Tea and Vitriol

  Tomorrow is Memorial Day. It is the unofficial start of summer, the culmination of a three day weekend that usually features picnics where people overindulge in barbecued food and beer, parades and fireworks. But that is NOT what Memorial Day is all about. Memorial Day was set aside to honor the brave men and women who served our country in the armed forces to preserve our freedom...and never made it home. Freedom is not free. Our service men and women in many cases paid the cost of freedom with their blood, sometimes making the supreme sacrifice: their lives for our country. We take those freedoms for granted on a daily basis. Some people, when they have run-ins with the law, claim that they now know what it is to live within a "police state," when it is patently clear that they know no such thing. A "police state" would never allow them to speak publicly in that manner. Among some people, it has been fashionable for a very long time to mock patriotism and the ar

On May 30, 2020 Rochester experienced its first full-blown riot in over fifty years. That was a year ago. This explosion of violence, vandalism and looting was detonated by the death of a Black ex-con, George Floyd, while being detained by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota the week before. Rochester's "peaceful protest" was orchestrated by Madame Ashley Gantt, leader of the local terrorist organization, Free the People ROC, which is part of the nationwide BLM movement. It was NOT peaceful. Beginning as as assembly at Martin Luther King Park during the height of the pandemic, Madame Gantt and her speakers whooped up the attendees into a frenzy, chanting obscenities at and about the police. Then they chose to march to the Public Safety Building, where they set fire to or vandalized vehicles, throwing objects at the police, hoping to injure them as the police guarded the building. Then, they dispersed, proceeding to vandalize and loot stores in their paths. Even the Town

 "Put the Blame on Mame" was a cabaret number best remembered in Rita Hayworth's film noir  classic, "Gilda." Ten years later, it was less effectively performed in Anita Eckberg's schlocky horror-drama "Screaming Mimi." Mame was a woman who was blamed for everything and anything, from the Chicago fire to the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Since these events were more than fifty years apart, it suggests that Mame was quite a dame and had remarkable staying power. Today, we are still blaming Mame in Rochester. Except that we have renamed Mame. Mame is now the police department. Or "systemic" racism. Or "White privilege." Or sexism. Or politics. Mame is everything but personal responsibility or ethics. Rochesterians don't seem to like those concepts too much. After all, all the recent shootings, stabbings, non-fatal assaults and car-jackings here have been blamed on systemic racism or the pandemic. For once, something isn

  Mayor Warren whupped Evans' ass in the debate. She was the consummate political performer. He, a dismal  amateur who is a tad too old to play the ingenue. The best Evans could come up with were glittering generalities:  "Restoring, rebuilding, trusting transparency, and building bridges that have been broken." Whatever the Hell that is supposed to really mean. Their statements revealed that neither are playing with a full deck and that both believe in federal subsidies paid for by people who work. Whoever wins the General Election in November, Rochester loses.

Political opinion polls are conducted to gauge the public's reaction to certain events or politicians, especially during as election year, and also to influence unsure members of the electorate. Rarely are they unbiased and usually they are flawed. Take, for instance, the results of a poll conducted by Emerson College and release by Channel 8 News yesterday. The opening question was: If the primary election were held next week, who would your vote for, Warren or Evans? There was no "Neither" option offered, only "Unsure." That was the first flaw. Evans ranked ahead of Warren by 10 percentage points, 49 to 39, with 12% "unsure." Before Warren's detractors start to celebrate prematurely, they need to be reminded that she did poorly in the polls against the Great White Father, Tom Richards, in the 2013 election, yet trounced him in the primary, beating him out for the Democratic Party endorsement. The second flaw was a biggie. The Democratic Primary i

 On May 19, 2021 the husband of Rochester mayor Lovely A. Warren was arrested for drug trafficking and illegal weapons charges. Their home was also raided by the NYS Police that day. On May 20, Mayor Warren called a press conference and stated that she would not offer her husband support regarding the criminal charges against him. She also stated that they were "separated" (not legally) for years and that they were residing together to provide a family atmosphere for their daughter. In a home with illegal drugs and illegal weapons? She also stated that she didn't know anything about her husband's activities (questionable) and that she hadn't done anything wrong (also questionable). Then she launched into one of her usual diatribes, stating that it was part of a plot against her and that her husband's arrest was political and really an attack on her, not him. We can ignore that last part, because the Warren administration has been obsessed with plots against th

It is only a month until the Democratic Primary Election in Rochester, New York, and the pressure is on for candidates to get their names out there to the public. Since Rochester is a one-party city, the primary usually determines the winner of the General Election in November. There is a surfeit of Democratic candidates vying for five at-large spots on Rochester's City Council, not to mention those running for County Leg and School Board. All of them are making the same empty promises; all of them are wearing out the words "transparency" and "accountability" in their propaganda. Like all politicians, their manifestos consist of glittering generalities, sounding good and meaning nothing. They are absolutely useless, since they are no longer the right size to fit the bottoms of standard size bird cages. That was the only reason I kept them before, so my parakeets could do to them what their senders planned on doing to us if elected. But what gets my goat are thei