New York City's Mayor's Race officially Moves Into Weird Gear.

Joe Lhota's political bio: son and grandson of a New York City police officer and fire fighter pledges to cut taxes for billionaires and slash wages and benefits for city employees.

Wow. His mother should have thrown him out and kept the stork.

That awkward moment when a man isn't sure if he did a number two.

They say he only lacks charisma. A man can be short and dumpy and bald, but if he has fire, women will like him. If he's Joe Lhotta, women will like him about as much as a man who leaves the toilet seat up. Seriously. Joe Lhota has about as much fire as the 1962 Mets, and will be lucky if he finishes the season with the same winning percentage.

Too much of a good thing can be taxing. And taxing can be a good thing. Such as taxing billionaires to pay for after school programs. In fact, if most people new that teenagers were at school all day before their parents came home from work, they would find such news downright relaxing. 

Public education is a good thing, and too much of a good thing can be wonderful. Every child in New York has pre-school? Wonderful!

Joe Lhota talks about success. He climbed the ladder of success all right, wrong by wrong.

Cablevision CEO. MTA chairman. From one legalized monopoly to the other.

Oh, but he has experience!

Doing what? When we say Lhota at the debate last night, he looked like somebody who wasn't sure if he had farted or pooped his pants.

And apparently, after yesterday's Federal Appeals Court Ruling, anybody who lives in New York City's media market is going to see a lot more of J Lho in action. Basically, a millionaire in Alabama decided he wanted to contribute $200,000 to J Lho's Super Pac. The New York Times has the details here.

Ironically, as much as I despise unlimited corporate influence on political candidates and their campaigns (aka "bribery,") I do take comfort in knowing that the millions of dollars that J Lho spends will do nothing to stop his inevitable defeat one week and a half from now.

Not only is J Lho down 2-1 in all major polls, but this is a man who said he would run over the most adorable pair of kittens in the world. Even most cold-hearted people would have the common sense to keep something like that a secret if they wanted to win you over.

Why did the scary candidate say he would run us over with a subway train?

And that's Lhotta: There more there is to see, the less there is to like. You can't sell bad product, and right-wing millionaires should have learned that with Mitt Romney. Oh the irony: The party that brands itself as flag-bearers of fiscal responsibility can't even invest in a winning candidate!

But this race is about more than Lhotta. In a week and half, he will fade back into obscurity, where he belongs. Hopefully, in a year and half, every child in New York will have the oppurtunity to pre-school and get a head start life. 

Left? Right? Center?

What's a moderate? What's a liberal? What's a conservative?

I have decided to remove the phrase "liberalism" from the title of this blog because I found it ultimately self-defeating. All of my views could either be described as liberal, moderate, or conservative. Therefore, because each label is so stigmatized, I decided to toss them all in favor of something more universal. Also, "Yankee" and "Liberal" is somewhat redundant. So I redacted both words completely.

For starters, what is a conservative? One would think that a conservative would not run a budget deficit during a period of economic expansion. One would believe in conserving natural resources, and making wise investments for the future. In other words, balance the budget through reasonable taxation, use care and consideration with the extraction of fossil fuels, metals and minerals, and rebuild highways and bridges before they collapse and kill dozens of people.

Obviously, political "conservatives" jettisoned these principles eons ago. I could say that I am a "conservative" because I don't think I should be able to set my kitchen tap water ablaze, but apparently, in today's climate, that makes one a liberal. C'est la vie.

Is there a middle ground in all this? Good question.

Funny how the "center" leans towards the left.

What bothers me most about the term "moderate" is that it is a complete mental shortcut. To subrscribe to any of the "big three" political labels is a sin; none of them are sacred. Rather than explore all sides of an issue (because there are more than two sides to each issue), a "moderate" simply decides that between two arbitrary points is the answer. Between left and right, there is truth

Granted, that's sort of true. If one says that Karl Marx is left and Ayn Rand is right, then one could reasonably say that the truth lies exactly in between. Between an economy where the state owns everything and an economy where the state owns nothing lies "truth."

The inherent problem with this philosophy is that is assumes, without justification, that every ideological argument is between two equally spaced polar opposites.

The politics of guns in America is a shining example of this flawed ideological examination. The
media loves to portray the gun safety dialogue as a political battle between two opposite camps: Those who loves guns and those who hate them. While these factions do exist, it is a very small subset of a much broader spectrum. Universal Background checks is a fine example. Public polling showed somewhere between 85 and 90 percent support for a measure that would make it harder for criminals to get guns and give law enforcement a tool to apprehend wanted criminals. And ten percent of the country wants criminals to buy guns unencumbered because they need them to overthrow the government should they feel the need.

First of all, where would the "center" be in this equation? How can a person show up in a public place with an assault rifle strapped to his back, make vague threats about killing American soldiers, and wear a button that says "Another Responsible Gun Owner?" Nay. It should go without saying that a responsible gun owner is somebody who understands that a gun is dangerous in the hands of a criminal, and any American citizen who would make allusions to kill an American soldier is a treasonous fool. Period. Maybe it support for universal background checks isn't centrist, but, well universal, because support is virtually uniform across party lines.

So if you're one of those 85 to 90 percent of all Americans who thinks the government should actually do something, where do we fit in? Even though public polling shows that roughly one quarter of all Americans self-identify as "liberal," large majorities of Americans support issues that are identified with the political left, be it marriage equality, a progressive tax structure, or universal Medicare. Let's face it: what the right brands as "socialism" is just another word for organized compassion. And it goes without saying that organization and compassion are both very good things.

So if somebody asks me what I am, or what I believe in, I say I am an organized compassionist. Or a prairie populist. Or just a decent human being. What can I say? My parents taught me to help my neighbor, even if my neighbor lives a thousand miles away.

New Name, Same Old Story?

What this (new) iteration of this blog is about. Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love This Blog's New Name.

A little over two years ago I started this blog mainly as a thought experiment. I was fatigued, admittedly, that neither political party was willing to pay so much as lip service to income inequality. A merry band of lunatics decide to give both Tea and Parties a bad name.

The last straw, admittedly, was when taxpayer-funded, "liberal" NPR wouldn't even address income inequality in a discussion about public housing in America. The commentators merely recited some information that was readily available from Wikipedia and then took calls from people who used to live in public housing high-rises.

The callers shared some personal anecdotes. The details where different, but the stories where the same. Everybody felt grateful that they had a roof over their heads in time of need, but the overall experience was awful and oh, how good they felt to get away.

And no, none of them had an idea as to what could be done to improve the situation.

"Well there you have it," said the "liberal" host of the radio program. "And with that, we're out of time!"

I had to howl at the moon, and this blog--although futile--did prove a catharsis. A few months later, some ingenious young people decided to camp out in Zuccotti Park, and, if nothing more, income inequality finally got on the map of political discourse.

So why keep this blog going? Even though I rarely update it (I work nearly 50 hours a week), I just can't stop myself. Quite frankly, I am having a lot more fun over at Natural New York, where my wife and I take pictures of flowers and write snarky poems about them. And yet, I can't help but try and offer a few words here and there about the plagued political discourse in America.

However, much of what I have posted has been too partisan, too preachy, and too polemic to be considered good writing. At least that's my opinion. So, I will try harder to go against the grain of Internet idiocy, and double down on my commitment to quality over quantity. And, in honor of George McGovern, I have renamed this blog Prairie Populism.

Stay tuned, and feel free to tell me what you think. Compassion, Love, and Understanding are the Answer.

Until then, Peace Out!

Yes, this is still an Assault Rifle

The pistol grip enables the user of the rifle to aim repeatedly and accurately in a small amount of time. A hunting rifle is designed for one shot. Hence, hunting rifles do not have pistol grips.

Josh Moore holds his totally not-an assault rifle

Shawn Moore, an NRA-certified firearms trainer and licensed hunter, recently stirred up some controversy when he gave his son, Josh, a .22 calibre rimfire rifle for his birthday and posted the photo on Facebook.

Someone who saw the photo called their local child welfare service office, who in turn sent an official to investigate, which left Shawn Moore ripping mad. Moore called an attorney to help set the record straight.

"Just because it has a sexy look to it does not make (the gun) an assault firearm," said Evan Nappen, Moore's attorney. "

We have heard this argument, relentlessly from the NRA and their ilk in the weeks after Newtown. How dare anybody attack a poor, defenseless rifle, based on how the thing looks?

Sorry, but a semi-automatic rifle with a pistol grip is an assault rifle, no matter how you look at it. Here's why.


This is the the 9mm High Point-carbine semi-automatic that Eric Harris used to commit his assault at Columbine High School on April 20th, 1999. It looks very nondescript. It doesn't have the same, military-style look as an AR-15, or Josh Moore's .22 Calibre rimfire. But it does have a pistol grip.

This is Dave Sanders, a teacher and softball coach at Columbine High School.

In the security video tape of the massacre, he is seen running up the stairs, towards the classrooms, rather than outside the school. After directing hundreds of students in the cafeteria to safety, Sanders ran towards the classrooms, most likely to help warn others.

Eric saw Dave Sanders running towards the classrooms. With one hand firmly on the rifle's pistol grip, Eric was was able to quickly aim and fire not once, not twice, but three times at Dave Sanders.

The first two shots hit Sanders in the back; the third ripped through his neck and exited his face. He stumbled into a nearby classroom, where students saw their teacher vomit his own blood and teeth. Terrified to venture into the hallway, the students admitted whatever first aid they could, while another wrote on a whiteboard: ONE BLEEDING TO DEATH In hopes to get professional medical help.

But the professional help never came--not in time. By the time medical help did arrive, it was too late. Dave Sanders was dead.

One bled to death. Because the rifle had a pistol grip, Harris was ready to accurately aim and fire repeatedly in a matter of seconds. Harris' sawed of shotgun, or Dylan Klebold's Tec-9 handgun, would have been unlikely to deliver three fatal wounds at long range.

It's not cosmetic. It's a feature. To a soldier in an army, a pistol grip has a benefit. Sadly, it has a benefit to a homicidal maniac as well.

So let's not give whiny critics of gun safety an inch in this regard. Not now, not ever. A pistol grip is not about how it looks, but what it does.