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Old technology and too many roads

TRAVERSE CITY — Congressional Republicans are treating the Trump/Zelensky memo like it’s a particularly hard “Where’s Waldo?” Gosh, they just can’t find a quid pro quo anywhere! Let me help. Trump: “I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time … There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that. So, whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

There he is! There’s Waldo! I see him!

C’mon, people. This isn’t a game. It’s our country. If we can’t agree on anything else, can we at least agree that using America’s power to get dirt on a political opponent is wrong?

– Sometimes I want to go back to technology that just works. For instance, wireless. Love it. But it only works when it feels like working. I think I’m going to go back to a wall-mounted landline phone and a plug-in AM/FM radio.

– No, they shouldn’t remake “The Princess Bride.” That they would try to improve upon perfection is inconceivable. (Princess Bride fans will know what a good joke that was.)

– I would take the best fall day over the best summer day eight times out of 10.

– Words I love: blather, nincompoop, hornswoggle, gingersnap. They all sound like what they mean.

– Please join my crusade against “got,” as in “He’s got to go to the mall.” No, he doesn’t. Got is unnecessary there. He has to go to the mall (although, in truth, no one EVER has to go to a mall.)

– So you know, no, I can’t control the urge to edit everything and everybody, even though I, myself, am far from perfect. It’s the writer’s curse. Forgive me.

– A Genesee County teacher who recently had a baby has filed a grievance against her school for only allowing her to pump breast milk twice a day, which she says is not enough. I swear, sometimes it’s like we still live in the 1700s. How enlightened of you, Birch Run Schools.

– Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey said this week that Michigan has too many roads to maintain and we should return some of them to gravel. Brilliant. As a friend of mine said, let’s start with the ones in Shirkey’s district.

– We don’t have too many roads, we have too many people like Shirkey who don’t want to pay their share of having roads, clean water etc. The GOP’s “every man for himself” stuff is getting seriously old.

“Integrity is doing the right thing when you don’t have to-when no one else is looking or will ever know.” – author Charles Marshall, from “Shattering the Glass Slipper”

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Andrew Heller, an award-winning newspaper columnist, appears weekly in the Daily Press. He graduated from Escanaba Area High School in 1979. Follow him at andrewheller.com and on Facebook and Twitter. Write to him at andrewhellercolumn@gmail.com.

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