Angry New Yorker |
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Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man
"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly."
- Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
NY 23 What to say about the debacle upstate in the 23rd Congressional district. Suffice to say, Mr. Hoffman has our nod, for what little it's worth. Newt Gingrich is blowing a hole below the waterline in his ship of self with his endorsement of Dede Scozzafava. As Richard Brookhiser notes, the "contest in NY 23 is what the New York Conservative Party was made for." As Mark Steyn quips, Dede Scozzafava "isn't RINO but DIABLO - Democrat In All But Label Only. It's not one of those "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" bi-swinger deals — not when you're pro-'stimulus', pro-cash-for-clunkers." Enough is enough. A Must Read:
No shortage of bad and expensive ideas. Our country is in the best of hands. I can tell you this is they try to impose this where we live civil disobedience shall be the order of the day: Feds to Convince DC Area Taxpayers to Embrace $4.8 Billion Mileage Tax Wednesday, September 30, 2009
What next? Stalin's Birthday? Has the moral decay set in this deeply? We would have thought it impossible, but alas we are often chagrined at our naivite when it comes to the depths. From National Review Online:
You can drop a comment to the people owning/running the Empire State Building here - http://www.empirestatebuilding.com Labels: Empire State Building, jawdroppers Wednesday, September 09, 2009
We should be ruled like China. At least according to Tom Friedman. I get royally tired of beating the Tom Friedman piniata but the guy demonstrates cultural and historical blind spots the size of a red giant star. I'd be embarrassed to showcase such blinding ignorance. Yet, he no doubt considers himself rational, reasoned and supremely educated. He is none of these, and is in fact, wait for it, a "liberal fascist" who deserves no audience for his fervid mutterings larger than that of his own wide-eyed visage in the bathroom mirror each morning. I've said it before, but I have to remind myself of it constantly: Be extremely wary of those who want to "save" something, or do putatively "good" things for one group or another unless they either have a direct and immediate dog in the fight or are following their well-understood & established religious tenets because otherwise there is always a hidden agenda at work. But in some cases there is no longer even an attempt to hide the subcurrent agenda.To whit today's firestorm regarding Friedman's column, One-Party Democracy, in today's NY Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1 While our current system is substantially broken (repealing the 17th Amendment and getting rid of partisan gerrymandering would go a long way toward fixing our federal systemic woes), no less a luminary than founder and 4th president James Madison, often called "the father of the Constitution", wrote in Federalist 10: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.” Or, in more up-to-date terms ala Churchill, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried." Friedman's column yearns for snuffing out of "factions" - that is interest groups - in the interest of furthering his goals. But if tried it would, as Madison noted, extinguish liberty. We should all be very wary of Tom Friedman and like-minded minions. The Firm Hand of the Benign Strongman [Mark Steyn] The New York Times's Thomas Friedman finally gets to where he's been wanting to go all these years. Everything would be so much better if we could just submit to the benign rule of an enlightened elite:
 Thomas Friedman is a Liberal Fascist [Jonah Goldberg] Mark beat me to it, but I must put in my two cents. Thomas Friedman writes:
So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks" to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these "drawbacks" pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America. I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it's the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearned for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn't picky in this regard). This is the argument for an "economic dictatorship" pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It's the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives. I have no idea why I still have the capacity to be shocked by such things. A few years ago, during the worst part of the Iraq war, I wrote a column saying that Iraq needed a Pinochet type to bring order to Iraq and help develop democratic and liberal institutions. To this day, I get vicious hate mail from liberal and leftist readers for my "pro-dictator" stance. Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman, golden boy of the NYT op-ed page, is writing love-letters to dictatorships because they have the foresight to invest in electric batteries and waterless toilets or something. It looks like there's reason to hope I was wrong about Iraq (I certainly hope I was). But at least I favored a dictatorship of sorts — for another country! — because I thought it would lead to a liberal democracy. Here, Friedman lives in a liberal democracy but has his nose pressed up against the candy store window of a cruel, undemocratic, regime and all he can do is drool over the prospect of having the same power here. It's disgusting. Update: A friend IM's:
More on Friedman's Enlightened Despots [Jonah Goldberg] Dan Blumenthal at the EB:
This reminds me. I'm not a great student of what's going on in China, and I don't have its enlightened rulers on speed dial the way Friedman does. But I just find the idea that China is a great environmental steward absurd beyond ken (or barbie). China chokes the planet with more industrial smog than we do. Whole cities exist in perpetual dusk. China's factories are constantly sneaking lead and other poisons into their — and our — food and toys. The country is turning into a desert at a terrifying pace because of their land and water policies. Lord knows what horrors the Chinese are keeping off the books. I simply do not believe Tom Friedman et al when they say that China is beating us on the environment. No totalitarian regime has ever been a better steward of the environment than an advanced industrialized democratic regime. I have a hard time believing the Chinese are an exception to that rule. Update: Kenneth Anderson via Volokh.com calls Friedman's column "monstrous". (h/t NRO) Kenneth Anderson at Volokh:
Update: More from Will Collier. Thursday, August 13, 2009
New York's former and disgraced governor, Eliot Spitzer, is today a columnist at Slate.com, the webzine founded by Michael Kinsley and funded by Microsoft. In an era where the concept of personal shame has evaporated Spitzer is trying to rehabilitate his shredded reputation. A few months back in April, we apologize for not spotting this sooner, Spitzer co-authored an editorial entitled "Gun Control Without Gun Laws: How Obama can use government procurement regulations to limit gun violence" available here. It's worth a read if only to ponder that Eliot Spitzer is an object lesson: sometimes the universe does give people the justice they deserve. Why anyone still listens to this fool of unbridled chutzpah, arrogance and self aggrandizement is beyond us? Here he is on how the government can blithely still accomplish gun control without those pesky little things called "laws." We've yet to see a more telling example of raw unbridled power than his statement below that: "more fundamentally, companies could be told to stop selling certain types of weapons to the general public... * * * If government cannot legislate the conduct it wants, then it can use market power to buy it. For the money we are spending, we should buy not only guns but some peace from gun violence."Oh? For the children, right? Under what actual legitimate authority, you know "derived from the consent of the governed", are you talking about here Mr. Spitzer? Or do mean the same type of authority that you exercised to get your hooker to take the train down to DC for you? Here's the thing, Spitzer: If govt cannot legitimately legislate in an area it is overreaching its rightful confines if it works consciously to reach the same result through other means. (Which is why so many lawyers and constitutional scholars, like me, have very very deep seated problems with the constitutionality of federal tax and spending coercion on the states - thank you oh soooo much Supreme Court for South Dakota v. Dole (which was also a case "for the children"). ) Spitzer is also wrong on the facts. Drug dealers didn't "pioneer[] the use of 9-mm guns" the government did as part of switching from the long standard .45 over to 9mm pistols in order to use the same ammo as Nato forces. And Spitzer calls for magazine safety disconnects... maybe he should talk to those self-same police and military folks whose buying power he wants to harness... none of the guns they buy have them (for good reason too long to go into here). And witness first hand the oft derided but very real slippery slope in action: "If we can use a capital infusion to a bank as an opportunity to control executive compensation and to limit use of private planes, why can't the government use its weight as the largest purchaser of guns from major manufacturers to reward companies that work to keep their products out of criminals' hands?"Why not indeed? Government. Weight. Largest. Behold the truism in action: a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have. Finally, let's flip one of Spitzer's final sentences around and apply it to the govt in the way he applies it to private gun manufacturers. Spitzer quips: "This prompts a simple question: Why do we buy guns from companies that permit their products to be sold to bad guys?"To which our retort simple question is: "Why do we trust any government that permits its officials to constantly lie to citizens, confiscate ever increasing amounts of hard earned wealth, bankrupt them, their children and their grandchildren yet is allowed to continue to peddle old discredited ideas as if they were bound to work this time around?" Labels: gun control, Spitzer, Supreme Court Monday, July 06, 2009
CityJournal's Steven Malanga is digging again in NYC and NYS finances noting: "Over Bloomberg’s tenure, the city has, thanks to annual spending increases, Remember this when "Mayor Mike" starts blustering about cost-cutting and his fiscal responsibility - neither of which are true in any meaningful fashion. Malanga's full article is here: The City’s Finances: Budget-Cutting Made Simple Frederic U. Dicker finally gives up on NY. And he was one of the holdouts. See http://www.nypost.com/seven/07052009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/albany__i_give_up_177689.htm?&page=0 Money quote:
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
New York in Decline. Steve Malanga's op-editorial, Shackling New York: Why State is in Decline, in today's New York Post highlights why New York, unless it changes course, is doomed to steady and ultimately perhaps irreversible decline. Malanga notes "New York state is dead last in the freedom index 'by a wide margin,'" according to a recent study by George Mason University's Mercatus Center. The Mercatus Center study, Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom, is available here [PDF]. Malanga queries, and rightfully so in our opinion, as to the consequences of this lack of freedom and states, "[t]he best way to judge is to look at the collective condition of the states with the worst rankings. (New Jersey is in 49th place, following California and Rhode Island.) Further, Malanga reports on the contrast with the study's freest states: New Hampshire, Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho and Texas, which have unemployment rates at or below the national average. (New Hampshire's is 6.2 percent, or two full points below the nation's, according to recent Labor Department statistics.) You decided whether it is also a coincidence that each of these states is a net winner in terms of domestic migration, with far more citizens entering than leaving. The Mercatus' Summary of the Study states:
Labels: economic decline, freedom, New York Monday, April 06, 2009
Danger, Will Robinson!! [h/t David Freddoso in NRO's Corner] Behold the death of the American experiment. For if this idiot's thinking because further pervasive, as it appears to be, there is no end but disaster, disunity and division. As Freddoso, notes "Cook County Board President Todd Stroger recently explained cigarette tax increases in an unexpectedly candid radio interview. Host John Williams asked: Isn't it unfair to keep targeting smokers with tax increases? And it's our experience that the local and state level are following suit. Of course, this is President Obama's bedrock philosophy too in his "share the wealth" program. There's fewer [rich, producers, energy companies, etc.] than poor voters, ergo, tax, tax, tax Group A to get votes of the poorer. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. (At least until your hair falls out completely). From "protect and serve" to "wait and report" The recent upstate Binghamton shootings revealed a disturbing trend in police operations (which isn't just limited to the U.S. as Mark Steyn has noted) where police in responding to 911 "emergency" calls arrive and then... wait. But it highlights that in a real emergency you're on your own - and should plan and react accordingly. Jack Baeur isn't coming to come bursting through the window at the 11th hour to save the day. As "Jack Dunphy" notes in The Corner: Even if the gunfire had ceased, the people already wounded deserved an all-out effort to provide them with medical care as quickly as possible. I expect we’ll be learning that some of the victims bled to death while waiting for the help that came too late. Knowing how police departments function as I do, I have no doubt that there were officers ready and willing to enter the building within minutes but were prevented from doing so by superiors who, in ordinary circumstances, make no decisions weightier than selecting which desk tray to place a piece of paper in. These people had to be prodded from their desks when the trouble started, and their presence at the scene merely clogged up the decision-making process. Sunday, January 11, 2009
Gaza Ruminations Human suffering should never please another human. That is the goal. Hamas, however, is anti-human, in that it's official position is the affirmative suffering and the continuation of suffering and death. As such, the only possible way to defeat them is to grant their wish and deliver such suffering and death that the pain of waking each day, the heavy anguish of ongoing suffering, the soul killing understanding of the ruination and rubble resulting from their death wish, finally, finally delivers the message that their ideology is defeated. Without receipt of this message only pain and suffering lie ahead. And the faux "humanitarians" who wring their hands about a "humanitarian crisis" will have the blood of future combatants on their well-meaning but idiotic hands. Complete defeat of Hamas is the only option. If the population that voted for them continue support, then they, too, need to be defeated. Completely. Until their spirit is utterly broken, their lives ruined, and the hearts emptied of the will to fight. As harsh as this is history and human nature have time and time again shown that, sadly, this is the only viable resolution. Anything else is a wistful pipedream born of liberal wishes and an ignorance of human folly. Grabbing the Brass Ring. When we were children, several decades back, it never entered our minds that our goal should be "to grow up and go work for the city." The fathers of several friends worked for the city - as sanitation men, fire fighters or in some unknown civil bureau. Other than a mentor who went to work for he NYC court system and the father of the friend who worked for the DEP on the NYC water system we felt mildly sad for those men went to work for the city; as if circumstances and some failing conspired to push them into the arms of the city civil service as a last resort. Working for the city was for those who either weren't able to or couldn't finish college or find a "decent" spot in the private sector. The examples of people we personally knew who'd gone to work for the city included a childhood friend whose girlfriend got pregnant at 18 and who dropped out of college to honorably support his sudden family by joining the transit cops; a friend who couldn't make it at college and joined the fire department, etc. In our view a city career was a safety escape hatch. You'd virtually always have a job, but you'd be limited to a small apartment over a deli or an attached house in a distance part of Brooklyn or Queens. Your day would be drudgery, your hours, conduct and promotions fixed by minute and dry rules and regulations. Today, however, those who went to work for the city at the time we were in or finishing up college are retired and living off hefty guranteed city pensions while the value of our 401Ks have dropped like a rock. We're in our third career at the moment and get home each night around 9:30 now, after having been laid off twice in the past two years. The economic news each day is paralyzing. And those people that we felt mildly sorry for as having to settle for working for the city had the last laugh. This is no way to run a railroad. From today's NY Times: City Employee Pay Is Outpacing Private Sector, Report Says. “Bolstered in part by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s spending, the average New York City employee cost the city $107,000 a year in wages, health insurance, pension and other benefits in the 2008 fiscal year, an increase of 63 percent since 2000, according to a new report. |
Officials are looking to convince residents in the Washington, DC metropolitan region that converting every local streets into toll roads would be good for them. The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board last Wednesday voted to seek federal gas tax funds to bankroll a $400,000 study on how best to sell the public on a controversial per-mile tax proposal that would raise up to $4.8 billion in new revenue.