The Case Against Barack Obama...

As if one actually needed to be made?

Anyhow, I have not bashed President Frequent-Flyer-Miles for some time now, which is not surprising: in order to criticize someone for anything, it is first necessary for them to have done something. Barack Obama, as I have said many times before on this page, is simply not a doer so it has been difficult to criticize anything after his first year in office -- except his lack of action. However, the last few months of Presidential inaction may have given new meanings to the words 'procrastination' and 'inertia'.

Why Conservatives Fear Newt Gingrich...

I used to think I was a Conservative, but that was before I realized what the difference between a Conservative and a Republican really was. This realization didn't just sneak up on me, arriving with one of those "Eureka!" moments where the skies seem to part and thunder echoes across the valley, with the trumpets of angels heralding some great epiphany.

Five Reasons Why You Can Stick a Fork in Herman Cain…

#Excelsior502- I really liked Herman Cain, truly. To me, Mr. Cain was a breath of fresh air cutting through the rank, musty effluvium of Our National Political Scene. A self-made man, not a professional politician, with a record of success, and a homey sort of demeanor that made him downright likable from the get go.

Cain might have been somebody in this 2012 GOP nomination contest, he could have been a true contender. He might even have found himself as the eventual nominee’s Vice-Presidential choice, but alas, it is not to be. For Herman Cain, far from being the mighty planet in a crowded political solar system has instead turned out to be little more than a streaking meteor, flashing spectacularly in our metaphorical night sky before crashing to Earth with a mighty "Boom!".

Five Reasons Why Michele Bachmann Should Quit While She’s Ahead…

#Excelsior502- Pity Michele Bachmann. It must be tough enough to be a Congresscritter without the added burden of being a punching bag for the political Left in this country, it must be doubly-hard to be a Congresscritter running for national office with the added bonus of being way too easy to tag with a torrent of left jabs in the immediate seconds before the final knockout blow is delivered.

Five Reasons Why Jon Huntsman Should Be Mowing My Lawn...

...and for free.

#Excelsior502 - One of the many services we provide here at the Lunatic’s Asylum is the proffering of unsolicited opinion on topics various and sundry. One of my personal favorite past times is in serving up my cynical and jaundiced political views with a large side order of sarcastic invective, and the latest targets of my diseased political outlook have been the current crop of 2012 GOP contenders.

Five Reasons Why Rick Santorum is More Annoying Than a Parakeet on Speed…

#Excelsior502 – I hate birds. I hate birds even more than I hate cats, which is something, since I believe that in the future the only use we’ll have for them is probably as food once the Global Economy finally collapses. Anyways, the reason why I hate birds so much is because of a former paramour named Anne-Marie.

Five Reasons Why Ron Paul Should STFU…

#Excelsior502 – Presidential hopeful and Texas congressman Ron Paul fascinates me, in much the same way that Gollum from the Lord of the Rings does. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of his undeniably inspirational sense of stick-to-it-iveness, or maybe it’s the romantic notion that even in the depths of utter despair and hopelessness one can still find something noble and human in the deeply-flawed-and-ultimately-doomed tragic figure who manages to achieve some greater good against his original intent.

Handy Herman...

Boy, it's sure beginning to really suck to be Herman Cain!

Let's put this out here right at the top: I don't believe, based upon the scanty and mostly anonymous evidence presented so far, that Herman Cain has molested or sexually harassed anyone. I believe, in much the same way the lamestream, libtard press believes, that is, sans incontrovertible evidence, that Cain is innocent in much the same way as his political opponents would like you to believe that he is guilty.

Gettin' With the Times...

It was inevitable.

One day I knew that if I had ever wanted to make this collection of diseased rantings a viable commercial enterprise, I would have to get with the program and make it accessible to morons of all stripes.

I REALLY MISS GEORGE W. BUSH

You know what? I miss President Bush, and I'm tired of people still dissing him like he's some chump. Yeah Clinton was great, but who would you rather have had in office after that, Gore? Kerry?

With either of those guys as President, we would've been as lame as our neighbors by now. Don't get me wrong, I like Canada. They got free health care and poutine (which makes culinary sense). And Mexico...Mexico is warm.

Anyway, you need President Bush, like everyone else in this world does. Who else could have removed the threat in Iraq, trained the Iraqi people to defend their land, and instilled civility to a country? Who else would've given us stimulus checks in order to pump up the economy? If you don't like that, then you're most likely a Democrat...a crack-whore welfare Democrat.

Behold, my favorite President of the United States of America, in the greatest State of the Union Address ever. A speech you probably missed because you were busy hating him and wishing that your lives were miserable:




Have a good weekend...

*this post also appears at the Insane Asylum Blog*

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TEXAS JUDGE CRITICIZED FOR BEATING HIS DAUGHTER WITH A BELT

Seven years ago, Texas judge William Adams caught his daughter Hillary (who was 16 at the time) downloading music illegally from a website. So he did what any parent that believes in not sparing the rod would do. He disciplined her with his belt.

Hillary, unbeknownst to her parents, recorded the whole incident. She held on to the video over the years, but decided recently to upload it to YouTube in an attempt to make him "get help" according to her. She said that he's been harassing her over the years, and she wants him to stop. She doesn't go deeply in the details about the harassment, so I can't justify her uploading the video especially since she said the intent wasn't to get him trouble.

Five Reasons Why Rick Perry is a Major Douche...

I have an almost visceral dislike of Texas Governor and Presidential hopeful Rick Perry. I wouldn't go as far as to say that I actually hate the man, because I don't know him personally. Rather, my dislike is based upon certain politically-motivated factors which manifest whenever the man appears on television.

Here are Five Reasons why I believe Rick Perry is a Major Douche:

Herman Cain and Sexual Harassment...

By now everyone should have heard about Herman Cain's little trouble with some allegations of randiness. I won't recap the whole, sordid...ahem...affair, because the facts are still in question, as are the circumstances, and the story still needs some time to play out fully before comments are made by me.

Someone Hired Me?

With regards to the lack of content, recently:

I'm busy. I've got a new job (sort of) that I'm working on, and so far as I can tell, the only good point in it's favor is that I'll get to (legally) fleece Senior Citizens -- the second biggest community of mollycoddled crybabies in the United States (Baby Boomers come in first).

A Round of Applause for Mr. Chap...

Nicely done, Mr. C!

Mister Chap will be helping us keep our insanity levels at '1.000 mg of Thoraizine...stat!' .

He's a good man, a good writer, and a snazzy dresser, so lend him your eyes and your brains while he dishes out his own brand of expert-approved mental pablum. You can also visit him at the Insane Asylum.

You'd better....don't make me come up there and make you...

Welcome aboard, Mr. C, and thank you, thank you, THANK FUCKIN' YOU, for helping to destroy that totally-invented Kennedy aura that has done so much damage to our beloved Republic!

J.F.K., M.L.K., D.D.E. AND BLACK JESUS

[author's note: Allow me to introduce myself. I go by Mr. Chap, and I am the owner of the Insane Asylum website (http://www.insaneasylumblog.com/). At the Insane Asylum, we strive to make people think about the things they normally don't. From unbelievable news to politics, we cover the issues that drive our society.


I'm really honored that Matthew, who is an all-star contributor at the Insane Asylum, has given me the green light to write here. For the record, I do think I should let you know that I'm a sympathetic Grammar Nazi who is open to beginning sentences with "because" and "but", I rarely use curse words, and I'm also a serial comma killer.

Enjoy the ride...motherfuckers.]

Stuck In Neutral...

It must really suck to be Mitt Romney. I mean, if you took away the rugged good looks and the vast personal fortune you'd start to wonder just what was left, and then, upon reciting your (extremely short) list of remaining virtues, slowly begin to understand just why it is that Mr. Romney can't seem to break the 25% mark in most presidential polls these days.

Khaddaffi Dead, NATO Protects Next Dictator-in-Waiting...

While the news of the gruesome and all-too-late death of Colonel Moammar Khadaffi is welcome, it should not be greeted with all the expressions of hope that many in the Obama Administration, particularly President Frequent-Flyer-Miles, himself, have attached to the event.

Despite the evocation of a belief that, with this brutal jerkoff now pushing up the daisies, Libya is on the path to democracy, exasperating experience (and history) has often shown that no such thing will happen, nor should it be expected to happen, without continued sacrifices in blood, treasure and political capital by the West. Particularly, by the United States.

Blogging Has Been Light, My Apologies...

I have been busy moving and getting settled in. The insanity spigot will be turned back on within the next few days, I promise.

In the meantime, occupy yourself at our Wall of Infamy, otherwise known as the Blogroll on the lower right hand part of this page, and take a gander at the Blogs this Lunatic reads. It only takes a few minutes, it doesn't hurt, and why not bump up some page views for the people who have helped me bump up mine?

Socialism With a Smiley Face...

Green Energy is all about Wasting Energy…and Cash.

So no one should be taken by complete surprise that yet another Obama-administration-backed Green Energy company is about to get flushed down the toilet, but only after it has wiped it's ass with millions of taxpayer dollars.

The Emperor Has No Balls...

New York City Mayor Embraces Enemy Occupying Wall Street, says the headline, but the truth goes deeper than this.

Michael Bloomberg, or as I like to call him Mayor Bloomdouche, is a pansy. Worse, he’s an overbearing, busybody, imperial, technocratic, nose-picking pussy who probably suffered through the childhood traumas of bed wetting, poor potty training, a premature cessation of breast feeding, and chronic masturbation, which have all combined to result in the obnoxious, petty dictator who has somehow managed to corrupt (with his personal fortune, no doubt) the electoral system so as to stay in office far longer than is decent, and far beyond the point of effectiveness.

This Is Why Congresscritters Should be Tarred and Feathered...

RE: a story in my local puppy-training aid, the Staten Island Advance, hails Rep. Michael Grimm (R) for his first gosh-honest bill, an amendment to a veteran’s health bill that would provide returning servicemen suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with companion dogs as a therapeutic aid.

Welcome, Diogenes' Middle Finger Readers...

We're glad to see you here at the Asylum, and invite you to indulge in as much psychiatrist-rejected mental diarrhea as you can stomach. You'll find coffee, scones, and strychnine on the settee near the heavy steel doors leading to the padded rooms. If you need anything, or require a great, big, whopping dose of Thorazine, Lefty, Swifty, Bull, Ox and Twinkie, our courteous and professional Asylum Elves will be glad to help you...right after they finish ironing and folding the strait jackets.

A link to Diogenes' Middle Finger has been added to our world-famous Wall of Infamy...errr...Blogroll. Regular Asylum readers should scoot on over there on pain of death...or at least under threat of visit from Knuckles the Enforcer Elf.

Enjoy.

Oh, and while I'm at it, you'll be glad to know that the mental deficient who writes this thing (that would be me) is also a featured contributor at the Insane Asylum, which we strongly suggest you should read daily, or there will be no more Prozac for you! Stop by and give my real-but-imaginary friends Mr. Chap and Nena Grace a few minutes of your time... you'll be glad you did!

Straight from the Horse's Ass: Mormons are a 'Cult'...

I’ve said it before many times on these pages; it’s something that should be obvious to anyone with enough brain cells to breathe without mechanical assistance: Evangelical Christians are amongst the most obnoxious of douchebags in America today.


It’s also been said on these very pages that the biggest obstacle in Mitt Romney’s road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is his Mormon Faith. When the subjects of ‘Evangelical’ and ‘Mormon’ collide, the resulting stupidity is usually one-way, and serves as a warning that maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty about banning abortion on demand, just yet.

We Want...Things...an' Stuff...and Junk Like That...

On the recent phenomena that began with the 'Occupy Wall Street' nonsense, and which has now spread nationwide. We are now witnessing the full range of left-wing stupidity manifested within a series of mass-tantrums that would get far more serious attention if they were more truthfully named.

'Occupy Wall Street' would be better served with the more-honest moniker "Come stand in the street like a pretentious doofus Rally", if it's counterpart in Boston were named 'Thumbsuckers and Bedwetters United!", and the completely unhinged bullshit of those who live and die at the welfare trough in New Orleans were to be called by it's proper tag, the "We're Here, We're Stupid, We Wouldn't Even Make an Effort to Save Ourselves From A Hurricane We Watched Cross The Atlantic For A Week on Television, Why Should Anyone Pay Any Attention To Anything We Have To Say?" March.

Niggerhead…

No sooner did I write the words ”Herman Cain does not play the Race Card” then he goes ahead…and plays the Race Card.

The Freedom to Be a Dumbass...

With regards to the “Occupy Wall Street” protests currently disrupting civil discourse and commerce in New York City:

One of our greatest and most precious rights as a citizen of the United States is one that is not enshrined within the Bill of Rights, or ensconced within the cannons of The Law. It is an Implied Right, something that, for lack of a better term, we might say “goes without saying”. It is a Natural Right which all people take for granted, if they even recognize it at all.

And that is the Right to Be Wrong.

Your 2012 GOP Scorecard...

So we've had a couple of debates, some straw polls, a whole lot of biased reporting and misinformation from (P)MSNBC, the New York Times, and the other usual suspects, and it's time to take stock of the GOP field.

Herman Cain Kicks Ass; Morgan Freeman is One...

I’m about to take exception with Mr. Morgan Freeman, perhaps one of our top five American actors, in my estimation, for some ridiculously stupid comments he made regarding the Tea Party, and his contention that it is a racist organization.

Solyndra, Obama, and Socialist Managerialism...

With regards to our current political and economic circumstances, the question has been asked repeatedly: Is Barack Obama a Socialist?

Told You So...

So, I caught the replay of Emperor Barack's no-doubt-about-it-certainly-non-political Economy speech, and yes, it pretty much was what I expected. Although he fails at so much, at least our President has become wildly successful at becoming entirely too predictable.

It's Even Worse Than I Thought...

In reference to this post, in which it was revealed that the City of New York was actually paying people to be 'better' parents, I have some new information for you.

Exclusive! The Lunatic's Asylum Gets Advance Copy of Tonight's Obama Speech!

In a major journalistic coup, the Lunatic's Asylum has obtained an advance copy of the speech that President Marriott-Suites will be giving before a joint session of Congress this very evening. Lefty the Asylum Elf, after intense negotiations with Barack Obama's Teleprompter, snagged a snippet of the speech which we have been told we may publicize here at the Asylum.

On Hurricanes and Mayor Bloomdouche...

Overwrought pre-over-reaction to what, by most professional estimates, will be little more than a bad wind storm when Hurricane Irene reaches New York City.

Some will say that this level of panty-bunched hysteria is little more than city government being prudent about saving the lives of it’s citizens. But I’ve lived here all my life, and having experience with both City Government and the oppressive regime of Overlord Reichsfuhrer Bloomthief, in particular, I know better.

Throwing Money at a Moral and Ethical Problem Never Works...

Paying 'The Poor' to be better parents? How much you wanna bet most of that money went to crack, malt liquor and home pregnancy tests instead?


There are specific reasons why most 'Poor' people a) get -- and stay --that way, and b) are bad parents: they're stupid, and were mostly (not) raised by other stupid people. Giving them money to not be stupid hasn't worked for 50 years, but I guess some Libtard had his panties in a bunch and was determined, despite all that long experience with the Welfare State, to keep on trying.

Politically Obligatory Stupidity...

I'm about to say something that I've said a million times before, but it bears repeating; your government, at all levels, is full of mouth-breathing doofuses, and it's our fault that these people are somewhat-gainfully employed at taxpayer expense.

Stilettos in the Sand Has Moved...

Beth is back! Stilettos in the Sand -- having completed the arduous journey of relocating from that abysmal litter box of Saudi Arabia to the sunnier climes of South Carolina -- is now Stilettos in the South. Head on over, give Beth some page bumps, and have yourself a real good time.

The Sound and The Fury...

What we saw at last night’s Republican Debate in Iowa:

Ten Years Later: Some of You Still Don't Get It...

Yesterday’s e-mail brought a rather silly request from a group which calls itself Unity Productions Foundation in which I have been asked to provide a link here at the Asylum to some stupid video about the trials and tribulations of (presumably) peaceful Muslims who are only trying to build mosques and go about their daily lives in peace, but find themselves discriminated against and unfairly singled out by the government for being 'different'.

On Deficits, Debt Ceilings, and Douchebags...

So, we have a deal on the debt ceiling. Did anyone ever harbor a doubt that there would be one in the first place? Neither political party would ever engage in the sort of brinkmanship that would have brought about a default -- or the lesser-and-probably-better evil of a government shutdown -- because of all the bad press such a thing invariably generates. Quite frankly, I would have thought it an interesting experience to shut the federal government down, except for truly vital services (and sorry, but printing welfare and Social Security checks are NOT vital services), just to see if anyone would notice.


I mean, let's face it; we're paying hundreds of thousands of government workers do pretty much nothing right now, so what harm would there be in giving them a few weeks or a month of unpaid vacation? Would it make any difference to anyone besides them?

Anyhow, we have a deal. I'm not exactly certain of everything in this deal, mostly because the press (the second biggest bunch of idiots after the class of morons we've elected to hold public office) can't make up it's mind whether to tell the truth about the deal, or just continue to demagogue it, if they even understand it themselves. You know the Press in this country is absolutely clueless when Nora O'Donnell stands out in Rose Garden pontificating about the wise leadership of Barack Obama, who saved us from almost certain default.

Truthfully, Obama did no such thing. His contribution to this entire fiasco was to simply insist that he get what he's always wanted, offer a 'compromise'; which was never any such thing, tell the other side to fuck off, and then immediately storm away to give a press conference in which he accused Republicans of being unreasonable.

Of course, this needed to be Obama's...ahem...default position, because if the cash spigot is ever turned off, the first victim is his questionable signature 'achievement' of ObamaCare, and because the class warfare argument that always comes out when it comes to (other people's) money is the only weapon Obama has left to use. He needed to be seen as 'fighting' for the sick, elderly and illegal aliens because this is what this Presidency is all about: appearances.

Barack Obama, whatever his true talents might be, is a lousy, transparent, clumsy liar. It shows every time he appears on your television screen to repeat the same mantra we've heard for the last three years:

"George W. Bush did it, the Republicans want kids with autism to starve in the streets, we have to 'save' this-that-or-the-other, I've sent Biden to work out the details with Reid and Pelosi, now I'm off to another fundraiser and a round of golf, Good night and God Bless America..."

Barack Obama may be the first African-American to have been elected President of the United States, but it's become painfully clear that he will, alas, perhaps be the last for many years to come, if only because he's now, more than ever, clearly associated a certain species of politics with race. If you didn't notice the rank stupidity in the man when he was busy putting your band-aids and eyedrops under government control while the economy was crumbling, when he was spending your money to ensure that endangered turtles could cross busy thoroughfares through little tunnels so they wouldn't get squashed, when he was busy nationalizing General Motors, going on three vacations during the Gulf oil spill, starting a third -- and possibly a fourth -- war while excoriating his predecessor for starting two others -- and that's just a little taste of the Obama brand of stupidity -- then you're probably not breathing without mechanical assistance, my friend.

Barack Obama was never a leader; he was a marketing campaign. This fact was made known a very long time ago. His behavior during the'negotiations' over a debt ceiling deal just made it obvious to the four of five numbskulls left who didn't get it the first 1,003 times.

Barack Obama will never be re-elected.

But Obama isn't the only shady character in this little national melodrama. Before I get into what I think one might call 'the guts' of the actual deal, I'd like to spend a little time talking about some of the abysmal personalities involved, who, if they had any common sense or decency, would do us all a favor and take rat poison with their morning coffee.

I can scarcely imagine a worse collection of doofuses and rogues, and what makes it all truly frightening is when you stop to consider that these assholes were all ELECTED.

Apparently there is no shortage of retards in America.

Let's start with the always Lady-like Nancy Pelosi, living proof that if the San Andreas fault were ever to let loose and send California adrift into the Pacific Ocean, we'd be a much better country for it. There is no possible way that one could take this woman seriously, especially when she makes an argument that the democratic party (small 'd' intentional) was fighting "to save life as we know it on this planet" with it's particular brand of Leftard stupidity during this 'historic' battle.

It's time someone retired the menstrual windbag from San Francisco.

Then comes Harry Reid, who should legally change his name to 'Doctor No', whose only position during this important national debate was to announce his intention to vote against any plan that came from the Republican-controlled House as a matter of reflex. One is left to wonder if. when California starts drifting towards Japan. if it wouldn't be to much to ask that it take Harry's little corner of Nevada along with it. A despicable human being, if ever there was one.

It's time someone retired the Senator.

Joe Biden is living proof that a jackass CAN be cross-bred with a human being. Unfortunately, unlike in the case of the mule, the occasion did not produce a sterile hybrid. If genetic science is ever to advance from it's present infant stage, it could do worse than to base an entirely new chapter upon ways to engineer the human genome so as to avoid producing more Bidens. Accusing his fellow citizens who have fundamental disagreements with his brand of insanity 'terrorists' -- and then denying he said it -- was beyond the pale.

The only reason Barack Obama hasn't been assassinated by some racist douchebag, in my view, is that even the dumbest, most-inbred hillbilly Klansman realizes that shooting Obama achieves nothing except to make Biden President of the United States. That would be an even bigger disaster than Obama himself.

Unfortunately, unless there's an accident on Joe's beloved Amtrak while he's travelling back to Delaware, we're stuck with him. Here's hoping Biden is too stupid to chew his food before he swallows and treats himself to the full Mama Cass in order to spare us all any more of his rancid mental diarrhea.

As for 'my' side in this whole brouhaha:

John McCain once again covered himself in glory. Or at least his own bullshit. But that's to be expected from a man who has made a viable career out of disaster, and usually disasters of his own creation. If you needed any further proof that Obama, at the very least, could be considered the lesser of the two evils that could have emerged from the 2008 election, here's Johnny to make that argument one you would at least have to seriously consider, if you didn't already know better.

McCain served the same function during this thing that he served in 2005, when a Republican party with control of all three bully pulpits, couldn't reform entitlements and instead wound up expanding Medicare and adding another trillion bucks to the debt so that the two richest generations of retirees could continue to live far beyond their useful years. In retrospect, we'd probably be a much better country if John McCain had died in Vietnamese captivity. McCain's role is always to be a spoiler, and often, for no other reason than the sake of spite.

It's time someone retired the Senator.

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell put in a virtuoso performance of 'establishment Republican' crapspeak, managing to straddle the not-so-fine line between victory and full-blown, panicked retreat with all the grace of a three-legged elephant on uneven stilts. This is a guy who needs to be primaried in the next election cycle, and then outright defeated. In this debate, McConnell expertly played the role of Marshal Petain to McCain's Vidkun Quisling.

It's time someone retired the Senator.

In fact, it's time someone retired an awful lot of Senators, Congresscritters, and potential Vice-Presidential material (i.e. the career party hack who commands a lot of respect within the apparatus, but little from without), because the past decade has made it abundantly clear that we're not getting the best-and-the-brightest when it comes to our Congressional delegations, and a result, we're not getting the best-and-the-brightest when it comes to Presidential elections, or to simply putting some common sense to work in evaluating or solving this country's problems.

This debt ceiling fight spotlighted the extent of the real problem (i.e. the extent of the brain damage in Washington) in the starkest terms; the issue is a straightforward one -- the country is broke, it's time to re-organize and re-prioritize the nation's expenses -- and the majority of the infighting revolved around ensuring that each and every Congressman's and Senator's bread was buttered before they got to the nuts and bolts. If the nation was the Titanic, these would be the people who would ensure the deck chairs were properly arranged before the ship went down.

The Plan, as I understand it, promises to 'cut' $2.4 trillion from the Federal Budget (oh wait, we haven't actually had one of those for the last two years) over ten years. In a country with a $14 trillion debt, this is small potatoes, and even this apparently-staggering sum probably only comes from 'arresting the growth' of projected federal spending over that time frame, and conveniently for the current crop of doofuses in Washington, the bulk of the 'tough cuts' come at the end of the line, when someone else will have to make the decision about what stays and what gets shitcanned. The 'deal' was made without a thought being given to entitlement spending,which is the real killer in terms of federal obligations.

In other words, for all intents and purposes, the can just got kicked down the fucking road...again. Only this time the numbers are bigger.

In defense of John Boehner, the House Majority Leader, this is, perhaps, the best he could have done bearing in mind that the GOP controls but one house of Congress. The real issues that plague America's finances -- entitlements, ObamaCare, the Progressive Tax Code (more like 'regressive'), a bloated bureaucracy, a government that does too much and spends too much to do it, complete dumbasses in elected office -- will have to wait for a day when the GOP has at least control of the House and Senate (fingers crossed for 2012!).

You still have to give Boehner some credit for trying, even if you're like me and not satisfied with a result that hasn't slain the ObamaCare ogre, and which doesn't leave illegal immigrants and the elderly dying of leprosy in the streets (yes, I'm a true believer in the idea that you have truly outlived your usefulness when you've outlived your own savings and become little more than a parasite ward of the state). Still, it's a start. The actual hard work starts now: keeping the momentum going, and then riding the issue to electoral victory in 2012...and hopefully with a new generation of better conservatives (not just the kind that the Religious Fanatics like, but true small-government, reform-the-tax-code-and-entitlements, fiscally-careful conservatives).

In the final analysis, a pox upon both their houses --upon a GOP which did it's best to build the deficits we're suffering with, and upon a democratic party (small'd' intentional) which 'fought' to maintain the status quo ante despite the fact the status quo can no longer be funded -- but there does have to be a Square One somewhere along the line. This 'deal' doesn't go far enough to suit my tastes, but at least there's a clear delineation about where both sides stand (as if that wasn't aleady obvious), and it serves as a basis with which those who go to the polls next year can make a better decision; do you want to continue to fund a bankrupt welfare state with a debased currency backed by borrowed money, or do you want to get serious about changing the way the American government does business, while sparing your pocketbook?

Without that change, there won't be an America in the future. And while $2.4 trillion in mostly-deferred 'cuts' is trifling in comparison to the true scope of the problem, it's a baby step in the right direction.

The Regulatory State Run Amok...

Drop that muffin! You're under arrest!

FDA now considers Walnuts to be drugs.

The government is now out to regulate food companies and suppliers who claim, often with some justification, that their products are 'better' for you and have beneficial health effects. If this is what ObamaCare has truly wrought, then we're in for a reign of petty tyranny, the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the Intolerable Acts.

We're probably also going to suffer under a government-run healthcare system which can spend it's time looking for legitimate businesses to sue and harass, while providing the typical Third-World style of government healthcare: you'll get that proverbial mosquito-netted cot on which to slowly die from some otherwise-treatable malady upon, safe from the prying eyes of the tourists and journalists.

Light bulbs. Low-flow Toilet bowls. CAFE standards. Salt, sugar and caloric intake. These are all, to some extent or another, regulated by the government, all under the auspices of 'it's good for us', so why shouldn't the government take the next, logical step and claim walnuts as a prescription drug, or unfiltered tap water a danger to Americans? Who's stopping them? Who is raising a ruckus over such an insignificant thing?

The thing is, though, these regulations are never about 'what's good for us'; they're about putting some nameless, faceless bureaucrat in charge of some aspect of your life, then taxing everything within an inch of it's life, and expanding the scope and power of government in ever-more subtle and destructive ways.

The insignificant has a way of becoming very significant under those conditions, and very quickly.

Revolutions have often begun this way.

Maybe They Should Call It a White-Old-Man-Cession...

Yes, yes, I know: I've been absent for a while, but I have been quite busy. Looking for a steady job in the blasted heath of what used to be the economic capital of the world can be quite the time-consuming task.

It's also becoming a damned-near futile one. Unless you speak a foreign language.

I say this because it is true. For upon entering the Department of Labor here on Staten Island (what used to be called 'The Unemployment Office'. In Reichsfuhrer Bloomdouche's New Yorkistan, we're supposed to call them 'Employment Centers' keeping with the now decade-long Bloomberg tradition of calling something exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to be for political purposes) one cannot help but think that English must have been replaced as the Chief Lingua Franca at some point, and whoever did it just forgot to tell us.

You will find all sorts of literature there in the Employment Center -- about your rights as a worker, about state wage and overtime laws, how to apply for welfare -- but few, if any, of these pamphlets are written in English. There's Spanish, Creole, Polish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Cantonese, but no English.

The same goes for the Bloomberg Administration's most efficacious, cost-effective, and low-tech solution to the problem of finding a job in tough economic times: the Job Board. Or, as I like to call it, a bulletin board full of minimum-wage grunt tasks that all end with the sentence 'Se Habla Espanol".

If you're a Native Born, English-speaking job seeker with actual skills, you're shit out of luck. The Employment Center apparently doesn't exist to get YOU a job -- for all the times I've been in there in the last five years, I can't recall anyone ever actually doing anything to help me find an employer. Instead, it's always been 'fill in this paperwork, and wait for us to call you. That call, incidentally, never comes -- and frankly, I wonder just what these people are doing on any given day (other than encouraging illegal immigrants to apply for welfare benefits while also hooking them up with jobs).

There was once a time when the Job Market made sense. People needed other people with actual skills, and so they did something that nowadays seems quaint and anachronistic: they employed a Personnel Agency to go out and find qualified candidates for whatever job they had available, and to perform a very valuable service in weeding out the marginally-qualified before arranging interviews. These Agencies put you in touch with prospective employers, there was often a series of interviews, and if you made the right impression upon the hiring manager, you very often got the job.

No more.

Today's Personnel Agency is  little more than a whorehouse for temporary workers. You get pimped out on short-term projects,and wind up having to split your earnings with the agency, who incidentally, also gets a fee for supplying your services. Temp work always sucked, but it never sucked this badly. You might also try to find some (again, temporary) work with what's euphemistically called a 'Consulting Agency', but again, this is sort of like Indentured Servitude: whatever contract you negotiate under the auspices of the 'Consultant Group', you're going to lose about half of it before you even see it.

That's if you can manage to elbow the Indians and Chinese out of the way first, so that you can even get a sniff at a contract. They're willing to work at such ridiculously-low rates that you wonder how it is that they manage to survive, until you remember that they come from countries where famine is a fact of everyday life. These are people who could stretch a pound of rice and a dozen cockroaches, for a family of six, out for half a decade, if they really had to, and skipping meals eighteen days in a row is no big deal.

Anyways,the Personnel Agency and 'Consultantcy' groups have had their primary function of connecting employer with potential-employee largely superceded by that most impersonal of contraptions, the computer.

See, nowadays, you may not even get to see another human being when applying for a job, and depending on how the computer is programmed to do it's job, you  may never even get an interview even when you're infinitely qualified. Your resume goes into a the dark, murky depths of cyberspace and winds up in some hiring manager's PC, and the next thing you know, his 'puter is deciding for him whether or not he should invest any time or effort on you.

I wonder: How many people would have been hired if they got as much as ten minutes of face time with a Manager,but they never got that opportunity because the computer rejected and shitcanned their resume before the Manager was even aware it had been received?

Well, don't fret that personal-factor bullshit none, because technology has an answer for that, too, in the form of Facebook. It has now become common to see a space on an online application where one can put in their Facebook and Twitter nonsense, particularly a link to a Facebook video of you trying to sell yourself to potential employers (why bother with videos when you can you just as easily invite people in to TALK to them? What's so 'interactive' about Facebook or Twitter, in this regard, and really: would you hire someone based upon their ability to use internet shorthand and avoid the 140-character limit?).

It isn't enough to have qualifications and experience, anymore, now you must master the intricacies of Social Networking and Personal Online Marketing just to find a job? What kind of bullshit is this, other than a way of keeping people -- that is,the older folks, who might be making more money -- OUT OF the job market?

That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of the Modern Job Search. It gets far worse.

Another useful tool in days past was to 'know somebody' who could whisper a word in someone else's ear, or perhaps get you a shot at a position, but those days are long gone. Despite all this bullshit about a 'connected' world and Social Networking, even if you DID 'know someone' the chances of them being able to connect you with a job opportunity are rather slim for two reasons:

1. There ain't no jobs, and the job your contact has they might only be managing to keep by hanging on by their fingernails. They ain't rockin' boats, they ain't stepping forward to put themselves out, and they certainly ain't bringing potential competition into the office.

2. You DO realize that most of the jobs you (and by that I mean 'I') can do with all your qualifications and experience can be done in India, China, Russia, Pakistan, South Africa, Ukraine, and Indonesia for a fraction of the price you'll ask for, right? Why should anyone pay you $150,000k a year, plus bennies, when they can get some third-party Asian coolie to do the same job for $15k (often less), and they don't have to give him medical, a pension, or vacation days?

Then there's the 'BA or equivalent' routine.

I don't know when it became necessary for EVERY job to require a bachelor's degree, but I can pretty much say that it is perhaps the most ridiculous requirement imaginable. I don't have a degree, myself, and quite frankly, I didn't NEED one; I learned my trade by doing, not by sitting in a classroom, learning to parrot a professor who has no actual EXPERIENCE, while piling up unpayable debt.

As a former hiring manager myself, I saw so many college graduates that I began to wonder if they weren't making them on an assembly line somewhere. Most of them, incidentally, couldn't write, count, or find their own asses with both hands. So, imagine what a shock it must be when you pick up an ad for a Computer Operator's job (a job that is, frankly, about as close to factory work as you'll find in the IT industry) and it requires a BA or 5 years of experience.

No problem: I have 20+ years of experience, right? Should be a shoe-in. Except there's no degree for a job that doesn't really require one. And if that excuse doesn't confuse you, try this other one:

Oh, right...I'm too old. Apparently 44 is the new 81 when it comes to employing people, especially if it's in the financial industry and they have to abide by some of the more onerous...and expensive ...state laws. Like the Pension Law that states that if you underwrite any State business, then you MUST contribute a lump-sum payment into your employee's pension fund, based upon their age. A 40-year-old working for a financial firm that underwrites New York State debt, for example, costs that financial company $10,000 a year in pension benefits before he even walks through the door for his first day of work.

Fail to make that pension payment, and you'll never underwrite another bond for New York State.

Of course, no one ever tells you you didn't get the job because you have no degree or are considered too old, you simply don't get called back. Ditto when a background check reveals you've been treated for a mental illness, despite the fact that your medical records are supposed to be private. I'm beginning to think it's probably worth eventually getting caught by claiming a disability on an application, just to have some additional legal protections,or get myself higher up on 'TheList'.

I guess I always could go back to school to learn a set of new skills, but applying for financial aid (State or Federal) is a bit tricky, you see. I'm not Black or Female enough, according to the one consultant I've spoken to on this subject (yes, he actually said those words!). Are you sure you don't have any Muslim, or perhaps Pacific Islander, in your background? Too bad; that would have made you golden.

Same thing for Government Work: not black or female enough, and besides, I have this nasty habit of scoring '100' on every civil service exam I've ever taken, which means I get called LAST for any job, assuming I even get called AT ALL.

I can't stock shelves at the local supermarket: I'm over-qualified, they say. I can't program mainframe systems, or run massive mainframe complexes; I'm under-qualified -- no degree -- despite the fact that I did exactly these things for over 20 years. I'm not bi-tri-or-quadri-lingual, which I'm told puts me at a distinct disadvantage in the 'Global Marketplace', but then again, the 'Global Marketplace' is right here in the United States, sucking up welfare benefits, undercutting wages, and filling the 'Employment Office' with pamphlets written in Sanskrit, Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics.

What to do, what to do?

I guess I'll have to do one of those 'reinventing myself' routines you used to see on Oprah before she got tired of hiding her raging 50-pound-a-day bonbon habit from public view. I mean, I could start a business of my own, but certainly not in this country, that's for sure. The taxes and ObamaCare mandates alone would kill you. But even going overseas to start a business could be tricky. After all, you need to find a business concept that will attract local interest.

That means any plans I had for teaching basic hygiene in El Salvador are probably doomed to fail before I even begin. Do you know how many e coli-on-spinach cases we'd avoid if Salvadorans just washed regularly before they picked it?

Ditto for my other great idea, which was to introduce soap to Pakistan. I figured I could corner the soap market,and be the biggest importer of the stuff by simply putting a few dozen bars of Ivory or Irish Spring in a suitcase -- this would represent about a 5,000,000% increase in Pakistani soap imports -- and selling them on a street corner in Karachi. Pakistanis will pay anything, you know, just avoid each other's stench.

Seriously, though, I have to find something to do, and soon. It's starting to look pretty bleak, now and I'm running out of time, what with a sick mother and bills to pay, and all that. So, if there's anyone out there that needs a relatively-smart guy with a work ethic, willing to pay a decent wage, drop us a line at the Lunatic's Asylum and make us an offer.

I'll pretty much consider anything that doesn't involve a foreign object being inserted -- or forcibly removed -- from my rectum.

National Marlboros and Twinkies Day...

Yet another city government decides that smokers are fair game.

It is ironic, no, that's the wrong word...it's sad...that in this day-and-age of the West 'bringing freedom and democracy' to the brain-dead-bass-ackwards-intolerant Muslim World, the West itself becomes just a little bit more like those Muslims with every passing day.

As far as smoking bans go, this one is quite tame compared to the oppressive regime we Smokers here in Fuhrer Bloomdouche’s New Yorkistan must suffer. However, when you start to discuss the possibility of discrimination in employment because of a person’s willingness to engage in a legal activity that government has collected untold hundreds of billions from for centuries, you’re starting to wander off the reservation of 'caring' about your fellow men and into the hypocritical minefield of totalitarianism.

Smoking Bans are quite popular these days, and smokers are perhaps the last group of people on Planet Earth that one can, in a socially-acceptable sense that requires nothing more than a great deal of moral sermonizing, openly discriminate against. Oh, and the Fatties. You can discriminate against them, too.

The reason being that the habits of Smokers and Fatties have long drawn the disapproval of so-called Liberals who consider both a blight upon the landscape, an easy source of tax dollars, and a wonderful target of opportunity in the fight to bring about socialist tyranny one baby step at a time. After all, how sweet is it that one can torment, brutalize, unfairly tax, discriminate, and hold up for public approbation and humiliation their fellow Men under the cover of the bromide “I’m only worried about your health, and the health of others” and not have to mean a single word of it?

If you only ever understand one thing about Liberalism, then understand this:

Liberalism is never about your freedom. It's never about your right to live as you choose. It's never about your benefit; it's always about the Libtard being able to reorder society according to his or her own often-questionable tastes and ideals. Liberals don't want the power to 'take care of you'; they want the power to make you live as they see fit as a matter of their own personal physical and mental comfort.

Some will make the argument that Smokers and Fatties are millstones hung around the neck of society, as their habits are more likely to cost the State billions in health care costs, and thanks to many junk science studies about secondhand smoke and the supposedly bad health risks associated with excess body weight, you have, if you’re a good little Leftard with dreams of wielding the power to tell everyone else how to live, a ready excuse to let your inner tyrant fly.

I’m going to engage in a little experiment here, one Libtards engage in all the time. Bear with me, this might be instructive. It's called The Game of Moral Equivalence That Really Has No Moral Component.

If one were to say that smoking and obesity bring with them a great number of potential health risks, and these risks cause a great deal of expense in terms of rising insurance and treatment costs which others must bear, therefore, smokers and the obese must be shamed, taxed, made to change their habits against their wills, and otherwise blamed for all of society’s evils, then please explain the following:

If smoking and over-eating kill, and drain the public coffers, and are otherwise habits that can either be avoided or reformed through the use of taxation, regulation, and discrimination, then why has no one applied a similar program of enlightened oppression against Homosexuals?

After all, homosexual activity often leads to AIDS, which we all know is a deadly, incurable disease, that often requires a great deal of money and specialized medical care to treat. I wonder, if we added up the costs associated with the health risks of smoking, obesity and AIDS, if the numbers wouldn’t, in proportion, show AIDS to be every bit as deadly, every bit as expensive to treat, and as easily-avoidable as lung cancer or diabetes.

Why aren’t the health care advocates out there railing against butt sex as a deadly threat to society that costs the taxpayer billions, and as a disgusting habit that often carries with it unacceptable behavioral and health risks to innocent bystanders? I mean, because of AIDS, right here in New York City, we give free needles away to heroin addicts as an anti-AIDS measure. Because of AIDS, then, we've encouraged and subsidized drug addiction -- another expensive public health problem! -- haven't we?

Oh, right: because most Leftards are probably gay, and heroin addicts. But I (only-half) jest, of course. The real reason is because open homosexuality is one of the devices the Left depends upon to sap the moral strength of a free people, to destroy the bonds between family members and communities, and to encourage all sorts of vices and attitudes which can later be manipulated for political advantage.

If we’re going to be discriminating against people because of their habits and the supposed cost/threat to society, then let’s start prioritizing the costs/threats accordingly. When the day comes when homosexuals are discriminated against because of their behavior and the health risks associated with it – not to mention the crippling financial drain incurred in treating AIDS -- then I’d say we have True Equality in America.

I know plenty of Smokers who have lived good, long lives, free of medical complaint, with nary a cancer cell in sight.

I know plenty of Obese people who have lived full, active lives, without the trouble of diabetes or weight-related bone/joint issues.

I know plenty of Smokers/Obese people who pay for their own private health coverage, and who do not have to – nor want to – depend upon the state for their well-being and health.

I also know plenty of homosexuals who have caught AIDS – and often brag about it because it brings them sympathy and a mess of attention (which is what all homosexuals want, anyways. It's why they 'chose' to be gay in the first place!) , not to mention federal funds – who do nothing but try as hard as they might to obtain the drug cocktails they need to stay alive (and thus spread the AIDS virus, because let’s face it; they’re often not giving up sex, are they?) at someone else’s expense.

It’s not an automatic that a smoker dies of cancer, or that he/she spreads cancer through secondhand smoke. It is not an automatic that an obese person is going to spend years in a hospital bed in a special ward sucking up tax dollars like a sponge for treatment, or going through replacement knees like I use toilet paper.

It is, however, an automatic that a homosexual with full-blown AIDS is fighting a losing battle, and would most certainly die without $3,000-a-dose anti-viral drugs that he possibly can’t afford for long on his own, constant monitoring of his health status, and other expensive courses of treatment.

So, why do we pick on Smokers and Fatties?

Because they’re not sympathetic ‘victims’ with a political utility, that’s why.

I think it’s time the Smokers and Fatties of the World United, and stopped this insanity, began to expose some of these double standards, and engaged in a fight to restore our right to live our lives as we goddamned please, and give the shit our elected officials and the busy-body-Nanny-staters give us back tenfold.

I hereby declare today National Marlboros and Twinkies Day. Light one up for freedom! Suck down a Twinkie in defense of your rights! And make sure you do it in the face of the most insufferable leftist douchebag you know, and if she (it’s usually a she) has anything to say about your ‘disgusting’ behavior, then blow smoke in her face and squish the rich, creamy filling into her hair, sending her screaming into that good night like a Arab who’s just found out his fourth wife has a dick under that burqa.

Or at least punch her square in the mouth. Just on general principles.

And while you’re at it, tell every homosexual you know that you’re not inclined to pay for his treatment when he finally (not if, always when) catches AIDS.

It’s time to start fighting back.

Unfounded Calls of Racism, Stupid City Government, and a Dead Child...

Today I’d like to tell you a tragic tale involving a dead 13-year old girl, a yellow school bus, a bad public transportation system, a tractor trailer, a school administration that is more concerned with appearances and political correctness than student safety, and a court system which city lawyers openly abuse. It will not end well, I promise you, and I can also guarantee that at the end of it all you’ll be shaking your head in stunned disbelief that so-called responsible adults could be this stupid, petty, and well, irresponsible.

Our story begins two years ago, when the New York City Board of Education (three lies for the price of one) began looking for ways to cut it’s budget without firing the 2,000 or so teachers currently held in so-called ‘rubber rooms’ awaiting termination or criminal prosecution, thus pissing off the local education unions, whilst still giving the appearance of being both fiscally responsible and fair to racial minorities.

Given that combination of political requirements, it’s not surprising that Educational Establishment (an oxymoron if ever there was one) came up with a politically-biased solution that cost a young girl her life.

It all has to do with appearances, and false accusations of racism, plain and simple.

You see, I live on Staten Island, the Forgotten Borough of New York City. It is a place that City Government tends to think of as a cash cow and a dumping ground for projects that no other borough -- with their decidedly greater populations and more vocal ‘community organizer’ types -- just won’t take, such as Landfills, Wind farms, prisons and infectious disease wards.

Wikipedia describes Staten Island as a ‘suburban community’, and it once was, but it is so no longer. What it has become is a 12-by-7 mile bonanza of property taxes for a City that can concern itself with your salt intake, but then not give a shit about whether or not your community has adequate sewers and storm drains, public transportation, hospitals, or schools. There are 500,000 people shoehorned onto this over-developed island which is always last on the City’s ‘To-Do’ list, but always first on ‘People We Can Raise Taxes On’ list.

City Officials just absolutely love the property and income taxes they can collect here (amongst the highest in all of the United States!), but they just can’t see their way to spending any of it here. Probably because the island typically votes republican, and most of us are gainfully employed. There’s far more money and political power in (created by politicians in the first place) poverty than there is in the catering to the needs of the Middle Class who pays for it all, you see.

Four consequences of this attitude are:

1) The Road System on this island is a joke. Many of the main arteries still follow their meandering, pre-Revolutionary War-era paths from days of yore – in some cases, they still follow the routes they took during the days of the Dutch Settlements (pre-1660!) and these are often narrow, crowded with vehicular traffic, and lacking in adequate safety features (traffic islands, traffic lights, stop signs, or crosswalks). You’ll find the roads in a perpetual extremely-poor state of repair (the 12’-long-by-three-foot-deep-pothole-full-of-frozen-water-on-every-corner capital of New York!), and many basic services – like sidewalks along busy streets – are simply missing, and no one in City Government gives a shit. I can’t tell you how many stories of ‘Person-struck-and-killed-by-car-in- neighborhood-without-sidewalks’ stories there are every year in the Staten Island Advance, the local newsrag. It’s easily in the double digits.

Remember, this is supposed to be 21st-Century New York City.

2) Public Transportation is seriously lacking, and what is available is often unreliable, hardly goes where it needs to (the Transportation Plans which brought it here dating to the 1960’s, and only begun in earnest in the 1980’s), and under-utilized since decades of abject neglect of the transportation system has created a cult of the automobile that would rival that to be found elsewhere in the United States. This may be the only place in all of New York City where your trip to the ‘Corner Store’ often requires a journey by car that will take you a mile or more from home, and take 30-40 minutes because of traffic.

3) Schools are in seriously short supply. Since most of the available land (even City-owned land) has been parceled off and sold to developers (we need more overpriced Mother-Daughter townhouse/condos on this island like we need a plague of locusts), or goes to more Parks and Nature Preserves (which we need like a hole in the head. 1/5 of Staten Island is State-or-Federally-protected Wetlands, bird sanctuaries, parks, national monuments, and so forth), less space is available to build schools. Especially middle schools. The last new High School, for example, built on Staten Island (in the early 1980’s) was originally designed as a minimum-security prison -- in a residential neighborhood -- that only became the ‘new’ New Dorp High School because of the near-violent outrage that sprang from a community that wasn’t even asked if it would want a prison in it’s backyard, nor told until the very last minute that one was even being built.

4) What schools we do have are generally placed far apart, and are poorly served by public transportation, requiring more yellow bus service than might be normal for children who live in the other boroughs where there are more schools and more transportation options available.

Yellow school bus service in this borough is a necessity if children are to get to and from school safely and in a timely fashion. In fact, Yellow School Bus service for Staten Island schoolchildren from kindergarten to Middle School had been a standard for over four decades, courtesy of a political class that once understood the unique nature of the problems here, and a federal judge who granted Staten Island a waiver when parents in the other boroughs claimed that Staten Island kids were receiving a benefit that children elsewhere weren’t getting. The majority of these complaints, incidentally, were based upon race. At the time, the majority of Staten Island public school kids were white.

And if anything ever screamed ‘Racism’ way back when, it was the idea of white, middle class kids being chauffeured to and from a school three miles away when minority children had to walk, often only just a few blocks. Go figure.

The accusations of racism in Bus Service have never completely gone away, and those who have yelled ‘Racist!” the loudest and most persistently, I can promise you, have never stepped foot upon this isle to see the truth for themselves. Then again, people who make their livings shouting ‘Racist!’ and extracting government money for it are very often never really concerned with truth, nor care about the consequences of their actions, so long as a politician scratches his particular itch.

To give you some idea, my nephew Mikey is one of those children who was eligible for Yellow Bus Service. Let me tell you what he has to do to get to and from school, and maybe this will illustrate the problem for you.

Mikey’s school is approximately 4.6 miles from his own front door. Without a school bus, Mikey has limited options. He could walk to and from school, having to cross at least three major arteries which local drivers treat like the Indianapolis Speedway, dodging distracted by text-messages or putting-on-their-makeup-in-the-rearview drivers for whom simple things like proper use of turning signals, red lights, traffic lanes, No Right on Red signs, and pedestrian traffic are crippling inconveniences which conspire to keep them from their quest to be the first to the next red light at 65-mph-in-a-35 zone. It’s like a for-real game of Frogger.

This is mostly a cultural problem, exacerbated by poor road planning, construction and maintenance. To illustrate these issues for you, it is not uncommon for private individuals around here to pool their OWN money to build their OWN speed bumps on their school-zoned streets, because the City won’t, citing the excuse of expense. The City, however, has absolutely no trouble finding the funds to remove those privately-financed speed bumps – often in the dead of night --just as soon as it discovers them.

Option Number Two is that Mikey can walk eight blocks to the Staten Island Railway Train (a misnomer which consists of two tracks travelling in opposite directions that serves approximately 1/6 of the island’s population on any given day), take it four stops, and then have to walk 10 blocks from the station to school, both ways crossing busy (sometimes blind because of the curves or overgrown park/wetland) intersections without crossing guards or responsible drivers.

Option Number Three is take a City Bus, requiring a three-block walk from home, a transfer, and then a six block walk from the nearest stop. This requires, incidentally, about 45-60 minutes, so that he’d have to leave home at 6:30 to ensure he got to school anywhere near 8:00, due to the numerous stops (buses here stop at nearly every block for some reason), traffic and irregularity/unreliability of service.

Option Number Four is to take another City Bus which leaves him closer to school (after a transfer to another route), but which goes two miles out of his way in order to get him there, and probably takes closer to 90 minutes, all told.

You can see the problem.

So, the Board of Education, in a cynical effort to have it both ways -- paying lip service to the concept of financial responsibility, while pandering to the louder elements of the “Everything in Creation is Racist!” brigade -- decided it was time to end Yellow School Bus service for Staten Island (White) Middle Schoolers. Two years ago, the City claimed that doing so would save an estimated $2 million per year, which is a joke when you consider the NYC Board of Education is capable of finding more ways to waste $2 million a week without even breaking a sweat.

Local government (our Borough President) went right to the courts to stop this plan and to have the waiver granted 40+ years ago guaranteeing school bus service upheld. The judge in that case let the waiver stand, and then asked the Board of Ed to turn over its internal documents and e-mails related to the decision to stop service. What he got was a mess of blank and/or redacted paper, and an injunction against his upholding of the original waiver issued by a judge in a different borough after the Board of Ed went judge-shopping in (more-liberal) Brooklyn. Another judge, a state appellate judge, told the Board to go and pound sand, upheld the waiver, and squashed the injunction, and bus service was restored.

However, the Board of Ed is nothing if not persistent – and willing to waste that potential $2 million savings on more lawyers – had the service stopped once again by yet another judge, claiming the Original Waiver violates the ‘spirit of’ the 14th Amendment, despite any practical considerations. The court fight continues to this day.

Which brings us to the tragedy that is 13-year-old Aniya Williams. You see, she was run over by a great, big, fucking tractor trailer on a busy thoroughfare in an industrial area as she crossed a street -- one without a City-provided school crossing guard, despite the fact that it’s in a fucking school zone, and it was the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL -- in an effort to catch a city bus home, and thus spare herself the 40-60 minute wait for the next one.

There are two ironies here:

1. This young lady was entitled to Yellow School Bus service under the Old Waiver, which would have picked her up in front of the school, and dropped her off mere yards from her own front door, if not for all the legal wrangling and false accusations of racism in bus service.


2. Aniya Williams happens to have been African-American.

For the sake of $2 million dollars (probably $10 million now after the legal fees are all counted up), and to quiet the uninformed noises that came from the full panoply of ‘advocates’, ‘community organizers’, ‘community groups’, ‘education watchdogs’, public unions and all the other busy-body organizations and individuals who typically speak out of their collective asses, a child is dead. The only saving grace here is that more children aren’t dead, because on any given day there are probably going to be 50 more Aniya’s, racing for a city bus that runs on an irregular schedule so that they won’t have to walk 4 miles home, and who are forced to do so because a City Government that can’t count, but which can pander to anyone with an uninformed complaint and wants to monitor your caloric intake, just doesn’t get it.

This post also appears at the Insane Asylum.

Your Children Are Still In A Public School, Because…? Part II

Atlanta public school teachers and officials deliberately cheat while scoring standardized tests, to inflate their record of achievement.

And why should they do this? For the money, of course!

So long as the Public School systems in this country are government-union monopolies, so long as they are run by union-backed mercenaries and paper-pushers for the benefit of politicians, so long as they are stuffed full with battalions of teachers drawn from the lowest stratum of academic performance, and so long as the System survives with little discipline, oversight, or responsibility, it will continue to remain little more than a sinkhole for taxpayer money that could otherwise be used someplace else to much greater effect and general benefit.


And we’ll continue to raise future generations of blathering idiots who can’t add or read, and who don’t know their history quite as well as they know proper condom use. Remember: this is the generation that will have to take care of you in your old age, and now we know that some of them are getting passing grades only because their teachers and principals conspire to give such to them without making the effort to ensure they earn these passing grades.


That might require actual work on behalf of the School System.


The next generation, from what I can see, is going to consist of largely stupid people, laboring under the pretense of knowledge having been showered with watered-down academic ‘qualifications’, probably living at a lower standard than we do even in these economically-depressed times, perpetually angry, perpetually led by the nose by their politicians, unable to exercise the same kind of level-headed judgment you’d expect to find in a German Shepherd.


A frightening prospect, certainly.


This phenomenon isn’t just confined to Atlanta, either. Its prevalence was evident in my neck of the woods this past July 4th . See this post.

The headlock which unionized lowest-common-denominator teachers, professional bureaucrats, politicians, and ‘advocacy groups’ have on the American Educational System must be broken. It speaks volumes that here in New York -- where the Public School system spends $18,000 a year per pupil, and only manages to create more nose-picking morons, while it expands into the ‘Charter School’ area of education (i.e. a more expensive idiot factory), while the local Catholic Schools which spend much less per student -- and get much better results -- are closing their doors for lack of funding (mostly because the Pope won’t sell a painting or two, and the Archbishop can’t be bothered to give up his limousine).



I can promise you that teachers and administrators huddling behind locked doors in the (rhetorical) dead of night in a conspiracy to inflate their test scores in order to justify higher salaries and funding, or lowering standards in order to accomplish the same, is something that would almost never happen in a Catholic School setting.


It happens all the time in the world of Public School Education.


Mostly because the people who run the public schools have few real marketable skills, and questionable academic achievements, and so they need to cheat in order to avoid having to work for a living in a Private Sector they’re poorly prepared for, secure in the knowledge that they have the backing of a union machine which exists solely to suck up money, manipulate and subvert the political process, and intimidate it’s enemies, real and perceived.


After all, every idiot in America deserves a $76,000-a-year-for-eight-months-job, complete with sweetheart pension and gold-plated health benefits that most Wall Street types would have to perform several acts of forced oral sex in order to obtain.


Every last one of us pays for this kind of bloated, corrupt, irresponsible system, and our children are being cheated of their opportunity for a better future the longer this state of affairs is allowed to continue.

Dear Staten Island Parents: Your Children are Animals…

And it was such a lovely evening, too.


It was the 4th of July, and there we were, my date and I, not to mention thousands of others, eagerly awaiting the promised fireworks show that has usually taken place off the South Beach Boardwalk these last few years.

The Boardwalk had quite the crowd upon it. There were little children running around, laughing and playing. A few souls wandered the beach. There was a live band at the South Fin Café -- and they were pretty good for a local cover band, too. The event had, as it always has, attracted a rather large crowd. I would estimate there were easily 6,000-to-8,000 people there.

And most of them were well-behaved.

But the teenagers…

The local species of teenager has always left something to be desired. This is, in many ways, not their fault; they live on an island in which real-estate is something the developers use to squeeze three houses onto a lot zoned for two – with a nod and a wink from local government, who sees this minor violation of the law as no big deal; it simply means more property taxes to collect -- and with which the City seems more interested in creating parks which we don’t not need, which will go mostly unused, and cost far more in maintenance than they’ll ever generate, out of whatever may be left after the McMansions go up. There are few recreational outlets for your typical teen in these parts mostly for those reasons; there’s no place to put such things, anymore.

This is not a new phenomenon, either: it was much the same in my day, when the majority of our teenaged recreation revolved around keggers in the deep woods and finding places to park so that you could make out with Mary Jane Sugarshorts. After that, your choices were extremely poor. There’s at least two or three fewer movie theatres around here than when I was a kid (30 years ago!), and there’s also four fewer bowling alleys (all demolished to make way for condos), and the City is building a $70 million dollar monstrosity of an indoor running track here (are you kidding me?) when it could be using the money to keep the public swimming pools open, or maybe selling the land to a private concern which could open an amusement park or something (there were also more amusement parks – 5 – here when I was a kid. There’s now exactly one, I think).

The dance halls are largely gone, replaced with upscale lounges (places where the local metrosexuals can stew in their own pretenses), as are most of the skating parks and rinks (you can ice skate all you want, but who wants to in July?). These kids have no outlets for all their pent-up energy.

Of course, it’s not just that excess youthful energy and lack of outlets that are to blame, either; there’s a generation of parents who have been extremely lax about the job, and perhaps the words ‘Baby Mama’ and ‘Sperm Donor’ are more applicable -- and closer to the truth -- than the appellation ‘parents’. Most would-be parents in this neck of the woods are blissfully ignorant of what terrible little beasts their children are when out of sight, and they seem very comfortable in the adage that what they don’t know won’t keep them awake at night.

All of these things came together Monday night…and ruined the 4th of July for everyone.

It begins with the fights. It almost always does.

Brawls erupt everywhere. Most are simply pushing matches or minor skirmishes, easily broken up by the Police, or by bystanders. A few are serious donnybrooks where one gets the impression that the reason for all this warfare is a simple surplus of testosterone and a shortage of intelligence. However, the majority of the combatants are not who you might assume they would be; they’re girls. I must have missed the memo when it became a requirement of young ladyhood that you must have a good right cross.

There were, by my count, at least four ‘big’ girl fights within my field of view. By ‘big’ I mean they involved four or more girls, often in a shifting, swirling, maelstrom of constantly-shifting sides and loyalties, in which the girl who has your back right this very second suddenly changes her mind just as soon as she gets hit, or as she decides to take a swipe at another -- usually otherwise uninvolved -- girl she has a beef with. It’s all unpredictable. It becomes impossible to tell what all this fighting is about, what with all the screaming and hair-pulling and whatnot, and it was all reminiscent of the United Nation’s Security Council, only with more fists and much more intestinal fortitude.

If I were a teenaged boy in this day-and-age, I might fear for my safety taking one of these chicks out.

Not for nothing, but girls today are apparently watching MMA and WWE. Even some of the (bigger) boys watching these fights looked as if they were close to wetting their own pants out of anxiety. These girls are scary. There is nothing lady-like in their language, their dress, or demeanor, and they practice a style of street fighting that would have impressed all the Old-Guard young toughs of the Old Neighborhood back in Brooklyn.

Then came the extremely dangerous, immature, and indiscriminate practice of throwing fireworks and other incendiary devices willy-nilly within crowded spaces. Let me repeat that: several youths (douchebags) found it necessary and proper to walk about a crowded Boardwalk, tossing lit fireworks indiscriminately, with small children in close proximately, not to mention that one extremely mean-looking pit bull.

And just what sort of asshole brings a pit bull to a gathering of thousands in which there’s sure to be complete chaos and explosions? The same sort of asshole who would throw lit fireworks into a crowd, naturally. It wasn’t enough to come to the event, you had to bring your weapon-on-a-leash and then expose him to loud noises and complete pandemonium, as well?

A goodly number of these teenagers appeared to be intoxicated, leading one to wonder just where they got the booze (probably in the same places I got it when I was their age). Marijuana smoke could be smelled just about everywhere.

These sorts of thing don’t exactly shock me; I’ve lived here long enough, and seen this phenomenon often enough, not to mention it’s all the same shit I did when I was a kid (except for throwing fireworks). Complain to a kid’s parents about their child’s obnoxious behavior around here and you get the “Not-My-Kid-Now-Get-the-Fuck-off-my-Stoop” routine. You could have solid, undeniable evidence of their child’s misdeeds and they simply don’t care. So far as they’re concerned, their child is an absolute angel and if they were involved in something untoward it just HAS TO BE a case where someone else’s kid either talked them into it, or did it and then got the other kids blamed for it.

I could present a video, complete with play-by-play commentary, of their children burning down an orphanage, and it would not register. If parents don’t want to know, then they don’t want to know, I figure.

I expected this kind of bad behavior from the usual sources; the fourth generation Mafia-wannabes, the offspring of the Shanty Irish six-pack-and-a-potato set, the descendants of the Municipal Workers who have jobs simply because they can breathe without mechanical assistance and read at a 3rd grade level, the illegal immigrants for whom simple concepts like sanitation and public restrooms are nearly impossible to fathom, let alone those who don’t feel any shame whatsoever in celebrating the Independence of a country they’ve invaded and are robbing blind.

However, I was not prepared for what was perhaps the worst behavior of the evening: large groups of black kids, often 50 or more to a group. They don’t speak to one another; they yell at each other and over each other. It is impossible to see how anyone communicates, because they’re all yelling at the same time. One group fights another at the drop of a hat (one large-scale brawl erupted when two groups from rival neighborhoods happened to pass one another). The language -- when you can manage to pick out a word here or there in all that Urban Patois -- is even more debased and foul than that used by the pugilistic White Girls.

And they actually try to go around intimidating the white people they come across, as if it’s some sort of game. That doesn’t work on me (after all, I can still kick ass even in my advanced age), but there were people who were frightened or intimidated into giving up their seats on the benches, or ‘encouraged’ to find themselves another spot on the Boardwalk because the Jersey Street set decided they wanted to set up camp right there.

The Police, I’m told privately, were so worried about the possibility of a riot at this thing, what with all these drunken, violent, retarded, armed-with-explosives-and-vicious-dogs, gang-banging, brawling mass of knuckledraggers about, that…

The fireworks event was cancelled outright…and no explanation of just why was given.

Probably because that might have sparked an even bigger riot.

The Authorities decided it would be better and easier to have the crowd disperse than it would be to keep good public order. But not before they made a huge show of force. Perhaps they were right. From what I saw that evening, this was probably a prudent decision.

This is yet one more aspect of life on Staten Island that is being ruined by a rotting culture. In the grand scheme of things I will survive the cancellation of a fireworks show; the upside was that I had more time with my date (we retreated to the South Fin Grill for drinks. Review: they might as well draw a pistol on you when they present you with your bill). The downside is this is just yet another indication of How Things Came To Be How They Are.

You can no longer have a nice, family-friendly, community-centered event on this island; the teenagers arrive in great numbers and in foul mood, and fuck it up for everyone.

If I had the money, I could make a fortune providing these assholes with some place to go and have a good time, and spare the rest of the community the aggravation. Maybe an arcade, or a dance hall (the new rage seems to be pool halls, which have had recently to restrict their clientele to keep the 16-and-unders out because of all the issues that arise), perhaps even a cabaret where the teenaged garage bands could play (we used to have these, too -- the cabarets -- but they’re all gone now, having been razed in order to build yet another dominated-by-a-tanning-salon strip mall), but I can see why no one who does have the cash actually might invest it in this fashion;

It’s because these kids are fucking animals. More trouble than they’re worth.

Who wants to have to deal with the fighting, the drinking, the vandalism, the added security, the higher insurance costs, the trouble with the cops, and last-but-certainly-not-least, the extremely petulant attitudes of Staten Islanders when it comes to certain ‘Not-in-my-backyard’ issues. Everyone agrees there’s nothing for the kids to do, and in the same breath everyone agrees the solution should be in someone else’s neighborhood. Everyone agrees the kids are out of control, but no one accepts responsibility for their own out-of-control kid, and in fact, defends him/her at every turn, even when they are undeniably wrong.

About the only GOOD thing one can take from the events of Monday night is that none of the trouble seemed to be racially motivated. This has been a problem on Staten Island since time immemorial (race riots were once common in Staten Island public schools), but I can’t seem to recall one instance in which a fight took place between people of different races. Whites fought with whites, and blacks with blacks, and never the two did meet.

Thank the nonexistent deity for small blessings, right?

Still, it’s a crying shame that an event which has become a perennial local favorite must be cancelled at the very last minute because people have forgotten what it is to have even a minimum standard of decent behavior in public.

It Has Something to Do With Balls...

...and how you use them, apparently.

Gay Softball League Argues Over The Definition of 'Gay'.

To paraphrase Orwell "Some Gays are More Equal Than Others", it seems.

President Frequent Flyer Miles Strikes Again...

Can you imagine just what sort of Third-World shithole we'd be living in by now if this guy were actually trying to do the job to the best of his ability?

The best thing about Barack Obama is all the time he spends NOT being President of the United States, in fact often avoiding the job as if it came with a case of full-blown AIDS. Which means the important aspects of the job of President are probably being left to a motley assortment of others: Joe Biden, Lord-knows-how-many-ideologically-driven-Czars, White House aides and advisers, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

If you can find a bigger collection of retards anywhere on Planet Earth, I'll send you $5.

I hate to engage in racist stereotypes, but it needs to be said, I think:

Barack Obama likes picking up the paycheck, he likes the perks that come with the office,. he believes he's entitled to do whatever he can get away with -- but he's one of the laziest people I've ever seen in my life, and his inattention to detail is so pronounced that you begin to suspect that all of his qualifications are fake, begin to remember that the lofty speeches are written by someone else, and that he's probably passed through Life on Affirmative Action. One gets the impression that Barack Obama spends his days in the Oval Office playing X-box and pick-up basketball, and when it's necessary to trot him out in public, he's been told what to say, and since he has the attention span of a flea, he invariably fucks even that up.

"Unengaged" does not even begin to describe Barack Obama.

So far, if he's accomplished anything in nearly 3 years, it has been to reinforce pre-existing and negative racial stereotypes about the work ethic -- or lack thereof -- of black men.

Another vacation? More golf? Really? You know,Mr. President, it is usually customary for someone to actually DO SOMETHING before becoming mentally and physically tired enough to require a vacation. But, I'm a generous guy; I've seen what happens when you're apparently trying your best, and I'm willing to make you a deal:

You can have all the vacation time you want, right up until the election. Play golf every hour of every day. Send Michelle to Portugal, Sri Lanka, Timbuktu, for all I care, with as many servants as she arrogantly thinks she needs and is entitled to (she's forgotten that She's First Lady of the United States, not the Queen of the Universe). Give Air Force One the workout you absolutely know she's just craving. Hell, I'll even pay for your hotel room...oops, I already do...but that's beside the point.

Take all the time off you want, Mr. President, because the less you do, the better life gets for everyone else;

The more you're away, the less Washington screws with us.

The more you're away, the less time I have to spend watching you on my television screen while simultaneously trying to hold back a projectile vomit.

The more you're away, the more Presidential even the weakest Republican 2012 candidate looks. You make them all appear infinitely qualified by comparison, and your only hope for re-election is to stay off the idiot box so that people can't make that comparison and become complacent on Election Day, unable to make the choice between Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich.

The more you're away, the less sanctimonious and hypocritical blather I'll have to listen to.

Go on, Mr. Odingbat, take that extra week off...we've earned it.