A bumper sticker I spied not too long ago, upstate (I snapped a cameraphone photo of it, but it came out too crappy to use):

LIBERALS ARE PEOPLE TOO
THERE JUST POLITICALLY INCORRECT!

Yup, “there”, instead of “they’re”. No better way to sabotage an otherwise bold statement than via a boneheaded misspelling.

I would attribute this to a recent rash of mad-as-hell grammatical challenges, except that it appears this doofus has been displaying his cluelessness for a couple of years.

Consider these assessments by playwright Yasmina Reza of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, gleaned from her yearlong stint as insider on his 2007 campaign trail:

“One of the things that I liked about him — there are many things, but this really seduced me — was his insolence,” she recalled. “But he has not understood that power is itself insolent and that he could not continue with his habitual insolences. During the campaign his insolence seemed like an expression of freedom, frankness. But in office he has not curbed it, he has misjudged its effect.”…

Ms. Reza was not surprised when Mr. Sarkozy was next seen dating the former model Carla Bruni, whom he married in February. “He’s the kind of man who is incapable of being alone,” she said. “I don’t think he can spend a night alone, an evening alone. There may be passing affairs, but he needs someone real. So quickly someone serious entered his life.”…

“I think he is a tragic personality, a man bent on self-destruction,” she said. “It wasn’t clear during the campaign, but I am convinced that he has a powerful faculty for self-destruction.”

With all that in mind, let me throw this out there:

Is Sarkozy just France’s version of Bill Clinton, appropriately amped up for a Gallic political culture? Both men came into office as establishment-challenging reformers, after all. And as far as spotlight moments: Imagine the Monica Lewinsky scandal culminating not in impeachment, but rather in a divorce and remarriage… And you’ve got the Carla Bruni episode.

If all this holds, I guess we’ll be seeing a meltdown from the Presidential Palace in Paris before all’s done.

They’re no longer in Montreal, but the Washington Nationals are still saddled with a familiar problem: Anemic attendance, despite a spanking-new stadium.

Since we can’t blame a hockey-distracted populace this time around — or some sort of franchise curse — a trickle-down effect in DC’s political mechanics may be to blame for all the empty seats, particularly the highly-visible ones:

Then Jack Abramoff tried to buy off all of Washington. New lobbying laws soon followed, and now the maximum gift given to a lawmaker cannot exceed $50. Which means all the [behind home-plate] Presidential tickets – $325 for single-game ones, $335 on Saturday and $400 for the front row, all more than the best seat at Yankee Stadium, which goes for $250 – that should have gone from lobbyist to Congressman to hard-working staffer no longer exist, and the market won’t get any hotter unless the Nationals do, too.

So cleaner politics means bad business for the nation’s (alleged) pasttime in the nation’s capital. Emblematic of the times, no?

For anyone who was wondering what prompted new New York governor David Paterson to go on a confessional spree shortly after inauguration, he now claims that elements within the state police were zeroing in and would have outed him anyway.

Paterson first disclosed to the Daily News in March that both he and his wife, Michelle, had affairs during a troubled point in their marriage several years ago. The day after he was sworn in, the couple fielded questions at a tense press conference at the state Capitol.

“That feeding frenzy was getting closer and closer to my family,” Paterson said Friday, adding he had heard “wild rumors” about himself - including that he fathered his 23-year-old nephew.

“So what we decided to do was you get yourself before they get you,” said Paterson, who has also since disclosed that he smoked pot and used cocaine in his youth.

This is pretty much what I suspected, although I didn’t know specifically who was getting ready to hit Paterson — I would have guessed it would have been some investigative reporter or somesuch. But the flood of admissions were clearly a preemptive move.

What I’ve argued is that Paterson made his disclosures at the only good time possible. He couldn’t have done so before he was sworn in, because that would have jeopardized his ascension to the Governor’s mansion. And had he waited until later, not only would he have risked someone else beating him to the punch, but he also would have gotten considerably more flak; the positive energy he was getting from not being Eliot Spitzer served as enough of a shield to deflect serious fallout.

Simply put, there was no other time when he could have done it, and gotten gain out of it. It was actually a very shrewd public relations strategy: Taking advantage of a window of optimal goodwill.

Appropriately enough for a gambling mecca, Las Vegas is taking a double-down approach to urban revitalization: Instead of rehabbing its existing downtown, it’s building a sparkling-new replacement, right next door.

[T]he city will formally inaugurate a new urban core on a 61-acre, undeveloped parcel of land — a project that some experts say is unprecedented in city planning. Called Union Park, its supporters hope it will revive the historic downtown just to the east, where the region’s courthouses, government offices and oldest casinos are clustered…

“It’s quite unusual that there’s a big swath of downtown ground just sitting there without having to go through a whole rigmarole to acquire,” said Bill Hudnut, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. Mr. Hudnut, the former mayor of Indianapolis, recalled that acquiring just three blocks of that city “involved some legal fights and eminent domain, the demolition of buildings, numerous deals with numerous owners.” In Las Vegas, he added, “they’re just building new stuff.”

And I suppose if Union Park fizzles out after it goes up, they can just pick up another several adjacent acres and take a third stab at it. All that desert terrain is just a blank slate anyway, right?

In the same spirit as last year’s self-plagiarism, I’m commemorating today’s Earth Day observance with a blog rerun.

The year is 1990, the place is a dorm lounge in my alma mater, and the source material is an old TV with over-the-air reception only (pre-cable). Throw in my general 18-year-old boredom, and you get this improbable save-the-planet vignette:

My favorite Earth Day memory is a prank I played 13 16 17 18 years ago. I was sitting in my dorm lounge with a dormmate. We were flipping through the channels (no cable TV in the dorms back then–the dark ages!!), and catching a couple of news reports telling us it was Earth Day. Then we land on Home Shopping Network, just as they start rolling out their fur collection for display and sale.

It hit me: Furs? They’re hawking freakin’ furs on Earth Day? Come on!

Now, I wasn’t then, nor am I now, a hard-core environmentalist or animal-rights advocate. I’m sympathetic with those philosophies, to a point, but I eat meat, wear leather, etc. Nevertheless, some part of my sensibilities was offended by seeing such a bizarre juxtaposition. I think I was offended by the stupidity, or more likely ignorance, on display by HSN.

So, I decided to do something. I got my phone, dialed up the HSN order line, and as soon as the customer service drone answered, I yelled, “EARTH DAY! FUR IS MURDER! BOYCOTT! BOYCOTT!!”. I did it a couple more times after that. Then I got my dormmate to call too, on his phone; he did a very low-key version of same spiel (sans yelling–that was my schtick).

We had our fun, and decided to keep watching the channel to see if our childish actions had any on-air effect. Lo and behold, about 10 minutes after the last of our calls, the show host mentioned, “By the way, folks, today is Earth Day”, and then abruptly switched from the fur display to something else. We laughed our asses off! It looked like we had stuck it to the man!

Normally I’d let this recollection stand as is. But doing so seems to confuse some people. Therefore, I feel compelled to include something in the way of context and clarification. (I doubt the offended Home Shopping drones will even read this far down, but at least I’ve got it down for the record, and won’t have to bother with further response.)

It seems to be eluding some that the episode above happened in 1990. When I was 18 years old, btw — so the “childish” insult doesn’t faze me, as I practically was still a child at that point. Also, whatever call-center procedures that are in place now most likely weren’t in effect back then. So don’t bother citing current SOP because it probably doesn’t apply.

Secondly, I never state that the operators somehow relayed those crank calls to the broadcast booth. However, you can bet those calls were being monitored from a higher source, and from there filtered to what was going on on-screen.

Lastly: Whether or not my imagined cause-and-effect really happened, the sequence is where the humor is. It still makes for a funny story, which is why I look forward to recycling it yet again next year.

New York State’s newly-enshrined governor, David Paterson, is legally blind: Only his right eye has any visual functionality to it.

So how does he manage to head up the government of the nation’s third-largest state? With plenty of audible help:

Mr. Paterson, a Harlem Democrat who has been blind since infancy, has been making adjustments to his surroundings throughout his life. But, with the added demands of the job of governor and the relentlessness of his new schedule, staying on top of his work now takes a lot more time. He said much of his day can feel like a big game of catch-up. “I’m always trying to get back that time that I’m losing,” he said.

Given the volume of material he must take in, he tries to find ways to do things faster. He listens to very long articles or books on a special tape recorder for the blind that plays at speeds so fast, it is difficult for others to comprehend. “You get used to listening to that Alvin and the Chipmunks voice,” he said.

Not to get all gushy, but as someone with fairly weak eyeballs, I find Paterson’s ascent inspiring.

Regime change in the name of commerce hasn’t been (and, to this day, isn’t) limited to that black liquid found in the Middle East. Peter Chapman’s “Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World” goes deep into the United Fruit Company’s economic and political dominance in Central America during the early 20th Century, which included familiar corporatist tactics:

In some countries, United Fruit blatantly paid no taxes at all for decades. In others, when troubled by local officials, it simply installed a more sympathetic government. In Honduras in 1911, the banana men not only staged an invasion to depose the current regime and put in a new one, they had the audacity to demand the new government reimburse the costs incurred in the invasion!…

It may seem hard to believe that the banana business could be as nefarious as the oil business. But to our banana chroniclers, it may have been worse. The banana men managed to be at once ferociously exploitative, while cultivating a beloved image with their customers, pioneering public relations and marketing practices still in use today.

Equating yesteryear’s interventionist actions with today’s blood-for-oil foreign policy certainly puts things into perspective. I’m sure the history of United Fruit (today Chiquita Brands) is far from common knowledge, even though it should be as a watershed moment in CIA influence (i.e., the Guatemala coup in 1954).

But it’s important to look at this more comprehensively. It’s not just isolated one-off actions that jump from one corner of the globe to another — global interests by American-based corporations are the drivers for Washington’s foreign policy. This isn’t new, either for the U.S. nor other world powers past and present. If more people kept themselves informed, maybe the periodic jingoistic war rallying would fizzle out.

Don’t look now, but our petroleum imports may someday have a Portuguese accent attached to them:

[Brazil oil ministry head Haroldo] Lima told reporters that Petrobras “may have discovered a huge petroleum field that could contain reserves large as 33 billion barrels,” amounting to the world’s third-largest reserve, according to his spokesman, Luiz Fernando Manso.

Manso did not provide any details about where Lima got his information, except to say it came from “nonofficial, non-confirmed sources.” Brazil Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao declined comment.

Lima’s agency regulates Brazil’s oil industry, and his comments appeared to represent confirmation of what experts have long suspected: That extremely deep exploration areas hundreds of miles (kilometers) off the nation’s coast may hold potentially huge reserves.

Brazil’s current proven oil reserves are 11.8 billion barrels, according to the U.S. Energy Department. The U.S. has 21.8 billion barrels in proven reserves.

“You’re talking about a reserve the size of total U.S. reserves,” said Tim Evans, an analyst with Citigroup Inc. in New York. “It’s a big, big number.”

If this proves out, it means a new geopolitical dance is about to begin, with South America being the stage. And OPEC’s flirting with Brazil for membership will only intensify.

What to make of a surprising recent increase in Russia’s birthrate?

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s population plummeted, and until recently was shrinking at the rate of about 750,000 people a year.

So the Kremlin made kids a priority. A 2007 law expanded maternity leave benefits and payments, and granted mothers educational and other vouchers worth $10,650 for a second child and any thereafter. More important, perhaps, Russia’s surging economy has made it possible for young couples to plan for their future.

The population decline hasn’t halted, and demographers warn it could plummet again. But today births are on the rise, from 1.4 million in 2006 to 1.6 million in 2007 — their highest level in 15 years.

The governmental social engineering isn’t unique — tax breaks that encourage citizens to settle down and start multiplying have been implemented for decades in Europe and America, particularly after the World Wars. It would have been more surprising if Moscow didn’t take steps to reverse the decline.

While the Russian state isn’t out of the wood yet, this is a sign that its predicted dwindling-away isn’t a fait accompli. Even Parag Khanna’s vision of a coming global trilateralism, made up of China-Europe-United States with Russia and India relegated to also-rans, might need revision.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately, but I’m actually following through on intentions. Case in point: I managed to attend last night’s performance of “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?”, like I said I would.

Never mind that it was a fairly last-minute affair, what with having to stand in line for rush tickets for an hour beforehand. And that both the play, with its strained-staccato dialogue, and my companionship were both lacking (although the night ended up surprisingly cheerfully, once I ditched her).

The rush-ticket experience did produce a noteworthy sideshow. At one point, a street person worked his way up the line, offering up a bag of Starbucks ground-roast coffee beans for sale for the low-low price of $4.

His non-stop spiel emphasized that the retail price on this gourmet package was around $24, which made it fairly obviously that he had freshly lifted his merchandise from the Lafayette Street location. And that was the funniest part about it for me: He wasn’t trying to hide that he had stolen the stuff. He was merely trying to unload it as quickly as possible.

At the time, I felt a slight tinge of sympathy for the Starbucks store that got ripped off. But a few minutes later, when I went there to kill some time before the play’s start, I got a mild shock from how much pricier their menu was from other locations around the City — probably a good 25 percent higher. Maybe that’s attributable to their higher loss rate from thefts — or maybe they’re just greedier. So at that moment, I was actually kinda glad that that hustler swiped his caffeinated stash. Stick it to the man, if he’s going to stick it to me for my usually-cheap Awake tea.

Casting the bilateral relationship between the United States and Great Britain as a dysfunctional gay-male love affair?

That’s theater for you. And for me, as I plan to snag tickets soon to Caryl Churchill’s “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?” at the Public Theater, East Village ways, to see this imaginative spectacle for myself. Sexual politics, without the sexual part — or is that, without the politics part? Either way, brilliant!

It’s not exactly political-thriller material (but that’s okay):

The second of the play’s seven scenes ends with this exchange:

SAM: being powerful and being on the side of good is

GUY: God must have so much fun

SAM: win win win

GUY: love you more than I can

That’s Sam (get it?) and Guy (get it?), in something like love. If you know anything about recent geopolitical history, you can guess who’s the pitcher and who’s the catcher…

The Empire State is just waiting for the other boot to drop at this point, as Eliot Spitzer is holed up on Fifth Avenue, contemplating his resignation from the governor’s office.

But in the meantime, David Letterman is going off on the “luv guv” and his stalemate:

The studio audience erupted in applause when Letterman ripped Spitzer for pondering his future on the public’s dime.

“Well, I mean how does that benefit us residents of the Empire State, you know what I’m saying,” Letterman said. “I mean, should that really be his decision?”

Spitzer should “go down to the Mayflower hotel and figure that out there,” said Letterman, drawing both laughs and cheers referring to the Washington D.C. location of the governor’s tryst.

When one of the main beneficiaries of the punchline material being generated gets down and serious about ending this episode sooner rather than later, I think the writing on the wall can’t get any clearer.

As for the long-term impact, we can always look back on this as a prime example of hubris in action. Spitzer went from coronation (his landslide election victory over hapless Republican John Faso, which was telegraphed months beforehand) to condemnation in a remarkably short timeframe. And his vague apology over the prostitution sting, which came off more as an attempt to frame the issue as a private family matter than a political target, was the cherry on top.

I give you the last mortal words of Pancho Villa:

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

While making note of Villa’s penchant for Hollywood-quality self-promotion, I’ll let the statement stand.

I came across this quip over the weekend, before the prostitution scandal surrounding New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer hit the fan today. I may be the only one in the world drawing a connection between these two figures; but somehow, Villa’s coda seems well-tailored to Spitzer’s prospective hubris-filled fall from grace.

Once or twice in the past, I’ve invoked that old joke about finding a parking spot in New York City:

It’s like playing musical chairs, and everyone already sat down back in 1965.

For all the city government knows, the mid-60s might be when some of the 142,000 municipal free parking permits currently in use — only half of which can be accurately accounted for — were first issued.

The Bloomberg administration has vowed to reduce the number of free passes, as part of the justification for the congestion-reduction plans the Mayor’s been tossing around. But history suggests this cancer won’t be easy to reduce:

The placards have been a source of frustration to New York drivers for decades. In 1987, The New York Times reported that to ease traffic around City Hall, the number of placards issued to public employees would be cut to 15,000 from an estimated 50,000.

But the numbers continued to grow. For example, there are now some 50,000 permits that have been issued to Police Department employees to park around station houses and other workplaces, a number close to the 59,000 police and auxiliary officers and civilian employees who are eligible for them…

The numbers grew, in part, because city agencies were allowed to issue their own permits with no central accounting of whom they went to or why. In addition, the placards were easy to duplicate, creating numerous fakes on the street.

From now on, only the Police and Transportation Departments will be allowed to issue them. That will make them easier to track; it will also make it easier for the police and traffic agents to tell the difference between legitimate and bogus placards, city officials said.

Good luck. The only way to fix this mess is to null and void all the existing permits, and then force those who want/need them to reapply for theirs, with a limited number of justifications for getting them. That sort of drastic act just doesn’t come out of City Hall.

Once again, being carless in the City, I’m glad I don’t have a dog in this particular fight (and can function splendidly besides).

Police dogs in Germany will soon be stylin’ some serious footwear. Duesseldorf is outfitting its canine crime-fighters with blue plastic-fiber shoes for protection:

“All 20 of our police dogs — German and Belgian shepherds — are currently being trained to walk in these shoes,” Andre Hartwich said. “I’m not sure they like it, but they’ll have to get used to it.”

The unusual footwear is not a fashion statement, Hartwich said, but rather a necessity due to the high rate of paw injuries on duty. Especially in the city’s historical old town — famous for both its pubs and drunken revelers — the dogs often step into broken beer bottles.

Hmm. Wasn’t Hitler a dog lover? Just sayin’.

Macroeconomics doesn’t get much hairier than when stagflation, that old invisible-hand smacker from the 70s, makes a comeback.

“[The Federal Reserve is] cutting rates with a bill to be paid later,” said John Ryding, chief United States economist at Bear Stearns. “The question is not, will we get inflation, but how much will it cost to stuff the genie back in the bottle. This has the feel of 1970s stagflation.”

Over the last 12 months, consumer prices are up 4.3 percent on average, according to the Labor Department. The core index of consumer price inflation, which excludes food and oil, was 2.5 percent higher in January than a year earlier, significantly above the Fed’s unofficial comfort zone of a 1 to 2 percent underlying inflation rate. That’s a far cry from the double-digit inflation rates that battered the economy at times in the 1970s, but still worrisome.

What’s next? A re-experiencing of “malaise forever”?

Apparently, the intelligentsia at the Grey Lady just got wind of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and conclude that this upcoming movie represents a cultural barometer regarding attitudes toward America’s most notorious prison.

But Guantánamo is no longer just a naval station or even just a detention center. It is an idea in worldwide culture — in more than 20 books and half a dozen movies and plays, with more coming out every month.

It has become shorthand for hopeless imprisonment and sweltering isolation. “The strange new Alcatraz,” one writer calls it, “the gulag of our times.”

I don’t think the Harold and Kumar treatment is the tipping point in making Guantánamo a casual reference. The easy transfer of the militaryspeak “Gitmo” nickname into mainstream usage probably started the process, but the repetitive mention of the name during War of Terror coverage cemented it as common feature on the current-affairs landscape. A comedic turn is just another step in the progression of developing the social mindset.

Besides, in the case of this laff-fest sequel, the particulars of the situation come together to give a plausibility to the farce. Let’s face it, dark-skinned Harold and Kumar being tagged as Gitmo-level terrorists makes sense. But, say, Larry the Cable Guy getting shipped there in a similar premise? I wouldn’t put it past some Hollywood hack to try it, but any humor attempt would draw on different sensibilities.

What’s 105 stories tall, located in downtown Pyongyang, and an overpowering reminder of the dysfunctionality of the North Korean regime?

That would be the Ryugyong Hotel, a colossal failure in totalitarian architectural design:

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn’t the just the worst designed building in the world — it’s the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

Distressed real estate on this grand a scale just screams for an injection of Donald Trump! Maybe he can build a reality show around it; the losing contestants get hauled away by the secret police…

This quote by 19th-century British poet/social critic Matthew Arnold resonates with my personal worldview:

“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

It also comes across as timely in this political season. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which side of the political divide it more closely hews toward.

We’re always hearing about how Europeans rush over Stateside and load up on everything with a pricetag attached. Now we know why: Continental retail is ridiculously regulated.

Not only are out-of-season sales banned in countries including Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece and France, but a jungle of regulations also keeps European retailers in lock step: In most countries, they can’t sell below cost; in others they can’t advertise reduced prices in advance of sales or discount items until they have been on shelves more than a month.

A recent study in France explained that these bans were conceived to preserve “le jeu loyal de la concurrence,” or “the loyal game of competition.” Almost like a duel at dawn, fair competition isn’t considered possible without regulation to set a time and place for it.

Very Soviet-style. It’s a wonder EU economies are as robust as they are.

Despite the avowed nod to general welfare, there are black roots to this set of practices:

Some are said to have originated in the mid-1930s in Germany, when the Nazi Party wanted to protect the public from what it regarded as overly competitive “Jewish” practices by some shopkeepers.

Reform is afoot to liberate the sales-bonanza mechanism in France and other countries. Sweet chaos, via markdown prices!