The “Petticoat Mafia” Of Benham, Kentucky

The AP (via the Dallas Morning News) asks the question, “What happens when the garden club takes over the government of a Kentucky coal town?” The answer turns out to be a great story about a particularly different approach to government, one involving bake sales, concerts and a thrift shop instead of more usual, and blunter, instruments. These two paragraphs summarise the piece nicely, and the last sentence is certainly its best part:

“Beginning next month, [Mayor Betty] Howard will preside over a Town Council made up entirely of women from 54 to 80 who have worked their way to political power from the Benham Garden Club.”

“Over the past decade, the garden club brigade has built its power slowly, claiming the mayor’s office in 1994 and regularly occupying three to five seats on the Town Council. But in the November election, three men now serving on the council opted not to seek re-election to allow the club members to take all six council seats.”

Hat tip to Free-Market.Net’s Freedom News

Red Tape, Street Kids, And A Bakery

This article from the Christian Science Monitor makes me angry. A group of homeless kids in Mexico City are trying to open their own bakery, but can’t get a business permit from the city. They’ve got donated equipment, donated cash for the flour and so on, and a local baker who is willing to teach them the trade, but no permit. (They even have the support of the President of Mexico.) Fortunately, they kids aren’t giving up:

“This bakery will open,” says Osvaldo Castillo, one of the Liberty kids who hopes to leave the corner clown acts and windshield washing behind. “We hit some barriers, but sooner or later it’s going to open.”

Hat tip to Free-Market.Net’s Freedom News

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