Republicans look lame to most young people.  We are stiff and mean, always saying ‘no’ to progressive-sounding ideas. Democrats want to revolutionize the world; Republicans want to till it.  We are the authoritarian fathers to the Democrats’ cool aunts or uncles. That’s why for every Alex P. Keaton, there are two Gloria Bunkers, if not Gloria Steinems.

This perception was never more evident than in 2008, when idealistic young voters supported Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 66-31 – a shellacking for the GOP in the under 25 electoral market.  It wasn’t the margin of victory in the election, but it sure helped the Democrat.

But young voters should be wide open to GOP messaging in 2012, if only Republicans would address them.  Republicans may never enjoy a plurality of support like Senator Obama did in 2008, but parity, plus one or two is entirely feasible.

The 18-25 voting bloc is poised to skew Republican, even if it doesn’t know it yet.  It may not be hip to be Republican at that age, but it’s always been hip to be smart, and any young person blindly supporting President Obama’s deficit spending policies is being anything but. The President’s policies, and the policies of  most Democratic congressman, senators, and state leaders, are annihilating opportunities for future generations by the minute.  Republicans need to say that on college campuses about 100 million times between now and November 6, 2012.

The generation of young people voting in 2012 is in trouble.  The President is running up unfathomable credit card bills under their signature, as the brilliant economist David Malpass often puts it.  So are state legislatures.  The combined debt states face in pension costs now exceeds $3 trillion, according to estimates.  Add that to the $14 trillion in federal debt we are looking at today.  I won’t have to pay the bill. But my daughters and their daughters will.

A partner at my firm said something brilliant yesterday, literally at the water cooler.   “Why will young people move to New York City in a decade,” he asked, “when 100% of their discretionary tax dollars will go to paying for trash that’s already been picked up?” – that is, to pay the pensions of sanitation of workers and other city employees who retired years ago.  That’s actually what we’re looking at, not just in New York, but in municipalities everywhere. Money that pays for parks and little league scoreboards and community centers today will have to be diverted  into pension payments tomorrow. There is no way around that.

Young people are blessed with idealism and optimism.  It’s why audacious campaign lines like “This is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal” are so appealing at that age. But they are neither stupid nor unapproachable. Republicans need to remember that in 2012.

http://youtu.be/5ohIVzIZLuQ

If someone had the guts to film this, the least I can do is post it.  Insane.

Legendary Horse Racing Announcer Tom Durkin

The first time I heard of it, it was being called Mackey Sasseritus. Now it’s simply called Mackey Sasser Syndrome.

It was named after New York Mets catcher Mackey Sasser, who after many successful years in Major League Baseball, inexplicably began double clutching the baseball before  throwing it to second when a base runner was trying to steal the bag. I watched the Mets nightly in those days, so I knew Sasser and his talents well. He had a gun for an arm.

But then he started doing this weird double pump for no apparent reason. He would begin his throwing motion, and instead of releasing the ball, he would re-cock his arm, and then throw it. That one-second delay was enough for the slowest base stealer to take second standing up.

I remember Ralph Kiner in the broadcast booth — and every viewer watching — totally perplexed by it, flummoxed.  But Sasser couldn’t stop doing it. Night after night, he double-pumped that ball and opposing runners stole bases off him. It ended his career.

Similar things have happened to other ball players — Chuck Knoblauch, Steve Blass, and Steve Sax for a time.  Players with near perfect physical control, who had been throwing baseballs since they were boys, would suddenly be unable to throw accurately to another player 10 or 15 feet away.  No one could figure out exactly why, although it was clear it was anxiety-based. Some type of panic trigger was misfiring.

Today, we read in The New York Times that legendary horse race caller Tom Durkin has pulled himself off the Triple Crown desk. Durkin, just 60, has called the last 30 Triple Crown races. He is a master. But debilitating panic attacks surrounding the big races have spiritually flattened him, and he has decided to call it quits.  He’ll continue calling races; just not the big ones.

I am hugely empathetic to Durkin because panic attacks flattened me in my 20’s and 30’s. I had no idea what they were at the time. They came out of nowhere and crushed my confidence to an extent impossible to describe here.  A kid who would hang off the top branches of a tree by his feet to be funny, couldn’t stand in bank lines 15 years later. Cuckoo stuff. Any bluster I once had was pounded out of me. Mercifully, they went away in time, and I gained a good dose of humility from the experience.

Durkin’s voice won’t be heard at Churchill Down’s this year, but his bravery in speaking publicly about the reason will resonate for years, at least with me.

The Massachusetts House has now joined lawmakers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana in voting to limit the bargaining powers of public service unions, which have wrenched concessions out of the elected officials they help elect year after year for decades.

The reason? The Bay State can no longer afford sweetheart pension giveaways. No state can.

The big deal here is that Massachusetts is as solidly Democratic a state as there is, but reality has struck even there.

“It’s pretty stunning,’’ said Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO in this Boston.com story. “These are the same Democrats that all these labor unions elected. The same Democrats who we contributed to in their campaigns. The same Democrats who tell us over and over again that they’re with us, that they believe in collective bargaining, that they believe in unions. . . . It’s a done deal for our relationship with the people inside that chamber.’’

Instead of blaming their erstwhile friends in Boston, the union leaders should snap out of their trance.  It’s over. It’s time to deal in reality.

http://youtu.be/RSgyHXKO8YE

This is a web video from a student committee to draft Mitch Daniels. Jimmy McMillan is always worth a watch.

New York government — at least its powerful union-Left — won’t be satisfied until it chases every last wealthy family out of the state. And then it will blame them for leaving.

Here’s New York’s latest scheme. A program called STAR was created 10 or so years ago because school and property taxes had risen too high. Families couldn’t take it anymore and began leaving the state. So instead of reducing spending — the cause — and lowering taxes to reasonable levels, legislators came up with STAR, a refund program where New York homeowners would continue to be taxed at ridiculous levels, but would  get some of their own money back in a state-issued check every October, just in time for Election Day. Money New Yorkers had earned was meant to be seen as a windfall gift from their local legislators in Albany. STAR didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of families from leaving the state, but it got a lot of incumbents re-elected.

Then came massive deficits caused by years of mad blind spending, so most of the STAR program was suspended. But about 2.4 million New Yorkers remained eligible for one form of it. At least they used to be. Now, legislators are routing out of that program families making more than $500,000 per year. They will receive no refund on their money under a new law, i.e., they will see a tax increase.

That may sound reasonable in a fiscal emergency — $500,000 in income is a lot — but this threshold measure is part of a larger and more pernicious plan schemed up by New York’s union-Left. Or as Frank Mauro, executive director of the official sounding but union-created Fiscal Policy Institute, put it in the Ithaca Journal today, “This is reform at the edges.” The real plan is to make New York property taxes based on income rather than the value of one’s property. In other words, the unions want to swap out property and school taxes for a second income tax system in the state. They call this a “circuit breaker.”  It could just as well be called the “short-circuit,” because that’s what it will do to New York’s economy.

This thinking is axiomatic among New York’s left. Let the “rich” pay for it; let ’em pay for everything. That way we can keep spending and spending and the majority of people will still vote for us. We can have largess without limits in perpetuity.

Tell that to the “hedge fund millionaire’s” living in Greenwich.

I forget who said it, Will Rogers or someone, that the definition of middle age is when every new person you meet reminds you of someone you’ve already met.

I can appreciate that. But what I’m encountering more so these days is the need to constantly ask a waitress or store owner, “what did this place used to be?” And, too often, “…how about before that?” That’s the mark of middle age for me.

I was down in the City Hall area today where I worked for years — 20-plus years ago. All my landmarks are gone. Ritzy Tribeca has completely changed the look and feel of the area, and the missing World Trade Center is like a snapped off compass needle. I needed to do two 360’s to figure out which way was north and which way was south. I was a tourist in my old neighborhood.

“What did this place used to be?”, I found myself asking again over lunch.  But no one ever seems to know in New York.

It has to stink getting terribly old. It’s bad enough losing your life-long friends, but it has to be far worse losing the shared memories of the way things once were. My father just turned 88, and I often think of the New York he knew — of The Stork Club and Toots Shor’s; the old Garden and The Biltmore Hotel. There is no one  around anymore to remember the glimmering nights he spent there, or at the jazz clubs along 52nd Street where Ella Fitzgerald scatted and Nat King Cole crooned, or was it 53rd?  The Stork Club is a mere sidewalk plaque on an office tower wall now, marking where it once stood. But my father explains that it used to be somewhere else,  when it was the real Stork Club anyway.

The cultural stuff is tough on the heart, too. Like the day a young co-worker came into my office wearing a very Mary-Tyler-Moore hat. “Who’s Mary Tyler Moore?,” she asked.

How can you explain to a 22-year-old what the Mary Tyler Moore Show was in its day? It’s not possible. Just as impossible as someone from an earlier generation trying to explain what The Shadow once meant to him.

It’s the landmarks, though, that really get to me. The physical edifices that slip from generation to generation with relentless ease. I am  haunted by nostalgia around them.  A lot went on in those places, when they were what they used to be.

The 9/11 attacks gave rise to at least two bubbles.  The big one, the housing bubble has been discussed endlessly. Super-low interest rates sent millions into the mortgage market; the bubble eventually burst, and the world economy collapsed.  We know that story all too well.

But a smaller post-9/11 bubble remains, and may never pop.  It won’t take down the economy like the mortgage crisis did, but it will bleed billions of taxpayer dollars in the years to come — and sap the spirit of U.S. citizens in the process.  It is the security bubble that is choking federal, state, and municipal government office buildings, and transportation hubs, regardless of their strategic importance. It has become a living hell to enter any of them.

I attended a New York State Senate hearing this morning at 250 Broadway in New York City — a pubic hearing — and it took me 35 minutes to get through security. It was like trying to get into Fort Knox.  (I only got through because my colleague knew someone in the building.) At 9 AM there must have been 100 people in line at security — the queue was spilling onto the sidewalk – to get into a building where nothing of possible interest to a terrorist network has ever taken place.  Ever.

We see similar security in almost every city and state in the U.S.  Cities barely on the map have erected sophisticated security apparati.  I hate myself for thinking it,  but whenever I pass through a metal detector or undergo a wand check in a particularly obscure locale I think the same thing:  “Don’t flatter yourself. Who the hell wants to bomb you?” The answer, of course, is no one.

But that’s a truth we cannot talk about, because a.) “God-forbid, what if something happened?”, b.) No one wants to appear soft on terrorism, and c.) Security is a multi-billion dollar industry.  It lobbies. Indeed, the 9/11 attacks have been squeezed and exploited for every drop of funding for every imaginable security device, needed or not, and then some.

The Soviets used to indiscriminately set up traffic barricades whenever they wanted to subdue the spirits of its citizens.  It was a tried and true method of breaking their will when they got uppity. Well the KGB could learn a lot from the guards at U.S. government buildings today.  They can grind you into despair inside an hour.

I know this is a dangerous world. I know the bad guys probe our defenses, but c’mon. The lock down in America has gotten ridiculous. Not everything is a target, and everything cannot be kept safe if it were.    I, for one, would rather take my chances than get back into the line I was in this morning.

I don’t think Donald Trump is running for President. But boy does he have the microphone to himself right now. He is setting the conversation — a conversation — whether one likes what he’s saying or not.

What’s most interesting about Trump, and I don’t mean this as criticism, is that he’s shameless. That is, you can’t quiet him with condemnation or superior argument. His mouth keeps going no matter what. He doesn’t so much deflect criticism as bowl you over in a torrent of verbiage. He out wills his questioners.

That may be crass, but it’s a genuine talent. In political campaigns, you’re either on the offense or the defense, and Donald Trump is always on the offense, even when he’s defending himself. It’s an extremely difficult thing to do;  few seasoned politicians can pull it off. But it is second nature to Trump; he’s been jousting for years as a hard-nosed businessman.

“When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough,” he has been quoted saying.  (“You have to think anyway, so why not think big?” is another telling Trump line.)

Experience tells me that Trump eventually will end up on the defensive — the collective press corps is an overwhelming force — and that will end his experimental candidacy. But watching him blow through minor controversies like his poor primary voting record is instructive, as is his insistence on talking about taboo subjects on shows like “Good Morning America” and “The View.”  It shows enormous moxy.

In the meantime, Trump is exhilarating a portion of the electorate sick and tired of listening to political talking points. Trump says out loud what they wonder privately or share with friends on the next bar stool over — and he does it in plain speak.

Current US foreign policy is “asinine.” He “screwed” Gadhafi, and the Chinese “are looking to strip us of everything.” On Libya?  He’d “take their oil.” What do you think about that, huh?

It makes more than a few people want to cheer.

Trump speaks like a man with nothing to lose, because he has nothing to lose.  He has money and he can’t be shamed.  What do you do with someone like that?

Donald Trump is not running for President.  I’m sticking with that.  For now.

http://youtu.be/2N8gJSMoOJc

Well this is novel…

As of this posting, this video has been seen 1.5 millions times. It is one of many being thrown into the ethers by the National Inflation Association (I first thought it was a Ron Paul video; then I thought it was a gold industry ploy.)

To call these videos alarmist is a massive understatement.  They could serve as pilots for Hollywood disaster  films.  But as far as getting issues out there — if in the most hyperbolic way imaginable — they are clever.

That said, this is the best argument I’ve yet seen for preserving an objective news media. God help us.