Category: News and Opinion

In my earlier posts expressing amazement that Mike Bloomberg takes seriously the wackos in Virginia, otherwise known as that the Independent Green Party, I focused on the fact that the Indy Greens don’t think there’s anything strange about supporting both Mike Bloomberg and Chuck Baldwin, an anti-abortion, pro-gun  right-wing nutcase.

I did, take at face value, the assertion by the Indy Greens that they gathered the impressive total of 70,000 signatures for the Bloomberg “campaign”

If in New York City education the signposts to the future are easy to see, that is even more the cast in health care, where an institutional collapse is slowly grinding on even as health care spending escalates. For the shrinking number of people with access to benefits paid for by others, ever more services of greater or lesser value continue to be provided at greater and greater cost — to someone else — with no end in sight. Meanwhile, a larger and larger number of people are entitled to less and less. The one thing that could head off a retirement crisis caused by rising lifespans, moreover, is that rising obesity and diabetes could slash the age of death or disability of those without the health insurance benefits to combat it. Average American life expectancy could fall as a result, the way it did in the former Soviet Union after its institutions collapsed, unless the increasingly long lives to those with the good deals are enough to bring up the average compared with the majority. Moreover, those facing pre-mature disability are, by and large, also those without access to retirement benefits other than an oversubscribed Social Security system. So we could have two classes — one that has to go on working though unable, and one that is able to work but doesn’t have to, and gets to live on while not working, and consuming lots of health care, for a very long time.

Yesterday, I posted a story taking to task various media outlets and bloggers for spreading a false story concerning a statement State Senator Marty Connor was alleged to have made about congestion pricing. The story meticulously documented a sequence of events which made clear that the real meaning (and punctuation) of Connor’s statement was quite different from what had been reported, and that, in fact, it was his opponent, Daniel Squadron, who’d been obfuscating concerning his position on the issue.

Among the media outlets I mentioned was the Brooklyn Paper. I publicly announced that I had emailed the piece to Gersh Kuntzman, the paper’s Editor, and asked whether he would have the integrity to print a retraction. In context, it was clear that I thought it was quite possible that he would do so, since I also named several outlets and bloggers who I did not email, because it wasn’t worth the bother.

Apparently Mayor Mike takes the "leader" of the Virginia Indy Greens a bit more seriously than I do.

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/

Says mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser today: "He hasn't made any decisions and hasn't had a chance to speak with Mr. Campbell yet. But this is a call for post-partisanship that Mayor Bloomberg hopes the major parties will hear."

I wonder if Mr. Campbell will attempt to convince Mike to embrace the policies of Campbell's 2nd choice for President and support the repeal of Roe v Wade, thrown the UN out of NYC and support those oppressed gun owners.

I haven’t done a “Vines” column in a while so here goes. And for those who are unfamiliar with these columns, let me reiterate that it is a combination of some serious newsworthy items -that you probably won’t pick up in mainstream media- plus some juicy political gossip, some analysis, some innuendo, some political history, some personalities that you probably won’t hear of again, some predictions, plus any thing else (political) that you wanted to know but was afraid to ask*(especially about Brooklyn). 

Let’s start with NYC council woman Letitia “Tish” James. She is now on her way to becoming Brooklyn’s latest “elected-thug-wannabee”. She needs to know that this “intimidation” shit won’t fly with me on a personal level. I am not afraid of her or any of her fellow electeds. Last month I saw her in the council chambers at City Hall -while we both attended the memorial ceremony for deceased council member James Davis- whereby she deliberately sat next to me, and kept hitting me in the back. She kept making the false charge that I had written libelous things about her. She claims that in my blog column I stated that she was under criminal investigation. You be the judge. The column is dated May 20th, 2008. It is entitled: “Is Council Woman Tish James In Trouble”. Go read it (www.r8ny.com). It is obvious that her reading and comprehension skills are limited. Could it be that she is an imbecile disguised as an attorney/city council member?