It all started in New York (where else?). Anthony Weiner showed up in politics again. His wife actually supported his bid to become mayor of New York City. Perhaps she just wanted him out of the house.
Elliot Spitzer (former New York governor) also offered New Yorkers an opportunity to place him back in office as the city’s comptroller. His loss for that position was called, a stunning rebuke. Should a person forced out of office in disgrace be trusted to handle the purse strings?
The electorate of Toronto could have spent more time choosing their mayor. Although Rob Ford has been brutally honest, admitting he smoked crack but only in a drunken stupor. How would that qualify him? He did create a media frenzy however being named, “Canada’s newsmaker of the year” and has resisted all efforts to oust him.
I suppose Mayor Ford is no worse than the record number of baseball players who received suspensions for testing positive for drug use this past season. New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez fought the suspension and wanted us to believe he was innocent. He claimed to have never taken drugs but forgot about when he pled guilty just a few years back. Perhaps they were different drugs, but he still failed both tests. His penalty was a 211-game suspension, which will cost him more than $30 million. He gambled and so far has lost. Let’s all feel sorry for him.
Our Detroit Tigers player accepted his suspension like a man, served his time out, and made it back to hit a home run in the playoffs. I believe all offenders should be blackballed if they go beyond their first positive test. This could serve as an example to our young athletes.
Ballplayers are not the only professional athletes to test positive for drug use. Lance Armstrong, over a 13-year period failed numerous drug tests and even failed a lie detector test. Last January, Armstrong chose to confess on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, saying he had used drugs to help with each of his seven Tour de France titles. Seems he was looking for help from Oprah in his fight to avoid paying back millions in prize money. I never thought he won fairly and only believed he ran the downhill sections of the races. Oprah may have extended sympathy, but I find it hard to feel bad for professionals using drugs to perform events they are way overpaid for.
A recurring event involves a former athlete who gets a lot of press. Dennis Rodman keeps visiting his pal, President Kim Jong Un in North Korea. He claims all the citizens look up to him.
The ongoing fascination with Edward Snowden and his associates at the National Security Agency has to top the list of negative events of the year. If the people (who still have their jobs at NSA) weren’t smart enough to detect a minor service tech stealing thousands of documents, how can we expect them to protect us? We would have to assume highly sophisticated foreign hackers are just as skilled as a lowly service tech.
I don’t care if NSA has my phone number. But if they want to call me, they will have to wait until all those people on my no-call list get done chatting. They also will be disappointed if they only want to listen because all my calls are in English.
I wonder why President Obama questions his low approval ratings. Have any of his promises been kept? If he hopes, in the remainder of his term, to be judged a world leader he may want to look for a different set of geeks to work on his Internet projects. I have an idea: He could hire those geeks who hacked into the Target data and copied all that credit card information.
Let’s hope 2014 may be a little less negative and a lot more positive. I read that a study discovered half of us will make resolutions this week, promising to do better. The same study announced only 8 percent actually succeed in keeping those promises.