Check out the Newsmax.com interview and news story on George Marlin’s new book, Narcissist Nation:  Reflections of a Blue State Conservative.

This article I wrote appears on The Catholic Thing website.

This book review I wrote appeared in HumanEvents.com on May 9, 2008.

New York City’s economic elites enthusiastically support Mayor Bloomberg’s traffic congestion tax.  Why?  It will keep the “riff raff” out of their fashionable Manhattan neighborhoods.  Who are New York’s “riff raff”?  Outer Boro working stiffs who must use motorized vehicles to make their living.

This latest social engineering scheme of Manhattan’s “favored few” will go down because of the tax revolt brewing among New York’s “riff raff.”  The evidence: the recent City Council vote on the congestion pricing home rule message.

Twenty members from Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island (18 Democrats/2 Republicans) voted against the measure.  Political wags were shocked that 40 percent of the council’s membership stood up against the Mayor and Speaker Quinn.  In fact, the vote on the resolution was the most closely contested in decades.

Further proof:  Proponents are having trouble mustering enough votes from Albany’s overwhelming Democratic Assembly majority to pass the congestion tax.

The only organization with the guts to publicly oppose the pricing plan is the Conservative Party of New York.  Mike Long, the state chairman, denounced Mayor Bloomberg’s “righteous program” and reminded legislators that “now is not the time to force those who must travel to Manhattan, below 60th Street, to be burdened with an additional tax when all other aspects in our daily lives are reeling with additional costs…. Congestion pricing, congestion mitigation, whatever legislators chose to call it … New Yorkers who will be forced to pay it, know it is simply another money grab that will not be able to produce enough to pay for what it promises, thereby forcing government to take even more money from us in the future.”

Chairman Long’s position is the correct one.  And any Conservative Party endorsed state legislator who opposes it and sides with Manhattan elites, should be denied the party’s nomination in the November 2008 election.

A subset of professional conservatives are bellyaching that Senator John McCain is not fit to carry the 2008 Republican presidential banner.  One member of that group, Pat Robertson, who endorsed the pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, anti-gun Giuliani, says pro-life McCain is not a true conservative.  How ridiculous is that? (more…)

The political tide appears to be running against the death penalty.  The New York Times reported that “for the first time in modern history of the death penalty, 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.”  New Jersey abolished the death penalty in December 2007; Connecticut’s Superior Court is contemplating if the death penalty discriminates against minorities; the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing if the three drug lethal injection execution method is “cruel and unusual punishment.”  And in New York, thanks to Governor Pataki’s wanton approval of flawed death penalty legislation, the Court of Appeals in June 2004 struck down key provisions.  As a result, convicted Wendy’s restaurant mass murderer John Taylor’s death sentence was tossed out by the state’s highest court on October 24, 2007.

Many of those fighting to maintain the death penalty sentence believe they enhance their cause by arguing it is justified because it is a deterrent.  This line of reasoning, however, is flawed – the evidence is inconclusive, contradictory and fundamentally irrelevant. (more…)