Needles To Say, This Was A Bad Idea

I grew up in San Francisco and spent a lot of time hanging out in Golden Gate Park. This is the City’s little sister to New York’s Central Park. I used to feed squirrels there as a kid and have found memories of my mother taking me out there several times a week during the summers.

It has always been to me a place of paddleboats and serenity, of dream-like walks and blooming flowers. It is where I rode my bike when my training wheels first came off.

Now you can add the syringes of drug addicts as part of the landscape.

Thanks once more to the foolish policies of City Hall, Golden Gate Park has become a dumping ground for junkies.

San Francisco, like many “progressive” cities, supports needle exchanges for drug addicts. The theory is that to slow the spread of AIDS and other diseases, junkies should be encouraged to use clean needles instead of swapping them back and forth with each other.

I won’t even argue my points AGAINST needle exchange programs today. Let’s focus instead on the City not having the foresight to realize that these bums in the park would be littering needles the way they would litter their lunch…wherever they felt like it.

Now there are syringes all over this beautiful park. As if parents didn’t have enough to worry about with predators and street crime, now they can add accidental needle pricking to the list. Just another element that makes San Francisco even more unfriendly to families.

Last year, San Francisco spent $800,000 handing out 2 million needles. Now needles are being pulled out of the park by the HUNDREDS on any given day!

The same Board of Supervisors passed a city ordinance that allows anyone over 18 to buy up to 10 needles at a time at a local pharmacy—no questions asked. Meanwhile I have to sit there and fill out a form, show a driver’s license, and waste time just to get some cold medicine.

Isn’t it lovely how the progressive mind works sometimes?

Life, Liberty, and Text Messaging!

I hate it when reckless, irresponsible people ruin it for the rest of us. Remember when you were a kid? When Johnny kept talking in class or eating when he wasn’t supposed to? And what happened sometimes? EVERYONE got punished. No one had an extra recess. No one got to bring snacks to class anymore. All because of JOHNNY!!

Maybe the answer should have been to make Johnny the outcast and leave the rest of the class alone. Besides, we all ended up hating Johnny for blacklisting the whole lot of us.

This happens all the time in America at large.

I often talk about how a city in Northern California passed a Safe & Sane Fireworks ban that affected hundreds of thousands of people—all because of the reckless actions of TWO irresponsible and thoughtless youths. Why not punish THEM as severely as humanly possible and let the rest of us enjoy our Piccolo Petes and Cherry Blossoms?

We see the same sort of knee jerk reaction when it comes to driving while under the influence of a cell phone…and now text messaging is the latest whipping boy of politicians so eager to take something away from us.

We just talked on Fox Across America about how it was determined that the teen driver who got into that fatal crash last month in WesternNew York was apparently text messaging at the time of the accident. 5 people died. Why? Because of text messaging? No! Because of reckless driving. The driver was too inexperienced. She was driving too fast on a dark and winding two lane road. AND she was paying more attention to her phone than to the road.

THAT is where she made her fatal errors! I text message ALL the time. Much of that texting takes place while I am driving my car. And I have never gotten into an accident because of it. Not even a close call. Why?? Because I pay more attention to the ROAD than to the PHONE.

That driver could have been fumbling with her satellite radio. She could have been looking for a CD that fell to the floor. She could have been sharing jokes with her passengers. Any NUMBER of things could have distracted her. Time to ban vehicular channel surfing and joke telling??

One of the top “Nanny State” politicians around, New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (a favorite of ours to interview on Fox Across America) has joined forces with a Republican New York Senator to sponsor a bill that would outlaw…drum roll please…text messaging while driving. Ortiz is already responsible for taking hand held cell phones away from New York drivers. Now he wants to go after text messaging.

All because of a tragedy that could very well have happened whether the driver was texting or not.

So now millions of people might have yet ANOTHER thing taken away from them. A tool that can be used for closing business deals or telling loved ones who much you miss them.

Thank goodness you probably aren’t reading this blog while driving. I wouldn’t want to have blogs taken away because you got into a wreck.

Spinning the Bottle

Bottled water is causing global warming. At least President Bush isn't to blame this time. Unless we find that he owns stocks in the bottled water industry. You know Cheney MUST, right?

Radical environmentalists are now going after that bottled water you were about to take a sip out of. You see, it requires so much energy to MAKE those bottles. A spokesman for a Washington D.C. based environmental group claims that an estimated 47 million gallons of oil are used to make all those bottled waters Americans consume. And they end up clogging up our landfills, too. Wow. All these stats are making me thirty. Excuse me as I twist off the cap to my nice, cold BOTTLED water.

Snobby restaurants from San Francisco to Manhattan have put bottled water on ice. Tap water is the new reverse trend, kind of like paying extra for clothes that have tears in them already. Messed up hair is the new cool hairdo. Go figure.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has banned bottled water from city agencies. Los Angeles won't allow city money to buy bottled water.
You have to laugh when cities like San Francisco claim it saves millions of dollars a year, considering the City wants tax payers to pay for SEX CHANGES for city employees!! This from the City where child molesters and stalkers are allowed to march around as if they are the annointed ones. UNREAL.

Where are all the pro-choicers NOW?? I can't drink a bottle of water now without being looked at like I am raping the planet?? Where is the protection of MY choices??

Thank goodness the bottled water industry is fighting back against this stupidity. The Bottled Water Information Office claims that 727 million plastic bottles were recylced in American in 2004. Bottles are made out of plastic and glass, some of the most common recyled materials.

I don't WANT to drink tap water. I LIKE my bottled water. And last time I checked, I am still living in what appears on most days to be the United States of America.
So spin the bottle and pass me a glass full of ice, please. It's time for me to destroy the known universe. Gulp. Aaaaahhhhhh. Good stuff.

Please Don’t Hurt My Doggy!

Please Don’t Hurt My Doggy!

By Spencer Hughes

9 July 2007

I am having rage issues lately. Doggy rage issues.

We just moved into a new house and the neighbors all seem pretty cool. At least the human neighbors are nice.

But there is one neighbor the size of a six pack of beer that is threatening to give me a nervous breakdown. A Chihuahua. At least I THINK that’s the kind of dog it is. Looks more like a rat than anything else. A barking rat. A barking rat that keeps getting into our backyard.

Its owner keeps patching the holes it digs under our shared fence. And I do the same. Gravel. Sand. ROCKS. BIGGER rocks. NO GOOD. Nothing works.

This dog is trying to break me. Not only does it dig and get into the yard, it just walks up to our dog and yaps at it. YAP. YAP. YAP YAP. It is THE most annoying dog I have ever encountered.

I have tried to befriend it. Every morning when I take out the garbage, there it is. Standing on OUR lawn, yapping at ME! I talk to it. Try to pet it. I even offered snacks to try to get him to crack. NOTHING.

We are having a pool built and they dug the big hole this past weekend. I told the neighbor it would be a safety issue for his dog. He didn’t seem too concerned. Maybe he hates the dog as much as I do. So this morning, there it was…yapping away at the giant hole in the middle of our yard. Excuse me. HIS yard. He has done everything but erect a giant Chihuahua flag in the middle of our yard.

I feel run over and beat down. By a dog. And a little, yappy dog to boot. I actually had a dream that the little pooch had a construction accident when it got in the way of the plumbers. It disappeared for a few days and I was happy. That’s awful, isn’t it?

Well, not if you knew this dog.

And it’s owner doesn’t seem so nice to me anymore, either.