Monday, September 9, 2013

If One Million Muslims protest with 2 Million Bikers revving, does it make any noise?


 
The planned Million Muslim March on 9/11 has caused some controversy.   People are annoyed that the Muslims would march on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.    I am not sure, however, that there is much to get annoyed about.  The Facebook page for the event has only 57 likes – or one for each state, as one wag put it.

So the Million Muslim march will likely be a complete bust, with a few hundred or few thousand attendees, at most.

The real event on 9/11 will be the counter-march.

The 2 Million Biker march.

And this is not the spandex and 10-speed biker crowd.  This is the Harley, leather and American Flag biker crowd.  These are the people that ride to military funerals to block out the sight and sound of the Westboro Baptist church nut bags.  These are patriotic Americans with a willingness to put their bike where the mouth is.   Or something like that.

The Muslims have been granted a permit to hold their event, but the Bikers have been denied a permit to ride through without stopping.
 Undaunted, the Bikers are going to ride anyway. They will simply have to obey traffic signals, etc.
This should be an interesting event.  I am guessing the Muslims will be outnumbered 100-1.  The Bikers will ride slowly and peacefully around the city, snarling traffic and deafening bystanders for the entire day.

It will be fascinating to observe how the media reacts to this.   Other than completely ignoring the bikers, it will force them into verbal gymnastics to spin the days events.   The few hundred Muslims will be completely overshadowed by the sight and sound of hundreds of thousands of Harley's cruising through the city.
I look forward to complaints from the Muslims that riding a Harley is racist. 
 

 

Thursday, September 5, 2013

New York, meet Detroit...


Republican Mayors have run New York for the past 20 years. (Ok, Bloomberg is pretty liberal, but he is still less Lefty than the Democrats in that state).

Things have been pretty good in New York during that time.  Crime is down. Incomes are up.  The city is one of the shining examples of western civilization.

It looks like that run is about to come to an end.  The odds on favorite to win the mayoral election this fall is Bill de Blasio, a hard core socialist and wealth redistributor.  As noted in this article in TPM:

de Blasio for Commisar!
"But de Blasio’s campaign is framed around the problem of inequality and he’s been pretty specific about what he’d do. The centerpiece is a sizable hike in the taxes of upper income New Yorkers to pay for universal pre-k and after school programs throughout the city. The rest center around policies and laws to prop up the low-end wage structure."

The TPM article laments the fact that despite many candidates talking about income redistribution, no one has really done anything about it.  It goes on to say

"How much you can really move the needle on these questions in a single city with two other states nearby is a very open question. But New York, given its size and the relative immobility of some of its major industries, is perhaps the only city where you could take a stab at it. So it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. "
In other words, he is planning to soak the rich, and he is hoping that they will not move away and foil that plan. 

Good luck with that.  

Detroit found out the hard way that when you soak the rich and subsidize non working class, you destroy the entire city.

The assertion that New York's industries are immobile and therefore can be heavily taxed with little risk that they will move on to greener pastures is absurd.

Detroit had the quintessential immovable industry -- large smoke stack factories with a huge embedded supply chain of smaller factories.    And yet virtually the entire industry has moved away from Detroit.

New York does not make cars.  It sell financial instruments.   This is a completely mobile industry  -- all you need is an Internet connection.

If you start taxing New York millionaires, don't be to surprised when they become Hilton Head millionaires.

If de Blasio and his fellow travelers get their wish, they will destroy New York City.

R.I.P. Parody


The Obama Administration, and Democrats as a party, are officially beyond parody.

There is no joke you can make, or mocking barb you can toss, that is not immediately bought to life by some Democrat.

When Obama started to wobble on Syria, the wags and the bloggers pointed out that he surely was about to blame Bush for the current mess in the Middle East.


The ink was still wet on that particular lampoon when James Carville (D - Middle Earth), decided to make that argument.

Here is the exchange with Bill O'Reilly:

O’REILLY: Libya a mess. Iran is defiant.
CARVILLE: Come on, look. When is all of this — when was it not? I mean, Gaddafi is gone. It is a mess, I agree with that. But, you know what, it’s a mess and we haven’t lost any kids over there which says something and –
O’REILLY: I’m not sure that’s a litmus test, it doesn’t seem to be any clear vision on the part of President Obama. He doesn’t have — ‘here is what I want.’ He doesn’t have that.
CARVILLE: You know, what I would say and maybe a little bit of a different view here. I think what really is freaking people out is the incompetence of the Bush administration in Iraq.
O’REILLY: You’re going to blame Bush?
CARVILLE: Of course, the Iraq thing is why people have so much trepidation about going into Syria. They said the last time we went over there, look what happened. I really think this has something to do with it.


So there we have it people. 

It is all Bush's fault.

And Parody is dead.