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Posts Tagged → policies

Another NFL season? Who cares

According to the aggressive internet advertising I have encountered, and clicked right through, another National Football League season has begun. And unlike my childhood and adulthood up until 2016, I now just don’t care. I won’t be watching any NFL games at home, I won’t be going out to a sports bar to watch a game, and I won’t be going over to a friend’s house to watch a football game.

The fact is, me and the NFL are splits-o, over, finis, done, parted ways, divorced. Oh, I did my part as a fan; it was the NFL that caused our breakup. When the NFL’s strange public policy positions got me mad in 2015, the disrespectful kneeling by spoiled brats in 2016 got me furiously disconnected. I could not then relate to a business that deliberately stuck its finger in my eye and then expected me to overlook it and keep on keepin’ on. Nope. In 2016 I turned off the NFL TV and never looked back.

The situation has not been helped by a woke, racist, anti-America ESPN and fellow sports “media” outlets, in which the NFL continues to appear and participate, as if nothing is wrong. The situation has not been helped by the NFL adopting certain flags, colors, etc as statements about sensitive social issues and political policies that are guaranteed to drive away people who take their business with them. I always wonder what the outcome would be, the response would be, if the NFL jerseys and helmets sported the National Rifle Association logo….we know it would not be positively received by the ESPN et al “sports media” entertainment complex, which is really now just an adjunct of communist anti-America Hollywood.

I don’t think the NFL misses me, either. Occasionally I will be at someone’s home, or out with family, and a football game will be playing on a TV. My eye or ears will catch snippets of the game, and sometimes bits of the advertising during the game. So far the advertising ratio seems to (roughly) be about 25:1 aimed at American blacks over American whites. That disproportionate advertising effort tells us that American blacks are still loyal fans of the NFL, and very much the target audience of NFL games, while American whites have left the stadium, euphemistically and statistically speaking.

Incidentally, my disgust with NFL rubbing my nose in its leftist politics also bridges over into Penn State football. “The house that Joe [Paterno] built” has also left me in the dust, not so much the team or its management with the silly names on the jersey shtick, but Penn State University itself. My alma mater has gone totally woke, adopting policies and political positions completely at odds with my values. And at odds with the university’s own stated values of fairness, dedication to academic excellence, etc.

The way Coach Joe Paterno was mistreated by the PSU board of trustees didn’t help my view of the school. Then there was the unjustified hiding away of the Joe Paterno statue, and unjustified general official abuse of the golden Paterno name. PSU has done nothing of substance to correct its poor behavior. Instead its administrators and trustees and staff just keep on keepin’ on with the leftist nonsense, expecting me to get on board. Every year since 2012 PSU has found some new way to alienate me.

Despite receiving constant emails from Penn State and the PSU Alumni Association begging me to contribute and participate, I have backed away and found other ways to spend my time and money. Not getting back on that PSU train, despite five decades of dedication and personal participation.

So, just like I won’t support an NFL that aggressively adopts political positions that I cannot agree with, I cannot support a Penn State University that has adopted policies and politics that I cannot possibly agree with. The same goes for Major League Baseball, the National Basketball League, the National Hockey League, and a cornuplethora (thanks to John Correia for this funny word) of other now leftist-woke sports-entertainment institutions. All of whom seem to be doing just fine without me, I might add. If they missed me and my business, then they would have been courting me by dialing back the leftist politics junk. And they have not done so, but rather increased their leftist politics activism.

I will bet that if there is ever a need to financially support sports teams and leagues that have deliberately alienated their audiences by adopting leftist politics, and thereby lost a great deal of money, the political establishment will find a way to bail them out with taxpayer money. And we know the GOPe will make it happen.

Meanwhile, with the NFL out of my life I now have a lot more time and money of my own to spend on things that really bring me happiness. Reading on the couch next to my wife, visiting with friends and laughing about our kids, reloading antique black powder cartridges that became obsolete a hundred years ago, but which are still plenty effective for taking wild game at sporting distances, splitting firewood, studying the Bible, writing, there are so many productive uses of the time I used to mis-spend on the NFL.

So long, Screwy, I won’t see ya in Saint Louee, as Bugs Bunny would have said.

“Ridgie” no more

In 1998 I joined the Governor Tom Ridge administration in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, fresh off of a solid seven years of DC Swamp. Coming from the Washington, DC, federal bureaucracy, I was considered a professional insider and policy whiz. My own view was that I was a refugee from the anti-citizen, anti-taxpayer, anti-America administrative state that was so crazily overboard that I could no longer work inside of it. My job in the Ridge Administration was as Director of Education & Information on the executive staff at the PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR).

The state civil service bureaucrats in Harrisburg had a name for people like me. We were called “Ridgies,” because we were so dedicated to the unique Tom Ridge way of doing things. And what was that unique way of doing things? What was it about being dedicated to Governor Ridge that earned us this almost mocking sobriquet?

In a word, Ridge was honest. He brought a refreshing honesty and down-home common sense to running government that had not been seen in decades. So different and refreshing was this bright light being shone on The People’s business, that it left those of us who were implementing it with almost Moses-like beams of light emanating from our faces. You could say we were bright eyed and bushy tailed, excited to do our work. We humored the staid bureaucrats, but we meant it and we persevered.

I was proud to be a Ridgie, because Tom Ridge represented almost everything that was good and necessary in government doing the taxpayer’s work.

Fast forward 25 years and holy moley, what has happened…. Governor Tom Ridge has endorsed senile, corrupt, pedophile, racist failed liberal career politician Joe Biden over President Donald Trump. Trump being the Tom Ridge of today, Biden being everything that everyone hates about corrupt career politicians.

All that Ridge’s bizarre endorsement did for me was make me realize that unlike when he was governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge now values the permanent and unaccountable administrative state over the interests of the citizenry. When Ridge was governor, he confronted Pennsylvania’s hide-bound bureaucracies and forced them to serve The People, the forgotten taxpayers who underwrite all of government. Now, Ridge is on the side of that administrative state, a complete 180 degree flip from where he was.

What can account for this change of philosophy? Probably that Ridge Global, Ridge’s lobbying and consulting firm, is so closely tied to that same big government administrative state. He certainly is not advocating for good policy, because President Trump is implementing everything that Ridge used to say that he believed in, and here Ridge is opposing it.

I feel badly that such a good man as Ridge has been flipped by filthy lucre. It is painful to see someone whose good citizen name inspired us, his staff, to be proud “Ridgies,” to now renounce and stand against all he once stood for. The person in whom I put my trust to implement citizenry-saving policies is now an open and proud tool for anti-America forces and activists.

Contrary to what Ridge claimed in his Atlantic article earlier this year, he is definitely not a conservative. Because his policy views are very liberal. And based on the things he routinely says in public, and his consistent support for an obviously corrupt Joe Biden, Ridge can in no way claim to be a Republican any longer. Yet he is using his claim as a “conservative Republican” to advance anti-conservative, anti-Republican ideas and people. This is not honest behavior.

Sadly, Ridge is just as much a part of the fake news as all the other fake news people.  In turn, I must now say that I am no longer a “Ridgie.”

Unlike Governor Tom Ridge, I remain on the side of The People. I am still, however, a Trumpie, loud and proud.

USA! USA! USA!

TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP!

Heartbreak: Florida school is a “gun free zone”

My heart is broken about the school shooting in Florida.

As my heart goes in one direction, my mind goes in another. Here we go again, another shocking crime, another result of liberalism’s assault on American culture, a result of another stupid liberal policy rooted in feelings and not in careful adult-level planning.

Despite having been reported to police and FBI agents for months, this angry young man directed his violent thoughts against fellow students in Florida, using a gun to vent his feelings.

The school he targeted is yet another “gun free zone,” where not even the teachers are armed, but the bad guy is.  Criminals break the law by definition, and criminals taking advantage of “gun free zones” know they have a free hand to do what they want.

Political correctness teaches that guns are “bad,” and that feelings should dominate everything, even trumping fact and logic. Here we have another classic example of how liberalism is just plain evil and bad for America.

Liberals, this shooting is on your heads, the childrens’ blood is on your hands, because liberal activist groups and teachers unions keep blocking good policies that will prevent these kinds of events from happening.

If you want to avoid this kind of school violence in the future, allow law enforcement agencies to do what they need to do with violent youths (liberal policies treat law enforcement as the bad guy and shield bad kids from being held accountable), so they can head off these problems at the pass. And let teachers and other professionals carry firearms in their places of work, so would-be bad guys know up front that there is a strong disincentive to attempt violence at schools, where they will be met head-on with fatal violence.

Anything else is a continuation of the same old failed liberal policies.

Then again, liberals have known how bad their policies are for a long time. Perhaps these children are being sacrificed in order to advance the tired old liberal gun control agenda?

 

When public officials dodge, dodge, and dodge again

How sad that a private citizen would care more about protecting a public park than the paid public employees entrusted with it. It is amusing, and sad, that a professional or two would find every evasive maneuver literally imaginable (and that is with a very excitable imagination) to avoid doing something that the public very much wants. I guess that at some point, the public will have to find out, and then who knows what they will say about it… Sorry to have to see this and say it.