I can’t imagine how it got by the Democrats in Congress; perhaps asleep at the switch? The tax reduction plan, the way it was written, provides billions more tax relief than was intended by either party. Of course the Democrats can claim that the Republicans knew all along a terrible error had been made and conned them into supporting it. Not a likely story but Democrats will believe it and Terry the whiner will be on Sunday shows pointing out this &uot;fact.&uot; We all know how one certain party despises any kind of tax reduction as it interferes with their plans to increase unnecessary spending.

Not to be outdone, it appears our UDO rules contain a nearly fatal error that enables our esteemed developers to legally sneak in a few more houses per cluster. You all know what &uot;cluster&uot; housing is. The idea is to save sewer and water pipes by jamming all the homes into one corner of a proposed development and leaving the rest green space. This can be idyllic if large dogs and stereos are prohibited. They say it’s good for us to be crowded even though congestion is the very reason many people leave those other cities to live here. So cluster living could be called &uot;out of the frying pan into the fire.&uot;

Got an e-mail from my daughter who has a master’s degree in nursing.

&uot;Dad, you write a column and don’t know the round bone you broke in your hip was at the end of your femur, not the tibia? Gee whiz.&uot; OK, so I didn’t study anatomy, but not one person in the hospital named it, no doctor, no nurse, no X-ray technician, not even the traveling therapist who comes to torture me three times a week. I took a shot because it was one of the few bones I remember from a high school class. They had these big pull-down charts over the blackboard and the teacher would point out various parts of the human body. This was the senior year but they never pulled a chart down that showed that males and females were physically different. We referred to it as the twilight zone. We knew there had to be a chart up there covering the subject but no one dared to pull it down. We sneaked into the school one night just to do that and discovered that a particular area had been cut out. Deprived of our main area of curiosity it’s understandable we forgot tibias and femurs.

It’s probably temporary but for now it appears that &uot;A&uot; and &uot;B&uot; council teams are back, only this time the Mayor has joined with Johnson. Unusual combination those two and both were against lowering downtown taxes even by a lousy 2 cents. How else could they raise city employee salaries by 4.5 percent? Incidentally, how big was your raise?

One hundred and ninety-two nations have declared war on the tobacco companies. Maybe they are figuring on easy money by suing the devils. They should have noticed that the courts just overturned a multi-billion suit against cigarette manufacturing companies and told the whiners to grow up and quit if they don’t like what tobacco is doing to their lungs and best clothes. Those companies that sell bottled oxygen do not favor this war and hope the coalition of 192 lose, like many wonderful Americans hoped we’d lose in Iraq. Our United States and China abstained from joining in that war on tobacco and the other 192 nations will probably want to sue both of us for the secondary smoke we provide all of them. Weather patterns move west to east and only South America and Africa are safe from even the seventy million Americans who still enjoy a good coughing spell.

Frankly, I have no problem believing we humans are more closely related to the Chimpanzees than the gorillas. Shucks, a research team said so. I mean, who wants to be built like a gorilla that stays pretty close to the ground when they can swing easily through the trees like a chimp? And chimps have a high IQ, get hired to play funny parts on TV, they smile a lot, can wear some clothes, and they don’t have to be caged all the time. A gorilla is like a mean dog that will often turn on you and bite off your leg. Not so with a chimp; toss one a banana and he melts with pleasure, shows his gums and teeth, hugs you, and will sit on your lap. So, if you had a choice, and you don’t, which one would it be?

And don’t forget, the cost of the national Prayer and Fasting Conference includes meals.

Robert Pocklington is a resident of Suffolk and a regular News-Herald columnist.