Wednesday, September 17, 2014

I recently read a good book. The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier. A very dark and compelling book set in what I assume is Victorian England. If a book had a color this one would be in black and white and gray. It’s like Dickens with shadow people. Link

I once had a transcript of a Tree Commission meeting, during which the tree commissioners and Assistant City Attorney Ronald Ramingh discussed how they had gotten bested by a lawyer at the previous Tree Commission meeting. They agreed they needed to get the city ordinance changed, so they could keep doing to citizen property owners what the lawyer had convinced them they had no legal authority to do.

[Ex-cop settles for $287K

Klosowski, a Key West officer from July 19, 2004, until he resigned March 4, 2008, sued the city in December 2007 claiming he suffered harassment and retaliation from police supervisors when he reported being asked to destroy video evidence by a fellow cop. “Melt it,” and “Make it disappear,” Klosowski said his then supervisor Sgt. Pablo Rodriguez demanded of him after realizing the ICOP video system affixed to Klosowski’s patrol car had kicked on automatically the night of May 28, 2007. That night, Rodriguez was pursuing a burglary suspect, who was pedaling a bicycle along a sidewalk when Rodriguez drove his patrol cruiser over a curb and struck the suspect, Klosowski’s lawsuit states. Klosowski responded to a call for backup as Rodriguez chased the bike rider down Simonton Street. When he hit his patrol car’s flashing lights, the ICOP recorder began recording. Rodriguez turned loose the suspect, left bleeding and with a likely broken leg, without calling for paramedics, the lawsuit alleged. Rodriguez was later cleared of any wrongdoing by an internal KWPD investigation.

Klosowski read his resignation letter aloud during a trial a year ago, accusing then Chief Bill Mauldin and then-Capt. Donie Lee, who is now police chief, of allowing a campaign of harassment to go on in response to his refusal to destroy the videotape of the bicyclist incident. Klosowski said the police department’s brass made certain he got the worst job assignments, immediately starting with patrol of a “high-threat drug area” in Key West without proper backup. He later was denied a job as a school resource officer and a desk job despite his qualifications as part of a pattern of retaliation, the lawsuit alleged. At the trial, former Judge Tegan Slaton stopped everything after attorney Barnes, during closing arguments, said something to jurors that had been ruled inadmissible. Smith said he spoke to two of the jurors after the mistrial. One told him the jury had agreed to give Klosowski even more money than he had asked for and another “commented negatively” on the credibility of some of the city’s witnesses. “Our insurer is satisfied with the result and supports settlement,” Smith told the commission

However Im a Democrat that does not believe that at all. I appreciate your trying to convince others of your assumptions but you are all to  often way off base in them.

Let me try because I can also make a case for these Conservative beliefs.

Conservatives will not be happy until America puts boots on the ground in the entire Muslim world and sends every other nation in the worlds military home so only America has skin in the game. They also want the draft to be reinstated so we can stay in a constant state of war. They are strong believers in America getting involved in a religious war that’s been going on for years and years. They do not want the muslim sects to fight their own wars without your chidren and parents being involved.

See, we all know that’s untrue but hell if the right can just make wild ass assumptions we can all play.

We would all be wrong. The same way the poster is.

By the way. The President that said “NO NEW TAXES” before a tax raise wasn’t a Democrat

As to question #1: if you answered WW1, WW2, Korea, Iraq, or even Afghanistan you were flat wrong. The correct answer is the War On Poverty. It’s 50 years old and has cost us more than 3 times the total spent on all American wars since the Revolution.  As to Question #2: The war is still on going, but so far America has not won a single battle. We’re losing the war. The percentage of people in poverty 50 years ago is nearly identical to the percentage in poverty today.

Thanks to the War On Poverty the federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs. These programs provide cash, food, housing and medical care to low-income Americans. Federal and state spending on these programs last year was $943 billion. (These figures do not include Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance.) Over 100 million people, about one third of the U.S. population, received aid from at least one welfare program at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient in 2013. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.

The odds are that you believe that the word “poverty” means significant material deprivation, an inability to provide a family with adequate nutritious food, reasonable shelter and clothing. But only a small portion of the more than 40 million people labeled as poor by Census fit that description.

According to government surveys, the typical family that Census identifies as poor has air conditioning, cable or satellite TV, and a computer in his home. Forty percent have a wide screen HDTV and another 40 percent have internet access. Three quarters of the poor own a car and roughly a third have two or more cars. These numbers are not the result of the current bad economy pushing middle class families into poverty; instead, they reflect a steady improvement in living conditions among the poor for many decades.

It’s nearly certain that when you think of poverty you envision hunger and children deprived of healthy and nutritious food. Not so. The intake of protein, vitamins and minerals by the vast majority of poor children is virtually identical with upper middle class kids. According to surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the overwhelming majority of poor people report they were not hungry even for a single day during the prior year.

Johnson’s aim was not to prop up living standards by making more and more people dependent on an ever larger welfare state. Instead, Johnson sought to increase self-sufficiency, the ability of a family to support itself out of poverty without dependence on welfare aid. Johnson asserted that the War on Poverty would actually shrink the welfare rolls and transform the poor from “taxeaters” into “taxpayers.”

Judged by that standard or any standard, the War On Poverty is lost and will continue to be lost until meaningful reform occurs. That reform will never occur during Democrat governance. Link

Part 2) We had a house party recently, one of the guests was a single woman, a Jersey girl. Thanks to my advanced age and general decrepitude she did not see me as an object for lust, just friendly conversation. After having about 2 and a half Cosmos, she began feeling sorry for herself and was complaining how difficult it was to “hook up” here on BPK. She said: “I call my vagina Newark, everybody knows where it is, but nobody wants to go there.” (Thanks to the late great Joan Rivers)