February 25, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

Ms. O’Hara,

Speaking of “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help You,” it is obvious that the Koch Brothers, rapacious stalkers of mammon and filthy lucre, unlike George Soros and Tom Steyer, have infiltrated the Sun Sentinel. All people of good will know the deep government is filled who people who really, really believe that Midnight Basketball will work if given proper direction and adequate funding. Also, and predicated on a government program to make lions vegan, a plethora of lambs will be lined up around the block volunteering to cuddle with Leo or Leona.

They are the same people calling for a draft to fill up the ranks, the decimated ranks, of the hugely successful War on Poverty.

The Sun Sentinel, a paper that has never seen a tax that couldn’t be raised or a stifling regulation that can’t be made more stifling – After all, it’s for the children – would never knowingly permit headlines such as the ones discussed below. It’s obvious that someone took over the printing room.

#1 – “Tax Office Was Ripe For Fraud” – Men are not angels and we will always have crooks but this was an interesting scam. All such scams are predicated on the assumption that nobody is looking. It is easier to run a scam on the government because when failure isn’t punished and success can’t be rewarded there is no reason for the big dog to get off the porch and hunt. He’s going to eat regardless. 3 cheers for the insurance company because save for the $10,000 deductible they will eat the $2,400,000.

#2 – “Lease Dispute Could Shutter Butterfly World” says Dan West, Broward County Parks Director. Based on his statement to the Sentinel he is obviously an Affirmative Action hire under the category of developmentally disabled adult.

“We believe Butterfly World brings in substantial revenue,

 making it a profit-making business not a charity.”

God’s Holy Trousers but only a practicing modern American Liberal equates revenue with profit. Using that parameter, it is time, indeed past time, to break up the post office. It would take repeated bastinado sessions to get him to understand the difference between gross and net. Why there wasn’t revenue sharing in the original lease is further proof that the landlord, absent a profit motive, had no interest other than getting the rent paid. That’s what happens when a not for profit landlord negotiates. For 30 years the butterfly people had a great run. Now Broward County wants more $. They say they will take over the business. Think Post Office. Think AMTRAK. Think the airport deal from 20 years ago. Think about the Broward County Commission making fools of themselves in a desperate attempt to give Black man a hotel 20 years ago. Think about the deal for the ice rink where the Panthers play. Think about the coming screwing on Marlins stadium. 

If you put these slugs in charge of the beach they would be importing sand in 6 months.

Let the butterflies go. Free the buggers. It’s the only chance they have.

#3 – “578 Mailed-In Ballots Arrive Too Late To Count” – Is Mel Brooks scripting this? Is this from a lost Seinfeld episode? Beckett? Ionesco? It took 28 days to get an absentee ballot from the Post Office. I count my working legs on one finger but in 28 days I could circumnavigate this county. After all, I only have 3 titanium joints.

Will anyone have his sad sack, sorry ass fired? Don’t be silly. The union would go bonkers.

Columnist Margaret Carlson said it was OK that absentee ballots not getting here from GIs serving overseas was OK because they were “tax cheats”. That is not the case here. It’s a case of common incompetence and since there is no punishment we can say it is rewarded. Plus, they get to do it again. What a country!

My question is simple.

How did these stories, stories that suggest that government agencies probably couldn’t find their collective asses using both their hands if they were in a phone booth, get into the Sun Sentinel? Bribery? Blackmail? Or did you just hire a bunch of people from the Welfare Department? Maybe the Italianate hand of Steve Bannon can be seen. If I were you I would put Lee Atwater on the list of usual suspects, the ones to be rounded up.

Kevin Smith

February 25, 2018

Doug Hyde

The Sun Sentinel

Mr. Hyde,

Are you following the path well-trod by Mike Mayo? He went from telling me who won the God Damn game to why everything wrong with the world is caused by “deplorables” being deplorable long before deplorable became a modern American Liberal dog whistle to telling me where I can get non-canine Korean chow with senior citizen discounts?

If so, good luck.

I have clear memories of my father, the legendary Judge Smith, reading the 2 Arthurs to me on Sundays long ago.

Arthur Daley, a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in the sports section of the New York Times.

Arthur Krock, a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote Op-Ed columns on DC in the New York Times.

Perhaps not a Chinese wall of separation but neither the former nor the latter were  known to be envious of desk swapping.

[I am enjoined morally from mentioning the New York Times and Pulitzer Prizes without mentioning Walter Duranty. One of the more interesting “what ifs” is what the Times would have done if the winner of the same Pulitzer Prize 2 years later as Duranty had been as involved with his capitol’s secret police as he had been.]

Here’s a basic rule. It is a testament to Ockham’s Razor. [Ockham’s Razor? Send a SASE. Tell me who won the God Damn game. Tell me who was “chaired through the market-place”. Tell me who wasn’t. [You better send a big SASE]

One sentence in particular is worthy of being “mentioned in dispatches”.

“You saw what happened when four Dolphin players

took a knee during the national anthem in

protest of blacks being shot by police.”

The Sun Sentinel

Today

You

Would I be branded with the new Scarlet Letter, said letter being “R”, to signify the racism that all White folk are born with, if I were to tweek your sentence thus?

“You saw what happened when four Dolphin players

took a knee during the national anthem in

protest of police being shot by blacks.”

The Sun Sentinel – not

Today

Me

Am I back to using the Trivium to construct universals from particulars? You bet. [Send a really big SASE]

The last time I wrote to you was during the run-up to Super Bowl XXX1X. You spent 2 weeks kvetching and kvelling about the host city. You said it was just past Nowheresville, this side of Palookaville. My advice was simple: Don’t go

Speaking of racial things in general and racial genocide in particular, did you know that 6% of the population has been active participants in 35% to 40% of the abortions in this country since 1973? Who knows how many Ben Carsons or Maxine Waters have gone down the abattoir’s drain? Would you believe that Thurgood Marshall wrote that abortion was good for Black folk because they did not have to face the horror, the horror of growing up in a racist society?

Since modern American Liberals constantly and confusingly conflate correlation and causality I wonder where the outrage is at that inconvenient truth?

And, by the way, who did win the God Damn game?

Kevin Smith

PS – My last gun fight was on June 3, 1993. The first police officer was murdered while the second one was grievously wounded. I saved his life. He danced at my daughter’s wedding 2 & ½ years later. And yes, the shooter was a Black man. Your column today has earned you a significant laurel. You are hereby named

POMPOUS FART of the MONTH

 February 16, 2018

Governor Phil Murphy

Office of the Governor

Box 001

Trenton, NJ 08265

RE: Pipelines and the horses’ asses who ride them

Governor Murphy,

Disciples of Ned Lud – Ned Lud? Send a SASE – are rejoicing in your decision to deny state permits of the PennEast pipeline, “a 120-mile pipeline that would bring fracked [italics mine] gas across the Delaware River – that’s the one that Washington crossed, remember? – and into Hunterdon and Mercer Counties”.

Trenton, our beloved state capitol, is in Mercer County. I have been out of New Jersey a long time but I thought there was enough gas there to last several lifetimes. 

Why stop at stopping one from being built? Why not tear out one that has already befouled and besmirched our fair state? 

A brief bow to Clio, the Muse of History, is in order.

You may not be aware but in 1942, to quote the great Churchill, “a time of limitless peril”, tankers filled with oil were being torpedoed up and down the East coast by Hitler’s kriegsmariners before they could reach New Jersey. Once it was refined – Bayonne, Bayway, Linden – it was put back on tankers and sent to fight Hitler. This country built a pipeline  from Texas to New Jersey in record time. Talk about “shovel ready jobs”! Nobody cared about the furbish lousewort or the Delhi smelt or the Raritan River narwhals. The country, even Hollywood after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, wanted to kill Hitler. It was called “The Big Inch”.

2 things of note:

#1 – We won that war

#2 – By Labor Day, 2018, we shall be free of dependence on fossil fuels, right?

It’s OK if I’m off by a few decades. By then, the new and improved Solyndra will stop fracking, right?

As soon as we figure out how to genetically modify our famed succotash bushes into giving us 3 crops of lithium batteries a year we can kiss high test goodbye. At least that’s what the ca-ca filled moon bats who identify as modern American Liberals tell us over and over and over and over, right?

Let’s show the world that New Jersey stands for something other than Taylor Ham, landfills, end zones filled with mobsters, and a past checkered by a racist Governor.

Mandate that all government vehicles must use either bovine, porcine, orvin, or equine eructations as their only fuel source

Shut down the “Big Inch” and close the petrochemical complexes that poison our children while keeping their parents in serfdom. You can show them how to get to Utopia, said Utopia being filled with all the delights of a pre-industrial society. “Utopia”? Send a SASE.

Full disclosure requires me to tell you that I fracked my first well in January, 1974. Both I and the Republic have survived. There aren’t too many guys from Bayonne who can say that.

I mention “fracked gas” in my first paragraph. I took it from the website run by wing nut boobs who oppose the pipeline. It was the original Doctor Johnson, Samuel, not Lyndon, who said, “Such stupidity, sir, is not to be found in nature”. I mention that because natural gas, particularly when it is in a moisture controlled, pressure regulated pipeline is as fungible a commodity as is imaginable. Of course, people who would be hard pressed to find their Homerically dumb asses using both their hands wouldn’t be expected to know that, would they?

It was another Irishman, Edmund Burke, who said, “Unfortunately, experience is the only school where some people will learn”.

Accordingly, I name you

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK

      Kevin Smith

PS – Even though I know that “anticipation is the greater joy”, I can’t wait. “Utopia” means “nowhere”. It’s where people who believe in Midnight Basketball and taxing your way to prosperity wind up.

February 19, 2018

Howard Simon – Director

ACLU

4343 W Flagler St. #400

Miami, FL 33134

RE: What to do, what to do? – Some comments on your mini Op-Ed in Sunday’s Sun Sentinel.

Mr. Simon, 

The Sheriff of Broward County said that the “alleged” school shooter was an “evil killer”. T. S. Eliot spoke of evil in a most definitive manner. You may wish to familiarize yourself with it. Almost 200 years before Eliot wrote, Samuel Johnson told us 

“Of all the things that man endures, how few

laws or kings can cause or cure.” 

On the other hand…here are some stop gap measures.

#1 – Even though the First Amendments permits people to go to veterans’ funerals and shout “Death to fags” and permits an aging, skanky actress to hold up a severed head, said head resembling Trump, and allows a crucifix to be suspended in a vat of urine under the guise of art – and why can’t we see those cartoons of Mohammed, the goat humping paedophile? – and have the American taxpayer subsidize a play – Corpus Cristi, by name – whose premise is that Christ was crucified because 2 sodomites, Jesus and Judas, had a lovers’ quarrel, the part that identifies and encourages lobbying is bad because all modern American Liberals know that money sent to the NRA is used to bribe Republican legislators to continue the slaughter of school children. Making it worse, the noxious Koch Brothers fund these “deplorable bitter clingers” as they go about committing their profoundly perfidious deeds and that they support teenage bullying.

Suspend it. Scratch that. Repeal it.

#2 – The 4^th & 5^th Amendments are like manatees. Whatever purpose they once may have served their time has come and gone. Do you remember when Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior, said you didn’t have to obey an old law because it was, you know what I’m sayin’…old? I do. The point about “the wind and the rain may enter but not the King” may have held water before the Internet, and I can’t thank Albert Arnold Gore, Jr enough, and microaggressions led to school shootings. Not now. Get the warrant after the arrest. After all, it’s for the children, right?

Self-incrimination? Get real.

After you read the little shit his or her rights give them a few lefts. Then put the boot in. Defenestration is a scientific word for a process to see if someone can fly. It won’t take more than 3 attempts to get the usual suspects singing like an exultation of larks. Trust me.

It is culturally kosher for feral Black youth not to drop a dime when they “see something”, something as in “something evil this way comes”. Not so for melanin challenged scions of privilege. When they “say something” they expect either the Cossacks or the Brown Shirts, both of them if possible, to sort things out.

Come to think of it, the 8^th Amendment is getting a bit long in the tooth. While I am bound and determined not be cliché-ridden, the salutary effects of “cruel and unusual punishment” can’t be overstated.

 The British used to strap an intransigent Indian over the mouth of a cannon and have a family member light the fuse. That helped keep them in line for more than 2 centuries. Their Navy used “flogging through the fleet” and “keelhauling” as a run up to Trafalgar. Napoleon would select 3 poilus at random before a battle and execute them for cowardice. He said it “encouraged the others”. It worked until Waterloo. Salem had a witch problem in the 17^th century. A few of them were hanged and the problem was solved. The President of the United States, when advised that the Army had broken the Pullman Strike, was told that some of the strikers had been killed. “Did you kill enough?”, was his reply. 

It’s been 22 centuries since Carthage bothered Rome. Cartago delenda est worked.

Hillary, she of the fat ass, told us that we are “stronger together”. Let use the Ricky Ray Rector protocol and kill this right-wing gun nut.

Kevin Smith

PS – Just some thoughts from a curmudgeonly community activist.

February 19, 2018

Howard Simon – Director

ACLU

4343 W Flagler St. #400

Miami, FL 33134

RE: What to do, what to do? – Some comments on your mini Op-Ed in Sunday’s Sun Sentinel.

Mr. Simon, 

The Sheriff of Broward County said that the “alleged” school shooter was an “evil killer”. T. S. Eliot spoke of evil in a most definitive manner. You may wish to familiarize yourself with it. Almost 200 years before Eliot wrote, Samuel Johnson told us 

“Of all the things that man endures, how few

laws or kings can cause or cure.” 

On the other hand…here are some stop gap measures.

#1 – Even though the First Amendments permits people to go to veterans’ funerals and shout “Death to fags” and permits an aging, skanky actress to hold up a severed head, said head resembling Trump, and allows a crucifix to be suspended in a vat of urine under the guise of art – and why can’t we see those cartoons of Mohammed, the goat humping paedophile? – and have the American taxpayer subsidize a play – Corpus Cristi, by name – whose premise is that Christ was crucified because 2 sodomites, Jesus and Judas, had a lovers’ quarrel, the part that identifies and encourages lobbying is bad because all modern American Liberals know that money sent to the NRA is used to bribe Republican legislators to continue the slaughter of school children. Making it worse, the noxious Koch Brothers fund these “deplorable bitter clingers” as they go about committing their profoundly perfidious deeds and that they support teenage bullying.

Suspend it. Scratch that. Repeal it.

#2 – The 4^th & 5^th Amendments are like manatees. Whatever purpose they once may have served their time has come and gone. Do you remember when Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior, said you didn’t have to obey an old law because it was, you know what I’m sayin’…old? I do. The point about “the wind and the rain may enter but not the King” may have held water before the Internet, and I can’t thank Albert Arnold Gore, Jr enough, and microaggressions led to school shootings. Not now. Get the warrant after the arrest. After all, it’s for the children, right?

Self-incrimination? Get real.

After you read the little shit his or her rights give them a few lefts. Then put the boot in. Defenestration is a scientific word for a process to see if someone can fly. It won’t take more than 3 attempts to get the usual suspects singing like an exultation of larks. Trust me.

It is culturally kosher for feral Black youth not to drop a dime when they “see something”, something as in “something evil this way comes”. Not so for melanin challenged scions of privilege. When they “say something” they expect either the Cossacks or the Brown Shirts, both of them if possible, to sort things out.

Come to think of it, the 8^th Amendment is getting a bit long in the tooth. While I am bound and determined not be cliché-ridden, the salutary effects of “cruel and unusual punishment” can’t be overstated.

 The British used to strap an intransigent Indian over the mouth of a cannon and have a family member light the fuse. That helped keep them in line for more than 2 centuries. Their Navy used “flogging through the fleet” and “keelhauling” as a run up to Trafalgar. Napoleon would select 3 poilus at random before a battle and execute them for cowardice. He said it “encouraged the others”. It worked until Waterloo. Salem had a witch problem in the 17^th century. A few of them were hanged and the problem was solved. The President of the United States, when advised that the Army had broken the Pullman Strike, was told that some of the strikers had been killed. “Did you kill enough?”, was his reply. 

It’s been 22 centuries since Carthage bothered Rome. Cartago delenda est worked.

Hillary, she of the fat ass, told us that we are “stronger together”. Let use the Ricky Ray Rector protocol and kill this right-wing gun nut.

Kevin Smith

PS – Just some thoughts from a curmudgeonly community activist.

February 18, 2018

Irela Bague

The Bague Group

15 Madeira Avenue #6

Coral Gables, FL 33134

RE: So much ca-ca in such a small space – Some comments on your mini Op-Ed in today’s Sun Sentinel on Climate change and the unspoken curse of Vivaldi [Vivaldi? Send a SASE] in today’s Sun Sentinel.

Ms. Bague,

So there is no misunderstanding, so there is no room for even a scintilla of doubt, your Jeremiad-type screed on the horror, the horror of GlobalCoolingGlobalWarming et al will become the paradigmatic template, the sine qua non of the Professor Irwin Corey inspired psycho-babble that modern American Liberals use as a substitute for thought lest their brains shrivel up completely and be expelled through all available functioning cranial orifices. Think projectile vomiting through your eyes and ears.

As the Great Dr. Johnson once said, “Such stupidity, sir, is not to be found in nature”. Sweetheart, he never met you.

You say, as if facts, the scientific method, and History, that old bete-noire of addle brained twits who, absent tautologies, really would have ca-ca in their skulls, “Last year, the US experienced over 300 billion [that’s $300,000,00,00] dollars in damages caused by severe weather events. Scientists continue to warn that climate change will increase and intensify these events”.

Quien sabe, but your numbers may be correct. Several thoughts emerge.

#1 – Thank God for insurance.

#2 – Are the values of beachfront, water front, or littoral property going down in Florida? Are banks still making mortgages on such properties? Do you think it is “inconceivable and irresponsible” for American taxpayers to guarantee mortgages and insurance policies on such properties?

I am going to go out on a limb here but I will bet that you don’t know what ended the last Ice Age and what was the catalyst for the Renaissance. Give up? Climate Change in the form of Global Warming.

I am blessed to say that I have heard some of Bach’s Golden Oldies played on instruments built by Stradivarius. [Put that on your bucket list]

I am willing to wager all that I won on the last bet plus a few more black chips that you don’t know the one external factor that caused his instruments, all of which were built 

In the late 17^th century, to sell for up to 5 million dollars [$5,000,000] Give up? Climate Change in the form of the medieval mini Ice Age. 

1,500,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Basin exploded ending life on earth as it was then known. 750,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Basin exploded ending life on earth as it was then known. I don’t want to be known as the guy who cried wolf and I am not telling you to eschew green bananas but we are in the time envelope labeled déjà vu all over again.

1820 was known as the year that summer never came to Boston. Why is that? Here’s a hint. It snowed in June and July that year.

3 years after the OPEC-like whale oil cartel, with all the despoilers being in Massachusetts, tripled the price of its product the industry entered its death throes. Want to know why? Send a SASE.

What caused the loudest sound ever heard, ever, in the History of the world in 1883? SASE again.

It snowed to excess in 1888 and 1947. Why? 

There was a hurricane in 1908 in Galveston that killed 10,000+ people. What caused that? Ditto for Miami in1925. Also, the East Coast in 1937. 

How does Mount Washington get winds in excess of 240 miles an hour?

Where did the 1930s Dust Bowl come from?

I thank you for bringing out my elitist tinged curmudgeon side.

You commit the requisite sin of non-thinkers everywhere when you confusingly conflate causation and correlation. 25 centuries ago the Greeks quantified this Logical fallacy. It is better known by its Roman name POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC. Without its help you would be forced to, forgive me, think. 

You may wish to familiarize yourself with the Trivium, the capstone of which is Logic. It is another gift from DWEMs, a fountain from which all the graces of civilization flow. It is a spring from which there is no evidence you have ever quaffed. I don’t wish to damn you with faint praise but I don’t think you have ever heard of it.

I wondered through the web site of the Bague Group. I am pretty sure you are a lobbyist but the surrounding persiflage is so obfuscatory because most lobbyists don’t like to admit to it. 

Sursum corda! Be proud and be of good cheer. Yours is the only profession both recognized and recommended by the Constitution of the United States. Send another SASE and I’ll tell you where.

But wait. There’s more.

It’s a small thing, no bigger than a man’s fist on the horizon, but it’s like a fart in church or a turd in a punch bowl. It just sits there.

Your web site has a tantalizing headline. “Who we work for” shows that you are neither lobbying for the estate of Henry Fowler nor the estates of Strunck & White. “For” is a preposition. It requires something in the objective case. Next time try “whom”. It is like the classic Seinfeld episode where a de-trousered George Costanza is slobbering on the floor and Jerry says, “And you wanted to be my latex salesman”. Like I said, no big deal. Just like there’s no big difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.

Kevin Smith

PS – Climate Change – “the biggest threat humanity will face in the next century”. For clarity’s sake, with clarity not being your strong suit, do you mean this century or the 22^nd?

If ever there were a perfect example of “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome” you said it. “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”? Send a SASE, you boob.

February 11, 2018

State Senator Gary Farmer

111 E. Las Olas Blvd #913

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: Some comments on your insipid, inane, maybe vacuous, maybe all of them but how can I “paint the lily” of your moronic mini Op-Ed in today’s Sun Sentinel?

Senator Farmer,

“As we fight for a world free of racial divides…” God’s Holy Trousers, but you actually said that. Shall we count the ways – I daresay reductio ad absurdum – of the Logical lunacy of your addle-brained, ca-ca filled modern American Liberal premise, said premise being perfected at the thriving Balloon Juice, Rainbow Stew, Unicorn Co-Op, the one staffed by community activists from Caracas and Harare?

#1 – At least Dixie Highway runs on a North/South axis. Isn’t it time for that ill-named street to go? At the very least, no government vehicles can use it.

#2 – Plantation, Florida. Plantation, Florida? Really? Didn’t slaves live on plantations? Are we condoning slavery, like the New York Times did in 1864 by calling for a negotiated end to the Civil War? Plantation High School’s nick name is “The Colonels”. The Colonels”? Is Mel Brooks in charge of this production? [I was going to say Swift but I don’t want to overload you and your staff.] I had 2 relatives who traveled 3,000 miles to help free the slaves. They both fought at Gettysburg. One of them is still there, “wrapped in his faded coat of Blue”. I find that name extremely offensive.

#3 – Carl Vinson, John Stennis, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin had at least 2 things in common: They were all Democrats and they spent their entire adult lives trying to stop little Black boys from going to school with little White Girls. Vinson and Stennis have nuclear powered, nuclear armed war ships named after them. Russell has a ginormous office building named after him. Ervin is a hero to the shit-for-brains modern American Liberals because he “got” Nixon. Scuttling is off the table because we may need the ships shortly. How about changing the names? The U.S.S. O.J. Simpson and the U.S.S. Willie Horton has a certain euphony, don’t you think? How about the Al Sharpton Senate office building? I think that would bring us together.

“A world free of racial divides”

If it weren’t for non-sequiturs, eclectic indignation, and tautologies developmentally disabled Democrats, people such as you, would need strict instructions, negatively enforced, to piss in your boot.

Kevin Smith

P.S. Did you nod in approval when the Taliban blew up the 2,500-year-old Buddha statues? How about when al-Qaeda razed Palmyra? Did those meet your criteria for cultural cleansing? Have you ever read Orwell? Excuse me. Have you ever heard of Orwell? And it was late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863 in the Wheat Field at Gettysburg. They were both members of The Irish Brigade, the New York 69^th Regiment. 

January 31, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd.

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

Ms. O’Hara,

Just as Nancy Pelosi, she of the perpetually abysmal mug, said mug being stretched both tight and taut, of woeful countenance, about a half a bubble off plumb, is about to enter a room filled with mirrors showing her the way to discover some new episodes of “The Honeymooners” as she learns that plaids and stripes do go quite well together when she buries her own Easter eggs, I am a quarter step away from endorsing Dean Trantalis for Mayor of Fort Lauderdale.

As I read your editorial endorsing Dino I sang a minor te deum that I was exposed early and often to Samuel Johnson. It was, as the great doctor was wont to say, “the triumph of hope over experience”.

Your endorsement of him says he is committed to “smart growth”. What in the name of “shovel ready jobs” leading to a never ending “Summer of Recovery” is “smart growth”? Have any candidates sworn allegiance to “dumb growth”?

What special traits are required to be a predictor of “smart growth”? Is “dumb growth” personified by philandering or being a toss-pot? A still dead DWEM asked “Quis custodes custodiet”? 20 centuries ago. A good question then; a good question now.

Was the sale/leaseback of airport property 20 years ago “smart growth”? 

The Broward Board of Education indentured the people of Broward County for the capital amount of $700,000,000 for 30 years without having filled out the “use of proceeds” page. And why didn’t we get to vote on the interest? Do you know anyone with an interest free 30-year mortgage? Send up a flare if you find one. Then take your money out of the bank that made the mortgage. Assuming 5% for 30 years the total tab will be in excess of $1,750,000,000. That’s one billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Smart,no?

Speaking of “smart growth”, if someone wants to spend his own money to build something and is able to convince someone else to help him finance it where does it give some faceless apparatchik the right to say nyet?

But I digress.

The main reason Dino should be Mayor is because it is past time for Broward County to assert its role as the spear point of modern American Liberalism. With the exceptions of Zabar’s at noon on a cool Sunday morning or the courtyard at La Maison Streisand when the wetbacks, Dreamers all, are flogged for not straining organically raised, gluten free, quinoa-laced, orange juice, there is no place north of Havana and Caracas that is more progressive than Broward County.

No proof beyond manatee suffrage and the voting support that Doctor Mengele would get in any Democrat primary contest is required. His forward views on women’s rights, with abortion being the main one, are well known and appreciated here. 

It is time for a People’s Republic of Broward, first in Fort Lauderdale and then on to Light House Point before moving across county lines to Opa Locka and Belle Glades.

Let Fort Lauderdale show us the way!

As Michelle Obama, she of the $4,000 a week raise that she got when her husband went advising street urchins not to bring knives to gun fights to becoming a Senator says, “All we have is hope.” [Let the record show that Chicago’s murder rate began to rival Kabul’s when the feral Black youth of Cook County took his advice]  

Dino’s pajama boy campaign advisor was caught exercising his First Amendment rights by denying others theirs. That’s SOP for modern American Liberals. If he tells the police who were investigating trespassing, theft, and destruction of personal property to “Go fuck themselves” I can’t wait ‘til he becomes Dino’s information officer.

Happy days will soon be upon us.

Kevin Smith

PS – Which “lobbyists and special interests” will be shunned? NARAL? SEIU? NAMBLA?

Fair Play for Cuba? Short of tearing up the First Amendment how does he plan on stopping them? Which “wasteful spending” will he cut? How much? How big a bond issue will he try to bring to the market? Will he find pro bono lawyers to prepare the prospectus?

Will he find not for profit brokerage firms to sell it? Will he have to have a second term before we have lambs volunteering to spend the night with the lions? Does Medicare cover a suite at Bedlam to watch this unfolding raree? Orwell. Mel Brooks. Swift. The 3 Stooges. “A Confederacy of Dunces”. Fingernails on the blackboard. And quietly keeping score, “the Gods of the Copybook Headings will make their entries.

February 5, 2018

Mike Jackson – Chairman

AutoNation

206 SW 1^st Avenue

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

Mr. Jackson.

First, allow me to congratulate you on your selection as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. It speaks volumes to your business acumen and corporate acuity.

Second, and a far more reaching inquiry than congratulatory notes usually contain, is one of financial accountability.

Why shouldn’t the Federal Reserve Bank and all its subsidiaries be subject to the same accounting rules as AutoNation?

Back in my other life, I was an officer and director of a public company. Since I had no academic background in finance I relied on the number of footnotes after the actual numbers and the number of paragraphs the auditors needed to explain themselves to judge the health of the company. The dispassionate opinion of a 3^rd party carried far more weight than mine did, particularly when dealing with the outside world of shareholders and bankers.

Shouldn’t the Fed be subject to the same scrutiny?

The courtesy of a prompt reply would be most appreciated.

Kevin Smith

February 2, 2018

Governor Phil Murphy

Office of the Governor

Box 001

Trenton, NJ 0865

Governor Murphy.

May I suggest that your fracking ban in my beloved New Jersey – Bayonne born and raised – will have no effect because there ain’t no wells to frack. May I suggest that in the alternative you ban some of the effects of fracking?

#1 – One business day a month, a day chosen at random, no government building can use electricity.

#2 – One business day a month, not the same day as #1, no government vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine will be allowed to operate.

#3 – One business day in the month of August and one in the month of January no office building owned or leased by New Jersey will have either an air conditioner or a heater running. To sate the obvious, August for the A/C and January for the heater.

#4 - Ban all government facilities from using anything with plastic.

#5 – Other than “ohmadahn” maybe you can find a word used by Irish-Catholics as a synonym for “putz”.

#6 – Maybe it’s time to test the water at Goldman Sachs. You seem to be determined to out do Corzine. I shan’t fall into the convenient modern American liberal trap of constructing universals from particulars but “such stupidity is not to be found in nature”, right?

#7 – Beginning some 40 years ago I was fascinated with the concept of sanctuary and its evil twin nullification. 500 years from medieval sanctuary – remember Quasimodo with Esmeralda? – to John Calhoun, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. As one Jersey guy to another, I make this knowledge available to you on a pro bono basis. I don’t want to see you make a complete horse’s ass of yourself.

Kevin Smith

#8 – Ban Taylor Ham and all pork roll products. Talk about genetically modified foods! After all, it’s for the children. They are our future, aren’t they?

#9 – When is the ban on all petrochemical complexes in Jersey coming? It is, isn’t it?