This’ll kill ya. Or if it doesn’t, something else will.

So there I am, puttering around in the kitchen this morning. The kitchen TV is turned on and the news is playing. I'm taking the news in with only half an ear and one eye when some smug-looking Brit comes on.

He was a doctor. I also think the news station was NBC-TV in New York, but don’t hold me to that.

What finally got my attention is that the Brit started to talk about the notion that carrying around weight kills you and food kills, too. He wasn’t talking about heart attacks. He was talking about cancer.

Some of the points I think I heard that self-satisfied-looking, smug-sounding sawbones make included these:

1. If your fat makes you “apple-shaped” (i.e., you have lots of belly fat) you’re in greater danger than if you’re “pear-shaped” (i.e. the fat is on your butt.)

So what are people supposed to do about that, you self-important British buffoon? Go to the doctor and ask for belly-to-butt fat transplant?

2. You shouldn’t eat meat, but if you do eat meat, it should be no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.

So now you’re telling me that to avoid cancer, I should out and buy a pack of cigarettes? And what about all those doctors who only a little while ago were telling me to stop eating anything with white starches -- white bread, spaghetti, potato -- and start eating meat instead? Ever hear of the Atkins diet? Maybe you'd prefer I ate the cigarettes.

3. “I understand you Americans like hot dogs a great deal.” He then said that while we really shouldn’t eat them, but if we do eat them, to eat them in moderation.

Good for you, generalizing from who-knows-what cliché about Americans wolfing down hot dogs, you pompous English fuddy-duddy. You probably watched some clip of the annual summer Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest and jumped to the wrong conclusion from insufficient data. Who let you pass your first Moron Science class?

Incidentally, I understand you English eat disgusting things yourselves, like cold beans on toast for breakfast, and then you go out for fried fish and “chips” for lunch. Carry on old boy because you're English, but eat I recommend eating that disgusting filth in moderation.

4. Alcohol, we in the audience were lectured, should be avoided because it tends to caused colon cancer and breast cancer.

On the other hand, other quarters of the medical community are recommending that you and I drink a glass of wine a day – just like those skinny French drink wine – to avoid heart disease and cancer. It's supposed to improve circulation and get the heart beating a trifle faster, sort of like a brisk walk. Are you against exercise, too?

Make up your muddled mind!

The Crank’s beautiful girlfriend – and I can assure you without going into details that she has considerably more medical knowledge than the average TV news producer – says it all boils down to one thing:

“Nobody's getting out of here alive.” That applies always, no matter what you eat.

I don’t know what you’re going to do about all this, but personally, I intend to go home and have a sizzling sirloin steak as thick as a pompous English doctor’s head, charred on the outside and bloody on the inside, plus a steaming baked potato with slabs butter melting through its fluffy white insides, and a nice glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.

I mean, let’s face it. Everybody has to die of something and personally, I'd rather not die of starvation.

I know not what course you may take but as for me, I’d rather die of a sizzling steak, cabernet sauvignon and chocolate chip cherry vanilla ice cream than of a dreary pile of lettuce leaves and a dry slice of whole wheat bread.

Pass the cigarettes. I need to measure my sirloin.

Who wants to see us roasting in hell? Thanks to the Bush Administration, bigger questions are 1) who doesn’t? And 2) who will nuke us first?

Last Sunday night, the CBS News program 60 Minutes interviewed Afghan President Mohammed Karzai, installed in his position largely with the help of the United States. Karzai is a man who radiates dignity and self control, but in this CBS interview , he seemed trying to keep his temper from boiling over.

His complaint: That U.S. air strikes, aimed at Al Quaida bigwigs, are killing innocent civilians instead.

Civilian dead: 270.
High value targets: 0

Indeed, in further interviews with Air Force Colonel Gary Crowder, and a former Pentagon official, CBS uncovered that we’ve managed to kill 270 civilians with these air strikes, but not a single “high value target.”

Col. Crowder tut-tutted that while the civilians 270, Al Quaida 0 statistics are correct, “we have come a very long way in getting that intelligence to be more accurate. We will collect human intelligence, signals intelligence, overhead full-motion video, all of that tied together, very often in real time. That gives us a better understanding and a significantly higher confidence that the targets we're engaging are in fact valid military targets."

All very nice, one supposes, but Col. Crowder still didn’t offer any evidence that our new, improved techniques have netted us so much as one high value target either. Which leads one to wonder how much gas this Air Force brass gas bag can hold.

Meanwhile, we’re convincing more and more Afghans – neighbors, relatives, friends of the innocent bystander civilians killed by our “better understanding” – that they want to kill us in return. Can you blame them?

Imagine that a foreign power came to the United States, chasing people that none of us like – such as drug dealers and gang leaders. You might or might not like it, depending how much you mind a bunch of foreigners with weapons running around your home town. But suppose, that without killing a single thug, they managed to kill hundreds of Americans, destroy your home, and ruin your business. How would you feel then?

How do others hate us?
Let us count the ways.

Okay, that’s why now we’ve got the citizens of Afghanistan wanting to kill us. I don’t need to tell you about Iraq. They’re not putting out those IED’s because they really, really love us. So that’s two countries that would see us in hell.

How about Turkey? While trying to run interference for a group of Iraqui Kurds that’s creating hostile action on the other side of the Iraq-Turkey border, we’ve managed to alienate this once-strong NATO ally. That’s three nations that would see us in hell.

How about Iran? We’re threatening sanctions, and we’re barely veiling a threat to bomb them. Judging by the Presidential mumbo-jumbo that got us into Iraq, President Bush and his crowd seem to want to go beyond the threat, ASAP.

Okay, that’s four nations that want to see us all in hell. But wait, there’s more!

While we’re stretched out in the Middle East
why not go pick some fights in Latin America?

We’ve made it perfectly clear to Cuba that we’re not budging on our embargo there. Since the Cuban Missile Crises in 1962, we’ve been embargoing them, but quietly. Now, with Fidel Castro evidently dying and his younger brother Raul running things, we seem determined to poke a sharp stick into the Raul Castro’s eye. What will we get for this effort – unless it’s another invitation from Cuba to Russia to re-install those guided missiles pointed at the U.S. – you know, the ones that Jack Kennedy negotiated out of there more than 40 years ago?

That’s five countries whose citizens, for the most part, might be inclined to see us in hell, protestation of the Cuban career refugees in Miami notwithstanding.

Then there’s Vladimir Putin. Not a nice guy, which may be why George Bush seems to consider Putin something of a pal.

But with “friends” like Vladimir, you don’t need World War III. Which makes it puzzling why George Bush is now poking a finger in Putin’s eye by trying to ring Russia’s western flank with missiles, purportedly to shoot down missiles from Iran that actually don’t exist.

Synergy for a nuclear firestorm

That’s six countries that would like to see us in hell. And now we’ve got some synergy going. For example, instead of negotiating with Iran to cut out the nuclear stuff we keep threatening them, thus providing the irrityation that makes them work faster on developing a nuclear bomb and nuclear ICBMS, neither of which they have just now.

This makes us rush to get those missiles installed in Poland and Czechoslovakia, which infuriates the Russians enough to retaliate by installing missiles pointed at us in Cuba. So, lacking troops which are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, we nuke Cuba, which causes Russia to nuke us back.

Oh yes, did I mention North Korea and its own nukes?

How about Pakistan, which is unquestionably armed nukes and in peril of being taken over by Muslim extremists who hate our guts?

And for good measure, have you notice we have no good friends in Venezuela any more? That’s pretty important, because each time we offend someone in the Middle East, the price of oil goes through the rough again, driving our economy deeper into a hole. $10 a gallon gas, anyone?

Death Wish Infinity – The Ultimate Finale

What it boils down to – on the questionable assumption that he isn’t a total imbecile – is that George Bush is in the thrall of a powerful death wish. He wishes to die in a nuclear firestorm. Or to see the U.S. economy die in a financial firestorm. Or both. And he wishes for the rest of us Americans to die with him.

When people are dangerous to themselves or others, they are usually deemed insane, taken off the streets and confined to a mental institution where they can't do any harm. In this case, the body with power to get George Bush off the streets is Congress. Think they'll do it in time? Think they'll ever do it?

Oh, forget about it. Just pass the Kool-Aid.

Please excuse The New York Crank for this short and late post. He was walking behind a slow dog.

And if you think that's outrageous, check out this

The Kurds have no friends. But wait, there’s more! More tragedy. More pitfalls for America. And more danger for the world.

There’s an old Kurdish saying that, “The Kurds have no friends.”

They say this because they are a people and a nation divided into territories of other nations (see red areas of the map above) who have never been helped by anyone in their quest for independent nationhood. Parts of Iran are Kurdish. Parts of Iraq are Kurdish. Parts of Turkey are Kurdish. Parts of Syria are Kurdish. Part of what’s left of the Russian empire is Kurdish.

The enemy of my enemy is
the friend of my...oh nevermind!

Until recently, the Kurdish territory in Iraq was reportedly the least hostile to American troops of all Iraqui territory. After all, the Kurds were the people who got bombed with poison gas by the late Saddam Hussein. Watching Baghdad get busted up was something they must have enjoyed. I don’t imagine a single Kurd shed a single tear when Saddam met his end at the end of the rope. Moreover, chaos in Baghdad meant more autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan.

But there a few small problems with Kurdistan’s good news. First of all, a Kurdistan that's feeling its oats makes various other nations – none of them friends of the Kurds – nervous. That includes the United States which doesn't want an independent Kurdistan either. Or so we say. We still take the position that Iraqi Kurdistan is part of Iraq. Just like our old pal Saddam Hussein used to say.

A big passel of "what ifs...?"

What if Iraqui Kurdistan somehow actually won its independence? Would Turkish Kurdistan want to join them? What about Iranian Kurdistan? What about a Syrian Kurdistan? Did I mention Armenian Kurdistan, the Kurdistan located in the Soviet Union? This could raise hell with the internal management of the entire area.

When Kurds on the Turkish border get, uh, a bit frisky, as they seem to have been doing, ambushing, killing and kidnapping Turkish troops, Turkey gets highly peeved, as it has just done. So Turkey is massing troops in the Iraq border, not as part of a “coalition of the willing” but more likely as an expedition of the pissed off.

That in turn has led to frantic negotiations between the U.S. State Department and the Turks. Condi Rice herself is trying to hold this tiger by the tail.

But if Condi fails to mollify the Turks, they may cut off American military access via their country to Northern Iraq. And they may invade.

On the other hand, if the Iraqui Kurds somehow actually prevail, this may somehow give Iranian Kurds inspiration to rebel, which I speculate could provide Iran with a causus belli to get disagreeable about their nuclear weapons enterprises and blow something up. As for Syria – who knows?

Cold war and nuclear standoffs, anyone?
Or perhaps we could do World War III

I can’t even imagine where the Russians will come out on this one, given what else is going on. At the very least it’s more kindling for a cold war revival. Or for some hapless American troops to get caught in the crossfire between Kurds and Turks. Or Iranians and Kurds. Or Russians and Kurds. Or Iranians and Iraqis. Or Iranians and Russians. Or any strange combination of the above.

Maybe the U.S. will decide to solve the problem and mollify the Turks, Iranians, Russians and possibly the Syrians by bombing the Kurds, just the way Saddam Hussein did. That would bring this insane war full circle. One of our excuses for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein “bombed his own people,” meaning Iraq's Kurdish people. Shucks, we may start to think that’s our job. Of course, when that happens we won’t call them Kurds. We’ll call them “terrorists.”

I see by your swagger
that you are a cowboy...

“Bring ‘em on!” said George Bush, some time ago, his voice full of cowboy swagger. Now look at the constantly expanding mess we've got.

Well George, here’s an old cowboy maxim for you, even if I just made it up:

Never stick your bare arm in a bagful of rattlesnakes.

Whacked out by the FCC? Whacked out by Rupert Murdoch? Whacked out by homogenized news? Whack this:

Just in case you missed it, the Federal Communications Commission is considering a rule that would allow one company to own the whole media shebang in your town – the newspaper, the TV station, the radio station and for all I know, the noon fire whistle.

Which means that one man – regardless of political stripe and living, say, in Australia – can decide pretty much what you can read. Or not read. Or hear. Or see.

Yeah yeah, I know, you can always go Internet surfing and find something your local news outlet didn't cover. Maybe.

One reason I say "maybe" is that the FCC commissioned a study revealing, not surprisingly, that locally-owned TV stations provide more local news than media conglomerates. You know, stuff like local politics and what's happening to your kids in school, instead of stuff like whether Brittney or K-Fed is gonna get custody of the kids.

So guess what the FCC did with the study? Right, they destroyed it, so that the public wouldn't get confused by the facts. (The facts about that dastardly FCC move came out last year when somebody leaked the report to Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat.)

So whaddya gonna do? Complain to your Congressperson? Umm, sorry. Most Congresspeople seem unable to multi-task. I'm not sure what they're focused on instead of media ownership. The war maybe? The budget? Getting re-elected? At any rate, not many of them will offend mega-media moguls.

And of you think the U.S. Supreme Court will attack this one on the basis of, oh, I dunno, violation of the anti-trust laws, you ain't been paying attention to Roberts, Alito, & Co.

So whaddya gonna do? Well, the only left to do is whack a Murdoch. Go ahead, you might as well play.

Enviro-phony

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire turned Democrat, turned Republican to run for mayor, now turning Democrat-ish again for a possible run for the presidency is also turning out to be a major phony when it comes to matters of the environment.

The Mayor, who according to yesterday’s right-leaning New York Post, “has advocated everything from ditching incandescent light bulbs to taxing Midtown commuters to clean the air - produces 364 tons of smog-inducing carbon dioxide a year, according to a Post analysis of the billionaire's trans-Atlantic real estate portfolio and travel style.

“That's a carbon footprint larger than what's produced by 18 average Americans, 53 Europeans or 404 Guatemalans. It's equivalent to keeping 69 cars a year on the road or lighting the Empire State Building for 4 ½ days.”

Well, the I’m glad the Post has finally come around to the left-leaning Crank’s point-of-view that the mayor’s environmental concerns are as phony as a $2 bill.

I said it here back in September. And I said it here in August. And I said it still earlier here in June. But it’s great that the Post came up with some fresh nitty-gritty details, including these shockers:

His homes, said the Post, “boast enough square footage to swallow two mansions like the 10,000-square-foot one owned by former Vice President Al Gore, one of several leading climate-change critics rapped lately for being voracious energy users themselves."

And furthermore:

“Bloomberg's carbon footprint swells to epic proportions when you include his penchant for reaching his far-flung getaways by one of the handful of private jets owned by his financial information firm, Bloomberg LP.

”In 2004 - before he took steps to conceal his weekend travel from the press - Bloomberg was averaging one four-hour round trip to Bermuda each month in his sleek Dassault Falcon 900.

“Twelve such flights in a year would spew 40 tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, roughly as much as two Americans would produce in a year.
Bloomberg's carbon footprint could actually be much larger. The Post did not have enough information to estimate pollution generated by Bloomberg's four personal cars, the propeller-driven airplane he owns, or the company helicopter he's said to use.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times this morning reports another interesting assault by Bloombergian enviro-phony forces. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection is now busting people for picking up litter.

Well, not any litter. If you want to make off with a rotten banana peel and a plastic bagful of doggy-doo, there’ll be no concerted effort to stop you.

But just you try to pick up an old bedspring that somebody tossed out! You’re gonna get a ticket and you’ll be liable for a $2,000 fine.

Is this nuts? Nah, Mayor Bloomberg, who early in his mayorship dismissed recycling as stupid and wasteful, has discovered there’s a market for scrap metal.

Now, if I discard something, there’s no law on the books I know of that says my trashed property automatically belongs to the city. But leave it to the Mayor to come down like a ton of bricks on some marginal scrap collector who’s just trying to clear the streets faster than the mayor’s sanitation trucks and scrape to up a living in the while he's at it.

We ought to be giving these guys a medal. Instead, Bloomberg gives them the finger.

Computer crash causes cranky shutdown, and anti-Mac rage

My Mac I-book, less than two years old and still on extended warrantee, has gone kerplooie.

I made an apppointment to take it into one of the Apple stores in Manhattan. I had to wait 22 hours for an appointment. When I showed up for my appointment I had to wait an hour to be seen. And what the Apple "Genius" at the repair bar saw was bad news.

"Looks like your hard drive," and said, "and there might even be more to it than that."

He took the computer and promised a new hard drive plus whatever else is needed, free, "in five days or so, or maybe two, or maybe sooner, or maybe longer than that."

Wow, thanks Apple. Love that specificity.

Meanwhile, a couple of other problems surfaced. Apple insists on retaining posession of the damaged hard drive. With all my data on it.

"But that's my data," I protested.

"But it's our hard drive, if you want a new one that works," said the "Genius."

So Apple has declared its private ownership of my personal information. The bastards.

Meanwhile, I can't keep sneaking into Staples and pretending to try out one of their computers in order to post here.

So this blog is on temporary hiatus, for five days, or maybe three, or maybe two, or maybe longer than that.

Got a gripe about Apple? You're welcome to post it here. However, there may be a delay between the time you send it in and the time it gets posted, because Apple is currently in full possession of my computer. Along with my bank account and brokerage codes, social security number, and other personal information.

Prosecutor and criminal investigator, discredited by various authors for outrageous prosecutions, decide to sue, sue, sue, sue, sue everybody

If you’ve read the best-selling non-fiction book “The Innocent Man” by John Grisham, you’re familiar with the tale of the prosecutor and the criminal investigator who nearly sent wrongly accused Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz to the death chamber for a murder they didn’t commit.

Undone by DNA evidence that exonerated the victims who’d been convicted on the basis of coerced confessions, coerced “witnesses” and sloppy investigation, prosecutor Bill Peterson nevertheless refused to retract the notion that Williamson and Fritz were guilty.

But wait, there’s more: three other books alleging prosecutorial – ah, shall we call them “errors” – not only in the Williamson and Fritz Trials but also in another murder case.

Man, if these guys – best-selling authors like John Grisham, attorneys of national stature like Barry Scheck, organizations like the Innocence Project, and publishers like Doubleday Dell, Random House, Broadway Books and Seven Locks Press all keep putting out books about the way you do your job, pretty soon somebody might start thinking that essentially you’re a conspirator in a pinstriped suit, willing to put innocent men to death for – well, who knows what reason, although I can imagine a few having to do with, oh, perhaps sheer ego, or career advancement and wanton disregard for the lives of innocent people.

So Prosecutor Peterson, along with former Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation gumshoe Gary Rogers are suing in an Oklahoma Federal court. According to the September 28th issue of the Tulsa, OK, World, their laundry-list of defendants against charges of libel and slander include:

•John Grisham, author of “The Innocent Man.”
•Robert Mayer, author of “The Dreams of Ada.”
•Dennis Fritz, the author of “Journey Toward Justice.”
•Barry Scheck, one of Fritz’s lawyers who helped exonerate him, and a co-author of “Actual Innocence,” that discusses the case of Williamson and Fritz.
•The Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, publisher of “The Innocent Man” and “Actual Innocence.”
•Random House Inc., which owns Doubleday Dell.
•Broadway Books, publisher of “The Dreams of Ada.”
•Seven Locks Press and/or James C. Riordan, publisher of “Journey Toward Justice.”

You’ll find more complete details here, with a link to the Tulsa World article:
http://justicedenied.org/wordpress/?p=23

I would fervently wish that the jury will decide to assign court and legal costs to the loser, except for one little problem:

Oklahoma juries seem to have a bad habit of regularly deciding against the wrong people. (See any of the books listed above.)

Guess what your dollar is good for abroad? Good guess!

Well, gang, it happened again. The dollar sank against the Euro this morning to a new low. It sank against the Euro several times last week. And currency traders are betting the dollar will continue to sink. The ship is going down.

What’s that mean? Well, once upon a time we called it “The Almighty Dollar.” Back in 1959, a crummy five bucks in Paris could get you a clean hotel room, three squares a day, and still leave you some loose change for tootling-around money. There was even a guidebook called “Europe on $5 a Day.”

Today five bucks in Paris will get you a thimble-sized cup of espresso. Maybe. If you’re careful about the café where you order it. Or anyway, you could pull it off when I was there last month. Today, who knows?

Bush Dumbo-nomics

This is a consequence of Bush Administration’s Dumbo-nomics. If you cut taxes, export all your industry to places where slave labor works cheap so that US companies can turn bigger profits, and then focus your government’s spending on a trillion dollar war about – oh right, we keep changing what it’s supposed to be about– your dollar turns to toilet paper.

So if you're the Bush Administration you can try to disguise what you’re doing by making money cheap – essentially running the printing presses overtime and lowering interest rates – and then pouring the less-valuable cash into the economy, enabling people to buy houses at outrageously inflated prices with cheap mortgage money.

Except, you know all about the housing bubble. That’s what happens when you borrow, borrow, borrow your way into so-called prosperity.

Now we’ve got inflation, plus a threat of recession, plus an increasingly-worthless dollar. If an Al Qaida saboteur had come to the US to do us in by deliberately manipulating the economy to our national detriment, he couldn’t have done a better job than the current administration.

But, but, but, but….!
What about American exports?

Conservative apologists for the Bush Administration will say, “But wait a second! A cheap dollar cheapens American exports, and that’s good for the American economy.”

Yeah, it would be, if the United States hadn’t exported virtually all of its industry.There's almost nothing left. We hardly make anything here any more, except for American cars that even lots of Americans don’t seem to want, high fructose corn syrup and partly hydrogenated corn oil.

So what do we do here? Well, our biggest and most prosperous industry seems to be moving money around. You know, brokerage, investment banking, mortgage lending, hedge-funding, that sort of thing. You can’t export that stuff since it's so much more intangible than say, steel or Barbie dolls when they still were made here.

Then we trade houses. Can’t export those, either. Although increasingly, some European can outbid you if you're out to buy, even with cheap mortgage money.

Meanwhile, China is making everything from poisonous toys, to poisonous fish, to poisonous dog food – and who knows what else Chinese melamine got into besides wheat gluten that went into dog food – and selling it to us, the former bread basket of the world.

Well, uh, then what about
the boost to tourism here?

Yes, the cheap dollar attracts tourists. That’s good for the hotel business, much of which is owned by foreign investors and therefore not so helpful to us. But it’s going to make your own vacations start feeling mighty expensive.

Think about it. You can’t afford Euro-based Europe any more. Not if you’re sane. But if you’re planning to go to New York, San Francisco, Miami or even the Grand Tetons, to name just a few places tourists like, be warned. You’ll be competing for hotel room space with folks who are flush with Euros. They can outbid you, out pay you, and crowd you out. And once the hoteliers see the Euros coming, they’ll raise prices accordingly. So eventually you’ll priced out, too.

Oh, eventually that will even have an impact on domestic airlines. Why cater to bargain-seeking Americans when you can charge Europeans more for the same seats? So unless your idea of a really cool vacation is piling into the family jalopy and sleeping in Cousin Hector’s basement on the other coast, you’re screwed again, pal.

Oh, I forgot. If you want to replace the family jalopy that’ll cost you more too, and not only if it’s a foreign car paid for in dollars. When American cars start looking cheap in comparison, guess what American carmakers will do.

Did I mention the price of gasoline? Oh, right. You already know about that.

P.S. Like the toilet paper in the photograph above? Get it here for only $7.95 a roll. http://www.justtoiletpaper.com/currencynew.shtmlOr just use the money directly.

I took the Madison Avenue bus home from work last night.

Distance: 2-point-something miles.

Time taken: Two-and-an-effing-half-hours!

The problem: In a word, diplomats. Last night New York was crawling with them. In a way it was like waking up in the middle of the night, stepping into the bathroom for a glass of water, and finding the sink crawling with cockroaches.

The great un-diplomatic Manhattan traffic tieup

Somebody – NYPD, Secret Service, FBI, or for all I know the Iranian Secret Police – was making a huge show of tying up traffic for the security of various nations’ diplomats, including our own, while they go to and from the UN blabbing and blubbering to no effect I can detect other than annoyance. Meanwhile, it’s New York’s citizens who got shafted.

So a dude who happens to be a diplomat wants to go for a ride. Does that mean you have to clear all streets of all traffic in a four block radius while the guy checks out of his hotel, loads his baggage into a huge chauffeur-driven SUV, ambles out the hotel’s front door, picks his nose, blows a kiss, and gets in?

I live a few blocks from the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, a deluxe joint favored by people who live off the taxpayers’ (or slave owners’) money around the world. The Carlyle is on Madison Avenue between 75th and 76th. Why did that justify blocking off Madison Avenue from 73rd Street to God-Knows-Where, the side streets between Madison and Park on 75th and 76th Streets, and who knows what else?

Why did some diplomat’s temporary residency justify freezing several bus loads of passengers for twenty minutes. The bus couldn’t move forward. The riders couldn’t get off. We were prisoners of diplomacy! Out-effing-rageous!

The curse of Leona’s ghost

Earlier, the same bus that I was riding got caught in a different diplomatic security log jam in front of the Palace Hotel, on Madison at 51st Street. That’s the hotel that used to advertise that Leona (“Only the little people pay taxes”) Helmsley was their “Queen.”

Well, Leona’s now pushing up daisies, but her ghost still haunts the block. Nothing moved. Nothing budged. You could almost hear Leona cackling. Or sneering. Or gloating that “Only the little people ride busses.”

Secret technique of the
Not-So-Secret Service

For those of you who are security buffs, I did notice one interesting technique that some U.S. security service is using. (I say it’s a U.S. security service because it happened in a van with U.S. Government license plates.)

They’re using hatchback SUVs. And before any diplomat goes out the hotel door with his finger in his nose, they open the back hatch. One of those buzz-cut, conservatively-suited, funny button-in-the-lapel, doo-hickey-in-the-ear, sunglasses types sits down in the back, cross-legged like Chief Sitting Bull, facing out the rear window.

Can you see him once the hatch goes down? Nope, because they use that one-way glass that prevents you from seeing inside the vehicle. But you'd better believe he's there. I saw him get in. I saw him sit down.

Is he armed? I couldn’t tell you that. I didn’t see a weapon. But I’d be willing to bet a two hour traffic jam he’s carrying iron.

I mention this just in case you’re a terrorist, planning to sneak up behind a diplomatic vehicle and start shooting. Fuhgedaboud it, dude. They’ll blow you a way before you have a chance to call home on your cell phone and say goodbye to Mom.

On the other hand, I do wish the Secret Service (or whomever) would stop deploying secret agents in full public view. But I guess that’s what happens when you tie up traffic. Everybody in the vehicle stranded next to yours gets to see exactly what you’re doing.

Uh oh, it just occurred to me that if somebody in the Secret Service reads this, they may insist we commute to and from work blindfolded from now on.

Revealed: The Crank’s
plan for improving
diplomatic efficiency

Look pal, I’m for security as much as the next person. And I’m probably more in favor of diplomacy than anybody else you could name. But diplomacy in Manhattan simply doesn’t work. With cranks like me running around grumbling about needing over two hours to go two miles, and how late it’s getting, and how hungry we are, diplomacy here is counter-vibrational.

So here’s what I suggest. Get hold of an airplane hangar out at JFK Airport. Run a partition down the center. One side ought to be a dormitory, with none-too-comfortable upper and lower bunks, just like what they have in the army. The other side ought to be a conference room.

When the diplomats get off their airplanes, they should be herded into the hangar and forced to stay there and negotiate until they get something settled. Anything settled, come to think of it.

Until then, they’d have to sleep in a common hall, listening to one another snore and fart and whatever else all night. And they'd have to eat Army food. Does the army still service creamed chipped beef on toast – what soldiers at Fort Dix used to call shit-on-a-shingle – for breakfast? Good. Serve them that. Every last morning. Until they solve problems like Darfur, Iraq, and nukes in Iran and North Korea. Betcha it wouldn’t take more than a week.

Did I mention that I advocate having just one toilet for the entire diplomatic corps? Well I do. As well as one common shower room. And if one of those nose-picking diplomacy hacks is bending over for the soap when Congressman Larry Craig comes through on a Congressional junket, tough luck!

Subway fares, overcrowding, off-peak idiocy, clueless Bloomberg, and the insanity of letting people who ride to work in limos set transit policy

Hello, suckers! If you live in New York, you’re on the verge of getting smacked in your wallet again. Good and hard.

A big subway fare is in the works because the Metropolitan Transit authority is crying poor, even though they’ve got a billion dollar budget surplus this year. So says the New York Times this morning

Yeah yeah, I know a billion bucks isn’t what it used to be. But even with some of the crappiest Manhattan co-op apartments going for a piffling million dollars these days, a billion bucks is still real money. Or at least real enough to avoid forcing the MTA board to go to soup kitchens for lunch and sleep in cardboard boxes on a church step.

So what’s the problem at the
Metropolitan Transit Authority?

From their limos and office aeries, the high muck-mucks who run the system have decided to compete with Mme. Galzorist, the often off-base fortune teller on the block where the offices of The New York Crank are located.

The transit moguls say a money shortage is coming – they can see it in their crystal balls. It’s going to be caused by all the pension benefits they’ve negotiated, debts they’ve decided to take on, and an “anticipated” decline in income from real estate transaction taxes.

So okay, I’ll tell you what. Let’s say their crystal ball is 100% correct. Let’s forget about who negotiated and planned us into the financial tsunami that the Transit Authority insists is just down the road. Instead, let’s focus on some new stupidity.

Transit planning peak freaks

Some genius at the Transit Authority got the bright idea that while they’re probably going to raise fares by double-digit percentages, they ought to reduce fares for off-peak use. That way, goes the thinking of these geniuses, they’ll reduce peak hour use of the subway.

Small problem with that, dudes. Peak hours are peak hours because those are the hours when the bosses insist that everybody show up for work. Or the hours when everybody gets to come home from work. The average working stiffs have as much control over when they use the subway as they do over high tide in Upper New York Bay.

It happens when the boss says it’ll happen. So don’t even bother practicing excuses like, “Sorry I’m three hours late, boss. I was waiting for off-peak hours to kick in.”

Or better yet, “Honey, I’ll be home at 11 o’clock tonight. No, it has nothing to do with the blonde in the next cubicle. I’m waiting for off-peak hours.”

Transit capacity maxes out

But Transit Authority bosses are desperate. Says the New York Times article this morning:

Overcrowding is a growing concern for the authority. It is undertaking customer surveys for its subway lines, and initial results show packed subway cars a major complaint among riders. But the century-old system has little capacity to add service.

Which brings me to the next doofus in the New York Transit mess – Mayor “Mike” Bloomberg. As crankily complained about on this blog back on August 1, “Mayor Mike,” who takes two limos to the subway sometimes, wants to slap an $8 fee on drivers in midtown to keep them off the streets, presumably so they’ll take mass transit to work.

Mike, Mike, Mike, if the subway is already jammed just about to capacity, what’s going to happen when you coerce even more people to use it?

Right. You guessed it.

Political, partisan, petty, censorship-championing Rudy.

Hey, do you think Rudy Giuliani would make a the White House anything other than a truth-be-damned propaganda organ of the Republican party?

Think again.

Back in May I reminded you of Rudy’s “you have to take a bullet for me” mentality and tendency to pass the buck for his own mistakes. http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/search/label/Rudolph%20Giuliani

Now this in an e-mail sent to me by Richard Rosenthal, a New York journalist and advertising copywriter who specializes in bicycle-related subjects and found himself justifiably teed off last week when Giuliani pretended to take offense at the “General Betray-us” ad run by moveon.org. It's enough to make you think Rudy studied politics on the lap of Karl Rove:

Today's Times has an article, "Angered by an Antiwar Ad, Giuliani Seeks Equal Space". In 1998 I was hired by the NYC Department of Transportation to create ads promoting bicycling in the city in conjunction with Bike Month. Cycling is a non-partisan activity. The DoT is a non-partisan agency. Funding for the ads was paid by a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, a non-partisan agency.

After the NYC DoT turned down ads that said cycling was better for the city than driving because bicycles were non-polluting, quiet, and reduced congestion--they wouldn't permit me to say that--I submitted an ad with the headline, "We Bike Here." Around it were the names of hundreds and hundreds of New York cyclists, possibly with their professions: doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, laborers of all stripes, even a subway repairman and a bus maintenance man--all in small, 6 pt. type.

The DoT pored through the names and pulled out the names of Ruth Messenger (Manhattan borough president), Fernando Ferrer (Bronx borough president), and John Kennedy, Jr., all of whom rode bikes in the city, and said I would have to remove them, then asked me if Robin Williams was a Democrat and, if so, I would have to remove his name, too.

Why, I asked? Answer: Because we can't have anyone identifiably a Democrat in the list. The names have to be vetted at City Hall.

The DoT was not amused by my asking could they vouch that young Andrew Giuliani, the son of the mayor, rode a bike here. If so, I would be glad to add his name. (I quit rather than comply.)

While Rosenthal had the backbone to tell Giuliani’s little hatchet men to take a flying leap, I wonder how many Republicans will follow in his footsteps?

Laura busted in men’ room, Bin Laden gets his kidney dialysis here, and other previously unreported news

The news that a former French news correspondent, Alex Debat, (that’s him at left) faked interviews for the pretigious French magazine Politique Internationale and may have done so as a consultant for ABC News brings joy to my heart. http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/09/pelosi-greenspa.html

If the “professional” journals are no more reliable than the blogsphere, why can’t we blogists fake a few interviews, too?

Below, my suggested submissions of major news stories, based on authentically faked interviews and genuinely made-up facts:

FIRST LADY ARRESTED IN AIRPORT MEN’S ROOM
Minneapolis: First lady Laura Bush was arrested for disorderly conduct today in a Men’s Room of the Minneapolis airport. Mrs. Bush denied the charges claiming that in the first place she wandered in by mistake thinking it was the ladies room, that in second place she was entrapped, and that in the third place the motions she was making only had to do with a practice run at applying her lipstick, and fourth, she thought that if she pled guilty to disorderly conduct and went home, the whole thing would go away. Furthermore, she said, “I was only looking for George…”

OSAMA BIN LADEN GETS KIDNEY DIALYSIS AT WALTER REED ARMY HOSPITAL
Washington: In an exclusive interview, top terrorist Osama Bin Laden revealed today that he has been getting regular kidney dialysis treatments at Walter Reed Army Medical Center under the auspices of the CIA. The super-secret U.S. intelligence agency, he said, thinks his name is Hassan Ben Gladhand, and that he is an informant from Beirut. “During my last debriefing,” he said with a chuckle, “I told them I had definite information that Bin Laden was in Iraq running an Al Qaeda operation there, and also that they are definitely ‘winning’ the Iraqi war. The dummies bought it hookah, line and sinker…”

GEORGE BUSH PLANS TO DECLARE MARTIAL LAW IN THE U.S. AND REAPPOINT HIMSELF TO THE PRESIDENCY
Washington: Faced with continued gloomy news about public support for his Iraq policy, President George Bush today revealed that the nation “needs me too much” to replace him and that therefore he has called off the Presidential election, declared martial law, and named himself President for Life. “This is the only way we can continue our winning policy and war against terrorism,” he said in an exclusive interview.


TANTRUM-THROWING RUDY GIULIANI DISCOVERS A “VAST CONSPIRACY TO ELECT HILLARY” BUT NOW PLANS TO RUN AS A WOMAN
Complaining that his rival Hillary Clinton is “too pushy and taking all the attention away from me,” Former New York mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani threw a temper tantrum in front of an interviewer, lay down on the floor and kicked, then held his breath until he turned red. Finally, he began to spit. "Hillary is part of a vast conspiracy to elect Hillary," Giuliani complained bitterly, "but if the electorate wants a woman, I'll run as a woman."

FED UP WITH PRESS ATTENTION, CELEBS
DECLARE A GLOBAL NEWS BLACKOUT
New York: “We’re tired of tabloids, dumb headlines, false and misleading news about us, paparazzi and gossip,” a group of celebrities declared today. They included Tom Cruise, Brittney Spears, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and others. The celebrities had set up a joint press conference to declare, “We will no longer cooperate with the press.”

A view from the toilet: crankily guarded praise of Parisian short-term rental apartments

I recently returned from Paris where my beautiful girlfriend and I – and another couple – rented a two-bedroom apartment for a week instead of checking into a hotel. It was, as they say, an experience. What kind of experience it was depends on which of us you ask.

While I grew more and more enthralled by the flat, the Crank’s girlfriend grew proportionately disenchanted – a living example of how one visitor’s impression of quirky charm is another’s experience of living hell. Or at least of moderately discomforting heck.

The apartment was a two-bedroom triplex. Our bedroom was on the top floor. It offered a panoramic view of the Paris skyline from seven stories up. (That’s mighty high up in Paris.) The upstairs bedroom had an attached bathroom, with a sliding pocket door.

Let’s start with the upstairs bathroom

Here comes the first of the apartment’s quirks. The door to the bathroom was glass, which raised havoc with the notion that somebody sitting on the john in a roughly $3,600-a-week flat ought to be entitled to a bit of privacy.

One the other hand, as the Crank’s beautiful girlfriend pointed out, not entirely pleased, “This is the only apartment I’ve ever been in were I can shit and look at the Eiffel Tower at the same time.” (The photograph above is an authentic view from the toilet.)

Quasimodo’s staircase

Passage from the living to the upstairs or downstairs bedrooms was via a pair of corkscrew staircases so narrow that I found I could only use them by walking sideways. I very nearly expected on the way up to encounter Quasimodo coming down from an unseen belfry.

Again, I found this quirk charming. But the women were not amused. Not only were the stairs no fun to use in high heels, but there was no way to get our luggage up or down the stairs. We had to unpack in the living room, carry our stuff on hangers or cradled in our arms up and down the corkscrews, and then stash our emptied suitcases behind the living room couch.

Attack dog concierge

In a Paris hotel, the concierge is a usually-pleasant person who makes restaurant reservations for you and commands a staff that manages the bellhops and doormen. In Paris apartments, the concierge is part of an entirely different tradition – one that I’m sad to learn is rapidly disappearing. http://www.paristempo.com/concierge.html

Traditionally – and my experience with “traditional” concierges goes back to 1959 – the concierge is a woman of “a certain age” who works for the management of an apartment building as a combination janitor, superintendent and snoop.

She is – one imagines by consequence of some venomous code instituted during the Revolution of 1789 and never repealed – totally humorless, ill-natured and suspicious. Long before the security camera was invented, the gendarmerie of Paris knew they had a reliable record of who came and went in almost any apartment building. That record was the stewing memory of the concierge, tirelessly spying from behind her lace curtained window at the building’s entrance or in its courtyard.

In other words, "the concierge" is a Parisian institution, as integral to the city’s personality as Montmartre or the Seine. Our concierge was all that and more. She was of a certain age plus at least ten. She had all her upper and lower teeth – but only all the ones on the right side of her mouth. Her open-mouthed scowl was a vision to behold, and we beheld it often. She was frequently in an explosive mood. And she had a small, uncheerful dog who never wagged his tail.

The concierge flew into a rage on our arrival because I inadvertently tried to insert the wrong key into the lock that opened the building’s front door.

She flew into a rage again when two members of our party tried to squeeze into the elevator with their luggage on the way up to the apartment. (She professed fear that the weight of two people plus their suitcases would break the elevator cable.)

She put a thumb on our doorbell and kept it there for the full 120 seconds it took me to get to the apartment door one morning. Then she furiously announced that our house phone was off the hook and she could hear every word we were saying. (But she couldn’t understand any of them, since she spoke no English; for all I know, that lack of comprehension was the source of her resentment.)

The concierge’s self-evident ill will had Crank’s girlfriend nearly in tears. I, on the other hand, considered the concierge part of the ambient entertainment. I was no more upset by her than I’d get by watching Peter Lorre or Sidney Greenstreet performing as villians in an old black-and-white movie. In fact, I think she was better than Greenstreet.

Some wag once wrote that it’s silly getting upset because the French hate you – they hate each other just as much. Some Americans may feel annoyed by this. But that's one of the reasons I like going to France.

Meanwhile, vive le Sixieme!

Our apartment was on Rue de Seine, a narrow street lined mostly with art galleries. The quarter is lively 24 hours a day and extra lively at night when the surrounding 6th Arrondissement, as well as the adjacent 5th, seem to turn into a giant singles bar. Every sidewalk café, every restaurant, every ice cream parlor was booming – and at night more with Parisians in their 20s and 30s than with cranky old foreign visitors like me.

With due respect to my political opposite numbers at No-Pasaran – http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com – who find the French largely disagreeable and admittedly have more first-hand experience in France than I can claim – I found that at least the better-off youth of Paris are upbeat and totally counter to tradition and expectations. Alas, if over time the next generation becomes enough like us, there will be no point in going there any more.

Especially not after the last concierge dies off.

Burst housing bubble? Sorry pal, only the “little people” get their bubbles burst.

So I’m just back from Paris and what’s the first thing that greets me in the mail? Why, a report to the terribly, terribly rich from one of their New York real estate brokers, a company called Stribling. (God knows why they think a crank like me possibly could be super rich, or even merely rich. But let 'em dream.)

Entitled, “Mid-Year Luxury Report 2007 – The $5,000,000 and up Manhattan Residential Market,” Stribling's report leaves no doubt whatsoever that the roof is only crashing down on Joe Average and his pathetic adjustable rate mortgage.

Meanwhile the barely-taxed superrich with their $20 million to $1 billion-plus incomes have mega-wads of cash to burn on what Stribling is calling “trophy apartments.”

Says the Stribling report, “…there continues to be an extraordinary amount of money in this market, mostly from the beneficiaries of the hedge fund industry and other areas of Wall Street.”

Hedge fund industry? Aren’t those the guys who keep running to Congress demanding bigger tax breaks for themselves because they’re risking their clients’ money?
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/pm120

Nah, it's not logical. Just greedy.

If you think you just detected a slight flaw in logic, you're right. The hedge fund billionaires want a huge tax break for themselves because they’re risking other peoples’ money. Well hey, if you don’t have the sheer conscience-free nerve of knife-wielding thug, it’s still almost impossible to become a billionaire in this country, the likes of Warren Buffet possibly excepted.

But back to Stribling, the real estate brokers. Stribling reports that in the first half of this year in Manhattan, there were 45 sales of apartments in the cheesy $5 to $10 million range, 18 in the $10 to $20 million range, and six that sold for $20 million and over. That’s for an apartment, dude. You know, one of them things with a living room, a little bitty kitchen for the cook to make your dinner in, a dining room, a couple of bedrooms or maybe three, and perhaps a nice view.

The highest sale so far this year has been for over $33 million dollars. Only five years ago, the highest sale was for $17 million and fewer than half as many people shelled out over $5 million for a place to hang their hats as have so far this year.

"Mortgages? We don't need
no stinking mortgages."

Remember, these are folks whose co-op buildings don’t believe in mortgages. At the very least in most top Manhattan buildings, you’ll be required to put down 50% in cash and to have liquid net worth of at least three times – and I’ve heard of buildings demanding 20 times – what the apartment cost you.

In addition, many of the buildings for the super rich are "all cash" buildings. If you have to apply for a mortgage, the building's co-op board won't let you in.

But $5 to $33 million is still just play money for folks who also have palatial estates in the Hamptons, and travel around in private jets to avoid the nastiness of having to go through airport security lines with their shoes off or have their tranquility disturbed by crying babies back there in tourist class.

It's time to tax 'em
'till they bleed

All the more reason why this nation needs more steeply graduated taxes for individuals whose incomes run in the millions, and an excess wealth tax for people with more than double-digit millions of net worth.

And if you red state readers think you’ll get any love and comfort from the super rich for letting them rob you blind in the stock market and via George Bush’s "compassionate conservative" taxation system that punishes the poor just because they're poor, I refer you to the last paragraph of the Stribling report, which says in part:

“In this global economy, Manhattan should be compared to London, not Lubbock.”

Got that, Lubbock?

Hey, yo! Bye bye until Sepember 12th or so.

That’s it until mid September kiddos. I’m gone. Outta here. On vacation. Resting. Chilling. Laying back. Cooling it. You get the idea.

I’ll be somewhere near a beach a good part of the time. And in the heart of Paris the rest of the time. And I’ll be thinking about anything but this blog.

I mean, I’ve had it for a while with subways that don’t work because it’s raining. With a President of the U.S. who can’t hear any voice that doesn’t say what he doesn’t like to hear. With a mayor whose ego is so bloated he’s seriously considering screwing up the next Presidential election for his own self-gratification. (Somebody, please, teach that man to masturbate like ordinary people.) With waiters who can’t wait, billionaires who can never feel rich enough, and my own slum-grade office space, straight out of Charles Dickens’ worst nightmare.

Sorry, no comments will be posted until my return

As most of my dozen or so loyal readers (and a few Crank haters) know, I screen reader comments at this blog, although only for obscenity potential libel, and threats of physical violence. Since I won’t be here, you won’t be able to post comments until my return, assuming you have any comments.

I’ll be back in September, mad as hell at something or other. Guaranteed.

Sweltering New Yorkers endure a forced march, traffic clogs the streets, and Mayor Bloomberg’s “congestion pricing” won’t fix it

I woke up at 5 AM this morning to the sounds of thunder and a loud tattoo of rain on the air conditioner outside my bedroom window.

By the time I got downstairs to breakfast, CNN was reporting that most of the West Side subways were suffering severe delays or had come to a dead stop due to flooding. Yeah, flooding. The City of New York is getting to resemble a third world country. It rains for two hours and the city's mass transit arteries suffer the municipal equivalent of a stroke.

As I write this, CNN has posted a story saying that the whole subway system, including that on the East Side, is kaput for the moment.

"Due to severe flooding throughout the subway system, there are extensive delays on all subway lines," said a statement from the Metro Transit Authority (MTA). "Customers are advised when at all possible to use bus service." http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/08/nyc.weather/index.html

Bus service? You gotta be kidding!

I figured that it would be crazy to go down into the Number 6 subway line during this kind of mess. Unfortunately, I forgot that you should never put your trust in the Metropolitan Transit Authority. So this morning I hiked over to Fifth Avenue where there are bus lines that would get me fairly close to my office.

Lotsa luck! Where normally there are sometimes four or five people during rush hour waiting at the stop that serves me, there were now about 100 New Yorkers lined up for the next bus – more than could crowd onto a bus even if the bus arrived empty. A bus crawled right past them – already packed too full to take on more riders.

I started to walk. Bus stops further down the line were equally crammed with discouraged would-be riders. But I wasn’t the lone hiker. Platoons of grimly resigned people were trudging toward midtown. It was not a good day for a long walk. The temperature humidity index is supposed to make it feel like 105 degrees by noon today.

Meanwhile, Fifth Avenue was clogged – with buses, taxis, trucks, a few private cars, and lots and lots of limos and chauffeur-driven SUVs. Nothing was moving. Nada. Zip. The city has gridlock growing on its gridlock. The photograph above is just a bit of what I saw.

The goose egg nightmare

What effect would congestion pricing have? On a day like today, draw yourself a huge goose egg.

Desperate commuters from the outlying boroughs – and from the ‘burbs where there are also service “delays” today – desperate commuters can’t very easily walk the five, or ten, or twelve or 40 miles to the office. Even if it costs them two hours or more of extra commuting time in a gridlocked automobile, or an extra eight bucks, they’ll drive.

And on an “ordinary” day?

The guys in the limos won’t miss the eight bucks. The trucks have to get through, no matter what. The taxis will still be here. You may scare away a few automobile commuters, but you won’t achieve more than that.

To the extent that congestion pricing works at all, more hapless commuters than we have today will be driven into the dangerously crowded subways or aboard the jam-packed buses at rush hour. Which will simply make travel easier for limousine-riding billionaires like the mayor. They'll simply pay the eight bucks and laugh all the way to their power breakfasts.

Who wants a practical solution? Not the mayor.

A practical thinker might suggest that if Mayor Bloomberg really wants to get more people on mass transit, the first thing he’d do is work to improve mass transit. Improve the infrastructure and they will come. Drive them into the crumbling infrastructure with a punitive equivalent of a fine for driving and they will merely suffer.

The mayor might try to find way to help speed up construction of the under- construction- for-40-years Second Avenue Subway. Find funds to help the Metropolitan Transit Authority (admittedly not under his control) put more buses into service. Encourage cyclists instead of having his cops arrest them at every opportunity.

The city’s controller has already suggested something like this – a way to help out but still keep subway riding affordable for the average working stiff.
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/NewsBeats/transit.jsp

But don't count on Mayor Bloomberg for anything like that. Shuffling money around, even for a good cause, won’t get him the kind of notice he wants when he’s running for President. As reported at various times on this blog, the Mayor is definitely out to run as a third party candidate, which will make him the most arrogant spoiler in U.S. politics since Ralph Nader.

Oh yes, as if to confirm the matter once again, the New York Daily News caught the off-guard mayor talking about his presidential ambitions.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/08/08/2007-08-08_juror_mike_was_dc_dreamin-1.html

Hey Bubblehead, how many times do I have to tell you not to shoot your mouth off among strangers on elevators?

Aw c’mon, gimme an effin’ break! A blogger’s union? Who should I strike against? Myself? Qwaaack!

"In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards." --(AP story. Copy and paste the humongous link below.)
http://finance.myway.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt.jsp?section=news&feed=ap&src=601&news_id=ap-d8qr1uk00&date=20070805

Look, dude, I lean slightly to the left, but that doesn’t mean I earn a salary writing this blog. It's a labor of love. Or maybe of insanity. At any rate, there’s no way I figure I could make two cents an hour with what I'm sending out into the blogosphere.

If I go on strike and actually succeed in doubling my salary, I’ll still have zero salary.

If I go on strike to force myself to pay me a salary and win, I’ll have to take money out of my left pants pocket and put it in my right pants pocket. This is probably true of 99 and 9/10ths percent of the bloggers out there.

And then with whom should we, as members of the Blogger's Union, compete for membership? The Newspaper Guild? Not that I have anything against unions, but in order for a union to work, you have to have employees and employers. Maybe we could ignore that and simply oppose any union that isn't our union. We could have a blogger-laborer’s song:

The newspaper union
Is a no-good union
Is a company union
Of the bosses (Hissss)

The Writers’ Guild fakers
And the journalist muckrakers
Are making by the bloggers
Double crosses. (Hisssss)

The Mudochs and the Newscorps
And the Bancroft Clan –
Got ze-ro resistance from the Un-ian
They spread lies in the atmosphere
And finance disaster here
To bring down the blogosphere
With a union.

Tell you what, boys and girls. I’ll work on improving this verse if you go home and re-think unionizing a workforce that mostly works for itself.

Poison-me-Elmo, Dora the Toxic Explorer, and the Deadly Cookie Monster: Killing our kids for the sake of a buck?

I’ve just noticed that Mattel has announced a recall of toys. Evidently, Mattel’s crisis management PR guys must be burning billable hours full-tilt.

It seems someone found lead in the paint on a whole bunch of Mattel toys. Just the thing you don’t want your kids touching or putting in their mouths.

Why is that? Well, according to the National Safety Council, lead poisoning can result in “reduced IQ, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, behavioral problems, stunted growth, impaired hearing, and kidney damage. At high levels of exposure, a child may become mentally retarded, fall into a coma, and even die from lead poisoning.” (URL at the bottom of this post.)

Now look, I’m not criticizing Mattel for recalling what may be toxic toys. In that respect they’re doing the right thing.

But they also must be aware that there may be hell to pay when the stockholders latch on to this. The stock, in Thursday’s generally upward-moving market, fell 40 cents, or 2.7 percent. Things could be worse if customers stop buying Mattel products.

Minimizing the alarm

No wonder they’re minimizing the matter, even as they announce that their stuff may be poisonous. To quote an AP article (URL at the bottom of this piece) that quoted a Mattel honcho:

"We require our manufacturing partners to use paint from approved and certified suppliers and have procedures in place to test and verify, but in this particular case our procedures were not followed," Jim Walter, Mattel's senior vice president of worldwide quality assurance, said in a statement. "We are investigating the cause to ensure such events do not reoccur."

Well, Jim, glad you’re finally “investigating.” But I can’t help noticing that “this particular case” covers 83 different toys. To me that’s eighty-three cases. Eighty-three times how many units have you sold? In how many stores? Equals how many possibly poisoned babies, toddlers and little kids?

Oh, sorry, Mattel is not offering that information.

Who should take the blame for this? Blame Old Man Greed, who has agents ready to poison all of us for a buck every step of the way.

Death for your kids: another fine
product of our outsourced economy

We manufacture hardly anything in this country any more. To save a buck – and put much of that buck toward profits – we outsource just about everything we manufacture and a heck of a lot of stuff we eat to some low-wage corner of the world, There, desperate people can manufacture or grow it on the cheap.

And our prime source of stuff that we once made and grew for ourselves? Why, China, of course. So far, we’ve learned that China has poisoned our dog food, China has poisoned our cat food, China may be poisoning our own human food, and now they’re poisoning our toys. What's next, pharmaceuticals?

Sometimes when this happens, China arrests the president of some poisonous outsource facility and puts a bullet in the back of his head. You can rest assured that this teaches him a lesson he’ll never forget. Guaranteed he’ll never poison us again. Instead, it’ll be someone else’s turn.

What do you do when the enemy
controls your war production?

Other results of outsourcing are just as grave. Roughly two decades ago, I had a chat with the officer of a small conglomerate that was buying up high tech companies and making them more profitable before spinning them off again.

His company had purchased a U.S. military subcontractor that made missile nose cones. Then they moved the manufacturing facility from the United States to Pakistan, which resulted in cheaper labor, lower overhead and higher profits for the conglomerate. Of course there was a small problem.

Pakistan.

If we ever have to chase after Osama Bin Laden on the Pakistan border over Pakistan’s objections, what do we do? Call up the President of Pakistan and say, “Stop blocking those nose cone shipments? We need them to bomb you.”

Not to mention the possibility that Osama himself, as you read this, may be, umm, appropriating missile parts for his own purposes.

If we’re going to fix the problem we need a law that insists that every item sold in this country – and I mean every item – should come with a clear label that designates the country of origin. And we’ve got to ban outsourcing for defense.

And finally, we've got to ban outsourcing, period, from any country were there is a history of selling us impure or poisonous products – before all of us end up either economic prisoners of foreign suppliers, or poisoned by them.

The Republican Kumbaya tango

That noise you hear in the distance is the loud groaning of big business Republicans, wanting to know why we all can’t be nice and international and sing Kumbaya. Funny how they (and yes, some Democrats as well) turn into a bunch of hippies who want to buy the world a Coke whenever what’s really at stake is guarding huge profits at the expense of Americans. And that includes American kids who could be poisoned by their toys.

What’s next? A doll called Lucretia Barbie?


Check out these URLS:

(Note, I’m having linking problems that are making me very, very cranky. If the links don’t link, just copy and paste ‘em. That usually works.

The list of 83 potentially poisonous Mattel toys:
http://www.service.mattel.com/us/recall/39054_IVR.asp?prod=

News report on same:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070802/toy_recall_mattel.html?.v=3

What lead poisoning does to your kids:
http://www.nsc.org/library/facts/lead.htm

“Subway rider Bloomberg?” NY Times reveals my cranky doubts about the mayor's commute were well founded.

Late in June, I crankily noted that Mayor Bloomberg’s supporters say he rides the subway to work every morning. But I had my doubts. I wrote on this blog:

Some of his supporters will rush to tell you he rides the subway himself. Yeah? How often? And at what time of day?

I get on at Lexington and 77th Street, same place as Bloomberg would get on if he takes the subway to City Hall from the station closest to his multi-million dollar private mansion. Funny, I never seen him on the platform. Not ever.

Hey fellow Lexington Avenue Line riders, how often have YOU seen Bloomberg on the subway? (I used to see the late former Mayor Abe Beame on the subway about once every month. He also boarded at Lexington and 77th and he was indeed a regular mass transit rider. Moreover, he was even shorter than Michael Bloomberg, which is saying something.

So it’s not hard to believe that if Bloomberg rides the subway to work at rush hour, people would spot him there.) But finding Bloomberg on the subway at rush hour is about as likely as running into the tooth fairy.

Well guess what, folks. A team of New York Times reporters staked out the mayor’s mansion – not the official residence, which he shuns sleeping in, but his own private mansion on East 79th Street.) Were they inspired by The New York Crank? I dunno. But guess what?

They discovered

• Mayor Bloomberg only commutes via subway part of the time. And not a big part of the time, either.

• Even when he commutes by subway, he gets driven via SUV to the subway.

• He not only gets driven in a high fuel consumption SUV, but another SUV always accompanies his own SUV. That’s two SUVs to get the billionaire Mayor’s hind end to a subway

• He doesn’t even go to the subway station closest to his personal mansion – the same station I use – which may explain why I’ve never seen him there. Instead, he gets driven more than a mile to a less crowded subway station where he can catch a faster train.

All of which makes him as much of a typical commuter as I am free of cranky moods and loathing for this mayoral phony.

This is the man who piously tells us to stay out of cars to reduce traffic and pollution in New York.

He sanctimoniously tells us that an $8 charge for driving south of 86th Street will decrease congestion – which it will, for himself and his co-billionaire friends in their own SUVs, for whom $8 means less than eight cents to you and me.

Meanwhile, those New Yorkers who can’t afford a chauffeur-driven ride to the subway and an $8 tax for accepting it, sweat it out in the real commuting world.

What’s Michael Bloomberg’s real reason?

I’d be willing to hazard a cranky guess at several secret Bloombergian motives:

1. Despite his protestations to the contrary, it is evident that Michael Bloomberg is considering a run for the Presidency as a third party candidate – sort of a Ralph Nader spoiler with a few billion extra bucks in his pants pocket to blow on screwing up the election and throwing it to a Republican successor.

2. Here in New York, his school reorganization, despite Mayor Bloomberg's own advertising to the contrary, isn’t achieving much of anything. To claim he did something important, he’s grabbing at straws, like an $8 daily automobile use tax. (Disclosure of sorts: I do not own an automobile. You’d have to be crazy in this town just to pay the garage rental of $600 a month and up, not counting existing taxes and New York automobile insurance rates.)

3. Mayor Bloomberg is after the half billion bucks the Federal government will award the city if he enacts his plan, no matter how ill-advised the plan is or how much damage it does to the middle class. He may need the dough – plus the revenues his daily automobile use tax will generate – to balance his budget, since he doesn't plan on kicking in any of his own personal loot. Please remember: I dunno this for sure. I’m only speculating

4. With a daily tax on people who need to drive below 86th Street plus the half billion of federal greenback largesse for enacting the plan, watch him declare if he runs for President that he never raised taxes. Even though the $8 fee is a tax on every person who buys something delivered below 86th Street, or who pays for services below 86th Street.

So what can I say to Mayor Bloomberg? Only one thing:

Liar, Liar, yer pants on fire.

Check out this New York Times blog:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/shadowing-the-mayor-of-new-york/

Or read the whole Times article here:
(Sorry, you'll have to copy and paste this one into your browser)

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nyregion/index.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1185998905-VjnVbYs/wuBPxJzjlIcWng