December 31, 2001 -

ACQUISITIVE AGRARIANS!

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Welfare queens are down on the farm,

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and more. Now, the details...

TOW, Texas -- Welfare queens, it seems, can wear overalls and own big tractors. The Environmental Working Group filed a Freedom of Information Act contest and put the names of all farm welfare recipients on a Web site, www.ewg.org. Now this isn't to say that all farm welfare recipients are welfare cheats. I have a personal friend who got a piddling $5,426 in the past four years and he at least needed it. So, maybe only 99 percent of farm welfare recipients are welfare cheats. Now, doesn't that make you feel all better? So, take a welfare queen to lunch. After the morning Farm Bureau meeting.

One environmentally conscious recipient of your and my tax money was multibillionaire Charles Schwab, who owns a 1,550-acre stretch of California known as Casa de Patos. Schwab and his buddies shoot ducks on the land, which also is planted in rice. Last year, Welfare Queen Charlie and his family sucked up $564,000 in federal price supports for rice.

LONDON -- Aha! Thanks to the New Dork Times' Alan Cowell, we understand the Nike Nutcase. Mr. Cowell tells us that shoe bomber Richard Reid went to plastique footwear because he had "a sense that his Christian upbringing was not enough to shield him from the violence, poverty and racial bias of south London." If Cowell had bothered to read his own story, he would have understood that south London needed shielding from Richard The Victim - not the other way around. However, Richard gives us hope - if he is an Al Qaeda operative. This fellow is obviously so stupid that he probably has trouble lacing his own footbombs.

WASHINGTON -- After leading us to believe airport security screeners might be bright enough to tie their own exploding Nikes, the Department of Transportation has decided to forgo rules that would displace thousands of the current knuckleheads. For one, DOT says it won't insist that screeners be high school graduates. "This is a good and egalitarian decision," said Knott Hedde, spokesman for the American Association of Misfit Bag Manglers, adding: "There is no indication that terrorist hijackers are well-educated people and people such as us can look at these people, dull-eye-to-dull-eye and do the job."

CRAWFORD, Texas -- Let's run the tape backward a few months. Remember George W. Bush, the candidate many of our lefty friends told us was so stupid that he wore cowboy boots because he couldn't handle lace-up shoes? That same George W. Bush was named by the USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll as the most admired man in history of a poll asking respondents to name the living man they admired most. Bush's total was an eye-popping 39 percent. Last year, President Pervert and Pope John Paul II tied for first place with 6 percent.

NEW YORK -- Any doubts about the desirability of military tribunals to try suspected foreign terrorists were erased last week when the mighty New Dork Times issued forth with a hysterical editorial, calling for Al Qaeda leaders to stand trial in federal court. Obviously, military tribunals are the proper way to go. That conclusion comes from application of my Rule of Fools, which holds that the appropriate path in a dispute is almost certainly the one that stirs the Times to rabid dissent.

TOW, Texas -- It seems that Minute Maid carries a message that doesn't have much to do with squeezing oranges. A new commercial for Minute Maid orange juice depicts cartoon characters Popeye and Bluto as newly minted gay lovers. Popeye's former squeeze, Olive Oyl, gets the cold shoulder from Popeye as he and his new Significant Other, Bluto, stride into their new life of Togetherness. Cathy Renna of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation finds the new gay icons amusing. What's next? A pro-gay drink named Gator AIDS?

SEATTLE -- Richey Kemmling, president of the University of Washington Republicans club, wanted the student senate to show support for the war in Afghanistan. He expected opposition from Muslim students but was surprised when black and Hispanic groups began howling. A representative fool on the student senate is Alex Narvaez, who explained: "There are a lot of innocent people in Afghanistan."

NEW YORK -- Another victim got a break last week. The people who replayed the "Concert for New York City" on VH1 Christmas Day edited out the lusty booing that drove last-term Sen. Hillary Clinton from the stage - replacing it with general crowd noise.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Meanwhile, a bidding war broke out over recruitment of a few of America's homegrown intellectual terrorists. Princeton University prostituted itself in an effort to "lure" professors Cornel West and Henry Lois Gates Jr., from Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department. The New Dork Times described West as "a noted author, (who) has recorded a rap CD and been an adviser on Bill Bradley's presidential campaign." Wow! Most interesting in the hassle, however, is the fact that it has roots in the new Harvard presidency of Lawrence H. Summers, who was Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary. Summers expressed a faint hope that the Harvard Afro-American studies department might do more studying and less rapping. He also suggested there might be something amiss in the fact that grades at Harvard have followed the general pattern of inflation in Argentina. One of every two grades at Harvard in recent years was either an A or an A-.

DANIA BEACH, Florida -- Florida threatens it will again displace California as the nutcase capital of America. Florida's big jump in the foolscapes came last week when a passenger discovered a "small-caliber bullet" outside the gate leading to Spirit Airlines Flight 604 to New York. The passenger alerted sheriff's deputies, who evacuated the concourse and sicced bullet-sniffing dogs on the trail - all without finding anything evil. Wouldn't you say that a comparable stupid reaction might be tough to come up with? Maybe, say, you see a slab of bacon and declare a cholera epidemic.

QUESTION FOR THE DAY: Ever wonder why farmers wear those narrow-billed gimmie caps? (So they can peek into the mailbox to see if the federal welfare check has come in.)

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