Happy Birthday to Us!

This week marks the fifth anniversary for Mustard Street.

I can't improve on Philbrick's sketch of our mission on past anniversaries:

•  to focus on Rochester and vicinity;

•  to present original analysis;

•  to strive for good writing;

•  to focus on ideas, expressing them clearly and with a sense of humor;

•  to provide information that propagandists posing as journalists want to suppress;

•  to expose intellectual dishonesty in policies, politicians and the media.

To all of our readers, thank you for reading Mustard Street.

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Democrat and Chronicle Paywall

Gannett Co., Inc. plans to place online content on all of its local newspapers behind a paywall in the immediate future.   This means we'll have to pay to read material from the Democrat and Chronicle online.

Gannett is a big, sophisticated corporation, so we have to think that it has a business model showing that paywalling its local papers will work, and ultimately make money for its stockholders.

Still, we have to wonder whether people will pay money to read about how terrible it is when indigent alcoholics who die in flophouses don't get a nice funeral for free.

Gasoline's at $4.00 and going up, crisis is brewing over Iran, the economy's still in the tank -- and this is the D&C's idea of what's important to its readers.

This morning's headline, "Sally Green to Get New Burial," -- about the twelfth story on the subject -- looked more like something out of The Onion than a real newspaper.

And The Onion isn't paywalled.

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Back to the Blogosphere!

After taking a few months off after the campaign for City Council I find myself urged to get back to writing. The campaign didn’t end the way I would have hoped but it was an experience that I will never regret. So many new friendships and relationships created to my surprise. Plus the 10 pounds I lost walking to all of those doors didn’t hurt either!

What have I been up to you may ask? My wife and I have decided to go into business for ourselves and are in the process of opening a boutique in the City at the corner of Winton Rd and Blossom Rd. My wife, as many of you know, is from Thailand so we are focusing on importing women’s fashion accessories (Sterling silver, silk, handmade products, and a new line of handbags not available today in the US). Check it out at Fahsye.com or on Facebook by searching for “Fahsye”. And tell the ladies in your life!

What really urged me to get back to writing and will be part of the motivation going forward was this weeks passing of Andrew Breitbart. To say that I was a huge fan would be a stretch but I really enjoyed his work when I did catch him. 43 years old and already a huge success in the media industry. He was also a force behind so many other folks success in the industry as well, even those he completely disagreed with. Andrew picked up a torch and marched into the fight without anyone ever having to ask him. He was an inspiration to the younger generations and showed us how to use the tools of the day (social networking, blogs, twitter, etc) to fight the good fight.

So to Andrew, God bless! Know that your passion will continue on here on this earth.

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Weekender

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The Alesi Enigma

Will there be a primary challenger to State Senator Jim Alesi?   So far, it's not sounding like it.

We think it likely that Senate Republican leaders will be leaning hard on the Monroe County Republican organization to give Alesi a pass, notwithstanding Alesi's lawsuit fiasco last year.   Their thinking has to be:   with a majority this slim, we have to protect every seat.   So Alesi's purchase of protection and support from Governor Cuomo, with his vote on the gay marriage bill, may have been superfluous.

Other questions remain, though.   Will local Republican committees pass petitions for Alesi?   Absent pressure from County GOP headquarters, many won't.   If so, it's not a problem for Alesi, who can hire petition-carriers to do the job the GOP grassroots won't do.

But can't any plausible Democratic candidate beat Alesi, after the damage the Senator did to himself in the lawsuit mess?

We think that's the big question.   And maybe that's where the deal he made with the Governor over gay marriage will make the difference.   If there's no Democratic opponent to Alesi, or one who's out on his or her own, without the support from Albany we'd expect for a legitimate Democratic challenge (such as Mary Wilmot's in 2010), we'll know that that was the deal made the day Alesi holed up with the Governor before becoming the first Republican senator to support the same-sex marriage bill.

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Weekender

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Remember Where You Read it First

Don't be surprised to see now-County Court Judge Geraci ... as our next federal judge.
-- Mustard Street, January 3


Judge Geraci Nominated For Federal Bench
-- News Reports, February 9

An admirable nomination and a gain for the Federal bench.   Good luck, Judge Geraci.

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Must Israel Act Before the Election?

Reading about Iran's obvious rush to develop a nuclear weapon, and understanding the implications for Israel, leads me to a prediction.

First, if there's going to be a strike against Iran's nuclear weapon facilities, it's going to have to be made by Israel, because the Obama Administration won't do it.   Nothing original in that one.   Second, they'll have to act before the American election in November.

The current administration has turned its back on two of America's most steadfast allies, Britain and Israel.   And especially Israel.   Prime Minister Netanyahu has to know that absent the pressures brought to bear by an imminent election, the current American administration would not aid in such a strike, would pressure Israel not to do it alone, and would pull the rug out from under Israel if it thought it could get away with it.

And it can get away with it after the election.   But not before.

Our country's foreign policy apparatus spews out claims that Iran is far from developing a deployable weapon.   In the most charitable characterization, these claims are overly optimistic, as the government of Israel understands only too clearly.

The Israeli government also knows that getting it wrong about when Iran will have the Bomb they want can mean anihilation of the State of Israel.

That's why I'm guessing that it realizes it will have to act before November.   Regardless of the timeline for Iran getting its weapon, Israel has to deal with the timeline to betrayal by the current American government.   Assuming the President's re-election, that timeline ends on November 6.

I knows our little blog focuses on local matters, but in my view there's a moral imperative linked up with the survival of the State of Israel.   In a time of open anti-Israeli and growing anti-Semitic sentiment among large parts of the chattering classes in America and Europe, each voice offering counterbalance must speak out, however modest each may be.

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Mitt Muffs It

There's no better example of the reason why President Obama will beat Mitt Romney in November than Romney's disastrous gaffe about "not caring about the very poor."

I know, I know: it's taken out of context.   But that doesn't matter.

The comment shows that Romney is not rooted in the fundamental principles of the Republican Party.   Everyone who is knows exactly how to answer the question that Romney answered so ineptly.   It takes nothing more than saying what we know to be true:

The very poor are the people who need my party's policies the most.   They're the people whose lives our policies will improve more dramatically than any other group.   Because we give the very poor the best chance to not be poor anymore.   That's our goal.

Instead, we got "I don't care about the very poor."   We've seen before political tone-deafness like this, in President Bush the First -- the Bush of the tax cave-in and Justice Souter.

Here on Mustard Street we've noted more than once how your businessman/country-club Republican types often don't get politics and don't grasp political ideas.   Here it is all over again.

As for being taken out of context, are you kidding?   In the general election campaign Romney won't be able to say "Looks like rain today" without Obama's Palace Guard, the mainstream media, denouncing it as racist.   A campaign-worthy Republican candidate knows you don't say anything that requires the media to also report your next sentence in order to get your meaning clear.   They'll run with the fragment that puts a Republican in the worst light.

Rank-and-file Republicans are unenthusiastic about Romney because we understand that he doesn't get it.   Because he doesn't get it, he can't articulate it.

Republicans and conservatives win to the extent they clearly articulate their core values and ideas; Democrats and liberals win to the extent they succeed in concealing theirs.

There's more of this to come from Romney before Obama beats him.   Then God help us all.

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Larger Lessons from Kodak's Fall?

Kodak's example shows that nothing is forever.   Does that apply to methods of government, too?   These authors think so.

There is a positive correlation between an organization’s former dominance and its present inability to cope with 21st-century change   ...  "Industries that have had monopolies or highly profitable duopolies are the ones most likely to be completely gutted when a more powerful, more efficient system comes along.”   We need to hasten the inevitable arrival of that more efficient system on the doorstep of America’s most stubborn, foot-dragging, reactionary sector -— government at the local, state, and especially federal levels, and its officially authorized customer-hating agents, the Democrats and Republicans.

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Weekender

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Proposed Redistricting Maps

Information on the proposed new district lines announced yesterday for New York Senate and Assembly seats is available here.   It's the website of the ponderously named New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment, known in Albany as LATFOR.

As a creation of the New York State Legislature, LATFOR presents information on the proposed new districts in the way that makes it as difficult and time-consuming as possible to get the essential, bottom line information most of us are looking for:   which incumbent has what district, and how is that district changing.

We'll start posting visuals showing all this data together, for each Rochester-area Senate and Assembly district.

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