Koch did a decent job and was sort of normal for a Dem. Dems were no so nuts in those days.
It went to Hell under Dinkins -- this was the Big Slide -- and Giuliani cleaned it up after Dinkins.
Bloomberg was sort of OK, but a hard core leftist.
De Blasio destroyed it completely and drove it into the cess pool of bad leftist policies and Adams is even worse.
There is absolutely zero optimism that there is any positive development in NYC in the near term future. It became a sanctuary city, got its desired illegals, and is now in the ICU awaiting its death certificate.
It is worth saying that what we would consider a Kock Dem back in the day is an extreme MAGA right wing sentiment. That is how far left the country has drifted.
All right, I agree with the "Let it Burn" ideas....how bad are people willing to let it get before they demand change. The problem: Many of the highest GDP areas of our country are in the areas you and I would let burn. Can they be replicated? Maybe, or maybe but with far greater costs-or maybe they can't be replicated at all.
Also, when NYC goes down and is full of delinquents, they come for you and rob your house.....Already happening in the suburbs of Chicago.
I am not of the mind to let it -- our formerly great cities -- burn.
I am of the mind to:
1. Re-state and recommit to basic American values as contained in our founding documents.
2. Re-invigorating law enforcement and doing away with all the bullshit "no parole" programs and the legalization of drugs (talking to you, Oregon, who now wants to reverse their nonsense)
Clean out the gangs from projects everywhere (talking to you, Chicago)
3. Re-invigorating K-12 education to deliver graduates who can find and do jobs, re-invigorate trade school and vocational training
4. Creating a program of 2 years of mandatory national service for men and women built around the military, nursing, senior living, parks, and public maintenance.
5. Dramatically reducing the magnitude of gov't and the taxes needed to fit Jabba the Hutt.
I want America back again. I want the America that came together to win World War II and that supports the American Dream.
I want NORMAL and normal has been on sabbatical for a long time.
If conservatives, or republicans want to win elections they need to start screaming about social issues. All the time. Working class voters don't have the time to consider the implication of market driven forces even though they affect their lives, but they will easily understand which party will kill a baby after it's born and take your young son away from your family for sex reassignment. It often works, and even when it doesn't it moves the conversation towards the right. Frame the issues in the boldest terms and force the left to react. A lot of republicans were embarrassed by Lee Atwater or Tom Perdue but they won elections, and even when they didn't, the conversation changed. Now is not the time to worry about what is said about you at the country club.
Agee with a lot of this. Not all but a lot. Cities have always had their "shit hole" areas. I remember back in the 50's going to the NYC Auto and Boat shows with my dad. He would sometimes drive though the areas where the Squeegee Men would hang out. They'd come up, spit on the car window, rub it with their dirty sleeve and hope (expect?) a quarter or 50 cents.
Back then you could easily avoid those areas. Drive a few blocks one way or another and you bypassed them. They were contained. I think all cities have had those areas probably dating back to Rome and before. As long as they were contained you could go "slumming" and get a cheap thrill. Lock your car doors.
But the secret was containing the area. Like cancer once they metastasized and spread into the body politic, it's game more or less over, without radical surgery, which no one was willing to do.
SF had some bad areas, but few and more great ones than bad. If you went looking for trouble you could find it but if you didn't you could avoid it, mostly.
People with money want power, people with power want money. If you look at dictators like Hitler, Stalin, etc. They had power, also very rich compared to others at the time. Hitler's face was on a lot of stamps, got paid for every use of his image. A copy of Mein Kampf was given to everyone getting married. Hitler got paid for every one. People gave him stuff, built the Eagles Nest for him. Why? They wanted to be close to Power so they could get money.
It's not money or power. It's money And power. Capitalism leads to rich people becoming powerful. Socialism leads to powerful people becoming rich. Communism leads to powerful people acting like they are rich because they control the state and the state pays for everything. Nancy, Mitch, just about all of them. Don't need a private airplane if the USAF will fly you anywhere you want to go. Act like Taylor Swift without having to pay anyone. Sigh me up.
In business if you make bad decisions you fail. If things happen like Depressions or bad recessions you might and probably will fail. In government you don't fail because you can count on the tax payer to bail you out. See CA's train to nowhere as a good example. No matter how many bad or stupid decisions are made it doesn't affect the polices. Why? No consequences for the people making them. They get voted out of office, so what? Get a teaching gig at Harvard a la Lightfoot. Someone or some group will always step in and bail you out. That is their safety net.
That's where you are right about the R's. They will always stop in and bail the D's out. Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and then congratulate themselves. They want the praise of people who despise them. And it isn't all economics. A lot of it is ego. After a while, I think ego becomes a bigger player than economics. Honorary Ph.D's, speaking gigs with TED Talks, paid lectures, ghost written books. Money+praise+influence=Power. Power+praise+influence=Money. E=MC^2 or M=E/C^2. Same equation either way.
The R's remind me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where he keeps drawing a line in the sand, daring Yosemite Sam to step over in and then the next one and then the next one, until Sam falls off the cliff. He always falls for it, so do the R's.
Amok is an interesting word. It is one of the few words in American English whose origin is not Latin, Greek, or German. It comes from the Malay language and refers to an involuntary behavior caused by an evil spirit occupying one's body. Rumor is that American soldiers from World War II brought the word to the US from the Philippines. "Boondock" is another word imported from the Philippines after World War II.
Great post. Despite all of the crazy and signs of people waking up, I really don’t think normal people even yet realize the extent to which the government is being weaponized against us. They still think the government and media want to help people. There will be a lot more pain before things get better. If they ever do.
The sick and twisted view of the power addicted people in positions of authority is that they seem to think they're taking the high moral road by not focusing on money rather than power and consolidation of it amongst themselves and their friends.
They erroneously believe that they and they alone have grasped this seemingly esoteric concept that power and influence being more important than money gives them the moral higher ground and justifies their insistence that what they are doing is for the greater good, rather than an insult to the intelligence of the average citizen.The deleterious effects on those in socioeconomically impoverished communities(and the middle class) seems not to dissuade them one iota and they continue to throw good money after bad, much like the foolishness of if something doesn't work, even though it's wrong, try harder and spend more to continue doing the same wrong thing with more effort, instead of changing what's being done that hasn't worked. The insanity definition. Meanwhile, their condescending arrogance forbids them from admitting they have made mistakes. It's a vicious cycle that has them obsessed with this idea of societal nirvana and a refusal to understand that theory does not always translate to reality, and anyone who disagrees with their vision must be ignorant.
I truly believe, deep down that unless Donald Trump gets re-elected, and that's not to say he is the best choice of anyone in the country, but he is the only one with a legitimate chance to stand up to that structure to which you refer, we are going to see a much more rapid erosion in quality of life in this country that will emanate outward from our deteriorating inner cities in this country that are Democrat run.
Take for example Chicago-the east side of Oak Park has already seen the influence of the dangerous crime and street gang influence in the Austin neighborhood on the city border.
Every big city in this country with a Democrat mayor has at least one or two suburbs like that, which were successful examples of affluent integrated Suburban communities that are now being overrun with violent crime, due to the laissez faire attitude with addressing street gangs' influence.
Complacency in the halls of power and allowing a comfort level with the status quo is just as dangerous as an individual getting complacent and sedentary as he or she ages and the effects are barely noticeable on a daily or weekly or even monthly basis, but the intermediate to long term erosion of the quality of life shows up every year with a more haggard face, slower movement, apathetic attitude and worsening physical condition, which in the case of this analogy the worsening physical condition is the skyrocketing debt, the skyrocketing crime rates, and the skyrocketing taxes all of which can destroy a city, a county, a state, and a country in a decade or less.
Simultaneously pitiful and laughable, but it's not so funny when we're the ones impacted by it.
Oak Parkers are some of the most liberal in the entire nation. Their school system in the 1960s was tremendous. It's terrible now. (Same with Evanston, or Evanstan...)
Same thing with my old stomping ground, Evanston, where I lived in the mid 80s. It is simultaneously sad and rewarding to see the cuckoos at NU getting all woke, or more accurately, woker, while the east side of Evanston is becoming a hell hole and has been for at least two and a half decades, but getting progressively worse. Evidenced by this week's shooting where they had campus-wide alert sometime in the last 48 hours.
I must object, on humanitarian grounds, to your report that Biden "lays down and prostates himself". That seems unnecessarily, awkwardly painful. Not to mention visually, for his staff.
I don't understand why anyone would think the new crop of Republicans is any less corrupt than any previous set. Trump himself has ripped off small donors to fund his legal costs. Not to mention Trump Trading Cards and Trump Tennis Shoes. TPUSA is a grift run by an at least antisemite adjacent entertainer. Etc.
Republicans need to find candidates that appeal to voters outside the base. Proft thought Bailey was a good candidate. My dog probably could have got as many votes as he did outside of the base. Some of the social stuff is OK to talk about. But some of it makes the Rs look absolutely nuts.
The Republicans are a bunch of pussy's they just go along with the status quo. I live in Illinois when Jack Ryan got kicked off the ballot in Illinois. The clowns in Illinois got Allen Keys to run against Obama and you know what happened after that. The Republicans today are afraid to fight they go with the flow. I think that is why people like Trump are well liked by the public. He says it like it is and doesn't hold back.
It is literally impossible to be a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. What you are is an idiot who obviously had no idea what they are talking about. Though those terms in my book are all wrong. You are either a classical liberal politically or a week-kneed communist if you live in the west. The old term used to be fiscal conservative and social liberal, which is still just asinine, but closer to the truth. So one side you want all sorts of lax laws and or very few laws as it relates to your business and economic dealings. However, you want all sorts of laws on the other side protecting and allowing all sorts of things that have been known to end nations/societies from within- see Rome. Of course if you want all of these things, which some do in this country, I don't actually mind that but one thing is for sure, you are not damn well paying for all of it with my tax money. That is where the first part of this should be incompatible with the second part in so much as that is what has been done in the United States and much of the western world. They allow for all sorts of just insane things, letting what are insane people do whatever they want, which once again is fine with me, but don't you dare use my money to subsidize what was rightly once deemed as a sign of insanity and or coming from some sort of mental health issue.
Here is the tenure of New York City mayors:
Edward I. Koch 1978-1989
David N. Dinkins 1990-1993
Rudolph W. Giuliani 1994-2001
Michael R. Bloomberg 2002-2013
Bill de Blasio 2014-2021
Eric L. Adams 2022-
Koch did a decent job and was sort of normal for a Dem. Dems were no so nuts in those days.
It went to Hell under Dinkins -- this was the Big Slide -- and Giuliani cleaned it up after Dinkins.
Bloomberg was sort of OK, but a hard core leftist.
De Blasio destroyed it completely and drove it into the cess pool of bad leftist policies and Adams is even worse.
There is absolutely zero optimism that there is any positive development in NYC in the near term future. It became a sanctuary city, got its desired illegals, and is now in the ICU awaiting its death certificate.
It is worth saying that what we would consider a Kock Dem back in the day is an extreme MAGA right wing sentiment. That is how far left the country has drifted.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
"is now in the ICU awaiting its death certificate." Just like my hometown Chicago are! Well said Mr Minch!
It is really a shame as those were two great American cities and now I can't bear to go there.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Criminal the level of stupidity by the average low information voter!
All right, I agree with the "Let it Burn" ideas....how bad are people willing to let it get before they demand change. The problem: Many of the highest GDP areas of our country are in the areas you and I would let burn. Can they be replicated? Maybe, or maybe but with far greater costs-or maybe they can't be replicated at all.
Also, when NYC goes down and is full of delinquents, they come for you and rob your house.....Already happening in the suburbs of Chicago.
I am not of the mind to let it -- our formerly great cities -- burn.
I am of the mind to:
1. Re-state and recommit to basic American values as contained in our founding documents.
2. Re-invigorating law enforcement and doing away with all the bullshit "no parole" programs and the legalization of drugs (talking to you, Oregon, who now wants to reverse their nonsense)
Clean out the gangs from projects everywhere (talking to you, Chicago)
3. Re-invigorating K-12 education to deliver graduates who can find and do jobs, re-invigorate trade school and vocational training
4. Creating a program of 2 years of mandatory national service for men and women built around the military, nursing, senior living, parks, and public maintenance.
5. Dramatically reducing the magnitude of gov't and the taxes needed to fit Jabba the Hutt.
I want America back again. I want the America that came together to win World War II and that supports the American Dream.
I want NORMAL and normal has been on sabbatical for a long time.
But, hey, that's just me.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
If conservatives, or republicans want to win elections they need to start screaming about social issues. All the time. Working class voters don't have the time to consider the implication of market driven forces even though they affect their lives, but they will easily understand which party will kill a baby after it's born and take your young son away from your family for sex reassignment. It often works, and even when it doesn't it moves the conversation towards the right. Frame the issues in the boldest terms and force the left to react. A lot of republicans were embarrassed by Lee Atwater or Tom Perdue but they won elections, and even when they didn't, the conversation changed. Now is not the time to worry about what is said about you at the country club.
Agee with a lot of this. Not all but a lot. Cities have always had their "shit hole" areas. I remember back in the 50's going to the NYC Auto and Boat shows with my dad. He would sometimes drive though the areas where the Squeegee Men would hang out. They'd come up, spit on the car window, rub it with their dirty sleeve and hope (expect?) a quarter or 50 cents.
Back then you could easily avoid those areas. Drive a few blocks one way or another and you bypassed them. They were contained. I think all cities have had those areas probably dating back to Rome and before. As long as they were contained you could go "slumming" and get a cheap thrill. Lock your car doors.
But the secret was containing the area. Like cancer once they metastasized and spread into the body politic, it's game more or less over, without radical surgery, which no one was willing to do.
SF had some bad areas, but few and more great ones than bad. If you went looking for trouble you could find it but if you didn't you could avoid it, mostly.
People with money want power, people with power want money. If you look at dictators like Hitler, Stalin, etc. They had power, also very rich compared to others at the time. Hitler's face was on a lot of stamps, got paid for every use of his image. A copy of Mein Kampf was given to everyone getting married. Hitler got paid for every one. People gave him stuff, built the Eagles Nest for him. Why? They wanted to be close to Power so they could get money.
It's not money or power. It's money And power. Capitalism leads to rich people becoming powerful. Socialism leads to powerful people becoming rich. Communism leads to powerful people acting like they are rich because they control the state and the state pays for everything. Nancy, Mitch, just about all of them. Don't need a private airplane if the USAF will fly you anywhere you want to go. Act like Taylor Swift without having to pay anyone. Sigh me up.
In business if you make bad decisions you fail. If things happen like Depressions or bad recessions you might and probably will fail. In government you don't fail because you can count on the tax payer to bail you out. See CA's train to nowhere as a good example. No matter how many bad or stupid decisions are made it doesn't affect the polices. Why? No consequences for the people making them. They get voted out of office, so what? Get a teaching gig at Harvard a la Lightfoot. Someone or some group will always step in and bail you out. That is their safety net.
That's where you are right about the R's. They will always stop in and bail the D's out. Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and then congratulate themselves. They want the praise of people who despise them. And it isn't all economics. A lot of it is ego. After a while, I think ego becomes a bigger player than economics. Honorary Ph.D's, speaking gigs with TED Talks, paid lectures, ghost written books. Money+praise+influence=Power. Power+praise+influence=Money. E=MC^2 or M=E/C^2. Same equation either way.
The R's remind me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where he keeps drawing a line in the sand, daring Yosemite Sam to step over in and then the next one and then the next one, until Sam falls off the cliff. He always falls for it, so do the R's.
Love your stuff. Makes me think
Amok is an interesting word. It is one of the few words in American English whose origin is not Latin, Greek, or German. It comes from the Malay language and refers to an involuntary behavior caused by an evil spirit occupying one's body. Rumor is that American soldiers from World War II brought the word to the US from the Philippines. "Boondock" is another word imported from the Philippines after World War II.
Excellent. Thanks.
Great post. Despite all of the crazy and signs of people waking up, I really don’t think normal people even yet realize the extent to which the government is being weaponized against us. They still think the government and media want to help people. There will be a lot more pain before things get better. If they ever do.
The sick and twisted view of the power addicted people in positions of authority is that they seem to think they're taking the high moral road by not focusing on money rather than power and consolidation of it amongst themselves and their friends.
They erroneously believe that they and they alone have grasped this seemingly esoteric concept that power and influence being more important than money gives them the moral higher ground and justifies their insistence that what they are doing is for the greater good, rather than an insult to the intelligence of the average citizen.The deleterious effects on those in socioeconomically impoverished communities(and the middle class) seems not to dissuade them one iota and they continue to throw good money after bad, much like the foolishness of if something doesn't work, even though it's wrong, try harder and spend more to continue doing the same wrong thing with more effort, instead of changing what's being done that hasn't worked. The insanity definition. Meanwhile, their condescending arrogance forbids them from admitting they have made mistakes. It's a vicious cycle that has them obsessed with this idea of societal nirvana and a refusal to understand that theory does not always translate to reality, and anyone who disagrees with their vision must be ignorant.
I truly believe, deep down that unless Donald Trump gets re-elected, and that's not to say he is the best choice of anyone in the country, but he is the only one with a legitimate chance to stand up to that structure to which you refer, we are going to see a much more rapid erosion in quality of life in this country that will emanate outward from our deteriorating inner cities in this country that are Democrat run.
Take for example Chicago-the east side of Oak Park has already seen the influence of the dangerous crime and street gang influence in the Austin neighborhood on the city border.
Every big city in this country with a Democrat mayor has at least one or two suburbs like that, which were successful examples of affluent integrated Suburban communities that are now being overrun with violent crime, due to the laissez faire attitude with addressing street gangs' influence.
Complacency in the halls of power and allowing a comfort level with the status quo is just as dangerous as an individual getting complacent and sedentary as he or she ages and the effects are barely noticeable on a daily or weekly or even monthly basis, but the intermediate to long term erosion of the quality of life shows up every year with a more haggard face, slower movement, apathetic attitude and worsening physical condition, which in the case of this analogy the worsening physical condition is the skyrocketing debt, the skyrocketing crime rates, and the skyrocketing taxes all of which can destroy a city, a county, a state, and a country in a decade or less.
Simultaneously pitiful and laughable, but it's not so funny when we're the ones impacted by it.
Oak Parkers are some of the most liberal in the entire nation. Their school system in the 1960s was tremendous. It's terrible now. (Same with Evanston, or Evanstan...)
oh, Wilmette wants to join in too with their own Migrant response event ... https://trinitywilmette.com/road/
Same thing with my old stomping ground, Evanston, where I lived in the mid 80s. It is simultaneously sad and rewarding to see the cuckoos at NU getting all woke, or more accurately, woker, while the east side of Evanston is becoming a hell hole and has been for at least two and a half decades, but getting progressively worse. Evidenced by this week's shooting where they had campus-wide alert sometime in the last 48 hours.
ETHS is a hollow shell of what it once was.
I was a card carring democrat for 44 years
I knew all the old dirty tricks
But now it’s dirty tricks on steroids bordering illegal or just plain breaking the law
What the want is you
Submit or be eliminated one way or another
I must object, on humanitarian grounds, to your report that Biden "lays down and prostates himself". That seems unnecessarily, awkwardly painful. Not to mention visually, for his staff.
I need an editor, fixed. Thank you
I might be able to help you there.
‘Biden’s staff’: now there’s an awful visual.
I need brain bleach immediately.
Yeah, and also he probably couldn't get back up.
Peter Fitzgerald was the senator, Patrick Fitzgerald was the prosecutor. This was a good Kass column:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2012/05/24/ex-senator-tells-how-he-picked-an-untouchable-patrick-fitzgerald-to-be-us-attorney-in-chicago/
I don't understand why anyone would think the new crop of Republicans is any less corrupt than any previous set. Trump himself has ripped off small donors to fund his legal costs. Not to mention Trump Trading Cards and Trump Tennis Shoes. TPUSA is a grift run by an at least antisemite adjacent entertainer. Etc.
Republicans need to find candidates that appeal to voters outside the base. Proft thought Bailey was a good candidate. My dog probably could have got as many votes as he did outside of the base. Some of the social stuff is OK to talk about. But some of it makes the Rs look absolutely nuts.
Wrong name, I stand corrected
Keep them coming Mr Carter! You're writing modern day pamphlets like our Founding Fathers!
The Republicans are a bunch of pussy's they just go along with the status quo. I live in Illinois when Jack Ryan got kicked off the ballot in Illinois. The clowns in Illinois got Allen Keys to run against Obama and you know what happened after that. The Republicans today are afraid to fight they go with the flow. I think that is why people like Trump are well liked by the public. He says it like it is and doesn't hold back.
Spot On- Crazy
It is literally impossible to be a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. What you are is an idiot who obviously had no idea what they are talking about. Though those terms in my book are all wrong. You are either a classical liberal politically or a week-kneed communist if you live in the west. The old term used to be fiscal conservative and social liberal, which is still just asinine, but closer to the truth. So one side you want all sorts of lax laws and or very few laws as it relates to your business and economic dealings. However, you want all sorts of laws on the other side protecting and allowing all sorts of things that have been known to end nations/societies from within- see Rome. Of course if you want all of these things, which some do in this country, I don't actually mind that but one thing is for sure, you are not damn well paying for all of it with my tax money. That is where the first part of this should be incompatible with the second part in so much as that is what has been done in the United States and much of the western world. They allow for all sorts of just insane things, letting what are insane people do whatever they want, which once again is fine with me, but don't you dare use my money to subsidize what was rightly once deemed as a sign of insanity and or coming from some sort of mental health issue.