Was the US caught napping on this one? The ramifications of U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak falling could be major. Time will tell. And probably not much of it.

There are still role models in America.  Kansas City Royals pitcher Gil Meche just gave up $12 million because he doesn’t think he’s earned it.  The price of his autograph should increase tenfold.

Pitchers who throw no hitters are forgotten.  Meche will not be.

Every man has his breaking point, his line in the sand.

I just found mine.

I wish it was over some grand ideal – freedom, democracy, the pride of our nation — but it’s not.

It’s about my fireplace.

Over my dead body will someone stop me from using it.

I mean it.

A report on CBS Radio on Tuesday put me over the edge. The American Lung Association issued a news release that day cautioning Americans about the use of wood burning fireplaces and wood-burning stoves. Apparently they give off smoke.

The news release itself wasn’t bad — a friendly reminder not to burn poisonous plastics, to ventilate properly, and to wash behind your ears in the bathtub — but the radio story made me numb.

It was the voices of those interviewed. I’ve heard them before. They are the ones who made cigarettes cost $14 a pack in New York City; who cruelly mandated low-flush toilets, and took away the salt shakers at high-end restaurants (why did the pepper have to go, too?)

I hate those voices.

As usual, they were serious. Fireplaces, it seems, have become — here’s the killer line — “a public health hazard.” And once something becomes “a public health hazard”, look out. Your right to do it just went up in smoke.

The CBS radio report confirmed that:  Some towns, according the story, have begun banning the use of wood-burning fireplaces. And if some have, more will under pressure from them.  When the self-ordained public health police get an idea in their heads, they march on legislatures like creatures in Dawn of the Dead. They never stop.

They can’t have my fireplace, though. Not while I’m alive. I’ll barricade myself inside and burn every log,  stick of furniture, and floor board in my house before they get me. And it will be worth it.

It may not be the noblest cause, but it’s my line in the sand.

I missed this piece by Democratic pollster Doug Schoen in The Wall Street Journal Online last week.

What Would Andrew Jackson Do?

Schoen talks about the public service union takeover of the Democratic Party and hits the nail on the head. In short, voters are slowly catching on to the coup that has occurred within the party of Jackson – and they don’t like it.  They are beginning to leave the General’s Party in significant numbers, mostly to become independents.

Here in New York, the union-controlled Working Families Party now virtually owns the Democratic State Assembly, and with it, veto power over state fiscal reform.  The tens of millions of dollars the public employee unions have at their disposal every election cycle through mandatory union dues – paid for by taxpayers – makes them a consistently powerful force.

I wrote on these pages a few days ago that Governor Andrew Cuomo seems to be several steps ahead (perhaps Schoen is his pollster?) by openly battling public union largesse.  If he is successful, he could lead a whole new fiscally responsible wing of the Democratic Party, or, more accurately, breathe life back into a forgotten one.

But then there are those union dues.  They just keep coming…

Kooky Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich has finally reached the pits — with his teeth.  The perennial presidential candidate is suing a Capitol Hill catering company for $150,000 after biting into an olive pit mistakenly included in a cafeteria  sandwich wrap.  From the injuries enumerated in his lawsuit (story link above), one would think he bit into a small hand grenade.

The congressman probably could get a whole new set of chompers for around 50 grand. The extra $100,000, evidently, is for “pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment.”

As a former waiter, I should caution Congressman Kucinich not to climb back on that sandwich line again.   Things worse than olive pits can end up in food.

Whenever someone complains to me about a pet peeve, I tend to acquire it. So, in the hope that others are similarly susceptible, and in an effort to make the smallest dent in the world of words, here is one of mine.

I am reminded of it today by a headline in Britain’s Daily Mail: “Woman Mayor Shows Her Horrific Scars After Surviving Two Assassination Attempts by Mexican Gangs.”

I’m no grammatical genius – I couldn’t tell an apposition from a periphrastic if you hypnotized me – but I can pretty much tell when something sounds awful…awfully…when something sounds awfully awful. And that headline does, to me at least.

It’s the woman thing.  We hear it so often — “woman mayor” or “women candidates” – that it’s probably begun to sound normal to some people.  To me it sounds like gravel being shoved into my ears.

Last I checked, the word “woman” was a noun and the word “female” was an adjective.  But we almost never hear from female candidates any more, just women ones.

This is all the fault of men.  I guarantee it.  We have become so fearful of saying something, anything insensitive to women that we use the word “woman” a couple of thousand times a day each, even when we know it doesn’t fit.

The word “woman” is 100% certified safe, so we cling to it for dear life, like to a buoy in a lava field. We call girls “women” starting at around seven and boys “men” at around 70. We call female animals women:.  Women cats, women birds – and most certainly women dogs.  We even say it amongst ourselves.  It’s become that ingrained.  It’s Pavlovian. (I am convinced that women are well aware of this dynamic and secretly enjoy watching men squirm. I’m positive my wife does.)

The practice reminds me of a gaffe I heard while watching a Winter Olympics about 10 years ago.  A black skier from Sweden or Switzerland or maybe Swaziland won a medal in a downhill event.  The American broadcaster covering the event, a former downhiller herself, blurted out: “That’s the first time an African-American…from any country…has won an Olympic medal in skiing.”

Poor woman.  Everyone knew what she meant though.

Anyway, that’s my pet peeve. I hope it’s contagious.

A dozen years ago, a single Brooklyn address became a national symbol for government failure.

It was 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights, headquarters to the old New York City Board of Education (BoE), and it aroused in reform politicians and editorial writers at the time an almost pathological desire to rant. One New York City mayoral candidate called it a “blob’, while a sitting mayor – pre-9/11 – said he’d like to “blow the place up”, if you’ll excuse the expression. Such was the affect of the bureaucratic stasis emanating from The Blob circa 2000 on otherwise rational people.

New York has another building worthy of such ire today, also in Brooklyn.  This time it’s 2-4 Nevins Street, about a mile southeast of the old BoE.  Call it Blob II, if you will, because it symbolizes what is wrong with government today just as accurately as the BoE did in its day.

The Blob II – Spawn of Blob? – serves as headquarters to New York’s Working Families Party (WFP) and the radical community organizing group, ACORN.  They don’t call it ACORN anymore, of course.  It became “New York Communities for Change” (NYCC) after the former group got caught on camera teaching an ostensible underage teenage prostitute how to defraud the government.  When ACORN dissolved, NYCC sprouted roots in the exact same 2-4 Nevins Street space, with a virtually identical board of directors — a freakish coincidence that The New York Post reports on today.

The WFP and NYCC neighbors, whose members and leaders are inextricably co-mingled,  are the chief proponents of the high-spending, high-taxing, and high-borrowing policies that have brought New York to its knees. The WFP is the proverbial tail that wags the Democratic dog in New York, yanking the larger Party further leftward every year with a hard pull of the leash.  (To give you an idea of their politics, take a look at this video of Bertha Lewis, a board member of both the WFP and NYCC, at a gathering of the Young Democratic Socialists.)

The influence of the WFP and the NYCC cannot be overestimated. These are highly talented and well funded organizations – and they are not going away.

Time Square might be the crossroads of the world, but make no mistake where the radical center of New York politics is today: 2-4 Nevins Street.  It makes the old 110 Livingston Street look genteel by comparison.

But what to call it?

The Blob that Ate New York?

Scratch that.

The hungry and industrious WFP and NYCC  are hollowing out the foundation of New York State.  How about…

The Termite Mound?

Way too easy to do. Reuters story here.

How much is our word worth?

That’s about to become a key question in states across America. And the answer, to the chagrin of millions of retirees, might be “not much.”

At issue is public employee pensions.  They are strangling the country, state-by-state, city-by-city, and town-by-town.  Americans just ate the biggest meal in history, and we can’t pay the tip.

Now we are hearing of a possible solution, an age-old fall back for governments and businesses: If we don’t have the money, just renege on our promises.  (“We know we agreed to give you x, y, and z; and u, v, and w; and q, r, and s, but we simply don’t have the cash.”)

State capitols are abuzz with the idea that this may be possible. It’s the magic bullet over-promising elected officials have been searching for.  And when lawmakers are looking for a legal out, one can pretty much guarantee they’ll find it.

As appealing as this might sound to those of us sick of public pension abuses, is this really the answer? Didn’t we give our word?

There’s got to be a better way to do this.

Maybe it’s time to bring in Ten Bears (Outlaw Jose Wales refresher below.)

Ten Bears and Josey Wales Hash It All Out

I don’t know when I became one of those people – a starchy old parent alarmed by what’s on television today.  But I think I have.

Or maybe I’m fine and the problem is with television executives who have pushed  the envelope so far that a consummately hip and open-minded guy like me is forced to cry uncle.

I concede it’s probably the former – I did just use the word consummately after all – but c’mon.

The new MTV British-import “Skins” seems completely out of bounds.  It’s a sex- and drug-filled television series targeting American teenagers – and pedophiles it seems – involving an actress, in starkly sexual situations, who is just 15.

The show is causing such controversy that MTV executives reportedly have met to discuss whether they might face criminal charges from breaking pornography laws in the show. Taco Bell, the show’s sponsor, did a quick Macarena out the door as soon as blowback over “Skins” intensified, so the program is now without a sponsor.

But MTV is standing by the show.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to watch “Skins” when I was 15 – I would have tunneled under my neighborhood to get to a house that had it on – but that didn’t make it appropriate for me. I would do anything when I was 15.  And, like all 15-year-olds — perhaps more than most even — I needed guidance.

I first became of aware of “Skins” a couple of weeks ago on the #6 train in Manhattan. I was travelling downtown with three young women from my office. We were hanging onto the overhead railing and directly facing a panel advertisement for the show, which basically looked like the image above.

I’m a New Yorker, a jaded New Yorker, but the ad immediately struck me as wrong. So much so that I asked the women with me, all in their early 20’s, whether they considered it inappropriate, too.  They grudgingly said they did – and then called me “grandpa.” Nice.

If MTV keeps the show on, it probably will be a huge hit.  With sex and drugs you really can’t miss. “Skins” will get a new sponsor and make a hundred-jillion dollars.  And MTV will have, as former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously put it, “defined deviancy down” in America yet again.

It’s not me, right?