Most of the content of this site is geared toward red-in-the-face arguments about politics or red-in-the-face bouts of testing new types of liquor that the writers here have found (I had a great new boubon a few weeks ago that a fellow writer and I found in a Dupont Circle wine shop, and can’t remember the name - more later), but we are going to switch it up a bit today and make sure that anyone who reads our site remembers some of the things that really matter - life, love, hope, faith and second chances just to name a few.
Read the rest of this articleWhat Really Matters (Hint: Not Scotch or Politics)
May 19, 2008 by Thomas · 0 comments
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Aren't We Missing the Point of the McCain Story?
February 22, 2008 by Thomas · 0 comments
Tricky those Sulzbergers at The New York Times… First their editorial page slams Rudy Giuliani and endorses John McCain, only to have their political reporters drop the scarlett letter on him. I stumbled on the article Wednesday night by chance, apprarently right after they posted it, and I couldn’t figure out why the media’s collective head hadn’t exploded with excitement over it.
Then the 10 o’clock news came on and it all began.
There is so much that can be said, and I don’t think anyone would appreciate me rambling on and on about it, but I would like to point out a few important points.
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Giuliani Disses Flyover States, Gets Screwed
January 29, 2008 by Thomas · 0 comments
With John McCain’s win in Florida, for the first time in around seven years, I am reminded of the amazing benefit of the electoral college and all that it has spawned in American politics - in particular the primary process that mirrors it. If it were not for the small rural states that began the primaries, we could have ended up with Rudy Giuliani in the White House.
When Giuliani decided on his “big state” strategy to win the Republican nomination, I was skeptical, yet nervous. I am not a fan of the overwhelming power that Iowa and New Hampshire hold in the presidential election process and think we need a change, but at the same time, I realize the benefit it provides in letting states that are not New York, California and Florida actually have a say in the election process.
If it were not for the state-by-state primary process, everything that is not a major coastal population center (including the Great Lake coasts), would get ignored almost entirely. For a while, I was worried that Giuliani had figured a way to outsmart the conventional wisdom of campaigning in the cornfields and living rooms and that the man who doesn’t include more to a sentence than a noun, a verb and 9/11 might actually end up winning the nomination. However, tonight, after the 2000 election when the electoral college elevated the Moron to the Oval Office, its little sister, the state-by-state primary starting with Iowa and New Hampshire has redeemed the process.
For full disclosure, I am a red state liberal who happens to prefer city life personally. I have spent around 4/5 of my life living in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi even though I now live in New York. So while I hated to see Bush lose the popular vote and win the White House in 2000, I understood why the process is the way it is - unlike Hillary Clinton and her shrill screeches against it in her first year in the Senate. Without the electoral college and the states’ primary process, the voices of Iowans and Nebraskans and Alabamians and others would be lost amid the glamor and glitz of New York and Los Angeles-based campaigns.
Now, with McCain’s win in Florida due to the momentum he built up winning in the great states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, maybe Giuliani can realize that all those people he ignored and didn’t care about in Iowa and New Hampshire actually do matter. If you want to be president of these United States, you can’t just understand life in the city; you also have to understand life in the country. This country is about more than New York and L.A. It’s about Omaha and Birmingham and Tulsa and Portsmouth and Cedar Rapids and thousands of other small cities and towns across the country.
Go back to New York, Rudy. The rest of the country doesn’t want you there either.

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Weatherpeople are Ratings Whores.*
January 14, 2008 by Thomas · 0 comments
For the second time this winter, I have woken up like a kid on Christmas morning only to end up with disappointment stealing my joy. (In case you are wondering, neither morning was Christmas morning). As I went to bed last night, I again checked my computer and weather.com, and saw that they were predicting 1-2 inches of snow by morning commute time for New York City, followed by another 4-6 inches before noon.
But what did I find when I woke up this morning and scurried to the windows in my pajamas?
RAIN!!! MORE DAMN RAIN!!!
Honestly, how long can weathermen and weatherwomen pull this scam? I must have checked weather.com four times yesterday to make sure the forecast hadn’t changed for Monday, and sure enough, it never changed - each time inflating my dreams of skipping to work in the fresh snow before it turned into big gray heaps on the sidewalks.
That is four more times than I normally ever check the weather on a Sunday. Sometimes at work during the week I check it once before going to buy my lunch to decide if I need to really bundle up or not, but generally I MIGHT check it 4 times during an average a week. Yet, thanks to their meteorological propaganda, I checked it FOUR TIMES in one day. I can only imagine how many times school kids checked the Greater New York weather yesterday on TV or online.
The meteorological powers that be must make a fortune this time of year - all from taking an average rainstorm and turning it into the “BLIZZARD OF [insert year here].” I once took a fishing trip to Titusville, Florida near Cape Kennedy and stayed in a hotel room that looked right across the water at the space shuttle launch pad. Since there was no launch planned, it was just any other hotel room in Florida that had a nice view. But if we had been there during a launch, the nightly rate would have at least tripled for the same room. Our fishing guide said that sometimes to boost the economy, NASA postpones launches for a day to give a nice boost to the local economy due to all those people to staying in Titusville for just one more night to see a shuttle launch.
That’s what I think meteorologists must due for their stations and websites - from the National Weather Service down to this guy. They claim snow to quadruple the hits on their site or ratings of their station. Hell, maybe we should just let The Onion take the place of USA Today so that we can say that everyone always reads the news.
*Global warming sucks too, but this is all meteorologists’ fault.
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