Bloomberg is famously impatient with beltway politics and believes that to get anything done you need to work from the ground up.
Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it's not offensive it's funny?
We don't really go in for big family dinners but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.
I do believe that freedom isn't free - but today the corporate and political right wing is trying to cheapen this truly American value. They've been cynically using the word 'freedom' to rally the American public against its own best interests.