Jesus, Moderates and One Tough-Ass Weiner

Why hello. You may have noticed that this blog page has been somewhat, shall we say, deficient as of late. And by that I mean I haven't posted up a goddamn thing since right after the mid-term elections. Now, I could be like a good, little over-politicized American and blame this on the divisive political climate the country has been embroiled in for the better part of my adult life, or I could just be a responsible, adult human being and lay the blame for my shortcomings squarely at the feet of the person who is most responsible for them. That person is, quite naturally, Jesus.

"Oh, what? You feelin' froggy? Well, then JUMP motherfucker!"

That evil fucker really did me in this last year. A "job" that barely made any money. A swirling milieu of dead-end relationships. A certain smartphone that is only available through AT&T (well, Verizon is picking them up sometime soon, but still...). Too many distractions and stressors for a humble, unpaid blogger such as myself to overcome. Yes, 2010 has truly been a red-letter year for my increasingly forced First World Problems. And yet, here I am, a mere two weeks and change into 2011 and already the endless, Bataan Death March-like slog that was 2010 seems to be fading from my memory, like a half remembered, mildly disturbing nightmare that prominently featured center-left Senators and my inability to grow facial hair.

Not that I have those. It's just...

SPEAKING of center-left Senators, Sen. Joe Lieberman is getting the fuck out of dodge. On the one hand, the imminent (OK, two years from now, but no takebacks) departure of one the political arena's most cripplingly divisive and infuriatingly bland figures gives me a warm feeling just somewhere under my pancreas. On the other hand, he is depriving me the sweet joy of watching him get publicly crushed in the next election cycle. Even as I watched a clip of his retirement speech (preceded by an appropriately bland ad for a credit union), I was struck by the disquieting sensation that the bastard knew exactly what he was doing to me.

"I can smell your sorrow."

Sure, nothing will ever bring me back to the mountaintop of pure glee that was the excruciatingly slow collapse of the Paladino campaign (Carl! Hey, CARL! Missin' you, buddy.) and anything that is scheduled even remotely close to Nov. 2012 will no doubt be dwarfed by the long-awaited appearance of the Bedazzled Alaskan Clusterfuck once again wandering out of her natural habitat to root through the dumpsters behind Fox News Channel. All the same, a quiet loss for political bloggers who hate people they have never met.

Still and all, my outlook for the year is quite rosy. Sometime during the Reeps recent House cleaning, the Dems seem to have found their long lost spine tucked away in a box of Tom Delay's old sex toys. Early reports indicate that, while the spine is somewhat brittle from years of neglect and "smells like a skeleton's vagina", Democrats immediately strapped it on and got some actual goddamn work done before losing their fleeting majority vote. Several historic, progressive bills were pushed through during the last days of the 111th Congress, such as the repeal of DADT, the Health and Compensation Act for 9/11 first responders and a long overdue overhaul of the FDA. Very nicely done. So, how are we holding up under the new 112th Congress, lead in part by Speaker of the House John "There's a Tear in My Beer" Boehner?

Ah. Seems today the House voted to repeal the Universal Health Care Bill. BUT! All is not as bad as it seems, for even in defeat, the Democrats were resplendent in their new chrome-plated spine that fairly blazed with their unity and determination with a feisty New Yorker leading the charge (as it should be, as it should be).





While the unfortunate title "Weiner Rants on House Floor" brings strange connotations to mind, you gotta give it to the guy. He let fly like only a dude from South Brooklyn can. First he calls the Republicans liars and proposes making a drinking game out of their shit-talking. He then carefully includes any health care opponent who happened to not be lying that day while throwing a special jab at the newbies of the House who are mostly Tea-Baggers with heads full of pendantic Beckisms. And for the big finish? A football analogy! You know that no matter how hopped up he is at the conservatives at that moment, somewhere in the back of his head he's thinking,
"Aight, where am I meeting the boys up for the Jets game on Sunday? We are going to kick the Steelers' ASSES! J! E! T! S! JETS JETS JETS! Anyways, fuck these assholes; this bill is gonna die in the Senate."
Somebody start grooming this guy to run for President. But not too much.

So there we go. The political climate isn't as dire as it seems, my personal issues seem to have been sorted for the time being, NYC is as great a place as it ever was, the Jets are most assuredly winning the Super Bowl and I'm back to blogging. Hey, Jesus! Tell you what, give me a three month head start and we'll go head-to-head again in the spring. And stop with all the fucking snow, would ya?

-NMFP

I'm Back and I've Brought a Political Agenda with Me!!!

OK. Been a minute. This is a far more taxing of an activity than I had anticipated. Waking up every single morning and trying to find something in the world that is worthy of being mocked is, in and of itself, not a difficult thing to do. We live in vacuous times, after all. The act of dredging up skepticism and scorn, no matter how happy you are, on a daily basis is liable to put a bit of a crimp in your outlook on life, though. Consequently, I hit a bit of a wall. I realized that there were many things going on in my life that I was neglecting while I busied myself with fairly unimportant things like Carl Paladino, Juggalos and "breige" and so I took an unannounced leave of absence to further muddy the waters of my the runoff ditch I call my lifel. While I never want to make this blog a soapbox for me to whinge endlessly about my petty first-world problems, I must say my life isn't the easiest thing to deal with. I'm living in NYC, rounding the curve into my 30's, single, without a traditional career, tending a bar whose business level could best be described as "mehnifficent" and fighting a pitched battle against nicotine addiction. For example, this past Wednesday morning greeted me with the realization that I had broken up with the woman I was dating, cracked the screen on my cell phone and was now living in a country where the Tea Party had a substantial voice in the Federal Government.Needless to say, I was less than chuffed.
Only one of those items is really important, really pressing, really worth addressing in depth, so let's get right down to it:

NOOOOOOoooooOOOOOoooooo.......!

It's OK! Mine's not cracked nearly as badly as the one in the picture (my High School English teacher just contracted dropsy because of that sentence). In all actuality, if I hold my phone just so, most of the cracks aren't even visible. It's a very minor problem and yet, it's one that has been pressing on my mind even more than the fact that one of Ron Paul's barghest whelps is now elected to the US Senate.

Pictured: Rand Paul as a D&D reference

It would seem that I, and what feels to be the vast majority of America, am so turned off by the puerile dog and pony show that we have standing in for a political system that I have ranked it beneath "slightly damaged consumer electronics" on the scale of shit to be worried about. And why not? What was there that I could have possibly done about Rand Paul getting elected except make a very ill-advised trip to Kentucky to have my head stood on my some hick? Call me selfish, but I somehow feel that would not be my best contribution to the democratic process. To be perfectly honest, I would much rather have my impending, night terror-inducing visit the Genius Bar be at the top of my list of "What is Fuckered About My Life Today" but sadly it is not. So, like many other Americans, I bury my head in in the sand on the Beach of Mundane Horseshit and try to forget the fact that this world is going to hell in a handbasket just as quickly as some douchehammers with gaudy lapel pins can (edibly) arrange it.

Problem with that line of non-thinking is, while we all are worrying over our digital personality accouterments, we lose sight of the fact that rationality is being poorly represented in the halls of power. We have let a ludicrously small, yet obnoxiously vocal segment of our society seize a modicum of control over our daily lives because the Democrat we elected to the White House wasn't made of magic and couldn't whisk us back to whatever glory days we think used to exist in this country. These people represent a dangerous blend of aggressively blind patriotism, toxic xenophobia and willful ignorance that would feel right at home in North Korea. When that mentality is corralled into some rogue state such as North Korea it presents a fairly limited threat to the rest of the planet, albeit one that should still be dealt with gingerly. Yes, North Korea has nukes and Kim Jong Il appears to be a crazy person but I suspect he knows that heading too far down that road would be the end of him and his family and the country they have effectively turned into their own private cult. So they act like the ADHD kid having an fistfight with his imaginary friend on the playground of the world: leave them alone and they'll keep playing by themselves. When it manifests in the 6' 4' 285 lb. football player with a chip on his shoulder because he got beat up by his dad (British Empire) when he was a kid and who goes around picking on anyone he deems to be even the slightest threat, well, then we, as the whole of humanity, have a real problem on our hands.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here. This is probably not a new idea but it's definitely one that is not being implemented and one that I feel needs to be implemented with all due haste. After the 2008 elections, the freshly disenfranchised crazies of the Republican Party formed the Tea Party, yes? In the following two years they managed to steer that party's ruling establishment on a path of their own choosing in exchange for not breaking completely away and voting for their own on an independent ticket. Why, pray tell, is this not happening within the Democratic Party? Now, I'm not saying, "Let's round up all the far left whackjobs and throw a national screaming match". What I'm thinking is a liberal mirror to the Teabaggers, and I do mean mirror in the sense of "an exact opposite reflection". Where they are irrational, let cooler heads prevail. Where they are reactionary, we should be progressive. Where they are ignorant, we will be informed.
The one and only thing that should be copied from the the Tea Party should be it's aggressive stance on what it believes. I watched two years of a Democrat-controlled congress repeatedly bow down to the whims of their minority opponents and allow themselves to be brow-beaten with political epithets like "unpatriotic" and "elitist". The Democrats have been by turns apologetic, uninspired and self-divided for the better part of the last two decades, no matter how much control they exert in the government. If anything at all is going to get better, that behavior has to stop and it has to stop DAMN skippy, too. The Obama campaign of 2008 proved that grassroots political movements are highly effective in the Information Age and the Tea Party reiterated that point last week. What we need are progressive political candidates that are from the people they intend to represent. If they focus on core progressive issues that effect everyone while remaining apart from the "moral" issues that the right wing gets so riled up about, I think there's a better than even chance of turning this thing around. After all, what farmer in Oklahoma is going to be against regulating commercial agricultural conglomerates that force him to buy GMO crop seeds that won't reproduce, thereby hiking his yearly overhead to a point where he can barely make ends meet? What factory worker in Ohio is going to to complain about higher EPA standards at his plant that effectively add years to his life expectancy? Who in the entire country could not get behind a system of tax incentives to corporations that keep jobs out of third world sweatshops and in the hands of a country that used to be known for what it could build instead of what it could buy? Who in any of the deeply Republican states on the Gulf Coast would vote against politicians who would jointly tell BP that they could not do any business in their states whatsoever until they had fully repaired the damage they have caused? Who, on either side of the political divide could call putting the country back together "unpatriotic" or looking out for the best interests of the Working Class "elitist"?
Look at it this way, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert got the ball rolling with their rally. They proved that, if nothing else, there are more people out there willing to attend a rally for sanity than there are to listen to Glen Beck's fear-mongering. You want that change that Obama promised? Then we have got to stop playing the game. We have to look at our surroundings and form real strategies for fixing our very real problems and we can't do it without the people that have been co-opted by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Fuck "hope", let's shoot for "results". Hope is a real hard sell in a country that is this bankrupt and broken. Fear is a much more powerful emotion, after all and right now the Reeps are wielding that sucker like a battle axe.
Let's fight them where they can never win: fundamentally changing the lives of average citizens for the better. Yeah tax cuts put more money in people's pockets for the short term but it also leaves our children uneducated, our environment undefended and our infrastructure unattended. Do you really think if we made a society where it was economically attractive not only to keep jobs in the country but to make them environmentally stable and to pay living wage, that all the corporations would flood out of the country to open up sweatshops? Some of them, maybe, but certainly not all and, knowing this country, the void left by the defectors would be filled rather quickly. The Golden Age of the 50's and it's resurgent Middle Class that people like Bill O'Reilly wax so eloquently over would never have been possible without an economy anchored in jobs exactly like this. Whether Republicans like it or not, well-regulated, Unionized corporations are what put this country on the peak it used to claim and deregulation and the gutting of the Labor Unions in the 80's triggered the nadir in which we now find ourselves. Tell me, what is patriotic about making it convenient to ship jobs overseas and disenfranchise a generation?
It's time to call the greedy bastards out on their lies. If they want to point to liberal eggheads hiding in their Ivory Towers then we can point their landed gentry and moneyed industrialists hiding in their gated communities, as well as what appear to be our tax dollars in their bank accounts and the deed to what's left of the country in their back pockets. In the rural areas, we focus on the economics of everyday life. In the cities we do the same but we push for the social issues such as gay rights and reproductive rights that don't play in the sticks. After all, just because someone doesn't approve of abortion doesn't mean their only voting option is for a party that repeatedly bends them over a counter while reading from The Bible. Reasonable compromises can be made while still achieving the goals that will better not just Democrats or Republicans but Americans as a whole and it's high time someone found their voice (not to mention their cojones) and went to work instead of backing up every time Ann Coulter gets shrill. Guess what? EVERYBODY is angry at the state of the country! That's probably why so much of middle- and lower-class America jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon in the first place. I mean, when I'm pissed off, the last thing I wand to see is Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation. Let's drop the whole hippie-shrinking-violet act and go about the work of fixing a country that is so deeply broken that it's future, and quite possibly the world's future, is rapidly becoming our worst nightmares. No one else is going to do it for us. Please remember that: NO ONE.


Whew. I do apologize. That was a lot of words without a funny picture with a pithy caption included for levity's sake. Here you go:

At least California came out of the elections OK.

Well there you have it. I don't know how in the first place to begin implementing my angry political screed but I am definitely open to suggestion so feel free to bring anything you can think of to my notice. Unless it involves canvassing for NYPIRG or GreenPeace. That way lies madness.

-NMFP


(but actually it all really is...)

An Uncanny Penchant for Citrus

It's no secret that New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority sucks on a level that is usually reserved for Fow News personalities and band that feature the "musical stylings" of Mike Patton. The last two years, the entire NYC subway system has been held in a death grip of schedule changes, service suspensions, fare hikes and outright line cancellations under the dubious guise of a rebuilding project. Basically what this has boiled down to is NYC citizens shelling out more money for less train while the MTA helps itself to a pay raise, spirals wildly into debt and awards contracts to companies with mob ties. Fun for everyone. New Yorkers are a tough breed though and when life hands us lemons we throw them shits back and say, "I ordered GRAPEFRUIT, motherfucker!" Thus we have a whole galaxy of transit based blogs and websites to help us vent away our frustrations with a system that may actually drive us all completely insane one day. When perusing straphanger sites, it's important to remember that there are several different styles to choose from.
The largest category is that of the Traditional Subway Grouser. These are fairly straightforward in their mission to deliver provide a soapbox for people who have "just had it up to here" with the fares/delays/changes/yadda yadda yadda. Sites like these usually range in tone from information provision to active bitching. I rarely check these sites if for no other reason than the only thing I find more depressing than riding the subway are people whose lives revolve around how depressing it is to ride the subway.

Time to get a little more sunlight, hey grumpy?

In the same vein but much more light hearted, are the blogs of the Transit Sociologist. Subwaydouchery.com used to be a prime example of this, but has recently succumbed to putting LOLcats style captions on all their photos. These are usually dedicated to chronicling the many ridiculous ways humans will act when crammed together in a rickety metal tube and hurled blindly towards their destination. I myself have witnessed behavior in the subway both quizzical and obscene but after the hundredth time, you kind of get to this point where King Aurthur could ride a horse through the car demanding tribute from the peasants and I would only be mildly nonplussed and then turn up the volume on my iPod.

You really think I'd make something like that up?

Not all subway blogs focus on the negative aspects. My current favorite is the Subway Art Blog which is doing an outstanding job of archiving the guerrilla art that is curated daily beneath our feet. Amidst the photos of tags and the burgeoning field of poster modification, you will notice evidence of New Yorkers actively hurling their lemons:

The newest entries to the online transit world come from Twitter. While I bear an aversion to Twitter that verges on religious conviction, Fake MTA has been a consistently funny way to waste ten second intervals of my time.
And that's it for the week. I would like to thank everyone for making this the lowest traffic week my blog has ever had. The lack of support is so thick I can taste it. And yet? I live to write another day. Gimme back my lemons.

An Inspiring Interuption

A rather unsettling thought descended upon my silly head today: what the hell am I going to write about when the elections are over? Sure, I'll be able to get in a good post-action mop-up and if I'm really lucky (which prior forays into the worlds of skateboarding and snowboarding have proved I am anything but) there'll be a nice, fat voting irregularity scandal to feast upon for a couple of weeks. And then? Make no mistake, New York is not in any way a boring place to write about. Seeing as how this blog was birthed in the madness that is the 2010 election cycle, though, I feel it owes it's very existence to the Paladinos and O'Donnells and Iotts and, yes, the McMillans that have energized me to write so... well I guess the best word choice here would be "loudly". Sadly, none of my political muses seem to have a chance in hell of winning anything but footnotes in the history books for being some of the most "tetched" candidates this side of Ross Perot.
I would really like to keep writing about my love for junk politics but I find myself disctracted. You see, the freegan/hippie/artist/psychonaut barista at the coffee shop I am currently writing from has begun to blare the emotionally stunted screechings of some hellish new Mike Patton "music" project which is about as distracting as having a four hundred pound autistic toddler poke you in the ear with a Crazy-Straw full of yogurt every ten seconds. Can I just say, it's none of my business if you wish to drop eight-plus hits of acid every day of your life and then drink some opium tea with your pot brownies. I would normally have no problem with anyone turning their heads into tapioca through excessive drug use EXCEPT when said tapioca head grabs a guitar and an effects peddle and makes a beeline for the recording studio. If you want to take a magical mystery tour through canyons of raping babies and oceans of three headed kittens with no eyes on a boat made out of rat skeletons that is being piloted by and anthropomorphic syringe full of AIDS who is wearing clown makeup and vampire teeth, that is entirely your business. Would you be a peach though and keep it to your fucking self? It's generally considered bad form to drag as many people as you can with you when you slip off the raft of sanity.
This is not some Nancy Regan, stick in the mud anti-drug rant. I've done my share, as well as a few other people's share, which is also considered bad form. I just hit a certain point with the whole "third eye" scene where I paused a moment, took a long hard look at reality, and decided that I was good to go. Sure, I still dabble from time to time and alcohol is still my constant traveling buddy, but there really is a line you cross with the drug use, booze included, that you aren't coming back from.
I'm as excited as anyone else to hear news of pot decriminalization and California's Prop. 19 and any other general ceasefire in the war on drugs. The part I'm not so stoked on is that these moves give rise to people who think things like this are funny:

When I read that, I put my back out from cringing so hard. There's always someone with either poor impulse control or overzealous fervor who will actively wreck anything worth doing. Vegans take the fun out of eating, Tea Baggers take the hope out of politics and druggies actively kill any buzz I might have been working on. There seems to be some kind of unspoken race to the bottom within the druggie community. For example, you think that flag is bad? Check this one out:

I believe the term you're searching for is "doucheflag".

When confronted with that image, my first reaction was to hit. There was nothing in particular I wanted to hit, just punch the air like a teenager with Tourettes. It's rather hard to keep in mind that the author of that lovely bit of verse probably had more drugs in them than an urn full of Mitch Hedberg's ashes and, therefore, should not be hunted and killed for sport in retaliation for their crimes against the English language.
Legalizing pot is going to be such a double edged sword. Should this country ever have the collective common sense to actually legalize marijuana (good), smoking weed will probably become necessary, if for no other reason than to blot outhete towering tidal wave of stoner/druggie-themed marketing (unspeakably evil) that is headed for shore even as we speak. Here are some things to look out for:

1) Anything having to do with Alice in Wonderland.
We get it. Lewis Carrol was a wacky motherfucker and and you're all "down the rabbit-hole" and "through the looking glass" and totally amazed that the guy was writing drug references into a children's book. That's really great. Now stop. And leave Willy Wonka alone while you're at it.

2) Things that are unnecessarily "freaky".

"Yeah, man, my company is totally weeeeeeiiiiirrrrddd! We don't think like you do! We're totally so out there that we have to go to these really great lengths to let you know that, this ain't your dad's shitty beer, man! This is only for people who are totally, like, into stuff that's totally...weeeeeeeeiiiiiirrrrrdddd!"

3) Aliens
OK, so this one is from Roswell and therefore makes some sense as far a marketing gimmicks go. As for the rest of it, aliens have gone from terrifying invaders to little, green (like weed, dude!) intergalactic stoners that want to put on one of those insufferable Dr. Seuss hats, lie under a giant mushroom and light up a doob.  I'm with the rednecks on this one. Shoot them sumbitches! And last but not least:

4) The completely obvious.
Wow,Ralph Steadman designed your label? Tommy Chong endorsed your product? Cherry fucking Garcia?! No thanks. I'll just muddle through with my usual choice and it's "boring" packaging.

You know what all these things have in common? They are, to a one, fucking terrible. Really. None of the products that pictured here are in any way good to consume, but I'm sure they all do a great job of separating stoners from their money. I mean, hell, if I wandered into a 7-11 while tripping balls and saw a six-pack that had a body pierced caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland chilling with an alien as imagined by Bob Masse, I'd probably gravitate (slowly) in it's general direction, stare at it for a bit, forget how money works and wander away, secure in my knowledge that, when I finally come down, there is a beer out there made just for me.
So brace yourself for the nonstop train to Wacky Land we're about to unleash on ourselves. If we're lucky (and I think I've already established how bad mine is) it's not going to get any worse than this:

But those are some long odds my friends.

Beard With Authority

Yesterday I briefly touched on the gubernatorial campaign of Jimmy McMillan of the fantastically named Rent is 2 Damn High Party. Well, at least everyone else's rent is too damn high. Jimmy himself is only paying $800 a month for his one-bedroom in Flatbush. But that's OK. I'd much rather it come out that a politician who's rallying against high rent actually has low rent, rather than a politician who's rallying against gay marriage getting caught in a gay tryst. But who is this mustachioed candidate of mystery?
Turns out, the 64 year-old ran a much less electrifying campaign for the guv-spot back in '05, albeit under the much more electrifying name "Prince Jimmy McMillan (aka Papa Smurf). He served in Vietnam, where he was apparently exposed to Agent Orange which, like Bruce Banner's gamma ray exposure, imbued him with powers that are often out of his control.

Mustache Powers.

His website seems to be similarly irradiated, or perhaps his web designer was a little "too damn high" during it's creation, which, judging from the caliber of the graphics, would be sometime back in the mid-Nineties. There is evidence of rampant abuse of quotation marks throughout this migraine inducing minefield of shrinking letters, violently clashing colors and to cap it all off, my newfound desktop background:

This is why the Internet was invented in the first place.

The man is also a non-stop quote machine. I had a recent interview with the man himself but I was so captivated by the facial hair that I forgot to record the bulk of it. Here's what little snippets I did manage to get on tape:

NMFP: "But how can tomatoes be a vegetable when the seeds...OK, know what? We're getting a little sidetracked here. Where were we?

McMillan: "Rent is too...damn high"

NMFP: "Yes! I think we've been over that...several times now. Just...let me look at my notes for a second. OK, what is your opinion on the current conflict in Afghanistan?"

McMillan:  "I’m a war vet. Don’t forget I was in Vietnam for two and half years and I have three Bronze Stars, but the chemicals of Agent Orange -- dioxin and a lot of other chemicals mixed up -- I would get sick. When I get home tonight, I know I’m not going to be able to breathe if I take them off. It could be psychological, I don’t know, but I just put em on and wear them anyway."

NMFP: "Take...take what off exactly...I'm not sure...what, your shoes?"

McMillan: "If you want to marry a shoe, I’ll marry you."

NMFP:  "..."
 
McMillan: "Rent is too..."

NMFP: "GOT IT! Got it. Yes. Fine. Moving on. In the past, what has been your stance on global warming?"

McMillan: "To be honest with you I was cool as hell. Even with my gloves on I was freezing, it was like I was in the North Pole!" 

NMFP: "Uh-huh. I'm gonna mark that as 'against global warming' OK, I think that's all I need. Any final remarks, Mr. McMillan?"

McMillan:  "I'm a karate expert and a musician: I have 15 seconds. Now its time for the humorous Jimmy McMillan to come out."

NMFP:  "I assure you, sir, you've been quite entertaining. OK, that's it for today I think...

McMillan: "Rent is too..."

NMFP: "DON'T YOU FUCKING SAY IT, MAN! I'M WARNING YOU!"

McMillan: "...damn high."

OK, all joking aside, I am actually going to vote for Jimmy McMillan, and it's not because of his beard/mustache combo or because of his antics or because it's ironic (and he is going to get a huge amount of irony votes) or even because the rent is too damn high. I'm voting for him because people like Jimmy McMillan are the only hope this city, and to some extent the country, has of getting through our newly christened age of fading empire. They are the concerned, everyday citizens who live in your neighborhoods and shop in your stores and rub elbows with you on the subway (until you ask them to stop being creepy). They have found one or two particular axes to grind and they don't particularly give a shit about anything besides their stated goals. So what if Jimmy McMillan can't balance NY's budget because he lacks an economics degree? Make the Lieutenant Governor take care of that. I mean, what the hell else it the Lt. Guv doing?
Point is, politicians are, for the most part, nothing more than politicians. No matter what they say during their candidacy, they will go about business as usual as soon as they are elected to office. Sure, Jimmy McMillan is crazier than a shit-house rat but, unlike Cuomo or Paladino, this is a man who has seen the real problems facing his city and state from the only place where you can get a decent perspective of it: on the ground. We can poke fun at this man and others of his ilk all we like, but one day we are going to pray that we have an outspoken, passionate, grass-roots candidate who won't merely feed us some "Change we can believe in" pander but never actually make good on that promise. We need valid third party candidates in the country worse than the Pope needs to get fucked.
We live in a country that views third party candidates like Nader as nothing more than a sideshow at best and a spoiler at worst. This perception will never change unless people start taking risks and breaking away from both of the established parties in favor of someone who might actually do something different. Join me in voting for Jimmy and fire a shot across the bow of the political establishment, if for nothing more than to return the country to the facial hair golden age that peaked with Chester A. Arthur

and let the mustache hairs of freedom flow again!