CONTACT SENATOR MCCAIN:
Phone: 703 413 2008
Website: http://www.johnmccain.com/Contact/
Senator McCain,
I am a recent Republican, having fled the Democratic Party four years ago from its wildly leftist leadership and from its mandates. I had long been a Conservative Democrat, but I have given up on that path. I am for less government than more; I am for more economic freedom and less market control; I am for a strong, independent America, and opposed to Internationalism, Multiculturalism and to any ideology that would diminish our great nation's political culture and freedoms.
Senator McCain, I was an early supporter of your campaign, but I left your team because of your position on immigration reform.
Now, though, you are my Party's nominee. I want to give you my support. But you seem to me to be ignoring the positions of our Party on several key issues.
1. Immigration--sir, I know there are millions of illegals in this country. You want a compassionate solution. But sir, they are stealing our wealth from us by sapping our infrastructure, stealing through insurance and education costs and through not paying taxes. They must be sent home, and that can be done on a state-by-state basis. Regular checks for paperwork by state and local police can make this happen. They can come back, if they can get visas.
2. Energy costs--sir, I detect a Senate-elitist stance in your policy here, and an absence of a compass. Democrats have stifled refineries and drilling for new oil, and that has led now to impossible gas prices. This is economics 101 Senator; we have exceeded our refining capacity, and prices, because of this fact, will not come soon down. We must have more refineries now, and we must drill for more oil now. We need this fuel to keep growing, sir, and OPEC cannot help us refine more oil. The inability to make gasoline will still have an upward pressure on gas prices.
3. Ethanol--this is a boondoggle, Senator. Quash this before every foodstuff in the United States trebles in price in the next six months.
4. Israel
Senator, I think your heart is in the right place on this. We must for the first time in the history of Israel make Israel our right-hand ally in the Middle East.
5. Islam--We must stop pandering to the interests of Islamists to whom we send billions of dollars in aid, and who with that aid often send it back to us in the form of suicide bombs and terror attacks. We must pacify Islam, and help it learn how to pacify itself. These people really believe they will defeat the West and destroy Israel. Have you seen the DVD "Obsession?" You can find it on the internet. Also, we want the trail of Saudi influence money sourced and exposed. The fact that your campaign manager is a former Saudi lobbyist doesn't sit well with many of the people who share my political views.
Please consider my words, Senator. You must offer us Republicans who range from the Center to the Conservative core more. You must give us more of what WE hold true and dear.
I hope you will hear my words and those like me who will follow. We cannot get whole-heartedly behind you if you don't.
Sincerely,
James A. Bridge
Monday, June 23, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
NY Mets--Firing Across An Ethnic Divide
The Mets fired Willie Randolph just before midnight on June 16th, 2008, and they will not recover this season from the most disgusting display of gutless, no-class upper management behavior a Major League Baseball team has displayed since the SAME team fired Bobby Valentine.
They will not recover because the ugly fact is that this team has two huge problems--one, they have no chemistry; two, there is an ethnic divide on the Mets that is like an ugly, seeping scar on the face of the franchise. This kind of black eye and deep tissue bruising will take months to heal.
Recover in terms of wins and losses? Maybe. But this is not about games in the standings. This is about the after effects of ignoble behavior, about gutter-snipes, shady characters and back-stabbing bureaucratic weasels, about a dirty little secret of double-standards and ethnic prejudices that could fill 10 novels.
It's enough to make you want to dump your popcorn in the aisle, toss your $7 hot dog into the trash can and stalk out of the stadium with your children. Because I, for one, don't want to be around the likes of Omar Minaya. I don't like what I've seen this week, and I wouldn't put one dollar willfully into his pocket.
Omar Minaya's California press conference after his Midnight Massacre proved to all who heard or watched it just what a passel of low-life trash upper management of the New York Mets is made up of, and did nothing to dispel the growing suspicion that there is an ethnic split-personality on the New York Mets.
"This is what you have to do in my business," Minaya said at that press conference when pressed about his hasty flight to California and chasing Willie down with an ax at midnight. Maybe that's how you do it where you come from, Omar. I come from New York, and that's not how people like me think you do things.
What the Wilpons and General Manager Omar Minaya did to a life-long Mets fan, Yankee great, and now ex-Met Manager Willie Randolph is a complete disgrace. Not that you should treat anyone like they have treated Willie, but he is in the Pantheon of the Greats, of the Great New York Athletes, and of Outstanding New Yorkers. The Mets told the world Willie was their manager on a Thursday before Fathers Day weekend, then leaked it all over the place from Friday on, and then they sent the General Manager on a plane BEHIND the team, so he could be laying in wait to blow up the manager at midnight--AFTER A WIN! After, by the way, the Mets had gone 3-1 in their last four ball games.
You can't treat Willie Randolph like that, Mets. WRONG.
Back in the 80s there gleamed through the dark histrionics of the rampaging Steinbrenner Yankees a great talent, and he was Willie Randolph. New York's own, he was a fine ball player. Great, even, perhaps just short of the Hall of Fame, but still, he is at the head of the class. I've never seen a better second baseman in blue pinstripes with NY on the cap.
Then came Willie the manager and in three years, Willie the ex-manager.
Willie made mistakes, the biggest, I believe, in refusing to understand or participate in the Grand Theater of Baseball. Willie, for some reason, couldn't understand how important it is for the people who fill the tens of thousands of seats in ballparks all across this country to get fired up, and the lightning effect that can have on a team. Getting thrown out of a ball game can do it. Breaking a water cooler can do it. He might have learned that lesson this season as manager of the Mets, the team that stopped firing on all cylinders last season in 2007 and swooned out of first place under the thundering hooves of my own Philadelphia Phillies. He might have yet learned this lesson as the Mets continued to display a maddening dysfunction that even to the bluntest of us all was an apparent personality chemistry problem on the field for the Mets.
We all began to wonder about the rumors of an ethnic divide on the Mets, of the whisperings about a Latino pipeline to the General Manager, U.S. Baseball's first Hispanic General Manager, Omar Minaya. Paul Lo Duca's comments last year after a bad loss, "Why don't you ask them" waving at the empty lockers of Beltran and Delgado, then saying, "oh, right, they're gone," or words to that effect, only fanned the flames of this. Management isolated Willie, firing one of Willie's "guys", Rick Down. So, left on his staff were, Sandy Alomar Sr. and Jerry Manuel--whose pocket are these two guys in, I wonder? They are both Minaya guys.
Jerry Manuel didn't know about the impending firing, Alomar also not? Nor erratic stupor-star Jose Reyes? Yeah, right....who didn't know? That is hard to believe, as Tony Bernazard, Minaya's assistant GM, and a reported arch-foe and constant critic of Willie Randolph, dogged Willie's tracks in Anaheim like a stalker. Mike Francesca and Chris Russo to their credit on WFAN in New York City were ALL OVER Minaya about Bernazard's presence with the team in light of the weekend leaks of Willie's impending firing.
Is there evidence that a sector of the team stopped playing for Willie Randolph? How about Jose Reyes at the press conference: "It's too bad we couldn't play our best baseball for (Willie)." That statement, for me, says it all, and I don't think I'm reading anything in to it.
Jose, it should not matter who you play for. You should play your best baseball every time you put on your glove and spikes. If the manager is a black man, or Latino, or white, or Japanese, it should not matter one bit to you.
I hope that the Mets aren't having the ethnic problems that they seem to. But after Minaya's press conference, I for one, am sure they are. Jerry Manuel's hiring is nothing other than a placation of the team's under-performing and unhappy Latino core.
And that is an idea that is hard keep down.
James A. Bridge
They will not recover because the ugly fact is that this team has two huge problems--one, they have no chemistry; two, there is an ethnic divide on the Mets that is like an ugly, seeping scar on the face of the franchise. This kind of black eye and deep tissue bruising will take months to heal.
Recover in terms of wins and losses? Maybe. But this is not about games in the standings. This is about the after effects of ignoble behavior, about gutter-snipes, shady characters and back-stabbing bureaucratic weasels, about a dirty little secret of double-standards and ethnic prejudices that could fill 10 novels.
It's enough to make you want to dump your popcorn in the aisle, toss your $7 hot dog into the trash can and stalk out of the stadium with your children. Because I, for one, don't want to be around the likes of Omar Minaya. I don't like what I've seen this week, and I wouldn't put one dollar willfully into his pocket.
Omar Minaya's California press conference after his Midnight Massacre proved to all who heard or watched it just what a passel of low-life trash upper management of the New York Mets is made up of, and did nothing to dispel the growing suspicion that there is an ethnic split-personality on the New York Mets.
"This is what you have to do in my business," Minaya said at that press conference when pressed about his hasty flight to California and chasing Willie down with an ax at midnight. Maybe that's how you do it where you come from, Omar. I come from New York, and that's not how people like me think you do things.
What the Wilpons and General Manager Omar Minaya did to a life-long Mets fan, Yankee great, and now ex-Met Manager Willie Randolph is a complete disgrace. Not that you should treat anyone like they have treated Willie, but he is in the Pantheon of the Greats, of the Great New York Athletes, and of Outstanding New Yorkers. The Mets told the world Willie was their manager on a Thursday before Fathers Day weekend, then leaked it all over the place from Friday on, and then they sent the General Manager on a plane BEHIND the team, so he could be laying in wait to blow up the manager at midnight--AFTER A WIN! After, by the way, the Mets had gone 3-1 in their last four ball games.
You can't treat Willie Randolph like that, Mets. WRONG.
Back in the 80s there gleamed through the dark histrionics of the rampaging Steinbrenner Yankees a great talent, and he was Willie Randolph. New York's own, he was a fine ball player. Great, even, perhaps just short of the Hall of Fame, but still, he is at the head of the class. I've never seen a better second baseman in blue pinstripes with NY on the cap.
Then came Willie the manager and in three years, Willie the ex-manager.
Willie made mistakes, the biggest, I believe, in refusing to understand or participate in the Grand Theater of Baseball. Willie, for some reason, couldn't understand how important it is for the people who fill the tens of thousands of seats in ballparks all across this country to get fired up, and the lightning effect that can have on a team. Getting thrown out of a ball game can do it. Breaking a water cooler can do it. He might have learned that lesson this season as manager of the Mets, the team that stopped firing on all cylinders last season in 2007 and swooned out of first place under the thundering hooves of my own Philadelphia Phillies. He might have yet learned this lesson as the Mets continued to display a maddening dysfunction that even to the bluntest of us all was an apparent personality chemistry problem on the field for the Mets.
We all began to wonder about the rumors of an ethnic divide on the Mets, of the whisperings about a Latino pipeline to the General Manager, U.S. Baseball's first Hispanic General Manager, Omar Minaya. Paul Lo Duca's comments last year after a bad loss, "Why don't you ask them" waving at the empty lockers of Beltran and Delgado, then saying, "oh, right, they're gone," or words to that effect, only fanned the flames of this. Management isolated Willie, firing one of Willie's "guys", Rick Down. So, left on his staff were, Sandy Alomar Sr. and Jerry Manuel--whose pocket are these two guys in, I wonder? They are both Minaya guys.
Jerry Manuel didn't know about the impending firing, Alomar also not? Nor erratic stupor-star Jose Reyes? Yeah, right....who didn't know? That is hard to believe, as Tony Bernazard, Minaya's assistant GM, and a reported arch-foe and constant critic of Willie Randolph, dogged Willie's tracks in Anaheim like a stalker. Mike Francesca and Chris Russo to their credit on WFAN in New York City were ALL OVER Minaya about Bernazard's presence with the team in light of the weekend leaks of Willie's impending firing.
Is there evidence that a sector of the team stopped playing for Willie Randolph? How about Jose Reyes at the press conference: "It's too bad we couldn't play our best baseball for (Willie)." That statement, for me, says it all, and I don't think I'm reading anything in to it.
Jose, it should not matter who you play for. You should play your best baseball every time you put on your glove and spikes. If the manager is a black man, or Latino, or white, or Japanese, it should not matter one bit to you.
I hope that the Mets aren't having the ethnic problems that they seem to. But after Minaya's press conference, I for one, am sure they are. Jerry Manuel's hiring is nothing other than a placation of the team's under-performing and unhappy Latino core.
And that is an idea that is hard keep down.
James A. Bridge
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
![[Valid RSS]](valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")