Tag: Mickey Mantle Page 1 of 3

So many spots sweet and not so sweet in need of hitting and so little time…
Although we have a lot of stories yet to come, current events popular, political, sporting and otherwise preclude our ability to deliver them. What’s going on now is our priority, and the number one thing on all of our minds by way of mainstream media infusions is the DC circus that has come to everyone’s town.
Who is surviving amid the government shutdown that has extended into several days by last inexact count? That would be everyone still breathing. Threats of the debt ceiling approaching from one political party to another do little in terms of helping work things out. The United States has been broke for quite some time. The American people that constitute the majority of middle class wannabes have been close to broke, if not broke, for quite some time. When life is a daily struggle for people, politicians in Washington D.C. can urge us to come to their circus featuring the daily shows of bravado by President Obama and House Speaker Boehner all they want, but it won’t happen, as people working multiple part-time jobs in a lousy, failing economy are more concerned with getting food on the table to eat. The plight of government workers, harsh as it may sound, garners little to no sympathy from those competing for dwindling, temporary, holiday retail positions to make ends meet. The irony is that we need people to consume. The problem, however, is there can be no consumption without good jobs offering decent wages. It is an awful, vicious cycle as they say, with a troubling lack of end game in sight.

What is going on in DC seems to be a kid’s game, Speaker Boehner’s protestations to President Obama that this isn’t “some damn (adult’s?) game” notwithstanding. We want to know how to fix an economy in which the federal government is the nation’s biggest employer. We want to know how to mend a national psyche bruised from record numbers of people receiving federal assistance. We want to know why we must continually spend to support growth in the economy. We want to know how it has come to pass that savings accounts in banks will probably not ever pay meaningful interest rates ever again.
We have a lot of things broken and no one knows how to fix them. And geniuses in Washington want to know why the American people are taking little more than a “let’s see what happens” attitude? Politicians have lost recognition of what the word “solution” means, have made things worse overall, are amazingly enough bickering to the point of paralysis and most importantly, have repeatedly demonstrated they do not have a clue as to what is needed to get things moving in the right direction again—talk about institutional failures.

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There is over a trillion dollars of total federal student loan debt on the books. When did this become the new normal? How did we come to accept this as the price paid for a four year degree? After the housing debacle banks started scrutinizing loan applications. It is more difficult to get a mortgage today than it was before the Lehman Bros. crash in 2008. The government just assumes that by virtue of a four-year degree from a university, college graduates will be able to pay back their loans no problem? There should have been a cap in place as to eligible loan amounts for students whose ability to repay their debts has never come into question before. One in seven students defaulting on their student loan obligations is further evidence a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a job.

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Is it just me or should Obama and Boehner get some counseling together?
I’m part of the wait and see set regarding the antics in Washington. I would one day like to see politicians stop assessing blame. There is plenty of blame to go around. Why not work together and share the credit for constructive solutions? Everyone wins including the people. I understand that politics has mostly been static all these years pre- and post-social media. Our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn worlds just keep every blah blah immediately coming as it is uttered. It is hard to digest real news when so much verbal diarrhea is foisted upon the dais each day.
Just sayin’…

I watched part of the Miley Cyrus SNL. I so wanted it to be funny. I so wanted to watch the show all the way through. But I could not. The one with Tina Fey (she looked good) as host one week earlier started out way better. I will finish that one up soon. With six new cast members, as Fey jokingly noted in her opening monologue, it is a “rebuilding” year for SNL. As long as they can get guest hosts like Miley, they will always have an audience–no matter the regular cast. It is kind of like if someone made an offer to buy hittingthesweetspot and it was accepted. It would take a lot of time for the new sweetspot to gel (if it ever would at all). It would stay relevant to its audience, of course, provided I was allowed to guest post occasionally. Just sayin’.
Obamacare is not free health care. It’ll cost some of us more than we’re already paying. Other people not so much. All in all for all of us…not free. Just sayin’.
Playoff baseball is the best. And my Yankees are nowhere to be found. At least I am not a fair weather fan. I was a Yankees fan when they were terrible in Mickey Mantle’s last two seasons. I stayed a Yankees fan through their sucking years of the late sixties and into the seventies. I endured the Mets 1969 championship while the Yankees were awful—at least the Mets were a New York team. Then, George Steinbrenner bought the Yanks. It was not an immediate turnaround, however. Even when they made the World Series again in 1976 they were embarrassingly swept by the Reds. The Yankees today look like the economy—not getting better any time soon, I’m afraid. Just sayin’.

My horoscope said I was supposed to end this with a one line sentence reflecting my motto and output for not only today, but every day:
We do what we can and then we go home.