Category → Government Of the People…
The War on Women
I dunno…Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner, all three past or present elected officials still in office or running for office, and all three serial abusers/ users/ objectifiers/ harassers of women on the job and off….and all three are NOT Republicans.
We heard all about the supposed Republican war on women last year, and it didn’t make any sense to me, but here we have three public officials with lengthy records of using women, and…the silence is deafening.
Filner won’t resign from his mayor job, and both Spitzer and Weiner have no shame running again. If a Republican tried to get away with anything close to what any of these guys have done, he’d be lynched in the street.
Double standard, anyone?
Benghazi…the Government failure that just won’t go away
President Obama calls the uninvestigated, unrequited, unavenged murders of unprotected American embassy personnel in Benghazi, Libya, a “false scandal.”
Benghazi isn’t going to go away. It is a far worse scandal than the 1980s Iran-Contra arms smuggling scandal. Benghazi is worse because it involved illegal gun-running by American staff, and because now staff with direct knowledge of the events surrounding Benghazi are being submitted to monthly lie-detector tests to make sure they are not leaking information.
Obama will learn that it’s the attempted coverup that is usually worse than the original crime.
And what’s with a guy who pledged transparency and accountability in 2009, but now has so much illegal wiretapping and snooping against American citizens going on that he has to run around jailing people who want to whistleblow on his illegal actions?
What happened to Carter Ham and Admiral Gaudet?
American liberty hangs by a thread, and I find it distressing that so many people are much more loyal to a single political party than they are to the US Constitution.
Disconnect between Democrat chiefs and braves on gas drilling
Interesting wrinkle hasn’t really bubbled up yet into the governor campaign. That is the odd policy adopted a month ago among state Democratic leaders to embrace a gas drilling moratorium.
While to my knowledge none of the Democratic candidates for governor have embraced this policy, only one that I know of has strongly repudiated it. That’s John Hanger.
Hanger recently wrote that “if you support environmental quality, you support gas drilling.”
While Hanger’s polling numbers are on the radar but low among a field of candidates so large that it looks like a Hubble photo of some huge constellation, his prospects are looking better and better. By hewing to a moderate, common sense set of policy positions, Hanger is increasing gathering followers. My understanding is that Hanger does not support more gun control, which is my litmus test for a serious candidate in either party.
Natural gas is about the only thing going on in Pennsylvania right now. And for the future, too. Prospective leaders like John Hanger get my respect for acknowledging that and not playing to fake fears.
Harrisburg Auction Does Well
With the moose head, elk rack, and bison skull in the back of my pickup truck, I can look past Guernsey’s poor organization that kept me and dozens of other buyers standing in line, in the heat, for no apparent reason.
Today’s bidding at the carousel on City Island was surprising. People were paying top dollar for every little item brought before them. Auctions typically have “nests” of buyers who are interested in particular types of things. Today, bidding was highly competitive across the entire audience and from all corners of the room.
Once again, Steve Reed may have screwed up, but it’s rare that screw-ups get redeemed so well. The cit
-tay is raking in big cash. Ironic as it is that the warehouse full of artifacts is literally in the shadow of the anchor, errr, incinerator.
I’m sad to see this part of our city’s history end. But if the address on the crate holding my moose is any indication, it’s a period and way of doing business we need to improve on in the future. The crate says :”To Brian Kelley, Museum, S 19th Street…,” which is the exact location of the city’s incinerator. What kind of a loony bin was being run here?
Harrisburg’s Wild West Auction
Internationally famous as my city is, it’s not because we were one of the first municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Rather, it is due to our former mayor’s penchant for collecting western frontier artifacts on the public dime.
Derided as a careless buyer with Other People’s Money, former mayor Steve Reed was hounded out of office for his investment of about $8.1 million of public funds in these western artifacts.
I had no idea how many he had purchased, and how keen his eye was, until I visited the warehouse where they were all stored last week. My God, the place was the proverbial and de facto Wild West Museum that Mayor Reed had long sought to build.
Everything in it was incredible. One of a kind, extremely rare, irreplaceable iconic artifacts symbolic and piercingly representative of our nation’s western frontier experience.
Mayor Reed was an incredible mayor, up until the point where he wasn’t. It took an international recession to take him down, and expose his over-leverage of Harrisburg. However, he was in good company in both the public and private spheres. And there is no taking away from Reed that he had one hell of a good eye for hostorically important artifacts. One of his former sellers was in town the other day at the auction, actually buying back the items he had originally sold to Reed.
He credited Reed with being a highly informed, careful buyer.
Allen Pinkerton’s personal detective badge just sold for $37,500 plus 25% buyer’s premium. A Dodge City Marshal’s badge just sold for $4,000. A historic Wells Fargo trunk sold for $15,000. These are historic, one-of-a-kind artifacts, bringing in commensurate prices.
I say job well done, Mayor.
As for me, I have done my part and bid on a multitude of items, only to lose at every turn. After bidding on Canada Bill Jones’s nasty little push dagger (Jones is credited with coining the phrase “But it’s the only game in town”), and losing, I did win a sad old elk antler, which had purportedly served as a hat rack in some western bar. But now I own a piece of the city history. It’s good enough for me, and the icing on the cake is that the city is raking in millions of dollars from the auction. The stuff Reed bought years ago was so valuable that it has increased tremendously in value.
UPDATE: I have just posted the winning bid for Steve Reed’s Wild West Moose, and I am so pleased. I am naming it Stephen.
Sunday Hunting in Pennsylvania
Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (www.huntsunday.com) filed a federal lawsuit yesterday, seeking to compel Pennsylvania to allow the Pennsylvania Game Commission the authority to establish Sunday hunting for various species beyond the crows, coyotes, and foxes presently allowed.
The merits are enormous, the case against it weak. It comes down to good government applying consistent laws, a hallmark of democracy. Religious freedom is also part of the suit, since the ban on Sunday hunting is religiously motivated and prevents equal participation by all citizens.
What is sad is hearing pro-gun, pro-hunting folks use anti-gun, anti-hunting arguments to prevent Sunday hunting, as if it does not come back to hurt them.
Here is my position: If you hunt and own guns, then you should desire a greater hunter recruitment rate to replace the people we are losing to age. More hunters means a stronger Second Amendment advocacy pool. Otherwise, if we fail to make up the gun owners we lose, then the gun owners lose political power, and watch their rights slip away as laws change and they are powerless to stand up.
When staying positive is challenging
Witnessing the lynch mob and witch hunt surrounding George Zimmerman, and the supposed adults leading it, and the hatred, racism, and bigotry on display at the public events purportedly against racism and bigotry and for peace and justice, it is hard to stay positive.
After all, a lynch mob is exactly the opposite of peace and justice.
What makes me so sad is that black people still inspire me. As the product of a home where racism was not only absent, it was forbidden, and where everyone of all walks of life, all skin colors, and all faiths sat at our table, I grew up with a positive fascination with blacks and a passion for their success.
To me, American blacks are the modern equivalent of the ancient Israelites. With the legacy of slavery propelling them forward, blacks were supposed to be integrated into every facet of American life, business, law, medicine, politics, you name it. Very much an American story, from rags to riches, from poverty to great material comfort, and so on. In other words, blacks embody the potential of the American dream, and that is something so many fail to understand: Whites very much want blacks to succeed. Because it is a reflection on the promise of America, a reflection on all of us.
But in my lifetime, I have seen blacks going backwards, into self-segregation, into naked, open, raw racism and bigotry against so many other groups. Hatred is justified as “justice.”
So very few of the white people I know have any inclination towards racism. Skin color means nothing to 99% of the whites I know (and whites are most of the people I know, so I know their views). And yet whites are still accused of oppressing and hurting their fellow Americans because of skin color. It’s simply not true. In fact it is racist to accuse people of racism because of their skin color.
What’s sad about this is that eventually people are going to become worn out with being accused of something they are not. Calling someone a racist will lose its meaning. Maybe that is inevitable in a country that is rapidly turning brown, but it shouldn’t happen because the accusation becomes so hollow that it ceases to mean anything.
I still hold hope that things will get better. That requires everyone to have an honest discussion about these issues.
The sad irony of Zimmerman’s right to self-defense
The sad irony of George Zimmerman having a right to self-defense is that now roving gangs of thugs are beating Americans on the street in the name of “justice for Trayvon,” while others call for lynching of anyone “white.”
So because a jury considered the facts, someone now wants to go hurt and kill people of different skin color? Does anyone else see the sick irony and hypocrisy? Al Sharpton admits that Zimmerman cannot be charged on “the merits,” which is to say that he is innocent of having done something wrong, but he wants him charged nonetheless.
America is witnessing an orgy of feelings and anger. But these are misplaced feelings, it is unjustified anger.
Attacking and hurting people because of their skin color is racist, and here we have people supposedly opposed to racism doing just that.
This is not good, my fellow Americans, not good at all.
George Zimmerman’s right of self-defense
Maybe I should not be surprised, but I am:
People calling for George Zimmerman to be lynched by a mob or executed by some nameless gangster, dissatisfied with a jury’s decision…the human right of self-defense thrown out the window…people wanting to believe what they want to believe, uninterested in the photos of a bleeding, battered Zimmerman but very interested in the far-outdated photos of a youthful, innocent-looking Trayvon Martin…people decrying “racism” when the only racism evident was Martin’s “creepy-ass Cracker” comment to his girlfriend, immediately followed up by his life-threatening physical assault on Zimmerman…a media full of people willing to edit 911 recordings, or describe the Hispanic Zimmerman as “white,” to push an agenda and create an impression contrary to the facts….this case has been about everything but what it was about: Self-defense.
Zimmerman was attacked. Lying on his back and taking a savage beating from a large male straddling his chest, he pulled a legal gun and killed his attacker. That is the way life is supposed to work.
Had the skin colors been reversed, Zimmerman would now be a hero to many.
Self defense is what this is all about. Nothing else. I am pleased that the right of self-defense has been upheld. It is the most basic of all human rights.