None of the Above

I have written people in a few times, but never for president. I seem to remember voting for Mickey Mouse once because I heard that people in Europe sometimes do that as a way of voting for "none of the above". I wrote my old army buddy's name in once for township constable because there were no other candidates on the ballot for that office. I didn't even know what a township constable did, but I later found out that he was sort of the sergeant at arms for the meetings of the township board and, if nobody runs for the job, the board just reappoints the same guy who has been doing the job for decades.

Township boards themselves don't do a whole lot, and some states have abolished them, but Michigan still hangs on to theirs. People use them for ombudsmen, if they have an issue they bring it to the board, and the board directs them to somebody who can actually do something about it. The township supervisor, who is also chairman of the board, used to assess property valuations for tax purposes, but I think most townships hire a professional assessor for that now. The thing is, the state sends somebody out every year to check up on whoever does the assessments and, if he doesn't like what the assessor did, he just over rules him. So why doesn't the state just do he assessments in the first place? Your guess is as good as mine. We pay our property taxes to the township treasurer, but they just pass the money on to the county treasurer, so I don't know why they cling to that old formality either.

You know, I can't think of anybody right off hand who I would like to see in the presidency, but maybe I'll come up with somebody over the weekend. Most times, when I vote for president, I am trying to pick the lesser of two or three evils. There really ought to be a way to vote for "none of the above" and, if he wins, the office just goes unfilled. Maybe, after that happened a few times, people might come to the conclusion that we don't really need somebody in that job, and the office would be abolished. It's like that old joke: "Kennedy proved that a Catholic could become president, Johnson proved that anybody could become president, Nixon proved that we didn't really need a president so, ever since then, we haven't elected one." Well, I suppose we need some kind of president, but there are lots of other government jobs that, if they were abolished, nobody would miss them.

I suppose we need a Supreme Court too. Although I sometimes disagree with their decisions, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV, so what do I know? I think the idea of three branches of government checking and balancing each other was a good one. God only knows what evil might  befall us if any one of them had unlimited power.

I wasn't all that interested in the controversy surrounding Bill's blow job at the time, but I think people were more mad at him for lying about it than for getting it. Bill later claimed that he didn't deliberately lie abut it, His exact words were "I never had sex with that woman." and he later claimed that he didn't know that a blow job counted as sex. I don't remember any confusion about the definition of a blow job, just about the definition of sex, but a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. I do remember that a story was going around the bus garage that attributed the whole incident to a misunderstanding. It seems that a new cleaning lady had hired on and Bill was describing her duties to her: "Clean the upstairs rooms in the morning, clean the Oval Office while I'm gone for lunch and, after lunch, below me." Get it? With that southern accent of his, the lady though he said "blow me" instead of "below me".  

Y'all have a nice weekend too.