He looks like he just raided Cher's winter wardrobe...

Try parking panda, parking hero or one of the other apps. You might be able to find a better rate.

Also, while I know it isn't as fun as listening to music, tune into one of the AM radio channels out of NYC, like 880. They generally provide traffic and weather news on a regular basis throughout the hour.

For starters, legislation can't override scarcity and the other basic laws of economics.

You want to reduce the price of oil and gas? Allow more drilling -- greater supply, generally speaking, leads to lower prices. When Biden shut down certain auctions for petroleum rights, he created the perception that he was against oil, which rattled the markets, leading to a spike in the price of crude oil, which lead to a spike in gasoline prices.

Healthcare, being a complex "system" (I use quotes, mainly because the US healthcare system isn't a system, it is more like a quilt...), getting the government out of the business of insurance would be a good start. Medicare regulations, due mainly to the law of unintended consequences, artificially hiked health care costs, screwing the uninsured and the private payor. To give an example, every hospital that participates in the Medicare program is required, by law, to have a single rate for each and every procedure they perform. They also not permitted to offer discounts to private payers for paying cash. They are permitted, however, to offer "contractual allowances" to insurance companies and are required to give the best of those rates to the government. Combine that with the history of insurance in America, and you have a real problem. People stopped looking at their medical bills back in the Sixties and matters have only gotten worse since then.

Why didn't the Democrats correct the taxes when they controlled the House and the Senate and the Presidency under Obama? They had the votes to do so and chose not to, mainly because a politician first concern is getting elected and their second one is getting re-elected.

The simplest way to do most of the above is to get government out of the way of most things,

"Too much democracy" = mob rule.

In a truly "democratic" system, the majority rules, period. In a republic, there are protections, at least in theory. People don't know their rights anymore, mainly because we replaced civics with "social studies."

People think voting is a right. It isn't, it is a responsibility / duty.

You are confusing facts with excuses. I have excused nothing. I have merely pointed out that ignorance and stupidity, on any given day, are far more dangerous than evil. Real "evil," thank goodness, is relatively rare in this world, while stupidity is a lot like hydrogen. Evil is, to give a "for instance" that doesn't violate Godwin's Law, is Idi Amin Dada. Bob Stefanowski, while tall, which is about the best thing I can say about him, doesn't remotely rise to that level. He is a lender, not a loan shark. He doesn't use force to make loans, he doesn't use force to collect loans, he simply complies with the laws regulating his industry in this state -- laws that the politicians who claim he is "evil" have the power to correct / fix. Why don't they? If you truly believes he is "evil," then those politicians, to be frank, are complicit... or, as Burke would say, all that is required for Bob to be evil is the so-called good men who decry his business to do *EXACTLY* what they are doing... nothing.

Payday loans are the last refuge of the desperate, right up there with the lottery as a retirement scheme and playing day-trader with cash advances from your credit cards... (Yes, I had to explain that to someone some years ago, before the last housing bubble burst). That doesn't make them evil. Stupid as all hell, yes, but evil requires something more... it requires malice / malevolence... something more than plain, old-fashioned apathy and greed.

Quit pounding your shoe on the table.

There are a few weaknesses in your argument. Just as the Preamble talks about a "more perfect union," human nature has been being refined over the same period.
Slavery was inherited from the various colonial powers, primarily the English and the French, and individuals, both great and small, worked to end the practice as early as the start of the country, while even those who held slaves understood their own hypocrisy, such as Washington and Jefferson. Likewise, the repression and attempted extermination of the Native population had as much (if not more) to do with the greed of the electorate as that of the elected. Ironically, the original colonists thought the Native Americans were white men simply made ruddy from their exposure to the sun. I would also point out that the Natives played as much politics and silly buggers with the colonists, at least initially, as did the colonists with the Natives. The use of the Connecticut colonies as a buffer between the more aggressive Pequots and the weaker tribal nations further east by said weaker nations was just as mischievous as what the settlers did to the Natives or each other, early on. Likewise, the level of settlers friendship with the natives tended to be inversely related to the amount of gold they had.

People forget that the Native Americans had slavery, war and genocide long before the Europeans turned the North American continent into the religious equivalent of Australia. The Pequots, for example, wax poetic about "returning the land" land to the tribes that lived there before European settlers arrived, but look sheepish when you inquire how they came to live in such lands... by Pequot oral tradition, they more or less took the lands militarily, culturally obliterating the original inhabitants. Human nature is human nature, regardless of the color of one's skin. The fortunes of the African kingdom nation of Dahomey, for example, rose and fell based on the slave trade. Likewise, if you have ever seen the factor's stations in Africa, you would know that they could not have withstood the ire of the native populace, were that at least some of the tribes not fully complicit with the slave trade.

Generation X has been holding things together with duct tape and bailing wire for so long, while fully expecting to up in a puff of atomic smoke.

In what way, pray tell, are payday loans "evil?" There is no malicious intent on the part of the lender, nor do they force you to take out a loan. There is naught but greed, which is more or less amoral in nature. As for dealing with the Saudis, I would point out that most of the folks most in need of "green energy solutions" to deal with the transitions away from petrochemicals are not, shall we say, on the happy list of Amnesty International. Stupidity readily covers his willingness to do a deal with the Saudis and then run for governor.

I didn't forget, although I doubt they are actually auctioning it off insider information to the highest bidder in the literal sense. The most egregious thing I am personally aware of in *this* vein was Harry Reid's self-dealing, using his brother as a proxy (land deals) and his "brilliant" ability to time the energy indexes when passing legislature dealing with the energy industry. All very legal, but of questionable ethical value. There are other examples one could come up with involving real estate / fraud (Trump) or cattle futures (Clinton), et al and ad nauseum, but when the political classes start making rules for you and me and exempting themselves, we have an ethical deficit as a bare minimum.

When I was a kid, I recall that putting monies in a "blind trust" was something that politicians did, if for no other reason than to provide the appearance of propriety. (I was lucky that, as a kid, I got an education on saving money and investing from my parents...). Sometime between then and now, it is like the politicians stopped even trying to look upstanding. Insider trading is illegal unless you're elected. As a counter-example, which is about the only way I can illustrate this, Martha Stewart got the book thrown at her for insider trading not for what she did -- *ANYONE* who was told the stock was going to take a nose-dive would have done the same... she got the book thrown at her for two reasons. First, she lied about it. Second, as a former stockbroker, she knew better than to sell the stock and lie about it. The politicians get insider information from their day jobs and buy and sell as according said information.

Part of the problem is that folks are ignorant. Yes, we have democratic elections, but we are a republic, if we can keep it. One could argue that it has morphed into an oligarchy, but that is another issue for another time.

It originally favored the wealthy, in part, because they were educated and partly because they were the ones who set up this experiment in representative democracy. We were originally led by polymaths. We're now led by poltroons.

Look at the progression of Presidents. There are peaks and valleys, to be sure, but the trendline has been heading south. The first president had to be all but drafted and vigorously opposed expanding the power of his office, at least for the most part. Adams, bless his heart, had pretty good intentions but some fairly awful ideas. If I recall my history, Jefferson was the first one who really *wanted* the job and exceeded his authority, albeit for the good of the nation. Each successive president, with notable exceptions, has permitted the accumulation and centralization of power. To cite an example, the Department of Education, upgraded to a cabinet-level position in '79, was supposed to remedy problems. Instead, it has grown as a bureaucracy, spent an ever-increasing amount of money and for what? What is the trend-line of test scores? Education has been homogenized and dumbed down to the point where a high school diploma is almost worthless.

As for being an "evil schmuck," Stefanowski isn't "evil" per se... But plain old-fashioned stupidity can do a hell of a lot more damage than evil, if only because it is a hell of lot more common. Payday loans aren't evil, they are amoral -- no one puts a gun to someone's head and makes them borrow against future wages. If government really wanted to, they could revise the laws and regulations of the banking/lending industry and eliminate the business entirely, particularly in single party majority state like Connecticut... but they don't. What does that tell you?

It might compel me to vote against him, but that is about it.

Bob Stefanowski and, to a lesser extent, Ned Lamont are symptoms of a larger problem we have to face as a nation.

Seriously, we have taken a system intended for citizen legislators and permitted it to morph into a "jobs program" for the rich and incompetent. The overwhelming majority of legislators are a) rich (even if they didn't start that way) and b) lawyers who write laws for other lawyers to benefit from. The World War II generation was perhaps the last "great" generation... starting with "pre-boomers," (the generation born before WW2, but too young to actually serve), things have slid off the plate at an ever-increasing rate, with politicians beholding more to party than the constituencies they are supposed to be representing. The pre-boomers *should* have known and done better. The boomers, whose lives were too soft because their parents had it so hard, at least had the excuse of ignorance in their defense. With each successive generation, things have gotten softer and weaker, by and large. Universities used to be about the free exchange of ideas where the sand and pebbles were separated from the ore. Now we have children are offended by opposing / contrary positions and, if the NY Times is to be believed, want to be physicians without having to do well in Organic Chemistry, getting their professor essentially fired for being "too hard."

One of the dumbest things in our political system is that, because things are so polarized, we treat things as being strictly binary. When Trumplestilskin was under investigation, there was a... well, counterargument isn't the right word, but will suffice for the moment, suggesting that they should be investigating the politicians who became millionaires while in office, as if this was an "either/or" equation. The fact of the matter is that we, as the electorate, should be doing *both* things, holding all their feet to the fire.

In full disclosure, I am Gen X, raised by pre-Boomers who paid attention to the lessons their parents taught them about the Depression and the war years. I have my own collection of neuroses, problems and issues to deal with that are completely divorced from those of my generation, but the great masses of people are far too comfortable being sheep led around by shepherds, rather than citizens who hold their representatives accountable for their actions. Even John McCain, who was one of the "Keating Five," was essentially give a pass by the Senate Ethics Committee. Being sheeple leads only to being shorn, if you are lucky.

That is an unfair and unfortunate comparison... to John McCain.

How can anyone be against Bob Stefanowski when he doesn't stand for anything? John McCain certainly had his flaws, but he a) stood for something and b) had a compelling life's story. Bob has neither.