The Ant and the Grasshopper

[Fairweather]

OLD VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

 

MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.

 

CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

 

America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

 

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green...'

 

ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, "We shall overcome."

 

Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

 

President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

 

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

 

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Protection Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn’t

maintain it.

 

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses, bringing the rest of the free world with it.

 

[Mal_Con]

Nature Planet version: The ant being a worker in a communist hill never makes it to the winter. As fall approaches he is killed by soldiers and his body is recycled to feed the queen and aid in spring egg production. The grasshopper feed all through the summer decimating the crops in a poor country causing widespread famine and later genocide after tribal members blame the famine on neighboring tribes black magic. Grasshopper dies in the fall as do all grasshoppers. Moral life's a bitch then you die.

[prole]

Another classic from Grandpa's Inbox...

[Fairweather]

[video:youtube]

[olyclimber]

what ever money saved from anything, that guy looks like he could easily eat it in one sitting.

[Fairweather]

OMG, I didn't see that one coming!

[rob]

[Off_White]

That's funny FW, when it comes to ants I'd always visualized you as the guy with the magnifying glass...

[JayB]

[video:youtube]

 

Amazing. Like Pertinax after Commodus. Hopefully he lasts longer.

[Fairweather]

[video:youtube]

 

Amazing. Like Pertinax after Commodus. Hopefully he lasts longer.

 

He's my early long shot bet for POTUS in 2012. Like WH Taft--only with the beat down directed at the new big govt oligarchs and their union leeches.

[JayB]

[video:youtube]

 

Amazing. Like Pertinax after Commodus. Hopefully he lasts longer.

 

He's my early long shot bet for POTUS in 2012. Like WH Taft--only with the beat down directed at the new big govt oligarchs and their union leeches.

 

If a guy like that can get elected in New Jersey, perhaps there's a prayer for Washington, but I'm not optimistic.

 

As long as the public is convinced that the PEU's are "the little guy" we're a long way from the day when short-order cooks don't have to fork over their wages to finance health and pension benefits far more generous, secure, and substantial than anything they'll see for their entire working lives.

 

We're also a long, long way from widespread public disgust at cutting public services, particularly for the most vulnerable, before even marginally tweaking health and benefit expenditures for *future* public employees.

 

I'm voting against every single tax increase until the 60% of public spending that goes straight into public employee bank accounts gets dealt with, and their retirement and health benefits are on par with the private sector average. Probably means I'll be voting no forever, but I've had it.

[Off_White]

Short order cooks don't pay a lot of taxes, though I suppose they do pay proportionally more in a state that runs on Sales Tax rather than an Income Tax. I shudder to think what a government run by people paid greasy spoon wages and benefits looks like.

[prole]

Check out the TSA security checkpoints at SeaTac.

[tvashtarkatena]

Merka hasn't had a fat fuck for a president since Taft. IS AMERICA READY?

[tvashtarkatena]

If FF were talking about cuts in school administrators and other overhead positions, that might register. Billing classroom teachers as overcompensated falls just a wee bit flat though.

[prole]

Fuck it, why couldn't we just get unpaid interns and Bangladeshi call-center workers to fill government positions?

[tvashtarkatena]

I'd wager that FF also didn't mention that either

 

a) He asked police and fire unions for the same concessions and they, too, told him to FOAD or

 

b) He didn't ask police and fire unions for any concessions.

 

Just speculating...

[JayB]

Short order cooks don't pay a lot of taxes, though I suppose they do pay proportionally more in a state that runs on Sales Tax rather than an Income Tax. I shudder to think what a government run by people paid greasy spoon wages and benefits looks like.

 

A government run by people who divert the finite pool of tax revenues available to serve the public interest away from their most efficient allocation to provide the said services doesn't look terribly pretty, from an ethical or fiscal perspective.

 

"Consider what happened in Washington State. After helping Democrats win full control of the legislature in 2002, the state affiliate of the Association of Federal, State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and other unions persuaded lawmakers to lift the collective bargaining restrictions. Within three years the number of union members had doubled. With more state employees paying dues, the amount of union dollars flowing into the coffers of Democrats running in state elections also doubled. A prime beneficiary of such union generosity was Christine Gregoire, who became governor in 2004 after one of the closest elections in the state’s history. (AFSCME gave $250,000 to the state Democratic party to help pay for the recount that handed her the election by 129 votes). Once in office, Gregoire negotiated contracts with the unions that resulted in double-digit salary increases, some exceeding 25 percent, for thousands of state employees"

 

Even a cent of what someone like the average short order cook makes going into the pool of public money and being diverted away from its most beneficial use and put instead towards funding a benefits package infinitely superior to his own, for someone much better off than he is - is a travesty.

 

It's kind of funny and sad that financing your own retirement in with the same vehicles available to the vast majority of private sector workers, and bearing the same proportion of one's health care expenses is considered to be an unthinkable hardship for the current crop of public servants. Worse yet, one that warrants cutting essential services rather than the compensation of those that are tasked with delivering them.

 

It wasn't always thus....

 

"What produced the enormous expansion of public sector unions? In a case of unintended consequences, government unionism ironically developed from actions taken by those hostile to it. Many of the icons of the labor-left like New York’s great mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and President Franklin Roosevelt were adamantly opposed to public sector unions. LaGuardia, who pledged to make New York a “one hundred percent [private sector] union” town, had a civic vision of public employees as the people’s workers, exemplars of the common good. Famed for dropping in unexpectedly on city offices and dressing down slackers, LaGuardia explained that he did “not want any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold” in his city government. “The right to strike against the government,” he insisted, “is not and cannot be recognized.”

 

In 1935, Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act, the first peacetime effort to support the growth of private sector unions. Its aim in the words of its sponsor, New York senator Robert Wagner, was “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.” But like his close ally LaGuardia, Roosevelt drew a definite line when it came to government workers. “Meticulous attention,” the president insisted, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government. The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Both men feared that liberalism would be compromised by the unavoidably self-serving nature of public sector unionism."

[JayB]

I'd wager that FF also didn't mention that either

 

a) He asked police and fire unions for the same concessions and they, too, told him to FOAD or

 

b) He didn't ask police and fire unions for any concessions.

 

Just speculating...

 

Don't think any are on the state payroll except for perhaps the state patrol.

[j_b]

What do you do now that the till is empty? You reinstate the tax on the wealthy that you cut, moron!

[j_b]

The entire Nation collapses, bringing the rest of the free world with it.

 

That is what happened under Bush, the guy YOU voted for twice so that he could start 2 unnecessary wars, cut taxes that we couldn't afford to do without, and bring the world economy into a depression. Good job, delusional jackass.

[Nitrox]

The entire Nation collapses, bringing the rest of the free world with it.

 

That is what happened under Bush, the guy YOU voted for twice so that he could start 2 unnecessary wars, cut taxes that we couldn't afford to do without, and bring the world economy into a depression. Good job, delusional jackass.

 

The nation collapsed? Weird, I just looked outside and didn't notice any rape gangs or "Wolverines" spray paint...

[j_b]

why do you think the government put the taxpayer on the hook for $15 trillion in loans, insurance for deposit and investment, etc ... since February 2008? do you think they did it just so the looters could turn around and lend us back our money with interest?

[Nitrox]

How can the country be collapsed but SS is running perfectly?

 

You really are a predictable dumbfuck.

 

 

[j_b]

what else have you got beside lying, constant rhetorical hair splitting and insults?