Now imagine the coverage if Rudolph Giuliani had implemented such a program. What if George W. Bush initiated a similar Federal program! One can almost hear the screams from the left.

According to The Liberal New York Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended a city program to send homeless families out of New York on planes, trains and buses on Wednesday, saying it “saves the taxpayers of New York City an enormous amount of money.”

Speaking in the Blue Room in City Hall to announce a new finance commissioner, Mr. Bloomberg was asked if the program simply shifts the homelessness program to a different place, as some critics of the program have suggested.

“I don’t know, when they get to the other places, whether they find jobs,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It may be an easier place for them. If we don’t — we either have two choices. We can do this program or pay an enormous amount of money daily to provide housing.”

It costs the city about $36,000 a year to provide shelter for a homeless family. The average stay in shelter is about nine months.

But Mr. Bloomberg appeared sensitive to the image of flying homeless families to far-flung places, as the program is set up to do. In the past two years, families have been provided one-way tickets to Haiti, Peru, Mexico City, St. Croix, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, Santo Domingo and Casablanca. (The most popular destinations are Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.)

“The average cost is trivial,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Most go by bus. Very few go overseas, very few go long distances. Bus is the normal ways we pay for transportation, rather than air.”

In fact, the most common mode of travel for families in the program is air, not bus. Forty-eight percent travel by airplane; 37 percent by bus; and 15 percent by train, according to city data.

By my count there have been 64 U.S. Senators from New York State. Everything considered it is all but amazing that only two of these might be considered carpetbaggers: Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The other 62 were either native New Yorkers, or at least lived in the state for some time before being elected to the U.S. Senate.

It is also of minor interest that both Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton held the same Senate seat as Class 1 U.S. Senators belonging to the electoral cycle that were elected in the first election of 1788/1789.

Should Caroline Kennedy be selected to fill Secretary of State designate Clinton’s Senate seat she certainly would not be a carpetbagger. 

So, what are the qualifications to be a United States Senator? Pretty simple according to the U.S. Constitution, Article 1 Section 3:

No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

That is it; there are no other legal requirements.

The choice is solely the governor’s.

There is nothing to be gained by running a negative campaign about Caroline Kennedy, so Republicans and conservatives should treat her with respect, welcome her to the Senate, and prepare for the next election.

My first car was a used 1964 Chevy Impala. Today, I drive a Toyota Matrix and in-between I have driven so called “American” and foreign cars, although it was near impossible to tell where the cars, much less their parts were made. My ’64 was fairly easy to maintain and fix, a screw driver, wrench and a few other tools and you could fix most anything. My ’05 Matrix forget it, you need a special computer and program just to begin.

My first bank account was a saving account opened in elementary school. The man from Franklin National Bank came to the school every few weeks, I would put 25¢ into my savings account and he stamped my book with the deposit. Today, most of my money and debts are with Citicorp.

To me banks and cars are utilities, like a washing machine. I want them to work when I need them and to make my like easier. 

Some things seem pretty obvious (otherwise why would they need billions of tax dollars?):

• Neither industry has been run well. 
• Management has not done its job.
• The lower level workers will be hurt the most.

What I do not understand is why the banks (financial institutions) can get hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at them with almost no questions asked, and the auto industry must jump through hoops to get a few billion.

Maybe the auto industry was not making the cars Americans really wanted, but the banking industry was making loans they knew were problematic at best.

Maybe the benefits the auto-workers receive and received were too high, but what about the huge year-end bonuses those in the banking industry received year after year?

If AIG, Citicorp, et. al. are “too big to fail”, how can all three of the U.S. auto be small enough to be allowed to fail?

If bankruptcy is an option for the big three, why wasn’t it an option for the financial industry?

Sure the auto industry and the unions have poured millions into the political system, but so has the financial industry.

From a purely political philosophy I am opposed to all these government bailouts, loans, etc. But, government was part of the problem, so it must be part of the solution. And since we have started down the road of nationalizing industries, where do we stop? Certainly, not at the auto industry.

By opposing the loans to the auto industry, Republicans and conservatives need to wake up and realize that they are going to be seen as supporting the rich and oppressing the middle class.