feels like Spring already

It's feeling like Spring here in central Florida for several reasons: Our weather has been absurdly warm; the days are getting longer; whatever bug I've had is releasing its death grip on my back, allowing me to sleep and my energy level to rise; and the sap is rising in the punk trees we call "politicians" at the national, state, and local levels.

Florida actually grows "punk" trees, also called Melaleuca trees. They are invasive, noxious, pest trees, crowding out native trees in the Everglades and coastal areas. Their trunk unfolds like sheets of coarse paper but don't try to make a punk bark canoe out of one. At the age of 28 to 30 years, they sprout business suits and wing-tip shoes and join the Republican Party. Then they run for office and get elected in surprising numbers because of their pro-life, anti-gun, anti-axe, anti-chainsaw policies. They view the eradication of pest trees as an expansion of government and they are against that, too.

Some join the military. I heard one on TV the other night, explaining how the Bush phone-tapping program might have prevented September 11 because, if they had been tapping phones then, they could have discovered several of the participants. Obviously, he's never read Senator Bob Graham's book. (They don't read anything made of paper.) In his book, which has drawn a rather muted response from Bush apologists, Graham demonstrated that the feds had, in fact, without benefit of phone taps, identified several of the participants in time to keep them out or ship them out, but the feds didn't know what to do with them. Imagine how much more confused they would have been after sorting through all those phone messages.

The more I hear from our elected punk trees and their brass-hat counterparts, the greater my energy level rises.