Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Now Lansing Politicians Want a Poet Laureate!

Now Lansing Politicians Want a Poet Laureate! [Michigan Capitol Confidential]:
"Maybe it’s something in the water.
In recent weeks Lansing politicians have proposed laws mandating an official poem for Michigan and forcing taxpayers to buy a state flag for the survivors of current or former legislators when they die. 
Now comes yet another piece of institutional grandiosity: a bill to create an official state poet laureate.

Never mind pension underfunding and damaged roads, to name two issues crying out for legislative solutions; members of our full-time Legislature seem to have both the time and the sense of entitlement to designate an official state poet.

Alas, given the usual political incentives, were the measure to become law (unlikely) the candidates would probably sound less like the ancient Greek Homer of “Iliad” and “Odyssey” fame and more like a modern namesake — Homer Simpson. Doh!

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