So, Glen Beck had his faux civil rights rally, gathering the faithful on America’s Lawn on the promenade in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. 1000,000 Tea Party and Glen Beck fans showed up. In other words, 100,000 morons. On the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I had a dream” speech held in the exact spot, no less.

Doctor King’s speech was a watershed moment in American history, while Beck’s was more of an irritating sweat stain on our collective armpits. Glen even claimed to be King’s “brother.” If so, then he has to be the Fredo of the King brothers

Beck and the Tea Party were never people with ideas, instead content to be angry all the time and attack other people and their ideas. Now Beck and his Tea Party fans finally come up with an idea, this rally, called “A Rededication of America,” a golden opportunity to showcase whatever policies they were able to come up with, and guess what, the only thing they could think of was a violation of the United States Constitution and the laws of the land.

Normally, the prudent course of events would be to formulate some serious ideas and policies, and then hold your rally. Even if it’s only one big idea, something to stir things up socially and politically, that would be fine too.

Their big idea? Turning America into Iran, Christian Fascist style. Beck put it like this: “America today turns back to God.” Oh, really? If he’s talking about the same country the rest of us live in, The United States of America, he was calling for a return to a special time in American history that… never happened! From its very beginnings in the late 1700s, America put religion in its proper place, far from the halls of government.

Dr. King, who was an ordained Baptist minister, never tied the Civil Rights Movement to his or anybody else’s church, and borrowed his non-violent tactics from a Hindu, one Mohandes K. Gandhi, to achieve his goals. He instead relied on the words of our Founding Fathers and challenged America to be America for every citizen. It cost him his life, but it worked.

Our Founding Fathers, none of them particularly religious people, had seen first-hand the bloody results of state-sponsored religion, and were having none of it for their brand new nation. They stated simply that Congress shall pass no laws concerning religion, rendering it a private matter for citizens to deal with, or not deal with, as they saw fit. Any and all faiths were welcome to flourish in the United States, but none of them were allowed to have a say in governing the nation.

Which didn’t stop certain Americans far too insecure in their own faith from trying to persecute other religions, most notably the waves of Catholic immigrants who came to America in the late 1800s and early 1900’s, bringing with them the “Papist Scourge.” Jewish immigrants were also treated to this lapse of hospitality.

Both groups petty much ignored the bigots and went about their business, confident that the Constitution protected their right to pray and worship as they saw fit. Of course they were correct and the bigots are forgotten by history, while these immigrants have all left their indelible marks on America. They built and ran this place as we now know it and their descendants continue to flourish, having produced war and peace heroes, Nobel laureates, poets and titans of both politics and industry.

America itself flourished with this infusion of new blood, offering an unprecedented quality of life for the working classes unmatched before or since in history. Not having a useless and demanding monarchy or a rapacious official religion to support removed a huge social barrier from humanity. Outstanding individuals and hard workers could and did climb the social ladder, something almost impossible in the monarchies and theocracies that dominated the earth in the not-so-distant past.

There are still plenty of such nations around, staining the landscape of their regions and oppressing their own people, and now Glen Beck and the Tea Party want America to join these backwards assholes and “turn to God.” Turning away from God, or at least rendering Him a private citizen, is what enabled America to build the best hope for humanity the world has ever had, and to build history’s biggest economy.

While the Tea Party has never been renowned for its ideas, what with most of them being Sarah Palin addicts and complete morons, at least they attracted the attention of a lot of people who liked the notion of a new political party, any party, just to wake up the Democrats and Republicans who figured they had a monopoly on politics in this country.

The whole idea was exciting, at least for about 5 minutes.Then one of the Tea Partiers opened their mouth and all that came out was horseshit. Dang! Then came the revelation that the Tea Party isn’t a separate political party at all, but a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, Inc.

Apparently one of those notorious closet-queen Republican operatives came up with this ruse in response to having their party unceremoniously dumped from power in 2008, figuring Americans are really, really stupid. Stupid people have long been the bread and butter of the Republicans, people who can be regularly fooled into voting against their own interests.

In years past, the Republicans employed really smart people to sell others on the notion that what is right for the super-wealthy and the giant corporations is right for America. They’ve elected some terrible presidents with that idea, but the last time around they got too cocky and installed a semi-literate bumbler as a figurehead president and just had Dick Cheney run the show.

The fact that they did this so openly and led the nation into one disaster after another is what got them ousted in 2008. Americans don’t like dictators, and were doubly insulted that our first-ever dictator was Shotgun Dick Cheney, as unlikable a human being as has ever breathed with the aid of replacement parts, like some bald and dumpy Darth Vader without the cool swagger.

So naturally you’d think that the rank-and-file Republicans would protest and go off to form their own party. Too bad for America that the only serious recent attempt at forming a 3d political party turned out to be another phony sideshow from the Republican Dirty Tricks Department. The only “leaders” it attracted were Glen Beck and Sarah Palin, two seriously unhinged individuals who are also both as dumb as your average Cocker Spaniel.

Imagine being a follower of someone like that? Wow! The mind boggles at having as your leader someone who has never made a lick of sense and never sustained an ideology they did not contradict time and again whenever convenient. On Saturday in Washington, no agenda was proposed, no famous speeches made or memorable phrases etched into American political lore.

What was it all about? Who the hell knows with these pinheads? Let’s just hope that this whole “return to God” crap doesn’t become what so many other public petitions to God have become, a bloodbath for some poor saps practicing the “wrong religion.” For now, Beck and Palin resume their lucrative careers of trashing other people’s ideas, figuring that ideas are things they never have, so it must be wrong to have one. Ask Fredo what it all means.

So this dopey mosque issue near the site of the World Trade Center atrocity has the whole friggin’ country up in arms now, even people who never stepped foot in New York City, long-distance carpetbaggers claiming “hallowed ground” they’ve never seen, either before or after the 9/11 attack, much less bought a falafel from one of the local Muslim street vendors.

Tourists still pack the area, every one of them wanting to take a peek at Ground Zero to try to understand what it was like, to reconcile the horrific news footage seared into the whole world’s mind. In a sense, they have a powerful claim on Ground Zero, and a very real connection, both Americans and foreigners alike.

While New Yorkers endured the attack and lost so many, what we forget is that the rest of the world stood still that day, numb and disbelieving, riveted to the images of the capitol of Earth being so shockingly and devastatingly attacked. There were no other headlines or lead stories anywhere that day.

The jets crashing, the towers burning, people jumping 100 stories to their deaths, and the final, stunning twin collapses were followed in real time everywhere, and everyone stopped whatever they were doing to watch in disbelief. It was a day that will go down in history for as long as there is history.

The nearly 3,000 deaths were far lower than originally estimated, thanks to hundreds of fire fighters, police officers and many others who sacrificed their own lives to perform the greatest evacuation and rescue operation since Dunkirk. Ten times that number was considered a conservative estimate that day, when no one anywhere seemed to know exactly what was going on.

The New York City government was nearly crippled and very little real information was forthcoming, only scattered pronouncements and speculation on the part of the news media, and this went on for most of the day. The president was flying around incognito somewhere and the vice president took over, lower Manhattan was disaster area and cell phone service was knocked out.

Rumors of a dozen or more such jets were rampant, and the Air Force was reportedly hunting hijacked aircraft with missiles. The Pentagon was in flames and the crash landing of the 4th jet in Pennsylvania was thought to be  caused by our military. The uncertainty and chaos were terrifying.

A whole lot of people had a loved one who worked in the area, and the TV footage looked like no one could have survived anywhere near the collapsing towers. No one panicked but tension and confusion were everywhere, and a feeling of helplessness. So many wanted to help, to do something, but only police, firefighters and proven rescue experts were allowed near the site.

The city held its breath and waited for their land lines to ring. There were block-long lines for pay phones in Manhattan, people waiting to call their families to tell them they were okay, and to please call everyone else, there’s people waiting. Three thousand families never got that call.

We mourned our dead and still feel their loss. Wars were started to avenge them, grand pavilions planned in their memory. Services are held on each anniversary, and the wound still feels fresh. For most, there were little or no remains, loved ones incinerated to dust. Ground Zero is the only grave they will ever know.

Too bad these victims have now become political footballs, their memorial still unbuilt while their spirits are invoked by cynical fools with political ambitions. This has been going on for years, and now we have this media-driven madness over a planned mosque 2 blocks from Ground Zero, right down the street from the Ground Zero strip club, a place where presumably mourners can receive some measure of solace with a lap dance from a naked young lady. To each his own, no?

The story grows more bizarre when it is revealed that the location of the mosque was actually picked by a 19-year old immigrant from Colombia who was hired by the developer after appearing on a reality show. His job was to scout locations for the mosque and he found the Burlington Coat Factory building to be vacant and available.

The deal was consummated and plans made to build the mosque as something called an “Islamic Center,” a combination house of worship and community outreach facility. Lord knows that Islam could use some good PR right about now, and the hysterical reaction to their project only underscores that. Anti-Muslim sentiment has poured out of every corner of this nation, even from people who detest New York City and the big umbrella melting pot it stands for.

Unclear so far is exactly who is providing the funds for this piece of downtown Manhattan real estate, where every square inch of space is worth a  large fortune, even in this depressed economy. Few believe that the Muslim street vendors are footing the bill from the proceeds from the sale of bananas, couscous and souvenirs. This is a big money venture and will require hundreds of millions of dollars to complete. Who’s paying?

While the Imam in charge says he will raise funds from local Muslims and bond offerings, there are rumors of Iranian and Saudi Arabian funding, making the whole thing even more suspect. These are legitimate concerns, potentially dangerous political concerns having little to do with Islam and everything to do with provocation.

Is this what’s happening? Can we be sure? Anyone on the ball with finding that out before we start messing with the Bill of Rights? It’s always the Bill of Rights that stands to take a hit in times like these, with no shortage of media fools and elected politicians sworn to uphold the United States Constitution openly in favor of violating it because a distasteful religion is ruining the neighborhood and the Hallowed Ground trade.

For a story invented and fueled by the media, there are few hard facts available. That’s how out of practice our news media is with journalism, that they can’t even find out the facts on a story they invented. They seem content to report on the shit storm they have created to fill the slow news cycles of Summertime and feel no obligation to dig for facts.

Small wonder fewer and fewer people trust the mainstream media. The impact on New Yorkers’ daily lives by the building of this mosque will be nonexistent. We’re already tripping over a thousand and one houses of worship of every imaginable denomination, barely noticing them as we go about our business.

People swiftly got over the Mormons’ building a tabernacle near Times Square, and nobody likes Mormons all that much, not even their fellow Mormons if you follow their soap opera saga in the news with the lucrative sales of underage teenaged brides to lumpy old Chesters. Times Square survived, and so will Ground Zero.

Few people will bother to notice another temple to a God we all claim as our own as we go about our day-to-day business doing whatever the hell we feel like. Most Americans figure church is for women and religion is for teaching kids right from wrong. That’s not what we say about our various faiths, of course, but what we do, the truer measure of intent.

In Islam, like Judaism, it is the men who take the lead in practicing their faith,  something that makes many Americans uncomfortable. That whole 5-times-a-day praying seems excessive and unseemly, even without the bad press Islam gets from terrorists and religious tyrants.

The fact that Islam is just one more dumbass religion designed to annoy the crap out its believers by giving them a whole lot to do on top of having to live their lives is forgotten in this war of words. Life is hard enough without God, but almost unbearable with Him, because now people feel obligated to defend  their faith and attack the faith of others, not once stopping to think that every faith is founded on some pretty tall friggin’ tales.

That’s why they are called faiths and not The Jewish Fact, the Christian Fact or the Muslim Fact. None of them can stand up to a reality check or ever be proven. Our arguments about God and religion are transparent excuses to dominate one another along tribal lines and to vent our hatred of others. God has always been a handy tool to further these aims.

This Mosque on Hallowed Ground business is just one more example of people using God as an excuse to act like hateful assholes. The 3,000 victims of this religious warfare deserve better. They were real people with real lives and real families, not abstract concepts to be cynically used for our endless debates over the improbable and unprovable. Who cares who else builds what sort of shrine where or who they pray to or how? That’s private.

So, now  THE BATSHIT CRAZY LEADERS OF DANGEROUS UNSTABLE NATIONS CLUB officially welcomes its newest member, President (for life?) of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Mr. Chavez, a classic South American military strong man long painted by the American media to be some sort of dire threat to Western Civilization but really wasn’t, has finally gone batshit crazy. Score one for America’s right wing.

While his politics aren’t all that bad, he’s a bullly, a ham and a showman who censors the press. Like a hundred South American dictators and presidents before him, he promised to tackle the curse of too many Latin nations, mass poverty in a land of plenty, the wealth of nations in too few hands.

Throughout history, every reform or attempted reform of this Spanish Empire leftover, the Padrone/Peon social order, has met with vehement and violent opposition, with most Western nations condemning the reformer in question as a Communist who will destabilize the region. This knee-jerk reaction to defend the rights of “property owners” fails to address the hard realities in South America

None of these Western Nations with the big mouths share this lopsided social system anymore, not even Spain, whose last King realized how silly it was to be a king these days and closed the franchise, possibly the first sane act by a reigning monarch in a millennium. Maybe he was thinking about the legacy of oppression and enforced subservience that the Spanish monarchy left behind in her empire, places where when they finally left after hundreds of years, were still largely illiterate, superstitious and poor, toiling in the service of an educated, wealthy elite.

These are the conditions in which men like Chavez operate. The governments of many such nations are the exclusive domain of this wealthy elite, and the poor need not aply. The only avenue to power other than birth is via the military in such regimes, and Latin America has had no shortage of delusional Generalissimos adding to the misery of their nations’ poverty while lining their pockets until the next Generalissimo shoots them down and does exactly the same.

No word on whether or not Hugo Chavez is embezzling some of his nation’s oil billions, but on July 16, 2010, you can mark your calendar as the day he lost his friggin’ mind. There’s not many mad men where you can pinpoint the exact day and time they lost it, so kudos to him on that score. Might be useful data to social scientists someday, or a question in the Venezuelan version of Trivial Pursuit.

Always a Simon Bolivar buff, on that date Chavez took his obsession with the man to a whole new batshit crazy level when he had Simon Bolivar’s remains exhumed and started playing with the skeletal remains, picking apart Simon Bolivar’s carcass with his bare hands!

Not only that, he publicy exhorted the remains in the name of Christ to return to life! He claimed Bolivar had spoken to him, telling Chavez that he reappears every hundred years. Apparently, not one of Bolivars many talents was mathematics. Having died in 1814, he’s 4 years early for his second resurrection. At any rate, no one else was privy to their private conversation.

This is Simon Bolivar we’re talking about, the George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one for all of South America! Imagine an American President holding a press conference while manhandling the bones of Lincoln? That’s so bizarre, it sounds like something only Hitler would do. With all the batshit crazy leaders this world has endured, it’s hard to recall another remembered for corpse desecration.

This makes Ghadaffi seem less daffy, Ahmadinejad seem less mad, Putin less high falutin’ and Kim Jong not as Il as all that. These guys are ecstatic now that he’s joined THE BATSHIT CRAZY LEADERS OF DANGEROUS UNSTABLE NATIONS CLUB. Takes the heat off of them and their unsavory behavior in their own volatile corners of the world.

But the big question is, what the hell does it feel like to be Venezuelan right now? The stunning realization that the leader of your nation has just publicly and frighteningly lost his friggin’ mind has to be an unsettling feeling, to say the least. One wonders, is this an even worse feeling than having Bush The Younger as the leader of the free world, or not quite as bad as all that?

Chavez might get the “this-gives-me-the-creeps” edge here, since Dubya’s handlers never let him exhume any dead bodies for sport, and everybody knew Shotgun Dick was running the show anyway. Unfortunately for Venezuelans, Chavez doesn’t have a boss, and it sounds like he wants to be President of Venezuela forever with the re-animated Simon Bolivar as his Ed McMahon.

Hard to tell. Our America-centric megamedia corporations don’t report all that much about Venezuela unless it’s something that makes Chavez look bad. Well, now he’s he given them a gift that will keep on giving, his madness. Not only that, he’s given Venezuela a headache that won’t go away until he does. Maybe Simon Bolivar can talk some sense into him.

For decades now, the people who own and run this country have been doing terrible things to 98% of their fellow Americans. That would be those of us making less than $250,000 per year, a damned comfortable living, no matter what you hear to the contrary. Anybody out there think differently? If so, raise your uncalloused, bejeweled hands. The vast majority of working people can only dream of such an annual sum, raking in a sweet million bucks every 4 years. Imagine how diligent we’d be for that kind of dough!

The Cheney Administration ratcheted up this lopsided distribution of the vast wealth of the United States when old Shotgun Dick decided that the top 2% of Americans ought not to pay their fair share of taxes, and so implemented what are facetiously referred to as “The Bush tax cuts.” Bush The Younger couldn’t even run his mouth. Literally. He was Rain Man without the math skills or the ability to speak coherently. America’s first dictator was not satisfied with lowering the tax rate for the wealthy, but also installed a lot of free rides for them in the form of tax law loopholes big enough to drive your limousine through.

The Dictator Cheney oversaw the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy in recorded history. The result is that less than 1% of Americans, the super-wealthy, now own more wealth and assets than the bottom 95% of Americans combined. He also gutted the regulatory agencies designed to police the financial industries and refused to prosecute wealthy thieves, polluters and scam artists.

Such was the atmosphere of corporate lawlessness under Cheney that the leaders of these industries engaged in reckless gambling and monumental fraud with the nation’s money, culminating in the Crash of 2008, where $7 trillion in wealth simply disappeared, formerly fabulously wealthy banks and investment houses collapsed and the nation and the world was plunged into the most dire economic circumstances since the Great Depression, another debacle caused by greedy rich people.

This on top of the decades of depredations against the working classes on the part of this ownership class; shipping our jobs overseas, stealing our pension money to prop up their corrupt failures, and rolling back pay scales and hard-won benefits, sending workers ever deeper in debt to corporate interests at loan-shark interest rates.

Executives began taking obscene salaries, many hundreds of times greater that their average worker’s annual pay, something unprecedented in business history. They grabbed huge fortunes in a single bite, year after year after year, in the form of stock options, bonuses and “golden parachutes,” awarded by themselves to themselves from other people’s money, just because they could.

Since the 1960’s, the status and buying power of American workers has steadily declined, our education system has been neglected and underfunded, and our protections in the workplace badly eroded. The ownership class would like nothing more than to return to the America of the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw “a third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Then he did something about it, forcing ownership to treat the workers who made them wealthy like decent, valuable human beings.

Before FDR got busy, that America had no Social Security, no 8-hour work day, no overtime pay, no worker’s compensation and no unemployment insurance. During the worst economic times in America’s history, Roosevelt went to bat for American workers and forced ownership to treat workers fairly by law for the first time. They were incensed of course, completely enraged that a man of wealth such as FDR would grow a conscience and a pair of balls and care about poor people, long the bread and butter of wealthy oppressors.

The bloody Labor War ownership had been waging against American workers with hired goons and State Militias was halted. The government itself employed more than a million workers in public works projects building dams, bridges, roads and national parks, for the benefit of every American, a galling thing to the ownership princes. Social Security was implemented to eliminate the almost universal impoverishment of those too old to work, providing them with a dignified retirement after a lifetime of labor building, feeding and running this nation.

Prior to FDR, the term “retirement” was not in the vocabulary of American workers. An old-age pension was a new concept to most, something formerly reserved for the well-to-do, and that’s the way the ownership class liked it. They paid our American ideals lip service, of course, but preferred to live as monied royalty at the expense of the masses. Exploitation, tyranny and greed were their calling cards, then and now.

People who would send armed forces against workers demanding a living wage and safe working conditions in exchange for their honest life’s labor are foul human beings, the worst sort of scoundrels. They hung on to their ownership and bided their time, waiting for their chance to undo Roosevelt’s reforms. Towards that end, they acquired the major media companies and began controlling and homogenizing the flow of information.

It’s no accident that nearly every media outlet reports identical stories day after day, night after night, almost word for word. For example, it is a little known fact that the recent catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by greed, expedience and unsafe conditions was nothing out of the ordinary at all, but a fairly commonplace occurrence. It was just BP’s bad luck to have negligently killed 11 workers and spilled millions of barrels of oil off the coast of media-saturated America.

Tony Hayward’s petulant and dismissive behavior was business as usual. How dare we interrupt his yachting weekend with our overreaction to BP’s corruption and mismanagement? It’s not like his summer palace had its beach fouled, it was only the drones who would suffer and die! No one in Big Media made a stink when Big Oil poisoned the once-bountiful and beautiful Gulf of Niger in Africa over many decades, killing thousands of human beings, destroying millions of livelihoods and fomenting bloody civil war in several East African nations corrupted and controlled by multinational corporations with loyalty to no nation, only to profits.

Hundreds of thousands of East Africans perished and continue to be slaughtered, starved and displaced as the price to pay for ownership finding their oil under someone else’s soil. No problem, simply destabilize, corrupt, murder and pollute on a grand scale, then exploit the chaos to do as they damn well please. .

This is what we do! is the unspoken reaction of the ownership class to disaster, genocide and poisoning. That’s how profits are made and oil is provided for your damned SUVs and Toyotas! Not giving a rat’s ass about the working classes comes as natural as grand larceny to these people. Once they decided that workers in America were a little too comfortable for their liking, and darned uppity too, they went about selling our jobs and undermining our material comfort and our personal security with a vengeance.

It was only by a whisker that The Dictator Cheney did not get to hand over our Social Security money to these greedy scumbags, a goal they have not abandoned. They’re still kicking themselves and wondering if they should have bought the entire Congress instead of most of it. If and when that happens, kiss that money and any thought of a dignified retirement goodbye.

And don’t get so comfortable with a free internet either, an unforeseen technical juggernaut that allows pretty much anyone to have their say, globally and in a matter of seconds. They’re really pissed off that they don’t own and enjoy censorship rights to the World Wide Web and are striving mightily to correct that lapse.

If China and the various Stone Age Theocracies can get the giant internet companies to knuckle under for a buck, rest assured that Big Money is doing their level best to put their boot on our necks once again, especially since we enjoy the damned thing so much. That just won’t do.

Will the ownership class succeed? They’ve already drummed up considerable support at the grass roots level for their evil agenda, their wars, their greed and their pampered, royal lives from the very people they are hell bent on returning to 1933 and the bread lines, the soup kitchens, the epidemic of home and farm foreclosures and homelessness. They’re counting on your vote, since after all, as they have repeated again and again and again, only traitors vote against them.

They have succeeded in creating a Red State vs Blue State America, a house divided against itself. They openly import millions of uneducated immigrants and hire them to replace you, and then command you to hate them, people who have only done what our forebears have, come to America to find a better life, only to have it yanked out from under them as their reward for diligence and loyalty.

Then the super-wealthy tell you that the answer is to maintain their tax cuts and surrender your rights and your dignity, and all will be well, we’ll trickle down some crumbs for you to fight over like dogs under the king’s banquet table. Like that ever happened. These pricks have velcro fingers and never drop a crumb!

Here’s a fun fact: Mobile Oil paid no taxes to the United States Treasury in 2009 on their $10 billion profit, and yet received a $1.1 billion tax return! How’s that for new math?

Greed only wants one thing: more. Too many of us are too willing to surrender, mistakenly thinking they will be admitted to the club. Those who believe this fairy tale have two chances of that ever happening, one fat and one slim. Hopefully they will wake up while they still have the gold in their fillings and help the rest of us throw the ownership class out of our government, ensure they pay their taxes and act like law abiding citizens.

That sound you hear is FDR and those killed in the Labor Wars spinning in their graves.

At an International AIDS Conference in Vienna the other day, the participants stumbled upon a stunningly obvious truth. They said that one of the biggest contributors to the spread of the HIV virus is the fact that recreational drugs are illegal.

Nominally, the conference was about addressing the rapidly growing AIDS epidemic among Eastern European drug addicts, and any way they looked at it, it came down to this: drug addicts cannot legally obtain clean hypodermic syringes, and so they share them, and in the process pass on any diseases they have.

The conference called the 50 year-old War on Drugs a failure, about 49 years after it became obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain that this war, like any other war, killed a whole lot of people. The fact that most of the slain individuals were users of recreational drugs was just fine with a lot of people, those who had bought into the demonization of drug users, an odd concept in a world that embraces the widespread use of the most damaging and deadly intoxicant known to man, alcohol.

From 1919 to 1933, The United States of America provided the world with the model of what not to do about alcohol abuse when it passed the 18th Amendment to our Constitution, prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages. It was called Prohibition.

The results? Bathtub gin and other unsanitary home made beverages that blinded or killed a lot of human beings. Also, the rise of organized crime, the original criminal cartels, when they found a product that was cheap to produce and that everyone wanted at whatever price they chose to charge.

Illegal fortunes were made and local and state governments completely corrupted, and gangsters slaughtered one another in broad daylight over the huge profits at stake. The murderous gangster Al Capone was the most famous man in the world at one point, earning a million dollars a week in the 1920s, when 9¢ bought what a dollar buys today. That’s even better than today’s hedge fund thugs can manage.

It took America more than a dozen years to undo the damage, and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution cancelled the 18th and booze became legal, sanitary and inexpensive once again. Fast forward to the 1960s and ’70s and the rise in popularity of recreational drugs, mostly the harmless weed Marijuana but also including hallucinogens such as LSD and mescaline, and narcotics like heroin and opium, barbiturates of every pharmaceutical description and stimulants like cocaine and various amphetamines.

The nation was stunned and angry, and cynical politicians jumped all over the demonization bandwagon, passing laws against any drug that people seemed to enjoy. And so Prohibition was reborn, but this time not with an amendment to the Constitution but a thousand local and State laws varying in their severity, plus a smorgasbord of Federal Statutes thrown in.

The results? America holds more prisoners in our jails than any other nation on earth, an unconscionable 2 million souls, well over half of them for drug offenses. The spotty and unsupervised production of drugs resulted in overdose deaths and diseases, and the unavailability of clean needles created an epidemic of hepatitis among IV drug users.

And then there’s the rise of the new Capones, the billion-dollar drug cartels every bit as violent as the gangsters of the Roaring Twenties. They in turn have corrupted untold government officials to turn a blind eye to their lucrative business. The products they sell are derived from weeds, wild flowers and plants, cheaper than corn to grow and process, yet fetching caviar prices on the street.

Their profit margin was not lost on the huge pharmaceutical companies, who today produce many, many times the amount of “legal” addictive drugs than medical doctors require for treatment purposes. The rest find their way to drug users at hyper-inflated prices.

These astronomical drug prices contribute to crime, with many addicts needing to steal to get their fix, which would be the equivalent of one Martini costing $75, or a single glass of beer $15. Does anyone believe that our countless alcohol addicts wouldn’t turn to crime if faced with paying those kinds of prices?

The argument that alcoholics aren’t breaking the law by drinking doesn’t take into account that almost the entire nation broke the law during Prohibition. The amount of drinking in America didn’t change at all during Prohibition, and the attempted demonization of drinkers never took hold outside of the few hopeless drunks that were in every town and neighborhood, and still are.

The argument that consenting adults drinking alcohol do very little harm to society is also a myth that has been exploded in recent years by organizations such as MADD, and the vast carnage that drinking alcohol creates is general knowledge. No one, however, asks that it be outlawed, not wanting to return to the days of bathtub gin, infectious diseases and Al Capone.

So it’s odd indeed how few people see that this is exactly what is happening, and what has been happening for a very long time when it comes to drugs. And so the War on Drugs continues to claim many lives, many of them innocent children born to HIV-positive parents, or relatives of addicts who themselves do not use drugs.

No one condones addiction, whether to cigarettes, chocolate, bourbon, pain killers or heroin. But these things exist, and people who like them will find them, no matter who approves or how much they have to pay. That’s reality.

Another reality is the existence of a huge infrastructure built up over a half century dedicated to maintaining the War on Drugs. The huge growth industry that is our prison system has gotten so large that some state and municipal governments are privatizing prisons, prompting the private prison corporations to lobby legislators to pass even stiffer anti-drug laws with lengthier sentences in order to ensure a steady flow of their industry’s only raw material; human beings.

Then there are the countless law enforcement agencies dedicated to drug interdiction, huge bureaucracies employing hundreds of thousands of individuals, as well as having every police department everywhere dedicate a portion of their forces to drug enforcement. The assumption is that all these things are necessary, while the reality is that the whole thing is a self-feeding machine that exists only because it exists.

The fact that recreational drug use has dramatically increased during the 50 years of the War on Drugs only prompts the drug enforcers to throw more money and personnel at the problem, a problem that could be erased with the stroke of a pen making drugs legal. 50 years of failure and an ever-growing death toll demands that we end this idiotic war.

It is time we grew up about drugs and deal with them as we do alcohol; legalize, regulate and tax them, treat the hopeless addicts and educate potential abusers. 90% of all alcoholic beverages are consumed by 10% of the population, and the figure for legalized drugs will be identical. Doctors and scientists know this, educators and rehabilitation specialists know this too.

That’s the nature of humanity, 10% of us are addicts. No law and no war will change that. Treatment, research and medical science may one day change this, but killing people and locking them in prison for many years is far more heinous and inhumane than anything the average drug addict will ever do. Let’s send up the white flag and figure something else out.

So, we need to coddle and protect the Goldman Sachs of this world, and pass no laws intended to cramp their style, according to New York City Mayor and Wall Street bazillionaire Michael “Peewee” Bloomberg. Little Mikey’s contention seems to be that the banks are led by supermen who make our lives possible. If this is true, we ought to be grateful.

But it’s not true. Bankers have been around forever, usually doing all the things that banks do very quietly and carefully, which is pretty much what you want from them. Banks, while producing no hard products, were the places where individuals and companies kept their money, the collective power of their many deposits enabling banks to make loans at a modest but steady profit to said individuals and companies for housing, agriculture, industry and commerce.

Bankers were careful, stodgy men who watched over their businesses like  mother hens, making sure that the money people entrusted to them was well protected and solidly invested. It was, after all, not their money, but their customers’. The strict rules and policies of most banks prohibited reckless behavior, and the people attracted to banking were the perfect sort of fussy, uptight squares you would want safeguarding your hard-earned.

Wild men have other functions in society, and banking is definitely not one of them. Think warrior, poet and acrobat here, areas of endeavor at which wild people excel. Every so often throughout history, however, it dawns upon bankers that have their mitts on all the money, and the fusspots turn on us and start playing super-high stakes poker with our dough!

When they win they don’t spread the honey around, but when they lose they never pay the freight themselves, we do. When bankers go wild it is always other people who suffer. Their greed always mangles others.

Twelve years of global poverty and desperation we now call the Great Depression comes to mind, as does our current Recession/Depression, which doesn’t seem so great to those millions among us forced from our homes and jobs while the executives who engineered their misery soar high above the fray in luxurious private jets, lighting Cuban cigars with bonus money taken straight out of the pockets of the dispossessed.

And when Bankers go wild, the heads of other industries follow suit and assume that the laws of the land do not apply to them, either. Guys like the bosses at British Petroleum, the geniuses who brought us the massive crude oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is ruining the lives of millions and millions of Americans living on the southern coasts of the United States.

Not a single one of those people would be allowed to invent a car first and brakes second, nor would it even occur to them, but that is exactly what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico. They drilled for oil a mile beneath the sea before the technology existed to deal with leaking oil wells a mile beneath the sea.

There are 3,000 other oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and that technology is decades old, long past the time to have invented a decent set of brakes.

While working without a net might be impressive for trapeze artists, the only lives at risk are their own. Apparently the corporate pirates figured their high wire act would be more entertaining if the price of their failure would cost a good portion of their audience all their money and possessions. Some circus!

Not that we were ever invited to be dealt in at the table with our money sitting in the middle of it, or even consulted on the matter. No CEO asked for permission to play Monopoly with our money or our planet. Their thinking was that they were the supermen described by Peewee Bloomberg and so were above any tawdry laws and regulations meant for lesser beings.

Rules for Masters of The Universe? Perish the thought!

Hence all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from corporate boardrooms when the United States government decided to pass new laws governing their actions, just as it has always passed laws binding the actions of the rest of us. You try digging a leaky oil well in your back yard or gambling with your neighbor’s dough and see how far you get before you’re scraping a metal cup on the bars of your cell

So screw the Goldman Sacks of Shit for having to pay only a $550 million fine for cheating their own loyal customers out of many billions of dollars. That’s chump change to these high rollers, and $15.5 billion less than the bonuses they awarded themselves out of other people’s money this year. Their stockholders will also foot the bill for this paltry fine.

And anyone like that dumbass Congressman feeling sorry for BP for having to set aside $20 billion to pay for the damage they created can also go screw themselves too. 20 billion dollars is but a small down payment on the sort of epic ecological disaster they created without a thought to safety.

The American government has as much right to pass laws governing the behavior of corporations as they do individual citizens. The basics apply to everyone; don’t kill anybody, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat, and treat others as well as you’d like to be treated. Simple.

There’s no one who is unaware of these universal no-nos, nor is there anyone who has never violated any of them. The whole idea of passing laws is to forbid what almost everybody agrees is bad. The ones who do bad things get punished. Also pretty basic and simple.

The eleven workers who were killed when their unsafe oil rig exploded and triggered this environmental catastrophe are rarely mentioned in the press, and never by the spokespeople for BP. Workers dying horrible deaths are hardly the responsible corporate image BP desperately wants to project now.

These eleven dead men left behind eleven devastated families whose silence will soon be purchased by the company that killed them by arrogant negligence. Justice will not be done and the culprits will not be made to answer for the blood on their hands, the oil on our beaches, or the empty places in the hearts of these men’s children and wives.

Serious crimes have been committed by Big Oil, Big Banking and Big Insurance, devastating our economy and our physical surroundings, yet few arrests have been made, the results of few investigations. People are dead, money was stolen and fraud committed.

Sounds like the textbook definition of a serious crime wave, one where the government response should have been just a little sterner than handing the thugs responsible even more billions of dollars of other people’s money. That’s what started this whole mess in the first place.

In a better world, being rich and powerful wouldn’t automatically qualify anyone for a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. This just might be a good time to start building a better world.

Okay, we’ve had it. It’s America in 2010 and the ridiculous people just won’t go away. We’re surrounded by Christian Fascists who would have you love Jesus or die, freshly minted conservatives who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground about the ice cold realities of conservative politics and techie losers who want to wire our brains into the internet so we can all be as geeky as they are.

The earth is getting so hot that really old people are threatening to leave Florida and move back north, throwing their grown children who never liked them much in the first place into a panic. When scientists tell us it will only get worse, the Science Denial Industry holds another press conference to steer us back to the proper guide to predicting the future, the hallucinogenic Book of Revelations.

The Catholic Church is more famous for perverts than for saints these days, our athletes are morphing into Not-so-incredible Hulks and our televisions are fouled with phony “reality shows” celebrating the talent-free, the mean-spirited and the just plain dumb-as-a-turtle among us, and more ignorant blowhard Cable TV clowns than a healthy society can sustain.

Now we’ve got an arrogant young twat movie star grabbing headlines because she insists it is her right as a celebrity to use brick walls and pedestrians to stop her SUV instead of wearing out her brakes. Enough!

No sense asking the government for help either, they’ve got their hands full trying to clean up 8 years of serious damage done by our first dictator, Papa Doc Cheney. They’re also pretty busy trying to create jobs out of nothing since the bankers stole all the money, getting Big Oil to stop turning the Gulf of Mexico into an XXXL oil reserve tank, and trying to figure out how to pass a law when you’ve got a solid majority in both Houses of Congress.

Maybe math just isn’t Professor Obama’s strong suit. To our untrained eyes, in a 51 to 49 vote, 51 wins. What’s with all the hand-wringing, Hamlet? This guy gets a little too dramatic sometimes. Maybe it’s all that nation building this country is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably the two most difficult nations on earth to re-invent.

Nation building. Which is a good idea, once we finish building this one. That’s the thing America had that no one else did, a fresh start. When Europeans came here, they came from nations that had been built for many centuries. They were done. What you saw is what you got. Iraq and Afghanistan have both been done for two thousand years. Good luck to their nation builders.

Not so in America. We weren’t done the day after George Washington was sworn in, since there were only 13 states, slaves and indentured servants counted as 3/5 of a person and women couldn’t vote. We weren’t done when the slaves were freed, or women voted, when ordinary workers gained government recognition and support under FDR, when Civil Rights passed or when we put a guy on the moon just for the hell of it (how cool was that?).

We’re still not done. Just like the entrenched mindset that led to the compromise of slavery in the United States Constitution, there are still pockets of blindness and injustice yet to be addressed in America. We still deny gay people, our last niggers, their civil rights, and can’t seem to figure out immigration, which is odd seeing as how immigration is almost exclusively how America was populated.

The people that were already living here were mostly done away with, another stain on our national character we are still coming to terms with. After a stunning and complete victory in World War 2, we made some rookie mistakes in being the world’s biggest superpower, a rarefied perch previously reserved for the Romes, the Spains, the Englands and Frances of this world, nations with many centuries of political preparation for becoming dominant empires in a treacherous world.

America pretty much made it up as we went along, showcasing our happy and prosperous citizenry and wearing the Big Dog target on our back as our navies sailed the 7 oceans for whatever reason navies sail the 7 oceans when there is no war going on.

Mostly to play cat and mouse with the 7 ocean-presence of the Soviet Navy. The Soviet Union played our made-to-order swarthy villain for 50 years in a Cold War our leaders never got tired of but scared the shit out of everyone on earth. The Cuban Missile Crisis was very nearly instant global warming, and this would be going out by smoke signal.

That finally went away, then other crazy traumatic things happened, as they always do, and now we’re alone at the top trying to plug every leak in the dyke and running out of fingers. Americans are wondering what’s next for us, because in America you can still wonder that. America has always been as much an ideal as a nation. We’re not done yet and we can always change things. Better days are coming.

What? Russian spies in America! Has the retro craze even affected those of us who wax nostalgic about the Cold War, of all things? What, they miss Nuclear Bomb Drills? They wish the Berlin Wall was still there and that it was Russian troops shooting up Afghanistan instead of our own?

Or maybe they have fond memories of the exhilarating tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the highest stakes poker game ever played, with nothing less than the fate of all mankind in the hands of 2 pissed-off, driven men?

Well, if you are one of those people who wonder what it’s like to be a spy for Russia, it looks like they have some openings (11 and counting!) for avid fans of the bad guys in Robert Ludlum novels. The only drawback, it seems, is that today’s spies live exceedingly ordinary lives.

No dead drops, no radio and code book in the attic, no blackmailing of scientists, no poison-tipped umbrellas, no tiny cameras to photograph sensitive papers during a daring embassy break-in, and worst of all, you don’t get to cary a gun with a silencer, much less assassinate anybody!

Granted, the spies picked up the other day by the Feds were “sleepers,” deeply imbedded moles instructed to keep a low profile and blend in with the American crowd while filing innocuous “political reports” and awaiting instructions to take action that never came.

The biggest action these people ever saw was fighting crabgrass. The only “intrigue” in which they were involved was connected with the leadership of their local PTA. So you might want to rethink pursuing the exciting life of an international spy. It’s just not what was.

Employees of the SVR (the renamed KGB), it couldn’t have taken them more than a month to realize that there was absolutely nothing at all secret or classified going on in the suburbs, but, not wanting to lose their cushy gig, they fed their spy masters all sorts of melodramatic nonsense, knowing they’d lap it up.

KGB operatives were the most pissed off of all Russians when the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight back in 1990, rendering their vast espionage network all but obsolete. All they knew was the Cold War; the provocations, the propaganda, intelligence, counter-intelligence, espionage, sabotage and secret prisons. Then one day it was over without warning

Bureaucracies are, however, quite resilient, and the ex-KGB boys must have jumped at the chance to get back in the game when enterprising Russian and South American agents offered to spy on America from the comfort of their split-level ranch homes. What they promised to deliver we can only guess, but odds are they just made stuff up and passed it along on Twitter.

Imagine their chagrin when the Feds found out and thought they were on the level! Initial interrogations indicate that these people held no secrets about America, were in possession of exactly no classified documents or a single blueprint for a secret weapon on microfilm! Some spies.

One is reminded of the Conehead skit on Saturday Night Live where an alien family was sent to conquer Earth but instead wallowed in its bland pleasures and excesses, then panicked when asked for an accounting of their progress.

It was a good scam while it lasted, but with this Homeland Security Administration falling all over America like a ton of bricks to justify their own existence, these amateur spies were bound to find their way onto the radar of officialdom sooner or later. While busting this spy ring might have been a major coup twenty-five years ago, today it is only a mild curiosity at best.

Not too many people think all that much about Russia anymore, much less fear them. While this may bug the Russians no end, that’s just the way it is. With the Gulf of Mexico filing up with crude oil, jobs disappearing, homes being abandoned, lunatic religious terrorists vowing to destroy us and our rapidly warming planet poised to flood our shores with melting ice caps and drown millions of us, well, the Cold War doesn’t seem so bad now.

One would think that modern day Russian spies would be industrial espionage types, emulating China’s success in that area, especially with the orgy of corrupt capitalism and the gangster/entrepreneurs taking over the banks in the former worker’s paradise. For all we know, there’s no shortage of those people working in the United States for various corporations and the mole couples were a red herring.

Commerce is where the stakes are highest in today’s world, with the multinational corporations wielding more power and influence every day. And the pay is undoubtedly better. Russia has a whole lot of oil and natural gas, and when the Soviet Union’s collapse led to the privatization of these assets, politically connected and corrupt Soviet insiders along with the Russian mafia were the big winners in the instant billionaire sweepstakes.

The Russian government, on the other hand, can’t get out of its own way. Led by former KGB stalwart Vladimir Putin, a man who continues to call the breakup of the Soviet Union “a national catastrophe,” and accuses the American police of “going crazy” over the crabgrass spy ring, Russia is consumed with small wars with breakaway former Soviet Republics with names ending in “stan” and obsessed with regaining their Superpower status. It’s a little sad, really.

Even sadder is that so many within America’s intelligence community miss the Cold War as much as the Russians. An entire generation of our own Cold Warriors had nothing to do after 1990, which was okay by most of the world since the Cold War scared the crap out of everybody and gave our CIA license to do the most abominable things in small nations all over the globe.

Not that our “Russian experts” were any good. The fall of the Soviet union was as much of a surprise to them as it was to the rest of the world. You’d think that all the thousands of people trained to speak Russian and know everything there is to know about the Soviet Union would at least have a clue that the whole thing was about to go kablooey?  The answer to that one is “no” and they read about it in the papers like the rest of us.

Like their former-and hopefully-future nemeses in the KGB, our own Cold Warriors have now attained high rank through the merit of just being there and their mindset still informs the America intelligence community. Is it any wonder that a grubby bum in robes has eluded them by not playing by Cold War rules and hiding in caves in South Asia? Osama bin Laden has read all the Ludlum novels and wisely stays out of Prague and East Berlin.

And like most generals, our espionage leaders are fighting the last war, and this “Russian Spy Ring” vindicates that in their minds. We can look forward to more years of fighting the wrong wars with the wrong tactics. What will become of their new trophies, these Soccer Mom spies?

Who cares? They’ve already done enough damage, although not the sort their Russian handlers had in mind. America is unchanged by their feeble efforts, and more’s the pity since we need a complete overhaul of our intelligence agencies and their priorities. The last thing we need is a huge splashy “Red Menace” spy trial to take our eye off the terror ball.

This is not the 1950s, it’s the 21st century. Let’s hope our president doesn’t let our intelligence agencies get carried away with themselves and forget about bin Laden and his not-so-merry men, who, by the way, are feeling so comfortable that they have launched their own magazine to promote world-wide jihad. That should be interesting, as in horrifying interesting.

Probably the worst thing you can do to these spies is deport them, see if they can get hold of the spacious homes, minivans, iPads and the sheer American convenience of living in modern Russia. Those things are not for the Communist Party elite anymore, but the wheeler dealers in the private sector. The rest of Russia drinks plenty of vodka to ease the sting of getting screwed again by their latest Tsars.

Judging from their lack of initiative as spies, these mole couples are not exactly equipped to compete with the new Russian aristocracy of hustlers, mobsters and government-connected industrialists. There’s no place in today’s Russia for such people.

Thanks to them, however, there is a place again for American Cold Warriors and their legacy of psychotic, clandestine “black ops” that have caused so much misery. Way to go, Coneheads! Let’s hope they like vodka and standing in line dreaming about that worldwide worker’s paradise they were pretending to implement.

So now our diminutive multibillionaire Mayor here in Skyscraper Park, Little Mikey Bloomberg, has had another brainstorm designed to make life a little more difficult for non-wealthy New Yorkers. Seem he thinks our parks are too crowded. Okay, so what’s the plan, lil’ fella?

Build some more parks, right? There’s some available land here and there in the Big Apple, and it might be a good idea to give everybody a few more quiet patches of green to relax on, the better to appreciate the contrast to the hustle and bustle that defines our daily lives in the man-made canyons in this citiest of cities. Heck, we love our parks, big and small.

Not so fast, Mr. & Mrs. UThinkUMatter, Little Mikey’s got a better idea! Get rid of a lot of the food vendors, artists and entertainers that are a unique and colorful bonus of life in New York. Mikey figures people will make their park visits less frequent and shorter if their surroundings are less interesting, more like other cities’ parks. Pleasant but dull.

Playing the mayor’s trump card in his manic war on street and public park vendors, Mayor Bloomberg began aggressively revoking park and vending licenses and denying new permits, pulling the figure out of his ass of 81 vendors allowed in Central Park, which is a huge park. Citizens rallied to the vendors’ side, and now he’s backing off that figure, but some licenses will be lost, which translates to jobs and livelihoods lost and families made desperate. Isn’t there enough of that going around these days without aggressively adding to it?

For the mayor and “his people,” whoever the hell they are, to speak blandly of “licenses” instead of the real human beings each license represents, only reminds us what a bad idea it is to elect billionaires to public office. They are not even a part of the public, but a separate class of beings, never among us, always apart in an unreal of world private clubs, limousines, multiple vast estates, private jets, servants, security and complete isolation from the masses.

In a city with very many wealthy individuals, the billionaires are the Bosses of Bosses in this tiny hidden community made up of a pampered elite who want nothing more than to cavort in high style without having to be unduly aware of the riffraff who built and run this town. Oh, you can fetch their drinks alright, hold an umbrella over them while getting soaked yourself as they scamper from the limo, and you may also qualify to scrub their marble palaces for slim wages, just don’t pretend you count for anything other than that.

Having a billion dollars means having more money than 100 very, very rich people combined. Having tens of billions of dollars puts about 100 layers of people between you and reality, every billionaire a cocoon-bound Howard Hughes minus the manic hand scrubbing, living in a bubble of luxury and seldom hearing the word “no” unless it is coming out of their own mouths.

When was the last time you ran into a billionaire on line in the supermarket or at the dry cleaners? How many of your children’s classmates in public school are the offspring of billionaires? Ever sit next to one at a ball game? Any of their kids joining the army to serve their country or simply to qualify for G.I. educational benefits, risking life, limb and sanity fighting rich men’s wars?

Now, our little Mayor Mikey, he fancies himself a “Billionaire of The People” (¡As if there could ever possibly be such a creature!) because he regularly rides the subway, just like any other New Yorker. That is, any other New Yorker who’s got a bunch of guys with guns and walkie-talkies following his every move and has the train dispatcher alerted as to which train you are on so there will be no delays.

Mayor Mikey ever show up on your block to see how you’re getting along? If he does show up on your block, it is with a huge entourage of  handlers (Don’t only mental patients and dancing bears qualify to have handlers?), “advance men” (WTF?), security specialists and hordes of reporters with cameras who make sure his every moment among “the peoople” is staged and choreographed so that he has no direct contact at all with the citizens he leads.

This is your cue to hide your wallet. This is the little prick behind trying to ban smoking outdoors, who tells people what kind of fat they are permitted to fry their food in and commands us to consume less sugar, all the while jacking up the price of municipal services and parking tickets sky high, while inventing countless new “fines and fees” to be levied on those of us less than enthusiastic about his vision of New York City, a vision that has little to do with reality.

Towards this end he fills our city jails each week with poor people who have committed the most minor of infractions, mostly for having the temerity to be seen and heard in his city. Thousands of New York’s poor are subjected to regular police “sweeps” designed to keep as many poor people out of sight for as long as possible, since being poor definitely doesn’t fit in with his “vision” of New York as a swanky playground for the monied elite.

234 years after gaining our independence from monarchs, New York City is the last bastion of America to suffer under one-man-rule. This city of 8 million people does not have a representative government, with only a powerless and corrupt City Council in lieu of a legislative branch of government. That is the equivalent of the nation of Austria being administered by one man, with no local mayors, legislators, aldermen and what-have-you representing the interests of smaller constituencies. The mayor does as he pleases, needing to consult no one, and that’s the way a CEO billionaire like Bloomberg likes it.

This little man has been doing his best for 9 years and counting to make life in this country’s most expensive city even more expensive and now he wants us to sit in our own public parks without access to a damned hot dog or an ice cream cone while perusing the works of a struggling young artist or listening to a talented troubadour. Can we toss a ball around, maybe, or is there a new fine in place for having a catch with your kid? If Mikey wanted that law passed, there’s no congress or senate here to stop him.

What the fuck would a guy like that know about people, or parks, or street artists or hard-working vendors with families to support? Or the millions of New Yorkers and tourists who really dig having them around. Apparently we’re all “licenses” to Little MIkey, to be revoked or denied as is his whim, or jailed for the weekend or longer if we step out of line.

So if you are not one of the wealthy elite in New York City, do try not to be too conspicuous and breathe too much air, would you? Little Mikey is making it abundantly clear that this is their town, and he’s the Boss of All Bosses in New York. We’re just here to pay the bills and make their ride a sweeter one. Thanks, Little Mikey, but…

It’s always Silly Season in American politics, even at a time like this when we have a calm man at the top of the food chain. President Obama is the most even-tempered, lucid and reasonable person to occupy the White House since Dwight D. Eisenhower. A lot of people said that Eisenhower was an inactive president, a kindly war hero/father figure who became president as a reward for saving the world from Naziism. His amiable personality, good humor and complete and total sanity makes him perhaps the most normal and well adjusted of history’s great conquerors and leaders. Everyone liked Ike. Respected him, too.

His unshakeable faith in the American people, his quiet competence and transparent optimism were contagious, and the 1950s were perhaps the most hopeful of American Eras. And contrary to his reputation, this guy did plenty as president. He ended the war he inherited, The Korean War, within 5 months of taking office. This general that will go down in history alongside Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon, when it was his turn to run a war as his nation’s ruler, declined the honor and pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the other big victor in World War 2, The Soviet Union.

Presiding over the only modern economy untouched by the war’s devastation, Eisenhower put this unprecedented prosperity to good use. Inspired partly by the strategic advantage in rapid mobility that the Autobahn gave the Wermacht in Germany, and partly by his native Texan-American wanderlust, Eisenhower built the Federal Interstate Highway System, and in the process transformed America completely and permanently into the Mobile Society. Without endless highways, what the hell would the young Bruce Springsteen have written about?

Ike also got America involved in the space race, even though JFK got most of the credit. He presided over 8 years of peace and prosperity and left office with the most accurate prophecy by any president exiting the office when he warned of the grave danger posed by “the military-insdustrial complex.”

When Eisnehower left office is pretty much when America started getting weird, with the assassinations, the Civil Rights riots, Vietnam, Nixon, and so on and so on through the Cheney Administration. The Generation Gap became the Red and Blue Gap, a Them-vs-Us attitude usually reserved for one’s wartime enemies, not your neighbors.

Now that we don’t hate each other over race anymore, we all hate each other for political reasons or religious reasons (or both), and call one another horrible names. Half our leaders on both the political right and the left are scary megalomaniacs that need to be sedated. The hatred they spread is almost Biblical in its complete unreasonableness. It’s not enough to disagree these days, now you have believe that only a traitorous heretic could possibly see things differently. Ike wouldn’t have put up with that childish crap for a second.

Eisenhower swiftly ended the Korean War and passed his proposed agenda with the cooperation of members of both political parties. This was a time when members of Congress actually considered the merits of an idea idea more important than who thought of it. When a maniac rose up among them, one Joseph McCarthy, and threatened this nation with Stalin-style loyalty purges, members of his own party joined with opposition leaders to defeat and completely discredit him.

Eisenhower detested McCarthy and all he stood for, and didn’t let the fact that they were both Republicans stop him from showing his contempt for the man and all he stood for. There would be no room for a reasonable and responsible man like Dwight D. Eisenhower in today’s Republican Party. These days, integrity and conscience are subordinate to party loyalty on both sides of the aisle, even though our public servants swear an oath of loyalty to the United States of America, with no mention of party affiliation.

Maybe Obama is trying to tear a page out of the Eisenhower field manual, playing the mature gentleman and telling the unruly kids in Congress to stop their silly squabbling and do their damned jobs. He’s got an uphill climb with this batch of Representatives and Senators, a Congress with no shortage of very strange and shrill voices in these strange and shrill times. Many people openly question Obama’s patience and wish he would spend more time trying to talk the spots off leopards rather than do his job. They wish that President Obama would get all worked up into a lather and lose control of himself like they do.

There’s a reason why the President doesn’t do this, the same reason why America elected him. He is not a hysterical person. He’s not going to lose it. Which, along with brains, ethics, commitment, ideas and a basic human decency, is one of the things you look for in a president. LIke it or not, the American President is the most prominent leader in the world, perhaps the only nation on earth where every other country takes notice of who’s in charge and what he’s all about.

This was not lost on Eisenhower, and it is not lost on Obama. With perhaps only their even temperaments in common, these two Presidents brought a mature sanity rarely seem in modern politics to the Face of America on the world and the national stages. This is how a grownup is supposed to act, like an adult comfortable in his beliefs and choices, but one who realizes that reasonable people might disagree. These things happen.

Those waiting for Obama to lash out will be disappointed. Tantrums are for children, and they get reprimanded when they throw one. For our president we picked a serious man this time around; modest but confident, optimistic but realistic, even-tempered but resolute in purpose. In short, a grownup. Well, if he can do it, maybe it’s time for the rest of us to play nice with those no good rat bastards who disagree with us.