After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Bush reinvents manufacturing
I have excellent news, Americans! The Bushites have come up with a sure-fire plan to increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the USA!
In something called the "Economic Report of the President," George W's top economists assert that all of those people working in such fast food joints as McDonalds and Subway really are not part of the service economy ??but more accurately should be reclassified as manufacturing workers. After all, the Bushites say, when you insert that meat patty, lettuce, cheese, and ketchup into a sliced bun, you are engaged in the combining of inputs to "manufacture" a product, like electronic parts go into manufacturing, say, a computer.
And, manufacturing is officially defined as "the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials into new products," and, they claim, when you heat ground beef, you are, in fact, chemically transforming it into a burger.
Why would Bush want to redefine hundreds of thousands of hamburger flippers as manufacturing workers? So he can hush the critics who've been pointing to the drastic decline in production jobs. And since manufacturing gets special tax breaks, suddenly Bush's backers in the fast-food industry serendipitously qualify.
I'm with Bush on this one. After all, by assembling nouns, verbs, and whatnot, I have manufactured this piece, and by applying the chemistry of my tiny brain cells, I have transformed raw words into a new product. Manufacturers of the world, unite! Now, where do I go to get my tax break?