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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, one thing you gotta respect about the Libertarian Party (LP) is, they tell it like it tee-eye-tee-eye is. It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been a member of the party for over a quarter of a century….

Following is an excerpt from an email I received from the LP last week entitled Bush Hopes to Expand the Size and Scope of Big Government: William Redpath Provides Libertarian Response to the State of the Union Address:

….
There has been a great deal of controversy about so-called facts presented by the White House about the initial cause for military action in Iraq; it is time we look at some real facts. We are indeed nation building. We are playing policeman in a civil war. We attacked Iraq and triggered what is clearly a civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people in Iraq, all without a correct and coherent explanation of what our purpose and goals are from the Bush Administration. We have chased non-existent weapons of mass destruction instead of focusing on the terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. We are creating more terrorists on a daily basis because of our intervention in Iraq. In short, we went after the wrong bad guys and are now stuck in the middle of someone else’s civil war.

Bush said that we need to “win” in Iraq, but he has never clearly articulated what a “win” would be. That is the least he owes the American people. The most successful outcome Americans can hope for is to withdraw from Iraq as quickly as is safely possible for our troops, before too many more of our sons and daughters are added to the ever growing list of casualties.

We, in the Libertarian Party, still think there is hope for the advocates of limited government. According to an ABC News report, the President has only kept one third of the promises he made in his 2006 State of the Union address. Bush’s current approval ratings are lower than for any U.S. president the day before a State of the Union Address since President Richard Nixon in 1974. Hopefully, he will fail in turning his mostly big government solutions into public policy.
….

If Bush was smart, he’d take this advice from Ed Quillen.

We’ve conquered coffee. Let’s move on to bagels, shall we?

In 1996, I was working for a little software concern down in Greenwood Village. I was a greenhorn consultant sharing an office with an honest-to-God, type-A-personality, New York Jew. For the sake of argument, let’s say his name was Woody. Being a Midwestern boy, this was my first exposure on a daily basis to an New Yorker, let alone a guy so stereotypical he had to be made up.

Woody was a project manager. He had two principal clients in the financial services industry which happened to be bitter rivals. Woody has this charming habit of having long conference calls with them, naturally on speaker phone, during which he would pace the office or bounce a racquetball against the wall or both. More often than not, he’d play them off of each other. “Barco just bought our MegaFop software,” he’d tell the guy from Jarco. “Jarco’s going live next week,” he’d tell the guy from Barco. The usual response from either of these guys was usually some form of malevolent hate which Woody seemed to thrive on even while shrugging it off. “Cut the bullshit,” they’d demand as Woody bounced the racquetball. Good times.

One day I brought in to work a bagel from the local chain bagel place — the one that makes somewhat doughy bagels under the marketing guise of being run by a couple of neighborhood Jewish guys straight out of Hell’s Kitchen. You don’t get cream cheese on your bagel there, you get a “shmear.” You get the idea. Anyway, I bring this thing into work, Woody sees it, and begins to lecture me on what is and what is not a bagel. My over sized, doughy bagel from the local chain bagels place was apparently not a bagel. A true bagel, I was informed, can only be formed in the sanctity of the rarefied New York air, and only then in the morning, preferably before or just at dawn. And furthermore, chocolate, asiago cheese, and (Heaven forbid) cinnamon, have no business anywhere near a real bagel.

My curiosity about these mystical “O”-shaped chunks of paradise at this point was defeated by my growing annoyance with Woody’s insistence that everything outside of his beloved city was crap. In addition to the bagels being utter refuse, I was further informed that it was impossible to get decent Chinese food in Denver, the sushi was inedible, there was nothing to do downtown, and people here don’t know how to dress. Why are people from the biggest city in the country so small-minded? It’s a scientific mystery.

At any rate, my breakfast being criticized, fairly or not, I became annoyed. So I recommended to Woody that if he really wanted one of his incredible bagels, perhaps he should find his way back to New York. Why not right now?

Naturally this only endeared me to him. Maybe he liked my chutzpah, I don’t know. But he laughed in that “you’re OK, kid,” way that some people can, and left for a meeting.

Years later I traveled to New York and tried one of those mystical bagels. Woody was right. The ones we get out here are crap.

I’m a coffee drinker. I like it black or with a little cream. I like cafe Americano too, which is just espresso diluted with some hot water in case you didn’t already know.

I’ve been to Starbucks and Peaberry and the rest. Most of the menu is a bewildering list of goofy frou-frou sounding coffee drinks. Caramel macchiato comes to mind. Usually, I just ignore all that stuff and order a regular old cup of coffee.

But today I thought I’d find out how the other half lives. I ordered a vanilla latte, my first ever. I imagined a sweet coffee confection something like what comes in those tasty Japanese Boss Coffee cans. What I was served was a cup of hot milk with some vanilla syrup in it. There might have been a smidge of coffee in the bottom. I’m not saying this because I tasted it. I’m saying this because my hot milk was inexplicably brownish in color. Honestly, if you had handed me that drink blindfolded, I would not have guessed that there was any coffee in it at all.

Is this what the coffee revolution has been about for all these years? Mr. Croix once told me, “Do you know why Starbuck’s is so successful? It’s because they figured out that people don’t actually like coffee.” I guess he was right after all.