An Open Letter to Mayor Bloomberg

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To the Honorable Mayor Bloomberg:

Congratulations on your plan to ban Big Gulps.  You’ve piggybacked on an issue of minor importance created by the First Lady and already flowing through the public bloodstream.  Obesity.

Banning Big Gulps is a good step toward addressing the issue.  Please notice I didn’t say solving it, because it won’t.  That’s a good thing.  You’ve offered a solution through good intentions that won’t help, which means you can do more of it down the line.  The camel’s nose has taken the first step down a slippery slope.  Perfect.

But this brings me to the point of this letter.  The news is reporting that the Board of Health says the plan doesn’t go far enough and wants to expand it to milk shakes and popcorn.  This is the right idea, but terrible timing.  They’re supposed to see the camel’s nose, not the nose, neck, and half a hump.  That’s likely to ruin the entire deal!

The idea is incrementalism.  These things need to be done incrementally.  If you just ban Big Gulps, a majority of the people won’t care.  They’ll either not know about it, not care because they don’t buy drinks that size, or knowingly say that something really does need to be done about obesity because they’ve gotten it from the media for several months and never question such things.  That leaves the minority of people who do buy them and libertarians, who can be reliably marginalized as “extremists.”  If you do too much at one time, you might impact enough people and risk a political backlash.

The idea is to wait until enough time has gone by that people forget there ever was such a thing as a Big Gulp, which doesn’t take that long and is dependent upon the intelligence of the citizenry.  You’re in office, so that’s already been established.  It won’t be more than a couple months before New Yorkers will forget Big Gulps were ever available locally and will think they’re a novelty item native to Hoboken.  Patience is the key.

Once sufficient time has passed and New Yorkers are as fat as ever, if not fatter, you can tout the success of your anti-obesity efforts, but say that more needs to be done.  Then you can ban other things.  Good luck with your efforts.

Democrat Party May Be Facing an “Impossible Headwind”

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According to Politico…

President Barack Obama and his party may face an “impossible headwind in November” unless it shifts to a more forward-looking economic message aimed squarely at the middle class, three Democratic strategists warn in a memo out this week.

Pollsters Stan Greenberg and Erica Seifert, of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and Democratic strategist James Carville write in a research document for Democracy Corps that their party’s current frame for the 2012 race is not effective. Based on focus groups in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the strategists argue that voters are simply not convinced that the economy is on the move and it’s a mistake to try and tell them otherwise.

This is funny for several reasons.  No, it’s hilarious.  And pathetic.  And disgusting.  And a host of other things not worth listing.  For one thing, remember this book?  Written by James Carville, who said the Democrat party would “rule” for 40 years.  Actually, this may be true, but they won’t be in the majority.  They’ll just find a way to rule anyway, they’re Democrats.  Republicans got trounced for two election cycles, which meant people had finally learned what was good for them and voted the proper way.

Until the next cycle, after people had had two years of BHO and Democrat party majorities in both houses.  That’s typically how it happens, people vote for “change” without understanding what the change will be, and when they get it, they freak and vote them out again.  It happened in 1994 and 2010, and it will happen again a generation in the future.  Carville didn’t factor in how the Democrat party gets carried away every time they’re in charge.

It’s pathetic and disgusting because they think the problem is in the message.  If they just spin it another way, people will once again be hoodwinked and vote the proper way.  It’s not the message, it’s the policy or lack of a coherent policy.  (I suspect if BHO’s policies were coherent, people would vote his party out in greater numbers, but I digress.)  And the focus groups say the people won’t believe the economy is good and it’s no good telling them so.  Translated, this lie won’t work.

There is some policy recommendations in there, but hardly worth mentioning because they’re nothing new.  The recommendation?  Raise taxes on people making over 200K a year.  So much for a new message.

A Democrat Party Member’s Egregious Behavior

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Ever wonder what a member of the Democrat party had to do to elicit outrage from his fellow Democrats?  It’s been a mystery.  Groping, tax cheating, none of it is bad enough.  We’ve watched over the years as fellow Democrats have adjusted their stated standards to conform to whatever one of their own had been caught doing.  Well, now we know.  And it was bad enough to get him slapped!

“I just got off the phone with Gov. Walker and congratulated him on his victory tonight,” Barrett said, prompting boos from the crowd. “We agreed that it is important for us to work together.”

“No!” shouted the crowd.

When he was greeting the crowd afterward, a woman slapped him.  Why?  Because he gave a gracious concession speech and congratulated his opponent.  He acted like a Republican who lost.  When it was apparent he was being thoroughly trounced and it would take a grain silo to hold all of the extra ballots it would take for him to win, he did the civilized thing.  And got slapped for it.  In the topsy-turvy liberal alternate universe, a guy gets slapped for being a gentleman.

President’s Gaffes Causing History to Be Revised

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This is from ABC News:

For the first time since 1944, the two primary candidates for president have no military background.

Neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney enlisted in the armed forces, although both of them have histories that run tangent with the military.

Obama, for example, is related to a number of veterans, including an uncle who helped free Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz.

I remember President Obama’s gaffe about that.  The Russians liberated Auschwitz.  BHO wiggled out of it more or less by saying his uncle helped liberate another camp, Buchenwald, and maybe he did.  But this might be the first time a politician’s gaffe ended up years later being reported as fact in a story involving the candidate’s family history.

Next they’ll be reporting that FDR was president in 1929 and discussed the stock market crash on television.  Or that Justice “Stewart” swore Biden in.  Why not?  It’s apparently better to adapt reality to Democrat party gaffes, than to report the gaffes themselves.  Maybe they’ll report that Michelle Obama had a baked potatoe for dinner.  Doubtful, eh?

More Elizabeth Warren

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Now Breitbart is saying she plagiarized a recipe or two for a cookbook entitled “Pow Wow Chow.”  The recipes?  Cold omelets with crab meat and crab with tomato mayonnaise dressing.  Yes, old Native American recipes passed down through the generations for millenia, mother to daughter, until it reached the Massachusetts senatorial candidate of color.

Now I’m not the most sophisticated person when it comes to the culinary arts, in fact I might be one of the least.  However, if somebody showed me those recipes and asked me to guess their origins, the Cherokees wouldn’t be near the top.  No disrespect to the Cherokees, but tomato mayonnaise dressing doesn’t sound like something they’d serve.  I’d probably guess French and I’d be right, despite my lack of experience as a chef.  The recipes were from Le Pavilion, a French restaurant in Manhattan.  They were published before Elizabeth Warren shared her family recipes.

Now I’ve been trying to figure out what she should do in the outside chance the mainstream media asks her about this.  The answer?  She should claim the restaurant stole the recipe from the Cherokees.  Sure, it sounds absurd, but she’s a member of the Democrat party and has been uttering absurdities for weeks now.  There will be more to come.

Studying a Study on Studies

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The Pentagon was inundated with so many studies in 2010 that it commissioned a study to determined how much it cost to produce all those studies.

Now the Government Accountability Office has reviewed the Pentagon’s study and concluded in a report this week that it’s a flop.

It’s all right here.  Thinking about it metaphysically, is it possible to study it enough times so that the first study is produced again?  Or looking at it a little more sanely, does anybody really think the government needs any more revenue when it can already do stuff like this?  Remember this next time the Democrat party says it needs more tax revenue and tells us we’re greedy for not wanting to fork it over.

The Magic and Mystique of Records

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Remember them?  Now they’re called vinyl, but they were just records before they shrunk and evolved into CDs.  I’ve never gotten used to CDs, there is something cold and sterile about them.  Stick them in a slot and they disappear into a machine, not to be seen until you eject them.  They’re great for cars; records tend to skip when you hit speed bumps and potholes.  But inside a home, they’re just not the same as a record.

There was something almost magical about records.  You could save up and ride a bike down to the store and buy one for less than $4.00. When you got it home, you found that some had posters inside and some folded open.  Blue Cheer had one that folded open three ways!  Unlike CDs, you could watch a record spin and the tone arm slowly approach the end, where it would lift up and return to its rest.  You could see which tracks were longer, and how far along the song was by where the arm was at any given time.

When I was young, 33 1/3 RPM records were fairly new and they were still pressing some 78 RPMs.  Phonographs had four speeds:  16 2/3, 33 1/3, 45 (the ones with big holes), and 78.  I’ve never seen a 16 2/3 RPM record, supposedly they were developed for Chryslers.  It must not have caught on.

As a kid, I was entranced by a jukebox that played a 45 RPM record sideways.  I couldn’t understand how that worked, and still don’t.  You put a coin in, pressed a large (by today’s standards) button, and the turntable slid to the correct record on a rack.  Smoething moved the record onto the sideways turntable.  When it was done, the record was moved back.  Incredible.  Stuff just isn’t cool anymore.

It’s Been 20 Years Now (longing for an honest lucid president)

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When the president is going to be on TV, do you expect to learn something from him and know more afterward than you did before?  I sure don’t.  It seems to be a lost art, the president informing the nation in a serious non-political manner.  Not blaming the previous president for all the woes of his office, as if each presidency is a TV series episode that’s neatly wrapped up at the end of each show.  Or being able to speak off-the-cuff and communicate in an intelligible fashion.  The last three presidents haven’t been able to communicate well, or if they could wouldn’t communicate truthfully.

This isn’t just Democrat party presidents either.  Bush couldn’t communicate well, but he was at least truthful.  So it’s been 20 years since we’ve had a president who could talk to the nation as presidents should.  What does this mean?  An entire generation has been born and is reaching voting age without ever seeing one.  They might not even know that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Three in a row is indicative of something, but what?  The obvious connection seems to be the demise of the Cold War, so perhaps we don’t elect serious presidents because it doesn’t seem to be serious times.  A young Democrat comes along and talks about hope and change, including altering the ocean levels, and people fall for it because it sounds good to them.  It doesn’t make sense at the time and what you hear after the inauguration predictably doesn’t make sense either.

I long for a president who can explain stuff on TV without a teleprompter and leaves me knowing something I didn’t know before and can trust is truthful.  Can Romney do this?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the present occupier certainly cannot.

Dinosaur Farts

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…according to leading scientists.

So dinosaur farts contributed to their demise.  Well, it undoubtedly was pretty foul being downwind from a gaseous brontosaurus, nobody is likely to disagree with it.  But nothing that falls into line with the left’s agenda should be taken at face value, especially considering the climate.  The “…according to leading scientists” line is another good clue.  They’re leading because they publish “findings” that fall into line with the left’s agenda, not because they’re unraveling any scientific mysteries.  If you aren’t in favor with the left, your only funding source is “Big Oil” and other evil corporations, and you won’t be taken seriously just because of your funding source.

Here’s a hint of their agenda…

Methane is up to 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2).

It is created from a variety of natural and human-influenced sources which include landfills, natural gas, petroleum sources and agricultural activities.

Scientists claim humans have pushed levels of the gas up 2.5 times higher than they should be and estimate this is responsible for 20 per cent of modern global warming.

It’s time to expand the blame for global warming from CO2 to other gases.  What causes it?  Everything the left is up in arms about.  Landfills, natural gas, oil, and agriculture, meaning animals.  And what is there to do about it?

More taxes.  Watch for a resurgence of interest in fart taxes, which have been enacted in places and proposed in this country.  That’s what this is about.

Presidential Press Conferences

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There was an interesting article called Obama Abolishes the Press Conference linked on Drudge.  It not only discussed Obama not having them, but why they are important to have.

Press conferences are extraordinarily important for several reasons. A number of questions are asked on different topics. The pressure of being on national TV forces the president to explain his thinking. The public gets to actually see the president think and understand how he comes to his conclusions, an invaluable public service.

What’s more, the prospect of a press conference forces the White House to think through its own views. Everybody in the West Wing, including the president, has to stop and consider just what they are doing and why. Often the agencies are mined for answers about current policies so that White House aides can prepare the president, giving the West Wing valuable feedback about what’s going on.

The problem here is that we need a president who is capable of or willing to go into detail about his decision making, and we haven’t had one since Bush 41.  It’s doubtful Obama really knows why he does what he does, other than a Chicago adviser advised him to.  Bush knew why he made his decisions, but wasn’t good at explaining it.  Clinton could have explained it, but never would have told the truth.  So not having them isn’t that much of a loss.

But that’s only half of it.  We need a press corps (corpse for you Obama voters) who can do their part.  There are a handful of reporters who can intelligently discuss policy, but most can’t.  Bush routinely endured questions such as was he going to apologize to the American people, what his biggests mistakes were, or to prove he wasn’t AWOL.  It’s not surprising he didn’t have many after a while.

So until we have a president who can discuss issues well, and a press corps that will ask intelligent questions, we’re kind of stuck with what we have.