1226 Thoughts on the NYC Primary

1226 Thoughts on the NYC Primary

The New York Primary is behind us.  Here are some questions it raised:

Democrats:

• Why can they count 98% of the vote in five hours and the remaining two percent takes forevermore?
• Did Christine Quinn jettison Bloomberg or did Bloomberg pull the carpet out from under her?
• If apparent winner DiBlasio hadn’t run, would Quinn have won more than the Upper East Side?
• If John Liu didn’t have legal troubles, would he have won more than just Chinatown and Flushing?
• Did people actually vote for William Thompson or did they just vote against everyone else?
• Did Anthony Weiner actually think he had a chance?  Or was he just promoting his next job in the adult film industry?
• Now that he has nothing else to do, will Spitzer bankroll Weiner’s next film?
• Did people actually vote for Kenneth Thompson (Bklyn DA) or were they just sick to death of Charles Hynes and his recently awful record?

Republicans:  Of the five boros, only Staten Island reliably and regularly sends Republicans to office of any kind.  After 16 years of Republican mayors, the GOP may be overconfident, forgetting for now that neither Bloomberg nor Giuliani fits their notion of what a Republican is.

• Does Lhota think he can win anything but Staten Island (which really belongs to New Jersey but doesn’t know it) and a few patches of Queens?
• Now that he’s been rejected -- even in most of Astoria -- will Catsimatidis spend some of his money cleaning up Gristedes?
• Is there any reason to devote more than these three questions to the Republicans?

Time was, winning the Democratic party primary was tantamount to election. That’s not a given anymore.  But this time it looks like the city returned to its nature.

Giuliani won his first term because he faced a weak and widely disliked opponent.  Bloomberg won his first term as a Republican because everyone knew he wasn’t one but registered that way to avoid the Democratic primary which always is a mud wrestle.

New Yorkers like extreme personalities in our mayors.  The current one is extreme in his somberness. The next one has two of our favorite characteristics, he’s very tall and a showboat.  That’s what kept Ed Koch in business all those years.  It helped Lindsay a great deal, too -- especially the tall part.  The Republicans would have done better by running Shaquille O’Neal or Katie Mattera, one of the tallest players in women’s pro basketball.

New York has elected compact cars, too.  LaGuardia, Beame, Bloomberg.  But usually we go for the stretch limo types.

So that puts DiBlasio in a good position.  So does his current job, “public advocate.” The job description is kind of vague.  Little budget, little power, big mouth.  Mark Greene used it to catapult to mayoral candidate and then his present job, Minister of Obscurity.

The job is not exactly something invented by the Dutch in New Amsterdam.  It dates back only to the early 1990s.  The Republicans didn’t field a candidate.  No matter.  To make it noticeable, the Dems offered four “majors.” Of the four the only interesting one is Catherine Guerriero and she’s only interesting because she reminds everyone of a spinning-eyed Rosie O’Donnell confronted by a bear. This one’s a runoff for sure.  What’s going against her?  She’s been endorsed by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.  Since most cops live in places like Massapequa and can’t vote in the City, that endorsement will do her little good.

Bloomberg disproved the notion that New York is ungovernable. Let’s see what the next guy does.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1225 View From Afar

1225 View From Afar

(SEPT. 11, 2013) -- Years ago, it could be said with authority that the farther from ground zero or the Pentagon or Shanksville PA you were the less the attacks of 9/11/01 affected you.  This no longer is quite as true as it was.  Even to many of us who were there, 9/11 has been reduced to a cliche, a bunch of stupid slogans and platitudes.  The forces of entropy have engulfed the events and their implications and have squeezed the life out of them, turned them into mindless fodder for talk shows and parasite politicians and parasite publicists for this cause and that.

American politicians use the name of Al Qaeda as a weapon more deadly than even the attacks.  It’s a lodestone and a talisman to scare you, to abuse you, to take action in your name, action you disapprove.

“Homeland Security” is an excuse to track your phone calls, your snail mail, your email and the websites you visit. It’s something to wave in front of a sheepesque public allowing TSA agents to grope you at the airport.  No backpacks in the stadium. Open your packages.  Random luggage searches.

The new Trade Center is close to finished.  It is less ugly than its predecessors and probably built more solidly.  It is 1776 feet high, tallest building in the western hemisphere, fourth tallest in the world until some oil soaked sand dune Caliphate sheikdom throws up something a few feet taller just because it can.

Meantime, cops and firefighters and EMS workers who were at Ground Zero or the other points of attack still are dying before their time.

Now, a dozen years after the attacks, there still isn't enough said about why cops and firefighters and EMS workers are adding to the statistical death toll of that Tuesday.  

We do this.  We do it too often. And we do it with many a major event and many a catastrophe: we plasticize it.  The judge looking at the city's paltry settlement with the living victims found it wanting and added to it.  But this is not about some judge's view of who should be paid what.  This is about lives.  Men and women and children and their dogs and cats and goldfish, and who did right by all of us, only to be told "your lung disease is worth "x dollars," and we'll be happy to let you have it or give it to your spouse or kids or dogs or cats or goldfish some year when we get around to it and you're dead.

We have a replacement building, soon to be finished.  And the residents and the tourists will pass by it or through it and feel sad.

But what about NYFD fire captain Ed Placencio or police academy recruit Jerry O'Rourke, who were still roommates at Mt. Sinai's lung ward years after the fact?  Anyone drop by that room?

(Self plagiarism alert: Parts of this item were lifted from earlier Wessays on this subject.)

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrchards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1224 Tis the Season

1224 Tis the Season

(Note to readers:  There is no #1223 because two earlier posts have the same number, 1218, and the numbers have been off ever since.)

The National Meditation League should learn its lessons from the National Football League.  A sport that causes brain damage should be abolished.

The NFL just agreed to settle a lawsuit for 700-million dollars plus to help players affected by the years of brain battering they got on the field.  

This tells us some stuff about the “sport.”  First, it’s dangerous and often life shortening.  Second, if the league can peel nearly a billion dollars from its wad of bills and not feel it, it has too much money. Third: people who do this for a living are mostly idiots and require special care BEFORE their brains a scrambled, not after.  Fourth: if you’re a fan, you are supporting death… just not where you can see it happen, at least most of the time.

College football is even worse.  There, the players pretend to go to school and often are given decent scholarships.  That’s kind of like being paid to play, a no-no in the technical and legal sense but the reality is that’s what happens.

Football at any level is a big money business and the players are pawns and machines.  In college they risk serious injury in the hopes of landing a deal with the NFL.  In the NFL, they’re ground up, eaten alive and tossed to the curb when no longer useful… a state that often comes sooner than later.

So as the both the professional and semi professional seasons begin for the autumn of 2013, let’s get out there and watch those outsized guys battle it out like the gladiators of old.  It’s a lady-or-the-tiger arrangement in which there are no ladies and a slow eating tiger behind every door.

As for you, the fan: Get out there.  Bring your own bottle if it’s legal. Otherwise, tank up on overpriced beer at the concession stand.  Down a few cheap but expensive hot dogs and stagger home knowing you’ve made your contribution to the dehumanizing of a bunch of guys who don’t know any better and filled the pockets of team owners, television networks and self perpetuating college athletic departments.

And if you know a player who has yet to have a concussion or a broken this or a torn that, help him become one of the boys by tripping him on the sidewalk.  The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Now, as for the National Meditation League…

Meditation as a competitive sport is only in the early stages.  But there already is a full schedule of events and a professional association.

It’s hard to describe.  If you take golf, slow it to about half speed (you didn’t think that was possible, did you,) and use much less space, you have part of the idea.

The rest of it is kind of like making a cake in a microwave.  For those who never have seen that, please understand that it requires no actual baking.  It starts as a slab of nondescript material in a microwave-safe paper vessel.  You add water and stir a bit and then microwave it for a set number of minutes.  The cake then develops, much like those old Polaroid pictures that would pop out of the camera and the image appeared slowly as you watched.

If you left it in the oven too long, it exploded rendering the microwave inoperative.  Those situations were not covered by the warranty.

Beginners and amateurs in competitive meditation have not yet mastered this … but among the pros, you can actually watch brain swelling and heads expanding.

At some point, perhaps in the middle of a particularly close match on the pro tour, someone’s head is going to blow up.

So the NML had better learn from the NFL and start putting aside a widows and orphans fund.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1222 Too Big to Fail

1222  Too Big To Fail

How many people in this country are living below the poverty line?  And how many visits to a doctor did they skip because we don’t have universal health care?

How many storm-savaged/ravaged homes and businesses have yet to recover from Sandy or Katrina or Andrew?

We can bail out the banks.  We can bail out the automakers.  They’re too big to fail.

But so are the American people.

And we need a bailout.

Inflation is near zero except when you count the stuff people have to pay for … food and fuel… oh, and taxes.

Yet we have billions to burn in places we don’t belong, like Syria and Afghanistan and wherever else we are either hated and mistrusted or at least unwelcome guests.

We can’t fund medicine.  Education is a disaster at every level. We are so busy building walls against Mexicans and shooting people dead in places we don’t belong… so busy funding far eastern sweat shops at the expense of our own factories and workers and deregulating everything in sight and plenty that isn’t that we have lost ourselves.

Got a spare billion or two? (we do, but that’s another story.)  Hey, here’s an idea, let’s dump some more money into another impossible war.  No investor shorts Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, Unisys, or Remington Arms.

We are too big to fail.  We need a bailout.  And not just a financial bailout.

We need to shift our focus away from the Big Three Devilish Damsels: Casey Anthony, Jodi Arias and Miley Cyrus of the twitching and twerping and mediocre rear end.  Also, the Kardashians, the new English prince and anyone else who makes the cover of the Enquirer, the Globe, People, the New York Post, E! television and Entertainment Tonight.

We debate and argue and fuss about germ-sized “problems” and we don’t deal with the things that are destroying us.  Fakenomics. Deregulation, waste, corruptions and the politicians we still take seriously.  Poverty. Malnutrition. And how we’re going to recover from the tea party.

We used to take care of each other.  Now, we take care of business. We do it because it’s what we do.  Or what’s done in our name.

Shrapnel (middle school spy edition):

--According to news reports, the anti-drug warriors’ eavesdropping and spying make the NSA’s look like one middle schooler cribbing the test answers from the kid at the next desk. If the NSA is as effective at curbing terrorists as the DEA is at curbing drug deals, the terrorists have nothing to worry about.  At least not from us.

--We’ve also come to learn that the NSA has cracked all the internet security measures most of us pay for.  If the spies want to know your credit card numbers, you social security number and your eye color they already have it, so what’s the big deal?  The big deal is if the NSA can do this so can the middle school kid at the next desk.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1221 A Petard Hoisting

1221 A Petard Hoisting in the Works

Uh oh!  The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner.  Or maybe they’re sitting on the free end of the limb they’re sawing off a tree.  Been waiting more than 60 years to use that title legitimately.

This is about America attacking the Assad regime. It’s about America invading Syria.

First you have to understand the Republicans’ Prime Directive: Oppose everything President Obama wants and asks for.

Next, you have to understand that the republicans have been rattling their missiles for months.  Get in there. Clean the place out. Give ‘em hell.  Show them who’s boss.

Now comes the president and he’s on their side.  But instead of just pulling the trigger, he says “okay, first I’m going to ask for your approval.”

Very smart.  Or a happy accident.  They approve, they share the blame for what goes wrong and -- you know this -- things will go wrong.

They turn them down, they’ve done a 180 in midair or a barrel roll in a Piper Cub. Even today’s Republican voters would be able to see that.  Not good for reelection chances.  And, of course, the whole job of a sitting representative is getting re-elected.  Party doesn’t matter.

So what’s a poor beleaguered member of either house to do?

The answer is simple.  Use the fallback for everything: hold committee hearings.  And to use both belt and suspenders, hold subcommittee hearings.  And sub-subcommittee hearings.  Then vote on whether to take a vote.

Y’all can fiddle while Damascus burns.  No American will remember that ten minutes from now.  But if you actually DO something… THAT they’ll remember.

The research department has found a coded secret message in the congressional oath of office.  

Here’s the text of that oath:  

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Now if you translate that paragraph back into the original Aramaic, you’ll see that English words were added later.  

This sentence: “...I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion…” originally read “I take this obligation freely without any purpose.”  Clarifies that members of the house are promising to do nothing.

So Obama has won over his best buddies, Boehner, Cantor, Graham and McCain and is courting other hawks.  (We always knew John and Barry were allies. After all, weren’t both of them unqualified for office because they were born, respectively in Panama and Kenya? Plus Old John looks out his window and sees Arizona sand which is a lot like Syrian sand. Homey, he must think.) And the prez keeps trying to sell this glue factory nag to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. In Syria, Half Ass-ad is laughing all the way to the stockpile, and setting off the bombs.

Yes, sarin is illegal.  Yes it is immoral.  Yes it’s being used in Syria like pixie dust in a Disney cartoon.

But is this America’s problem?  Sure.  Just like Vietnam, Iraq, the other Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Albania.  Oh. Wait about Albania. Wrong Muslims.  That’s not until 2017.  Right after Chechnya.

----

From the AP: A followup to Monday’s blog post about the Montana judge who sentenced a teacher convicted of statutory rape to 30 days:

Click here:

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1220 The Judge

1220 The Judge

New, from our bulging Outrage File:

A judge in Montana sentenced a high school teacher to 30 days in prison for raping a 14 year old student who later committed suicide.

The teacher is one Stacey Rambold.  He is 54 years old.  The girl was Cherice Morales, age 16 when she killed herself.

The judge is G. Todd Baugh, 71.

Actually, the sentence was 15 years, with 14 years and eleven months suspended and one day’s credit for time served.

Judge Baugh distinguished himself by noting from the bench that the victim was “older than her chronological age.”

That started a major national hoo-hah of protest and authorities are reexamining the sentence with an eye to appeal.

Let’s get a little closer to this story.  First, this wasn’t a mugging rape or a date rape.  This was a months’ long “relationship.”  Under the law, it’s still rape.  Ms. Morales’ mother, Auliea Hanlon says the rape played a major part in the girl’s suicide.  That means there were other factors, too -- none of them made public.

Baugh apologized last week as rallies were taking place on the Yellowstone County Courthouse steps.  And he said while he hasn’t decided whether to seek re-election in 2014, he rejected calls for his resignation.

The teacher, Rambold, has been in trouble of this kind before.  He’d been warned he had to stop touching his female students, went into whatever “rehab” program they have for people like that but was booted because he didn’t show up for class.

Prosecutors weren’t ready to throw away the key.  They recommended a 20 year sentence with ten years suspended.  Not exactly hard time, let alone long time.

“Older than her chronological age”?  Every 14 year old girl is older than her chronological age.  And younger.  Fourteen is like the “terrible twos.”  One minute seductress, the next kindergartener with a cranky streak.  One moment tears, the next, laughter.  One moment “I HATE you mommy,” the next “I love you mommy.”

But 14 is 14 as one t-shirt at the rally said.

As outrages go, this one doesn’t match many of the current crop.  It’s not Syria or Egypt.  It’s not the tea party or the rise of other hate and domestic terrorist groups.  It’s not the Westboro Baptist Church or stop and frisk “the right people” as the NYPD says. It’s not the cost of medical care.  It’s not the unemployment rate.  But it’s still outrageous.

As for the judge, he promises a wider and more detailed explanation of the case and his decision.  But some people think there’s a genetic explanation.  He is the son of Sammy Baugh, whom the Associated Press describes as a “legendary quarterback” for the Washington Redskins of the National Football League.  That was back in the leather helmet days, the 1930s and then the 40s.

Draw your own conclusions about where the apple from that tree fell.

Best wishes for a happy Labor Day.  No thoughts this year that you haven’t heard before, except “Honey, they Shrunk the Union.”

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013