A Democrat's prayer (and also a comedian's)

Oh please Lord, let Sarah Palin win the Republican nomination for President. Yes, nominate Sarah, who once revealed to Katie Couric that she doesn’t know the name of a single newspaper, probably because she has never read one. Assuming she knows how to read.

If it can’t be Sarah Palin, Lord, let it be Michelle Bachman, whose ignorance of history makes her a laughing stock.

If it can’t be Michelle Bachman, Lord, let it be the plastic Republican who is named after a baseball glove and who once strapped his dog to the roof of his car and roared down the highway, and who was for Obamacare before he was against it.

If it can’t be Mitt Romney Lord, let it be Paul Ryan, whose plot to kill Medicare has the majority of Americans seething with outrage.

Y’see, I believe that America for some strange reason is coming to its senses. And when the process is complete, the Republicans are finished. I was about to say “the crazy Republicans,” but is there any other kind?

Harold Camping was right. The world absolutely did end on Saturday, May 21st. You simply failed to notice it.

According to a story by Joanne Scheffler in the Cincinnati Enquier, end-of-the-world prophet Harold Campaing is “missing in action” while his radio station is playing nothing but music.

Camping has not made, says Scheffler, “at least an attempt at an explanation as to why his predictions "... have failed again … just like his last on September, 1994.”

Okay, so I have a theory. I know it’s only a theory, but play along with me here.

Suppose the world did end on Saturday. So many of us were left behind that we haven’t noticed any changes. Harold, of course, has gone up to heaven.

Meanwhile, the end of the world is happening, only it’s happening on the slow side. A tornado wipe out a third of Joplin, MO. Do you think that’s simply a coincidence? Than how about the flooding Missouri and Mississippi Rivers?

It’s too late to repent, dudes. You and are doomed. The righteous are already in heaven. As for the rest of us, none of us is getting out of here alive, even if it takes a few decades to die.

Incidentally, you’ll know for sure you’re in Hell if the Republicans take over the Senate as well as the House come the next elections.

New York’s Emperor Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hoodwinked by fairies, seems to think subway beggars have been whisked off to Never-Never Land

So if you regularly ride the New York subways, you’ve heard speeches something like the these a couple of times a week from somebody shaking a filthy paper coffee cup full of coins at you:

“Ladies and gentleman, your attention please. I got AIDS. My wife is in the hospital with TB. I’m homeless. I got three kids to support and one of them is in a wheel chair when he fell out a window on the other two, who are on crutches. I’m a Viet Nam veteran. I lost my job. All I’m asking is that you give me a dollar, a dime, even a penny will help, anything you got….”

“I am part of da United Effort To Help Da Homeless Inc. If you’re carrying a cheese sandwich you don’t need, a ham sandwich you don’t need, a happle you don’t need, anything like dat, we will pass it on to some hungry people. Udderwise, please donate money…”

“I ain’t out there robbing nobody or killing nobody like other people….all I want is money to buy food. Do you want me to have to mug you for it?”

You’ll also occasionally hear people around you muttering, “Why doesn’t the mayor do something about this? This is against the law.”

Well here’s why he’s doing nothing – or at least nothing effective. According a story by Leo Standora in the New York Daily News, during a press conference somebody asked the mayor about panhandlers in the subway. His immediate reaction?

“Bloomberg got irritated when the question of panhandlers came up in a press conference.

He cut off the questioner, saying, "There aren't very many panhandlers left, in all fairness to the MTA. Come on."

Yeah, right. Come on, Emperor Mike. There are also the quartets that come through crowded cars, elbowing riders out of the way to sing do-wop songs or to play mariachi music, followed by some aggressive passing of a hat. There are people with sunglasses banging passengers' shins with white canes while holding out a cup or a hat or a bag.

And did I mention the insane homeless who can empty a car during rush hour while they lie across seats, reeking unbearably of days-old sweat and excreta in their pants, picking lice and bedbugs from their hair and clothing, while laughing insanely, or cursing, or glaring menacingly at the passengers halfway down the car who are trying not to inhale?

Nope, the mayor, who claims to ride the someway to work regularly (although he takes a limousine, escorted by a security detail, to a subway entrance in midtown rather than walk to the one near his private mansion)…the mayor hasn’t noticed any of this.

Maybe he’s just out of touch. Maybe, as the New York Daily News suggested, the security detail that precedes him into the subway at 59^th and Lexington (his home is on East 79^th Street, a mile and two subway stops to the north)…maybe the security detail scares the panhandlers away. Maybe he’s secretly blind and has cotton stuffed up his nose and in his ears.

Or maybe he’s been hoodwinked by his staff, or maybe even by leprechauns or fairies, into believing those aren’t really beggers, they’re tailors who are sewing him a new suit of clothes. After all, the expensively-tailored Bloomberg did in effect declare himself emperor, overturning a term limits law that he had himself supported so he could run for a third term.

Given the Bloomberg bait-and-switch record on term limits and other matters, my guess is that he’s simply a liar.

So is he so out of touch that he doesn’t see or hear about the legions of panhandlers in the New York subways? Or does he see them but pretend they don’t exist? As my pal Hotwire Kellington from down the block during my Brooklyn childhood used to say, “Youse pays yer taxes and youse takes yer cherce.”

Mass murder accessory gets 15 and a half days in jail for each person he helped kill. Not a bad deal (for him) in my opinion.

I read that John Demjanjuk, the former SS. Guard at Sobibor concentration camp during WWII, is biding his time in a nursing home after a court sentenced him to a whopping five years in prison for being a Nazi death camp accessory to 28,060 murders.

I whipped out my handy-dandy calculator (well, actually I clicked on its icon) let the math happen, and calculated that he gets 15.6 days in prison for each person he helped to exterminate.

At that rate, it would pay some enterprising-but-out-of-work person to contract to kill, say, three people at $25,000 a head. You, for example? You'd have to do 46 days plus in prison, but you'd emerge with 75 grand in walking around money. Not a bad tradeoff.

Why such a light sentence?

I get the feeling the legal authorities felt sorry for Demjanjuk. He’s 91, wheelchair-bound, and got schlepped almost straight from court to the tender ministrations of what I suppose are geriatric nursing home nurses. And he had been on trial for two years. Poor baby!

Okay, okay, to be fair to the prisoner, an Israeli court dismissed a conviction against him (which named him as "Ivan The Terrible," a particularly sadistic death camp guard) as a case of "mistaken identity." And Demjanjuk claims he was framed by the Soviets, although it's hard to imagine why they'd go to all that trouble to mess up an otherwise nonentity.

Anyway, he’s not off to the clink yet anyway. He has six months or more of an appeals process coming up, during which he’s free to enjoy his nursing care, so long as he doesn’t leave the country.

My guess is he’ll die of natural causes before the bars ever slam shut behind him . Meanwhile the Ukranian community of Munich will take care of him and his ailments.

And not with gas in a “shower room.”

Too bad. This is almost a case of life imitating art, the art being a 1970-something book by Lawrence Block in his Tanner mystery series called The Case of the Cancelled Czech.

Tanner, a kind of freelance secret agent, captures another doddering former concentration camp killer and wheels him – on a gurney if I remember correctly – to an oven, and shoves the SOB in while he's still alive.

However, real life is so much more civilized than art.

Except when it isn't.

What good is Medicare if doctors won’t accept it? Thank Republicans in Congress if you can’t find an experienced doctor to treat you.

Someone I know in California is 66 and has a heart condition. He’s had open heart surgery in the past. He had to wait six weeks to get to see his own cardiologist.

He’s not alone.

The problem is that while inflation increases, our Republican Congress has been whittling away at reimbursement rates, all in the name of cutting medical costs. Consequently, fewer and fewer doctors are accepting Medicare patients.

What follows is the general impression I get of paperwork that people have been getting from Medicare recently. It certainly feels right:

Your doctor charged: $9,750

For: nine hours of tricky neurosurgery.

We reimbursed him: $18.79.

You may be liable for the balance.

Have a nice day.

Sadly, doctors are being reimbursed at a pinchpenny rate that would bring joy to the heart of Ebenezer Scrooge. Yes, we need to control Medicare costs. But the way to start is by allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies, medical equipment makers and other profiteers – the big businesses that are out to make the elderly swallow a bitter pill of backbreaking costs on medications for chronic illnesses. These are costs that no other western country is paying.

Little wonder that last year, the number of doctors accepting Medicare patients dropped to record lows thanks to ridiculous provider payment rates.

And little wonder that Buzzflash.com is declaring, “Eric Cantor implies he supports death panels, as long as insurance companies decide and the rich are exempted.”

As long as the Republicans keep driving down doctors’ reimbursements we can be sure that:

•Fewer doctors will accept Medicare patients

• More Medicare patients will die or become gravely ill unnecessarily

• Fewer smart and talented people will want to incur the debt for the education it takes to become doctors. Instead, they’ll seek out a career trading subprime securities derivatives – and make billions while the nation grows poorer and sicker.

•Thanks to Republican (and some Democratic) servants of the insurance agency, there will be one class of medical care for the very rich and for Congress. The rest of us can face Republican death panels.

No wonder they’ve carried on about these death panels in the past. The Republicans invented the idea and evidently are champing at the bit to deploy it.

While you were watching the royal wedding this morning...

I'm only kidding. But it's a good thing I'm only kidding. Television news this morning – I toggled between NBC and CNN while I got dressed – was a "vast wasteland" as the late Newton Minnow once put it, of frippery, tomfoolery, and royalty worship.

Hey news viewers, while you were looking at the dowdy hats of the invitees and so-called "news people" (even Meredith Viera was wearing a dumb hat) there was a major shift in diplomatic alliances in Egypt. There were people made homeless by a storm in Alabama. The economy was continuing to "recover" while real people failed to benefit from it, continuing to lose their homes and find themselves unable to get real jobs, or in some cases even "McJobs."

Did I mention that American civilization as we used to know it is slowly slipping down the drain?

But oh, we got to see replays of the first royal kiss. I mean, is that what matters or what?

Send your favorite member of the broadcast media a lump of coal.

Bad News For Believers

According to AOL and the Internet, there is 
either no God, or no Heaven,
or none of either. I present the following evidence:
The line beginning with "<<<" describes 
the specific reason your e-mail could not be delivered.  
The next line contains a second error message which 
is a general translation for other e-mail servers.  
Please direct further questions regarding this 
message to the e-mail administrator or Postmaster 
\at that destination.  --AOL Postmaster      
 ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- 
<God@Heaven.org>     
(reason: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected God@Heaven.org)     -
---- Transcript of session follows ----- 
... while talking to smtp.secureserver.net.: >>>
 RCPT To:<God@Heaven.org> <<< 
550 #5.1.0 Address rejected God@Heaven.org 550 5.1.1 <
God@Heaven.org>... User unknown 

Don’t envy the super rich. After they’ve stolen all your money … their lives, and their spouses' and their children’s lives will be in grave danger.

Some years ago when The Crank’s Beautiful Girlfriend was still alive, the two of us went down to Ecuador. Our intention was to see the Galapagos Islands, but we also let some travel agent talk us into spending four days in mainland Ecuador, escorted by a private guide.

It turned out that we needed our own guide because the experience was not pleasant. As we soon discovered, Quito is a dangerous place. Even in downtown Quito, we were advised that it was unsafe to cross the street at night. I mean that literally. One night, just as the sun had set, we stepped through the front door of our luxury hotel.

“Where are you going?” the doorman asked.

We pointed to another luxury hotel just across the street, where there was a restaurant we had been told was pretty good.

“I’ll call a taxi for you,” said the doorman.

“But it’s only across the street!”

“It is not safe,” insisted the doorman. He blew his whistle. A taxi pulled up. The doorman held the door open for us.

I thought this was a scam to earn a tip for the doorman and a fare for the taxi. Little by little I became convinced it was something else.

Once we exited the taxi across the street I noticed that the driver waited watchfully until we entered the hotel restaurant on that side. Just as we walked in, he pulled away.

It was the same story on the return trip. Another doorman pleaded with us not to cross the street back to our own hotel, except within the safety of a taxi. And again, the taxi waited until we were inside before driving off.

The super rich get to pay for two armed killers at the door

Then, during a ride through one of Quito’s“nicest” neighborhood, we found ourselves getting driven among the hills above town, past nice-looking but not extraordinary suburban-style houses. Most of the houses had a uniformed armed guard with an automatic rifle standing at the front door. A few houses had two armed guards with automatic weapons.

I asked why a smattering of the houses had two armed guards instead of one,

“Oh,” said are guide, “those are the homes of the super rich.”

And that’s when I saw the future of America’s top ten percent of the population that owns and controls seventy-one percent of the wealth.

No, there will be no revolution against them in this country. No chance of the masses rising up and taking control as they did in Egypt and Tunisia.

We eliminated that possibility ourselves when we eliminated the draft. That insured us that instead of having a citizen-soldier army, like the one that refused to fire on their fellow citizens in Egypt, we would have an army loyal to the people who rule – like in Libya. If you mass to protest in a way that will seriously threaten the power structure, you will die in a hail of bullets. Kent State was just a precursor.

Suddenly to be super rich will be to put your life on the line

Instead, what will destroy the quality of life of the super rich will be the cost of attempting to defend themselves from gangs of ambitious thugs who form little fiefdoms led by ruthless and ambitious criminals who kidnap, torture, rob, and kill in order to survive and amass wealth outside of the power structure.

In short, the thugs who are robbing America of our Social Security and Medicare and product safety and education today will live in fear of even bigger thugs tomorrow.

This is how it is these days in most of Mexico, most of Nicaragua, much of El Salvador – in fact in every one of the impoverished Latin American nations where the top few have all the money and power while the people at the bottom struggle desperately to survive. Here’s travel authority Rick Steves talking about it:

The saddest thing about visiting Managua and San Salvador is experiencing the fear caused by the violence that comes with extreme poverty in a big city. Every major hotel and nearly every business has an armed guard. It's unwise to walk around after dark, especially with a big camera. While you're unlikely to be hurt, the risk is that groups of young thugs might just rob you at knifepoint. I found that, rather than whole safe neighborhoods, there were mostly small islands of safety around malls and fancy hotels. A wealthy tourist (and nearly all tourists here are wealthy, in relative terms) happily pays triple for a taxi that works with the hotels so you know you're safe. You generally hop from one safe zone to another by cab.

The future of super wealth in this country will be a future filled with fear of kidnapping. Fear that gangsters will surround your car and shoot your driver, drag you into a truck, chop off your thumb and send it to your family to show that they are truly sincere about wanting all the cash your relatives can put their hands on.

If it's not you who gets kidnapped, then it will be your son. Or your daughter. Or your wife.

Believe me, the “kidnapping tax” rate will be higher than any income tax that any Democrat has ever called for.

Decapitated heads at your font door

Expect to see decapitated private policemen among those who you hired to protect you. Dead guards lying in pools of blood in front of your bullet-riddled front door. Expect to take your daily drive to the office by a different route each day, preferably in a different automobile each day, to confuse those hoping to kidnap you and torture you.

It boils down to often-repeated history: those who sow unreasonably acquisitive greed will reap a whirlpool of blood.

And all when it would be so easy if you simply accepted a marginal tax rate a few points higher than you pay now, rather than demanding a tax cut while you milk the middle class and the poor for their social and medical security, driving them into penury.

Enjoy your money now, pal. It’s going to be hard shuffling your bankroll to count your wad when your thumbs are chopped off.

If you were Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, which half-truth and half-lie would you tell? And should you tell it in a suit or shirtsleeves?

From the “Politicker” Column of the New York Observer comes word that Mayor Bloomberg is “testing” at least two different junk mail packages to see which one does more to support his budget and fading reputation.

One talks about “no new taxes” which sounds nice, until you understand that the “no new taxes” he’s talking about amount to a tax saving for the rich. That would be people like, umm, Michael Bloomberg.

The package also talks about “fighting for new jobs in every borough,” while failing to mention that he plans to put some teachers out of jobs, which amounts to destroying old jobs.

The second package talks about “nearly $2 billion for our schools, while working to keep the best teachers in the classrooms.” That would be nice, if completely true, but again, he’s planning to fire teachers. And since younger teachers earn less than older teachers, what do you want to bet that the “not best” teachers will be mostly older than 50, an age category where new job opportunities are slim?

Clearly the $2 billion isn't a wind blowing a lot of good to most New Yorkers. Mayor Bloomberg knows that compared to his own personal wealth of $18 billion, it's a pittance. Why, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if by the time he retires from politics, Bloomberg will have spent almost a billion bucks just advertising himself.

How William and Kate’s wedding could help Tea Party Republicans destroy Social Security

It’s no secret there’s a Republican plot afoot to “recklessly slash funding to the Social Security Administration” in an attempt to jeopardize its ability “to get vital benefits into the hands of seniors and people with disabilities and provide assistance to the public.”

But how can they get away with it when so many disabled and older Americans rely on Social Security for their very survival?

In the past, Republicans created distractions. Gay marriage. Gays in the military. Abortion. Any emotional wedge issue that could get some Americans so fired up that some of us would forget about our bread and butter issues.

Now the Republican Tea-Party fringe is having an opportunity handed to it on a sterling silver platter. On April 29^th, Prince William and Kate Middleton will be getting married, and our fickle press will turn its full attention, or nearly full attention, to England.

According a piece by Nat Ives in Advertising Age, which follows the networks and the broadcast advertising dollars,

• “CBS's expansive plans include Katie Couric anchoring the evening news from London for three nights starting April 27”
• “NBC News has also introduced a free 'Royal Wedding' iPad app with hundreds of photos, more than 40 new and archival news reports, an interactive royal-family tree and a countdown to the wedding.”
• "Extensive coverage by CNN, which was less than a year old at the time of Prince Charles and Diana's wedding,” has already begun
• "'…and there's going to be so much hype, it's going to be wall-to-wall Will and Kate,’ said Brad Adgate, senior VP-research at Horizon Media. 'I could see people buying DVRs just for this or HD TV sets for the occasion.'”

And on and on. It’s a perfect opportunity for mischievous Republican bullies to put millions of Americans on a cat food diet by cutting their Social Security while the rest of us are focused on Kate's gown, which fewer and fewer of us could afford, since the middle class and working poor only get get tax increases while the rich get tax cuts.

The Republicans do their thuggish work best when the nation is distracted. This time, it’s the royals who could be doing the distracting.

GE: "We bring good spin to lies!"

Caught with its pants down lying and insisting that it did pay Federal income taxes while the truth is it actually didn't, GE tweeted its knickers into a twist. (Okay, so I'm muddling metaphors. So kill me.)

Here's a link to the story by Henry Blodget on Business Insider, called 'WHO'S FULL OF CRAP? GE, the New York Times, And the Hazards of 'Tweeting The Record Straight.'"

You have to read it all the way through to the very bottom, because first it looks like GE is lying, then that it isn't lying, then that it is ... and so on until they get caught red handed (but evidently not red-faced since outright lying is turning into big business standard operating procedure.)

It's time for Congress to come down hard on tax-beating big business. (Yeah, that'll be the day.)

Hey, Bruce Barlett: You can cut Medicare deficits by negotiating with drug companies instead of cutting drug plans, you pill!

Over on the Underbelly blog, my friend Buce observes that Republican opinion-maker and supply-sider Bruce Bartlett is melting down over drug costs that George W. Bush signed into law.

Oh please! Spare me!

Up in Canada, they get the same drugs that Americans get for half the price or less. How? The government negotiates with the drug companies.

Medicare isn’t permitted to negotiate under a law passed because of Republican pressure and a few Dems in the pockets of some drug companies. So the drug companies charge you and me more, and then charge the government more – and that second charge also comes back to you and me in the form of taxes or deficits.

If you cut all the “don’t intefere with business” garbage and simply stuck the fingers of some multi-million dollar salary drug company poobahs into thumb screws, the price would fall faster than a drunk tripping on a curbstone.

There’s more than one way to cut a deficit and effectively robbing millions Americans by drowning them in costs isn’t one of them.

A St. Patrick’s Day memo to the lunatic fringe birthers who think this nation’s President is a Muslim secret agent.

On this St. Patrick’s Day, I’d just like to remind you that his name is O’Bama.

Hey Mom, what’s for dinner? Oh yum! Oh boy! Oh goody-goody! Mealworms and mashed millipedes!

From the New York Times comes a story by John Tagliabue that you really, really gotta read.

Seems that over in Holland, some enterprising butcher is now offering bugs as an alternative to steaks. The idea is to convince Dutch citizens that bugs – from various kinds of worms to caterpillars “are healthier sources of protein, and are less taxing on the environment, than steaks and pork chops.”

Well, that’s true, of course. But the same thing can be said of eating your own uncle’s dead body – a Roast Rump of Unc, for example.

This is the kind of story that inspires my class warfare paranoia. Are the filthy rich really so greedy that rather than pay a nickel in taxes to grow the economy for the rest of us, they find it easier to convince us that food only a lizard would eat is better for us and the environment?

When I see broiled locusts and roast millipedes on the menu at Smith and Wollensky, I’ll believe it.

I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of a restaurant down in Oaxaca, Mexico a couple of years ago where one of the features on the menu was fried crickets.

On the other hand, to get back to one of my earlier points, maybe a fried Republican wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Feel free to contribute your own menu suggestions and recipes. Just try not to make it too vulgar or disgusting, or I’ll throw up over my computer keyboard and won’t be able to hit the post button.

How to solve the growing syndrome of "Name this after me for money, you pathetic starving municipality"

The New York Times cityroom blog is reporting this from Staten Island, New York's most backward borough:

Staten Island Republican Borough President James P. Molinaro (the jerk above, right) wants to sell the naming rights to a public bridge between Staten Island and New Jersey. The bridge will undergo some rebuilding soon.

Anything to avoid taxing the rich contributors to Molinaro's campaign and the incomes of their fellow rich Republicans.

But I have a solution:

What we need is some public-spirited person with a lot of bucks to bid the top dollar to name the bridge, "The Borough President James P. Molinaro Is An Asshole" Bridge.

Whaddya wanna bet, if that happens, that Molinaro starts walking his idea backwards?

Disastrous oil spills in Nigeria: Royal Dutch Shell says, "The Rebels done it." Yeah, and I'm the Tooth Fairy.

Check out this report in the Guardian. It makes the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf BP spill feel like a walk in the park.

Full disclosure: I came upon this Guardian story because I own stock in Royal Dutch Shell and I was looking for info that might help me understand why the stock price has been dropping in a generally-rising market – rising for stocks, rising for petroleum.

Maybe it's those 1,000 spill cases filed against Shell, one for over a billion bucks. Maybe it's time for me to sell my Shell stock.

Here's the answer to Scott Walker’s drive to bust up public employee unions. Organize more private employee unions.

I’m an old guy. When I was a kid growing up in middle-class Brooklyn, every other kid I knew had a union member in the family. That’s why we were middle class in the first place. It was the unions that got our families living wages, job security, and the promise that retirement wouldn’t get lived out in penury.

It was the unions that saw to it our parents had enough money to send us to college, where the first rate professors had tenure thanks to their own union, the American Association of University Professors.

Unfortunately, it was also in college that most of my classmates became “professionals” – which, with the exception of the doctors and the lawyers, had no meaning other that we didn’t wear a blue collar to work. With their new-found and meaningless "professional status," most of my contemporaries looked down their noses at unions.

For years I worked for ad agencies. We hired actors who received a royalty (called a “residual”) each time they appeared on television in commercials we wrote. Ditto radio announcers. The actors belonged to one of several unions – the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, Actors Equity – that saw to it that each time they helped make money for an advertiser, the advertiser paid them again.

In Hollywood, writers belong to a union and get residuals, too. But not in advertising. Ad writers anywhere in America work at the pleasure of their bosses. You could write a slogan and a commercial that stay on the air and in print for years. The agency will make money. It’s client will make money. And you can be fired the day after you write it. And get nothing.

So advertising people need to organize into unions. So too, office workers, broadcast technicians, marketing analysts, lab technicians, sales clerks and others. Let the bosses who milk your work and live in mansions ,while you live day-to-day making the money they steal from you to do it, know that the union will make you strong. You want your pension. You want your healthcare. You want your boss to pay for it. And if you don’t get yours, not only will your union go out on the street, but so will all the other unions that print, or manufacture, or warehouse, or sell what you make. And your union will do the same for them.

If we can get even a quarters of the Americans working in offices to unionize again, we can see the end of campaign financiers like the Koch Brothers yanking the strings they've got tied around the testicles of their little pull toys like Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker. The unions will have enough money to equal the ad expenditures of the Koch brothers. And they'll be able, via general strikes, to bring any state to its knees for refusing to negotiate with its own employees. Or any rapacious private corporation.

Call any existing union near you. Ask how they can help you get the workers in your own office unionized. Then go do it! And tell the bosses they can go thank Scott Walker that their own employees are unionizing.

This is a photograph of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin:

I’m kidding of course. But also I’m not kidding. Governor Walker’s high-handed, bullying and autocratic ways would have fit right in with the way “President” Hosni Mubarak ran Egypt as a private dictatorship, before crowds of angry citizens drove him out.

In case you’ve just flown in from Mars and missed the Wisconsin story, Walker says he’s trying to solve Wisconsin’s budget crisis – a crisis he and the Republican legislature manufactured by pushing through tax cuts that left Wisconsin with a budget shortfall. His "solution" is to deprive the state’s teachers and some of its civil servants of the right to bargain collectively.

The state’s workers are justifiably outraged. They’ve been gathering by the many tens of thousands in Madison, the state’s capital, to protest peacefully – a demonstration strongly resembling the demonstrations that brought down Mubarak.

Walker has been following Mubarak’s strategy. First he refused to budge. Then people in his party began offering too little, too late. What appeared to be a trial balloon was sent up by State Senator Dale Schultz. It called for unions to lose their collective bargaining rights, just the way Walker wants, but then to have them reinstated in two years. "I'm robbing you at gunpoint now, butI'll make it up to youy two years from now.” Yeah, right.

The teachers and civil service unions are crazy if they buy into any union-busting offer – and so far they haven't. Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic legislators are staying out of state so that the Republicans can’t gain a quorum and ram through a revision of elementary workers’ rights.

Let’s hope the unions have the gumption to keep on staying out there demonstrating until the state comes to a halt and the governor, like his look-alike Mubarak, has to resign and flee.

And let’s hope that just the way the movement that brought down Mubarak after it spread from Tunisia has now spread to Algeria and Libya, the movement to stop Republican autocracy will spread from state to state, bringing down one arrogant Republican governor after another.

Got nothing to do this weekend? If you’re in Wisconsin, join the peaceful demonstration and help bring Hosni-Mubarak-Walker to his knees.

Note on another subject: I am still mourning the Crank's Beautiful Girlfriend and will be posting only sporadically for the next few months.

The Crank's beautiful girlfriend – a eulogy

The Internet is a tricky medium. Even under cover of relative anonymity, I don’t want to say anything that might help some people identify the Crank’s beautiful girlfriend. She had a flawless professional reputation. She had patients (she was a doctor) of many political hues. I would not want them thinking any less of her because she was romantically involved with some cranky guy who keeps leaning to the left.

That said, I should tell you first of all that she really was beautiful. I’m an older guy and she was not born yesterday either, but she seemed to transcend her chronological age. She still got whistled at in the streets. We would go out with other couples, and occasionally, the unscrupulous male half of the other couple would try to sneak around my back and hit on her. She was a stunner.

She was also brilliant: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from an ivy college that she attended on full scholarship. Way up there in her class in one of the nation’s best medical schools, which she also attended on scholarship. A role model later on to other doctors whom she taught and supervised in her specialty. She was utterly charming, with eyes that sparkled when she smiled and a sense of humor that could reverse my darker moods in an instant.

When I first met her I was in high school and she was in what in those days people called “junior high.” When we caught up with each other nearly a half century later, it was love at second sight. Within a few months she invited me to move in with her. I would have to have been certifiably insane to say no.

There followed the seven happiest years of my life. Her friends and daughter tell me it was also the seven happiest years of her own life. What comes to mind is a verse by Edgar Allen Poe:

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

Went envying her and me—

Yes! That was the reason (as all men know,

In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of a cloud one night,

Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee

In my beautiful girlfriend’s case it wasn’t a wind. It was a cerebral event that put her in into a hospital where she lost her hold on life a few inches at a time until finally her family acceded to her living will and asked that the respirator be removed.

There is no justice to it. She should have lived. If either of us died, I should have died first, because men usually do die younger than their women and I was older than she. She had more emotional resources to bear my death than I have to bear hers. But there you are. Fate pays precious little attention to the people and their needs. It just does what it does.

There will be no politics from me today, my friends. Instead, let me just tell you to hold those you love close to you, hug them tightly, tell them every day that you love them, and enjoy every minute you have with them.

I’ll be back to this space when I’m feeling more like a functioning human being. For the moment, I’m simply lost in grief.

The New York Crank is Temporarily On Hiatus

The Crank's beautiful girlfriend has had a serious accident and is in the hospital. There will be no further posts until she heals.

I'll be back when she's better.