Punjab Asp. You might be interested to know that Santa Claus is richer than Daddy Warbucks because being immortal, the elf employees don’t require health insurance.

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9. You might have read in the paper that "the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough." You might remember how some folks howled and scratched to find dirt on Clinton. This was a very smart move, because it is never necessary to find dirt. The fact that you can generate a big fuss looking for nonexistent dirt is enough to convince some voters that accusations might have a basis in fact. And it detracts voters from the real business at hand which is never what is talked about but is very expensive. But, luckily, most of the people in the world do not read American newspapers and therefore have a much more objective view of what is going on in this country. So when Clinton went to Europe, he was greeted by cheering crowds. And yet, isn’t there another former president who dare not set foot in Europe for fear of being arrested as a war criminal?

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