Tear in My Beer
Attn: Bar Belle:
The column you wrote in last week’s LEO contained a line that said, “Like Lindsay and Paris, you got out of the car like a linebacker knowing you weren’t wearing underwear.” That line almost had me crying in my beer from laughter at Flanagan’s. Thank you for it — it was beautiful and well timed, considering the start of football season. Keep up the awesome work!
Joe Young, Fern Creek
Big Bad Bridge
Well, the Sherman Minton Bridge was found by a coalition of Indiana Department of Transportation and private sector structural engineers to have a “concerning crack” in an important load-bearing element, meriting the closing of the bridge. Less than 24 hours after President Obama called for increased infrastructure spending as part of the American Jobs Act, an essential part of the Louisville area infrastructure has showed that — surprise! — some such spending is, in fact, essential to keeping us from having to swim across the Ohio River to reach our workplaces.
I understand the need to decrease the federal deficit, and I understand the libertarian argument for restricted government. But what Rand Paul calls costly, unconstitutional and bureaucratic over-regulation, I call required safety checks. What Mitch McConnell calls out-of-control government spending, I call investments in non-crumbling bridges.
So, tea partiers, have fun sitting in three hours of traffic to cross the Kennedy Bridge, and comfort yourselves with the knowledge that we’re keeping the big bad government out of our lives.
Kristen Thomas, Germantown
Shermaggedon
Now would be the perfect time to rerun Steve Shaw’s article from Nov. 11, 2009: “Burned bridge.” I wonder if anyone besides me finds it ironic that River Fields’ anniversary of their formation was Sept.12, the day Shermaggedon began. Whoa! Karma?
E. Madden, Georgetown, Ind.
Karmageddon
Perhaps now that we are experiencing Karmageddon for ourselves, the people will demand that the East End bridge be built post haste. It’s only been 40-odd years since a bridge has been built linking Kentuckiana, and surely we need another committee and another environmental study to get the new construction under way! But with Dr. No, Ebenezer McConnell and Professor Gridlock running this country into the ground through their collective and deliberate obstructionism and infantile pledges to the cold-blooded miscreant Grover Norquist to never raise a dollar in revenue, the people will continue to suffer through these unbearable crises.
We could save a lot of money simply by installing a robot that incessantly iterates: “We need to reduce taxes for job creators beep bop boop. We need less regulation beep bop boop. We can’t afford public works projects beep bop boop. Science and education are bad beep bop boop. President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim beep bop boop.” So long as a narrow-minded group of well-funded activists successively elect these placid vagabonds, we the people will continue to reap what our apathy has sewn.
Thomas Clay Jr., Jeffersonville, Ind.
Ashamed
I sincerely hope everyone who has spent the last 20 or so years fervently employing every possible stalling tactic available to them to keep an East End bridge from becoming a reality are proud of their accomplishments. One can only hope that they will be as inconvenienced by the closure of the Sherman Minton Bridge as all the other daily commuters who depended on it. Actually, I hope they are ashamed of themselves and how selfishly they’ve acted.
Edwin Hurt, Clarksville, Ind.
