October 4, 2009

Yes, Still Another Forward…

…that says it all.

The sad part is - this is 100% correct

This should be read and understood by all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature,

It is now official—you are ALL corrupt morons:

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775—you have had 234 years to get it right—and it is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935—you have had 74 years to get it right—and it is broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938—you have had 71 years to get it right—and it is broke.

War on Poverty started in 1964—you have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to “the poor”—and they only want more.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965—you have had 44 years to get it right—and they are broke.

Freddie Mac was established in 1970—you have had 39 years to get it right—and it is broke.

The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, it has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before—you had 32 years to get it right—and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every “government service” you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars—AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?

Are you crazy, or do you just believe all Americans are morons too?

Truly, the inmates are running the asylum—and what does this say about us, as voters who put such idiots in office?? If we do not vote against EVERY incumbent currently in office—we are ALL morons, regardless of our political leanings.

Thanks and a great big hat tip to B.J.S.

May 5, 2008

Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk (Yay!), And A Few Other Items

I’ve been trying my best to stay away from politics the last few days while I enjoy becoming reacqainted with my home town.

It’s actually becoming quite fatiguing seeing “Obama this, Obama that, Wright this, Wright that” everywhere I go on the Internet. It’s like watching news sites, blogs and other media flogging the same dead horse over and over while ignoring stuff that is being pushed on us under the radar, using the Presidential campaign as a distraction.

By this time, anyone who, despite all the suffocating coverage, still believes that either Hussein Obama or Hillary Clinton belongs in the Oval Office is either profoundly obtuse, a “liberal-run government at any cost” Utopian, a jihadist, someone who despises either our Constitutional form of government and/or the American People, or a communist. I simply see no purpose in continuing to do what amounts to beating my head against a wall trying to prove a point that’s already been proven.

Especially when trying to convince liberals, who, when confronted with scientific fact or other indisputable evidence that runs contrary to their politically based “beliefs” will shrug it all off with, “That’s your opinion.”

By now, those folks out there in the middle of the road have more than enough evidence to make their own judgement as to the viability of either Obama or Clinton where the Presidency is concerned, as this time out, even the MSM has failed to hide the truth about the two Democratic candidates. All they can do is manage weak attempts at spin or try to divert public attention in what, just as Obama’s efforts to distance himself from Irreverend Wright, are proving transparent efforts, at best.

Face it, no matter which of the Democratic candidates gets the nomination, McCain will prevail in November. Any other outcome would be pure insanity.

Moving right along, on Wednesday evening I visited one of my old Little Italy favorites on Mulberry Street at Broome (they relocated about 12 years ago from a Hester Street location), Umberto’s Clam House. Since I was dining alone, I ate in the kitchen (a small counter from which you can see most of what’s going on and be served directly by the chef). I chatted with one of the owners and ate ala carte, a generous serving of linguini with white clam sauce (I watched the chef shucking a big pile of clams — yum, clams! — for my dinner, what a pro!), a basket of fresh, warm N.Y. Italian bread with butter…

Afterwards, I walked down to my new favorite N.Y. bar, an establishment that’s been in business since 1972, in a building that’s been around since before the last century, Kenn’s Broome Street Bar.

I must confess to a rather lengthy evening therein. It’s a very comfortable pub with a great staff and a good crowd of local regulars (though quite a number of European tourists also find their way there), a large menu of good food, including home-made chili con carne (one of the house dishes, for anyone who’s really hungry and reasonably gas resistant, is an open-faced knockwurst “chili dog” with cheese and a large pile of either crinkle cut potato chips or fries. Their burgers are intense and large, as are all the other items on their menu. They don’t skimp on anything. Daily specials can be anything from blackened fish to langosta and they have a more than admirable Saturday and Sunday brunch menu.

So, Thursday I was up and out early enough to meet a friend for a lunch date, and we headed for Mulberry Street. Mulberry is an Italian food lover’s heaven, more than three blocks lined with Italian restaurants, bakeries (Mmmmmm, fresh cannoli!) and cafes. We were both ready to eat at 11:30, and most of the eateries on that strip of culinary delight don’t start serving until noon.

However, La Mela seated us at an outdoor table at 11:40 and took our orders.

I had pasta in a white sauce with mussels that was awesome, and they were extremely generous with the mussels. If you’ve never had mussels in New York, you’ve never had mussels. Mmmmm, mussels! My companion had chicken scapariello, which I had a taste of and was pretty impressed. I’ll have to order it next time I go there.

Afterwards, we went down to the Broome Street Bar for a drink before parting company. Ah, Guinness!

It began to rain in the evening, so I returned to the hotel to visit my computer and catch up on some of my news reading and so forth.

Through the weekend, there was night clubbing on Bleeker Street in the west village, including a couple of hours of great Jazz at the Blue Note, wherein they serve a remarkably good lobster ravioli (all this eating, in New York, is easily offset by the amount of walking one does in the interests of really seeing the city).

A late Saturday evening dinner date found my companion and I at a neat little Italian joint at East 50th Street and 2nd Avenue called, very appropriately as they specialize in lasagna (17 different kinds, ranging from ground sirloin to prosciutto to lobster to veal and everything in between), Lasagna Ristorante. This was followed by a cab ride downtown to — where else? — Mulberry Street, for canolli and capucino at La Bella Ferrara.

Sunday morning I was down at Duarte Square (Canal & 6th Avenue) to watch the start of a bicycle Tour of New York, wherein some 30,000 participants embarked on a 2-3 hour, 44ish mile ride around the boroughs, equipped with a continuous police escort to block cross traffic. It was a sight to see, every kind of bicycle in the universe, from regular 10 speeds to bicycles built for 3, several side by side 3 wheelers (two people in reclining high backed seats peddling from relaxed positions), some crazy configs wherein there was a small front wheel and a large rear one with the peddles right above the front wheel, a bicycle that was built to resemble a Harley chopper and one individual was pulling a small wooden cage-trailer that looked like it contained his cat.

One morning last week, I took a stroll down Bleeker Street above 8th Avenue (west village), and was totally impressed by the atmosphere of the neighborhood. It is simply beautiful, lots of trees and the view down nearly every side street was profoundly green, the shops all upscale without blaring the fact. I stopped at a local cafe for a chocolate almond croissant and a capucino, sat outside and enjoyed watching the people pass by, the bird sounds and the morning aroma of spring in New York…

…then several cloudy, rainy days arrived, today being the first clear, sunny day.

On a less pleasant note, as I said above, while so many of us make a major event of every word issuing forth from the mouth of Hussein Obama and every outrageous statement uttered by his “former” Pastor Wright, in my opinion doing little or nothing to change the minds of those wingnuts who view him as some sort of messiah (face it, friends, there are a lot of incorrigible boneheads in this country who believe America is the root cause of every problem of every kind, everywhere on earth, and that only the mighty Obama can save the world), we pay less attention to issues that we really need to focus on that amount, basically, to government encroachment on our free enterprise system and the price we pay for this wholly unconstitutional series of actions.

Issues such Congress’ decision to attempt to meddle in banks’ current credit and debit card management methods, the effect the ethanol production mandates are having on food prices across the board, including starvation and food riots in the same developing nations liberals claim to care so much about (this despite the fact that ethanol production and use produce more of the dreaded C02 than regular gasoline use), and still another dreadful bi-product of the government protecting us from ourselves.

Yes, all those high taxes local governments in states like Illinois and New York love to levy on cigarettes, purportedly to “help us”, have created a black market that directly finances terrorism. I ran across the above link at a security industry website, and, in as timely a manner as one could ask for, Walter Williams, one of the most “on-top-of-things” columnists in the business, penned a spot-on piece about it.

While it’s politically popular to impose confiscatory taxes on America’s 40 million tobacco smokers, there are a number of consequences one might consider, but let’s start out with a quiz. If a carton of cigarettes sells for $160 in New York City, and $35 in North Carolina, what do you predict will happen? If you answered tons of cigarettes will be going up I-95 from North Carolina to New York City, go to the head of the class.

Smuggling cigarettes is illegal; so the next quiz question is: Who is most likely to engage in cigarette smuggling? It’s a mixed answer, but for the most part, organized smugglers will be people with a high disregard for the law. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has found that Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Middle Eastern (mainly Pakistani, Lebanese, and Syrian) organized crime groups are highly involved in the trafficking of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes. What’s worse is the ATF found that some of these groups use the money to provide material financial assistance to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Read on…

People who don’t spend a lot of time in major cities might easily miss this, but immigrants from Muslim countries have, over the last several years, established monopolies over certain retail-based industries that in some other sectors would easily inspire anti-trust lawsuits. Small markets selling, among other things, cigarettes are at the forefront of this phenomenon, with convenience stores and fast food restaurants not far behind. Here in New York, pizza shops are also on the menu to some extent, as are what I can’t help but think of as “jihadi wagons”, those stainless steel carts, towed daily to their respective curbside locations, from inside which Muslims serve hot grilled food (shish kebob, etc) through a window. Often one sees them joined within by fellow countrymen, deep in conversation, with others hanging around outside. When I lived here ten years ago, many of them were owned and manned by Russians, but this no longer seems to be the case.

Nice going, politicians — levy taxes, help finance jihad. Now the Bureau and the ATF have even more on their plates, so to speak, a tax-created homeland security issue.

Say what you want about the letter of the law, I tend to agree with Williams’ opinion that,

Some smugglers are good people who differ little from the founders of our nation such as John Hancock, whose flamboyant signature graces our Declaration of Independence. The British had levied confiscatory taxes on molasses, and John Hancock smuggled an estimated 1.5 million gallons a year. His smuggling practices financed much of the resistance to British authority — so much so that the joke of the time was that “Sam Adams writes the letters (to newspapers) and John Hancock pays the postage.” Like Hancock, some of today’s cigarette smugglers are providing a service to their fellow man caught in the grip of confiscatory taxation.

In my book, the Hancock-type smuggler is a hero of sorts. Let’s look at it. During the days of the Soviet Union, Swiss watches were illegal. During our Prohibition era, the sale, manufacture and the importation of intoxicating liquor was illegal. Britain’s Navigation Acts imposed high tariffs and restrictions on goods sold to the American colonies that ultimately led to our 1776 War of Independence. The common theme in all of these acts is government seeking to interfere with, regulate or outlaw peaceable voluntary exchange between individuals.

Reason?

It has occurred to me on numerous occasions and I have mentioned a time or two in previous posts that for some time, our government, and I’m talking about both parties, has been betraying us, treacherously so and purely in the interests of individual political careers by gradually reintroducing the very same governance that our founding fathers saw fit to rebel against and in so doing break away from Great Britain, and found the United States of America.

However, rather than fight it, we collectively permit this regression to pre-Revolutionary War conditions. We continue to reelect politicians who could give a rat’s backside about We, The People or about our great country — to these scumbags, the only thing America means is realizing their own personal political ambitions, getting reelected at any cost, and I have come to realize that no matter how we elevate one above the other in our esteem, you can count all the politicians in this country who entertain even an iota of patriotism on one hand.

That said, two of my upcoming activities will be to catch Clarence Spady live, and also to attend a musical play called Street Dreams (an excitedly upbeat young actress, or aspirant thereof, handed me a hand-out for the play, billed “an inner city musical”, presented by the Rosetta Lenoir Musical Theatre Academy — never heard of it — and it looks like fun) at the ATA Theatre on West 54th.

New York, YAY!!!!

by @ 6:42 am. Filed under New York, Opinion, Politicians

February 22, 2008

Screw The Country…

let’s just concentrate on getting the Hispanic vote!

In a CNN debate in Austin, Texas, Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agreed Thursday night that the Secure Border Fence Act of 2006, which directs the secretary of Homeland Security to construct 700 miles of double border fencing along specific sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, should not be enforced as written.

Stressing her desire to be deferential to the views of people who live along the border in Texas — which on March 4 will hold a primary that is widely viewed as a must-win event for the New York senator — Clinton said of a border fence, “there may be limited places where it would work. But let’s deploy more technology and personnel, instead of the physical barrier.”

“This is an area where Senator Clinton and I almost entirely agree,” said Obama. “I think that the key is to consult with local communities, whether it’s on the commercial interests or the environmental stakes of creating any kind of barrier.”

Both Clinton and Obama argued that the Bush administration was being too aggressive in pushing to build the border fence mandated by the 2006 law.

By “too aggressive”, they surely mean “verbally” aggressive. How much fence have they built in the last year and a half?

The agreement among the senators came in response to a question asked by CNN’s John King, one of the moderators of the debate.

On September 29, 2006, the Senate voted 80-19 for passage of H.R. 6061, the Secure Fence Act of 2006. (It passed the House on September 14, 2006, by a vote of 283-138). Clinton and Obama both voted for the act.

The law mandated that the secretary of Homeland Security build more than 700 miles of double fencing along specific segments of the U.S.-Mexico. Then House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R.-N.Y.), the principal sponsor of the law, explained its purpose in a floor speech on the day of the 2006 House vote. “It provides over 700 miles of two-layered reinforced fencing,” King said, according to the Congressional Record.

Above emphasis mine.

All 435 members of the House of Representatives and one third of U.S. senators faced reelection contests just one month after passage of the Secure Fence Act.

Yeah, sure… Voting for the bill was one thing, especially before an election, while actually allocating the funding to see it to fruition, after the election, is another thing entirely.

While Obama apparently has the black vote sewn up, he and Hillary are still vying for the Hispanic vote, yet neither wants to dumpsterize the vote of those favoring the enforcement of our immigration laws, so they offer straw-grasping alternatives neither would actually embrace, once elected, to the legislation they themselves voted for, in order to wear both hats.

That either specimen is actually a seriously considered candidate for leader of the free world is a telling example of how little today’s Democrats value even an iota of honesty in their political choices. But then, that became abundantly clear when they re-elected Bill Clinton.

January 17, 2008

Portside Racism

I’ve been sort of avoiding posting on politics for the last few days, a short break as it were, but there seems to be an issue in the wood work that I feel a need to remark upon.

It’s this whole Obama-Clinton thing wherein the media and, to some extent, the concerned candidates themselves have brought up the color of the former and the gender of the latter in the course of their Presidential campaigns.

What causes me to take notice here is that the left, which includes the mainstream media (MSM), places so much emphasis on the minority status of one and the female status of the other.

The first black President, the first female President.

One result of this is the evident need of Hillary Clinton to shout from the rooftops of hers and her husband’s infinite and historical quest for equal rights and opportunities for blacks. Despite, of course, the former POTUS’ completely empty record in that regard.

Point being, we’re seeing the history of our political left repeat itself: For decades, they have demanded equality, for everybody else, to American born white males. I completely agree that all Americans should enjoy total equality in the marketplace, in the neighborhood and everywhere in between.

That said, those we select to represent us in government should be elected purely on the merits of their policies and their patriotism, their ideals and their courage, not because they are a certain color, a certain religion or a certain gender (I know that there are generally only two genders from which to choose, but I once lived in San Francisco and in that municipality, there may well be a third sex — I mean, I would not even consider personally investigating this from a field perspective, so I’ll leave it in the realm of uninvestigated conjecture).

But the liberals and their Democrat political domestic staff insist, as they always have, in making sure to hammer home the fact that Obama is black and that Hillary is a woman.

This is divisiveness at its highest order. Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton is a woman and that Barak Obama is black. Just look at a photograph of either. The media has a lot of influence upon questions asked and the issues involved — they do, after all, have the job of informing the public as to the above. So when they stress the genders and colors of the two Presidential candidates, what are they doing? They are disrespecting both, creating artificial wedges between them. Do we want a female or a black chief exec? For that matter, what about a Mormon?

Keeping bigotry alive is a primary objective of the left, its believers, its politicians, its media — the MSM. Without the ability to play the “race card”, liberal activists and Democrat politicians alike would lose a valuable propaganda tool — they could no longer blame a white, conservative Judeo-Christian society for “oppression” against all those who don’t belong to “the club”. They could no longer brand patriotic, conservative blacks “Oreos” or “Uncle Toms” (among others, Justice Clarence Thomas comes to mind) for succeeding on their own two feet rather than pursuing the victim agenda, and pit them against lesser achievers of the same minority status’.

They would be forced to confront the equality status for which they have purportedly fought (purportedly is the key word here) as the reality it has become, and concentrate on the true issues our politicians need to address in order to competently govern our country.

Well, at least they would have a few less distractions with which to razzle-dazzle the American people while, “behind the scenes”, they eased us into the adoption of socialism as a new platform for the distribution (allocation?) of our tax payments.

In summary, we need to ignore the ethnic prejudices projected by the MSM, and start looking at the candidates themselves. The media folks have pretty much demonstrated that they are too biased, racially and otherwise, to be acknowledged as an accurate source of information or political guidance…

January 3, 2008

Too Much Government, Dagnabbit!

Now that Channukah, Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone and I’ve recovered sufficiently from a rather active New Year’s Eve to take a poke at this keyboard again with some semblance of coherence…

First, being a smoker, I need to pitch a brief bitch about the no-smoking-in-bars law that was moved up from this coming summer to the day before yesterday (1 January, 2008) here in Illinois. I read all these pieces about fellow smokers facing the tribulations of having to step outside the bar, into the Chicago winter (if I’m not mistaken, it’s less than 10 degrees outside as I type this), to smoke a cigarette. They speak of everything from purchasing ear muffs and extra scarves to giving up the tobacco habit.

For me, this just means I won’t go to any bars other than those in restaurants where I’m having dinner with friends, and I’ll abstain until after I leave the establishment. I simply won’t hang out at my favorite watering hole any more, or any other local drinkeries, for that matter. So I’ll save a couple of hundred bucks a week.

Then there’s this other law that kinda’ sorta’ went into effect without my even knowing about it: I noticed, over the duration of my last carton of Chesterfield Kings, that the durn things kept going out on me when I laid them in the ashtray (more of my cigarettes spend time in the ashtray than they do being smoked, as I light up most while I’m on-line, blogging, reading, commenting, etc). It seemed that there was a problem with the paper — so I called Phillip Morris to inquire, and they informed me that certain states (including Illinois) had adopted a law requiring that all cigarettes sold in them had to have the paper thickened so that they go out when they’re not being smoked. This was explained as a measure to prevent cigarettes from starting fires. Right. Okay. Whatever. I search-engined the law and read all the statistics. Fine. Ram it.

It’s sure nice to have government entities, be they local, state or federal, protecting us from ourselves. I mean, what would we do without intrusive government? Let’s make things really easy: Let’s simply shitcan the Constitution altogether. Who needs it, right? Today’s politicians apparently haven’t read it, anyway, so why bother to perpetuate its existence?

Having gotten that out of the way, let’s move on to the meat of this post:

Just like that–like flipping a switch–Congress and the president banned incandescent light bulbs last month. OK, they did not exactly ban them. But the energy bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bush sets energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs that traditional incandescent bulbs cannot meet.

The new rules phase in starting in 2012, but don’t be lulled by that five-year delay. Whether it’s next week or next decade, you will one day walk into a hardware store looking for a 100-watt bulb–and there won’t be any. By 2014, the new efficiency standards will apply to 75-watt, 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs too.

So now the government is dictating what kind of light bulbs will be available to us, cost be damned.

As a disclaimer, I will say that I use compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) for the simple reason that I dislike pedestrian hassles, especially being a high ceilings kind of guy, and the spiral bulbs mean not having to change a light bulb for a really long time.

However, I don’t believe that CFLs should be forced on the public, like it or not. They are significantly more expensive, for one thing, and for another, as was bandied about the Blogosphere several months ago, they bring a serious element of risk into the household.

Brandy Bridges heard the claims of government officials, environmentalists and retailers like Wal-Mart all pushing the idea of replacing incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving and money-saving compact fluorescent lamps.

So, last month, the Prospect, Maine, resident went out and bought two dozen CFLs and began installing them in her home. One broke. A month later, her daughter’s bedroom remains sealed off with plastic like the site of a hazardous materials accident, while Bridges works on a way to pay off a $2,000 estimate by a company specializing in environmentally sound cleanups of the mercury inside the bulb.

With everyone from Al Gore to Wal-Mart to the Environmental Protection Agency promoting CFLs as the greatest thing since, well, the light bulb, consumers have been left in the dark about a problem they will all face eventually – how to get rid of the darn things when they burn out or, worse yet, break.

So here we’re talking about government regulation requiring families and individuals to purchase and install in their dwellings common objects (unless, of course, they have no problem with living in the dark) that present potential health hazards.

Now, I’m not a litigious person, but…

… if the government can impose this upon the masses, then the masses should, by all means, be able to sue the government, big time, in the event that these CFLs, once they’re the only game in town, present the problem they did for Brandy Bridges. Instead of the citizen with no remaining freedom of choice paying for the clean-up, let Uncle Sam pay for it. After all, Uncle is forcing the situation on us, and doing so by ignoring the Constitution and the very principles of freedom that our founding fathers bestowed upon us.

November 19, 2007

If These Candidates Are Sincere About Their Intentions…

…not to raise taxes, why won’t they sign the pledge?

Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative taxpayer group, regularly asks Republican politicians to sign a pledge not to raise taxes. Three Republican presidential candidates have not signed the pledge, which one strategist said might hurt them during the primaries.

“I worked on Bob Dole’s campaign in 1988 and he didn’t sign and it killed his campaign in the final week,” David Johnson, a Republican strategist and president of Strategic Vision. “That’s how the first President Bush was able to turn around and win the New Hampshire primary.”

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have not signed the pledge.

Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and RINO McCain all have excuses for not signing, but to me, the bottom line is that if their hearts are pure on the matter of not raising taxes, they will sign the pledge.

The fact that they won’t sign on indicates that they have doubts, that they are leaving their options open rather than committing themselves to hard-copy promises that might come back to haunt them if they do agree to tax increases on their watch.

A track record is one thing, a stated intention still another, but signing an agreement with The American People, legally binding or not, is a much stronger declaration of intent than a few words spoken in a campaign speech or a debate, wherein a politician will more often than not promise whatever is necessary to get elected, the operative theory being that once they’re in office they can worry about any verbal obligations acquired on the campaign trail: Especially when the office in question is the most powerful political position on earth.

“They are kind of caught in a Catch-22,” Johnson said. “They know that this is a way to win the New Hampshire primary, but they don’t want to go on record saying they will never raise taxes and then, if they’re nominated and elected, have to go back on that pledge and have it used against them like the first President Bush did with his famous ‘no new taxes.’”

“I think it’s going to hurt these candidates in New Hampshire,” said Johnson. “New Hampshire is a very anti-tax state.”

“Voters, traditionally when the economy is bad, go for candidates who promise not to raise taxes and who promise to lower taxes,” he said, noting that by refusing to sign the pledge, the three candidates are creating a situation that could play well for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

I suppose that we shall see what we shall see….

by @ 11:44 am. Filed under Election 2008, Our Taxes, Politicians

June 22, 2007

The Bloomberg Uproar…

…is, as the Bard might have said, much ado about nothing.

The MSM and much alternative media as well promote the information czar turned New York mayor’s quitting the Republican Party as a significant event. Right, sure, um… it’s, er, truly an epic event.

Bah!

That’s right, Bah!

Bloomberg was a staunch Democrat prior to the N.Y. mayoral elections at the end of the Giuliani years. However, the Democrats already had a candidate. Really determined to be the mayor, Bloomberg went the turncoat rout and “became” a Republican for the sole purpose of running for mayor. He won.

His first move as the new Republican mayor was to revert to a Democrat, big time.

Now that he’s in the twilight stages of his second term, he no longer needs to be a “Republican”.

The headlines shouldn’t read, Bloomberg Leaves GOP, they should say, Hizzoner Casts Off Sheep’s Clothing.

Now the speculation begins: “Will Bloomberg make a run for President in 2008?”

The media and assorted pundits make reference to his $5.5 billion smackers, wondering if he will use a chunk of it to campaign for POTUS.

And then the wishful thinking makes its way to columns, blogs and broadcast — if he runs as an Independent, his candidacy will be good for, depending upon the commentator, the Democrats or the Republicans.

Now, all opinions are based upon the fact that he won’t win the general election, but that he’ll take votes away from one of the two major parties, like a major league Ralph Nader.

I am not a wishful thinker. Though I’m not always right, I tend to base my opinions and/or projections on what I view as reality based on evidence, human nature, track records, real circumstances, etc, etc. As often as not, I find myself at odds with fellow conservatives who continue to have faith in the integrity of today’s politicians while I reserve judgement under an umbrella of doubt based upon the “bitter pill” of experience.

Personally, as a conservative I would welcome a Bloomberg campaign.

He is for gun control, he is pro-”choice”, he is for stem cell research and other Democrat themes. He certainly wouldn’t get any votes from conservatives or true Republicans.

He would, however, get a lot of votes from moderate Democrats who mistakenly view Bloomberg as a conservative possessed of “progressive” ideals. With or without Nader running, the billionaire, with his monetary edge, would suck up Democrat votes like an aardvark with a Dyson tromping through ant country.

So sure, let the schmuck run for President. His loss would be America’s gain.

August 15, 2006

Term Limits

A few years ago, I wasn’t all that concerned at the concept of a senator or congressman spending several terms in his/ her office, but I’ve since developed a different opinion as I’ve watched these folks “do their thing”.

The majority of voters, Democrat and Republican alike, read the papers, watch the news and so-forth, but don’t really delve into the details of their senators’ and reps’ job performances. They reelect a lot of complacent, useless, pontificating assholes because they simply don’t have time to do any research. Many figure, “Who cares? They’re all the same!”

Because of the above, we now have a permanent ruling class, people who have been in Congress forever and take their jobs for granted the same way semi-literate union factory workers might take their own positions.

It gets worse: Now these same parasites are fighting their constituencies’ efforts to impose term limits on their miserable, lazy, useless asses!

A Monday editorial at WSJ’s Opinion Journal by John Fund sums it up nicely.

If elected officials were half as imaginative at solving real problems as they are at perpetuating themselves in office, we’d see real confidence in government restored. Alas, the big issue on many pols’ minds right now is getting rid of the term-limit laws that threaten to knock down their impregnable incumbent fortresses.

Read the entire OpEd here.

by @ 3:40 am. Filed under Politicians, Politicians, Diplomats, Hot Air, Etc...