The Blaisdell Blog

Being on vacation, I am drawing from a former column, with a few updates.   My favorite 4 th of July moment happened in Philadelphia .   We were visiting the Liberty Bell, which no longer hangs in the belfry of Philadelphia Hall, but is housed, across the street, in the Liberty Bell Center .   We were actually there on July 8 th , which is the anniversary of the date when the bell was rung in 1776 to summon citizens to the first public reading of our Declaration of Independence.   It was hot.   There was a long line.   It didn’t matter.             Two things happened that day that will make me smile my whole life long.   The first happened in the line.   A family with two children, a teen-ager and preteen, were in front of us.   The kids were a bit restless and the younger one pulled open a gift shop copy of the Declaration of Independence and, for no reason other than boredom, started reading it aloud.   When he got to the end of the first paragraph, his older sister took

The first salvo in the battle to reelect President Obama was fired in, of all places, Duluth , Minnesota on January 24 th of this year.   I have been to Duluth .   We stayed at the RV park in the downtown marina, visited the waterfront museum and ate dinner at Hell’s Kitchen.   It was great.   Little did I know that in the middle of a truly reconstructed, mining and port city, filled with polite Minnesotans there is, evidently, a powder keg of racism.   The proof of it is the Un-Fair Campaign.   This publicity barrage, sponsored by some 15 community organizations, is billed as, “an educational campaign to raise awareness about white privilege…and facilitate dialogue…towards racial justice.”             The message states that if you were born white you were born into a life of privilege, bought on the backs of all non-whites.   It also states that you are, by virtue of being white, a racist.   Besides providing billboards, flyers and a strong dose of vindictive hatred the progr

The federal Universal Service Fund, a tax attached to your phone bill each month, is being used to pass out free cell phones and cell phone minutes to allegedly poor people each month.   You pay the bill and anyone who fits the administration’s profile of the poor and needy (i.e. black, brown or likely to vote Democratic) gets a free phone.   In St. Louis a local film crew showed a car parked on the street in an urban area, its passengers calling to people on the street to, “…come get your free phone!”   The phones were passed out indiscriminately to anyone who came over to the car—as long as they fit the predetermined profile.   The news crew interviewed one woman who already had two such phones, each with minutes left on them.   There was no information asked of these people.   No one asked about their income, their need, their current status vis a vis a cell phone.   Information was being entered on a computer, but it had nothing to do with any questions being asked of the re

No one ever accused a Chicago politician of not knowing how to play the electorate.   They may not have started the political machine, but they did perfect it.   In announcing an executive order allowing the children of illegal aliens to remain in this country the President has worked a timely, “end around” play to Sen. Marco Rubio’s alteration of the Dream Act.             Sen. Rubio’s announcement to revise the Dream Act to make it palatable to a large number of Republican legislators, primarily by removing the path to citizenship, was gaining support.   Rubio was wisely refusing to release details of the emerging legislation which would have allowed the opposition to torpedo the boat before it got out of dry-dock.   [Personally, I agree with Otto Von Bismark, “Laws are like sausages.   It is better not to see them being made.”]    So, behind the scenes, Rubio was forging a law that would actually have the much touted but seldom seen, “bi-partisan” support.   When everybody has

I am much less an anti-union person than most people would imagine.   I was active in my teachers’ union (National Education Association) for years.   I was building rep, grievance rep, picket captain during three strikes and spent two years as co-chair of the teachers’ negotiation committee in a state that did NOT have collective bargaining rights for its public employees. The NEA, by the way, calls itself a professional organization, but if you waddle like a duck, quack like a duck and swim in the pond with other ducks, chances are you are, indeed, a duck. There is a huge difference between a public employee union and a private union.   Modern private unions grew out of the market place imbalances of the industrial revolution.   People were looking for work in the rapidly expanding industries located in the cities.   Because of the glut of workers, most needing little if any special skills and therefore easily replaced, the majority of the power was with the employers, not the

I didn’t write a thing about the GSA scandal when it first surfaced.   I like to see where the dust is going to settle on an issue before laying in to them with a large broom.   I also know that the press loves to write in excess about these things, correcting as they go along.   The first story will have a large measure of truth, but the follow up stories, as one news service after another tries to, “scoop” the other, will be based on third and fourth generation hearsay.                Every time I hear someone tout the concept of government run health care or the need for more governmental control of J. P. Morgan or other lions of the business sector   I want to point to the GSA and say, “Yup, we need another thick slice of that on our plates!”   If the government can’t keep a watch on the agencies they themselves create, what makes people think they can accurately or fairly regulate the entities created by the market place?   The free market is a relentless regulator; the gover