Category: News and Opinion

Earlier I outed Leroy G. Comrie for using close to two hundred thousand dollars on his re-election campaign when in actuality he had no opponent; well there are others. I am going to give you a list of the really egregious and odious ones who did the same thing; or those whose opponents were so weak that they didn’t need to spend a dime (collectively). And I mean that both literally and figuratively.

Let’s start with comptroller Bill Thompson, he spent $2,380,985. Can anyone tell me what he spent this money on?

Then Borough Presidents:

Helen Marshall spent $125,381.

New York’s election law requirements are justly criticized. So much so that I usually agree with the complaint that they are the worst in the land.

But then I read the following  about Pennsylvania:

Diamond is hoping to get on the fall election ballot as an independent candidate for governor. He gained notoriety for channeling voters’ anger over last summer’s legislative pay raise into an effort to oust those lawmakers.

So most of the black elected officials in Brooklyn hate my guts: whoop-dee-damn–doo. Let me give some of those in the other boroughs, reason to join the Brooklyn Klan in their dislike for me. Interestingly enough, one of the Brooklyn electeds stopped me last weekend- at an event in his district- and requested a sit-down. I don’t think so. My position is simple: when you sit down with dogs, you stand up with fleas; and fleas bite and they also suck blood.

Anyway, let me take my show on the road. To Queens to be exact. Let me out another one of these intellectually-challenged and morally-bankrupted individuals. His name is Leroy G. Comrie.

In Leo Rosten’s classic, “The Joys of Yiddish”, it is said that, at a rally in Nuremberg, Hitler was delivering a long and detailed harangue about the perfidy of the Learned Elders of Zion. “All of  the world’s  problems” he screamed “are the fault of the Jews”.

“Yes” replied a disembodied voice from the audience, “the Jews and the bicycle riders!”

Hitler looked stunned, “The bicycle riders” he asked puzzled, “why the bicycle riders?”

The voice responded, “Why the Jews?”

BELIEVE IT OR NOT THIS PIECE IS NOT ABOUT HEZBOLLAH OR JOE LIEBERMAN.

As noted in my prior post, we are facing a slowly building economic crisis on energy, and we are facing it without leadership. But what would leadership on energy look like? And do I have a proposal? As it so happens, I do. The unfortunate fact about the demand for energy in the United States is that it is “inelastic” in the short run. Since we cannot start living in compact cities or throw away our energy-intensive homes and vehicles overnight (doing so would take a lot of energy), we consume nearly as much no matter how much it costs, desperately bidding against the rest of the world for the limited supply, sacrificing other aspects of our standard of living. In the long run, if we had had leadership, we would have made different choices over the past 20 years. In the long run, if we had leadership, we might make different choices over the next 20 years. In the short run, however, there is only one thing that suburban, auto-oriented America can do to substantially reduce its energy consumption – carpool on a large scale.

The NY Post asked Hillary if she would return the campaign contributions she received from alleged Hamptons adulterer Peter Cook.

I wonder will they also now ask the various Republicans for whom admitted adulterer Rudy Giuliani raised money for, to return those contributions too?

I am more concerned about the intermediate-term future of the U.S. economy today that I have been in nearly 20 years, since 1986 and 1987. At the end of the 1990s I knew the stock market was overvalued and heading for a fall, but felt that the underlying economy was sound. Now, despite the hard work of the American people and the innovation of American companies, we are vulnerable to a significant downturn in our standard of living.

Today’s NY Sun had the following – 

"Going after a CEO just because somebody wants to have somebody to blame doesn’t make a lot of sense," Mr. Bloomberg, who is a former CEO, said.

An Non-CEO’s response –

Refusing to consider the possibily that a CEO could be to blame makes even less sense.

Although in many instances it takes years to plan a run for public office, I usually see primaries as a one-hundred-day countdown. I usually start counting on the Sunday before the first Tuesday when petitions are circulated, and I take it down to the day of the primary itself. That’s the Sunday when you gather your troops (petition-carriers, technicians, relatives, friends, etc.), and put your final plans in place for the petition-effort. The next day you usually go to the printers with your drafts in hand, hoping to pick them up on the Tuesday morning. Well-to all my white friends reading this (especially) – let me say that’s how some of us do it on the other side of the tracks/lol. It aint pretty; in fact it’s pretty ugly sometimes. But it could be fun if you are a political-junkie like me. First, you roll up your sleeve, then you tap the receiving vein two or three times, then you take the election-needle and you stick it in. If you are a pro at this, you don’t even flinch. It’s a fix good for at least one hundred days.

"A real discussion of Manton would be instructive; he took a party from self inflicted extremis and in two decades turned it into the ruling power in the City, while successfully transitioning it through tumultuous demographic changes. I didn’t care for the man’s politics or his tactics, but it is hard to think of him as anything but a giant. "

Gatemouth; posted on "Daily Politics" at 11:20 PM on 7/23/06

 "Can there be another Tom Manton? He brought his county organization back from the wreckage of the Manes era, managing to impose something resembling unity on a wounded organization. And he did it in the face of massive change, staying ahead of Queens’ radically changing demographics by supporting candidates from emerging ethic(sic)communities."