Mayor Bloomberg may balance the City's budget, but there may be nobody left to applaud him. Since Bloomberg took office, unemployment has gone up, corporations have left town, a new mafia has emerged in response to Bloomberg's absurd $7/pack policy on cigarettes, rents have actually increased at a time when occupancy is plummeting. Just now he announced his plans to raise subway fares to $2. The man is driving people out of the city...which will result, obviously, in lower revenues for the city--to which Bloomberg will no doubt respond by raising taxes yet again. Guess what? If it gets to where you have to earn 100K dollars a year to live here (it's about 50K now), then every business in the city will have to leave. (I should explain this 50K figure a little better: that's for a healthy individual without a family, a car, or a parakeet; living in a soiled rat-infested cubicle on the Lower East Side or the shitty part of Brooklyn or Queens; living frugally. The comparison generally accepted is that you must divide a NYC income by two to get the American equivalent; thus, $50,000 NY dollars=$25,000 American dollars.)

Bloomberg doesn't get it. Perhaps because this is not Bloomberg LP, but NYC.

Anyway. Try to add a little more gravity to the feeble protest against the subway fare increase. Straphanger's has a poll here.

Holy shit! Somebody else out there finds our national "non-debate" about the use of military force in Iraq peculiar enough to warrant a column.

It was amazing to read the Pentagon's detailed plans for an invasion of Iraq in the New York Times last week. The general reaction of Americans to this news was even more amazing: Basically, there was no reaction. We seem to be distant observers of our own nation's preparation for war, watching with horror or approval or indifference a process we have nothing to do with and cannot affect. Which is just about the case.

Michael Kinsley in SLATE.

OK--there have been a good many dissenters out there...but mostly there's just silence. There was mostly just silence

An editor at the National Review Online notes that "the American suspected of being a would-be dirty bomber seems first to have encountered Islam in the slammer. As I recall, over in the UK the same was also true of the alleged shoe-bomber. Do we have any idea of who is preaching what to whom behind those prison gates?"

Years ago I taught in a maximum security prison in north Florida--interesting story, that--but, anyway, I was very much surprised that so many sharecroppers and rednecks had discovered Allah. I just didn't figure...I mean, where where all these imprisoned crackers getting the Koran and such?

At the time I just let it pass as easily as the passes made at me by the inmates. But I revisit this prison Islam now, and wonder: Who's funding this junk?

I know the chaplain at that prison--Southern Baptist through and through--and I know that he wasn't providing pseudo-Islamic crap to his prisoners. (Hell--I had to lie and smuggle to get my prisoners the texts I was teaching--Atheistic and Marxian frequently--so prudish were the chaplain and guards.)

There IS, without a doubt, a major effort on the part of the Islamic World to indoctrinate imprisoned Americans into a sort of "Islamic" victimology--their best shot at a captured audience in this hemisphere.

I hope I can track it down...

Sorry about that--I'd been reading Melville for hours...

Whence our American willingness to indulge the Europeans their bloodthirsty racism? What are these ancient and elderly lands to us, that we should co-ordinate our policies so as not to injure them their absurd Continental vanity? We have acted, and continue, pudibundus, to do the bidding of these irrelevant lands. Already, the U.S. is completely inconsistent, and therefore increasingly seen as untrustworthy by the world's nations. Virtue commands that what we condemn in Iraq we should condemn in the Netherlands and EU. We all know--or, rather, we all could know, easily enough--that racial and religious hatred is distributed these days fairly equally amongst Islamic and European states, wherefore should these American States of ours impose the same penalties upon each, according to their several official state maledictions, which, you are no doubt aware, lead to actual violences and murders, and, at times, far worse. That we in the US should continue to have business with the vile and anti-semitic Europe; why, that inflames indignation and makes one suspect greatly another racism on the part of us Americans, whereby what is intolerable from the mouths of Arabs, is somehow acceptable from the mouths of the Vikings. Frankly, I would have us be consistent in our policy, and indeed, prosecute our policy with speed and with disregard for the aspects of our foes--as indeed virtue demands, for to consider the swarthiness or ruddiness of the foreigner is indeed wrong, though still does it seem this Nation's policy, much to my chagrin.

JERRY FALWELL IS SOFTENING HIS STANCE ON GAYS--or so he says (only to contradict himself within seconds) on FRONTLINE. Here's a fact: on Larry King Live sometime in the very late '80's or early '90's, Jerry Falwell precipitated perhaps 1,000 suicides. I know--he nearly convinced me that it were best for me to die by my own hand. I was saved only by virtue of having a caring pastor. (Incidentally, that great pastor is retired, now replaced by a cretinous fundamentalist: I fear for those one or two young gays who are brought up in that now hate-mongering temple.)

He's America's most Christian Christian, I realize; but he's also got the blood of THOUSANDS of confused gay children on his hands. He has killed them. May Baby Jesus reward him regally for his work, and reserve a blessed cloud near Him in heaven—for surely will I smite him should his path cross mine.

My dear room-mate warned of this, but I thought it unlikely. Now it comes out (referring to 1993):

Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was convicted of mixing the chemicals to make the explosives used in the attack, said terror mastermind Ramzi Yousef had plotted to target Jews living in Williamsburg and Crown Heights.
[Yousef] told me, ‘I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn,' " Yasin said.

They specifically wanted--at one time--to blow up my neighbors...and ME, for that matter...Not that it matters now, since they've blown up not merely my friends and neighbors, but a quarter of lower Manhattan.

Anyway, L. (my room-mate) was right.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "the Jewish lobby is influential, but not nearly so powerful as the dairy farmers." Joe Klein, Slate & the Guardian.