‘Influencer’ weaponizes cheesesteak in South Philly

Posted on October 4, 2026 by oddmanout215

We were arguing about a customer who bought a cheesesteak at Pat’s King of Steaks on Wednesday and allegedly shouted “It’s garbage!” before throwing the sandwich in the face of the shop’s general manager.

“What’s the big deal?” I joked. “The customer was exercising his First Amendment rights.”

Swamp Rabbit looked horrified. “The First Amendment don’t give nobody the right to shout ‘It’s garbage’ at a crowded steak shop. It don’t allow for assault with a cheesesteak.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” I said. “Cheesesteaks can be hazardous to your health, especially if you add Cheez Whiz.”

But Swamp Rabbit wasn’t laughing and neither was the owner of Pat’s, who offered a $5,000 reward for information that would lead to an arrest. The assailant filmed the incident by holding a camera in one hand as he threw the cheesesteak through the shop’s service window with the other. Meanwhile, surveillance cameras at Pat’s were filming it, too.

“You gotta be ready for your closeup these days,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Cameras are everywhere.”

The cheesesteak hurler turned himself in to the cops the next day. I felt sympathy for him until I read he’s an aspiring “social media influencer” or “content creator” who films himself at local eateries in the hope of attracting online followers. According to Fox 29, “The influencer says his approach is to review food and throw it back if he thinks it is bad.”

I told Swamp Rabbit that ad salespeople and publicists are being supplanted everywhere by influencers with ring lights and cameras. Most of them don’t make much money, but not for lack of trying. They hound potential clients and would pimp their own grandmothers to attract online followers.

“You’re exaggeratin’, don’t you think?” my seedy neighbor said.

I shrugged. “Maybe they wouldn’t pimp their grannies, but they definitely will hit you in the face with a cheesesteak if they have to.”

Posted in food, humor, mainstream media, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Faith in Dear Leader tested by diesel prices

Posted on September 28, 2026 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit thinks MAGA zealots will stand by their man. They didn’t lose faith when Donald Trump imposed counterproductive tariffs, undercut freedom of the press, sabotaged renewable energy projects, and deported immigrants who are U.S. citizens. According to the polls, even the jump in food and gasoline prices caused by Dear Leader’s “little excursion” in Iran didn’t drive away his hardcore cultists.

Hold on, I told my bibulous buddy. A recent Washington Post article has shed light on a new, dirtier problem — six-dollars-a-gallon diesel fuel — which is threatening to make agnostics of Trump’s true believers in districts he used to take for granted:

The political fallout [from rising diesel prices] is landing in deep-red voting districts the hardest. Federal data shows these tend to be the places where diesel powers the fuel-thirsty tractors and other machinery that the agriculture industry relies on.

Which means that farmers, who make up one of MAGA’s core constituencies, might not be able to turn a decent profit unless they pass on the rising cost of diesel to food shoppers.

“That’s us,” I said. “You might have to resort to shoplifting hot dogs at the SuperFridge again. I’ll have to live on lentils and ramen noodles.”

“You’re crazy,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “I predict them farmers will tell Trump they ain’t gonna vote for his lackies in the midterms unless he makes a deal with Iran that brings down fossil fuel prices.”

“Too late for that,” I said. “The midterms are only five weeks away.”

Desperate Trump boosters are saying the crisis will end if we stop exporting diesel produced in the U.S., but economists think that move would result in a glut that would make the problem worse. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress and farming industry leaders still don’t have the guts to speak out against the idiot responsible for the crisis. The head of the Iowa Corn Growers Association blames “all our elected officials in D.C.”

Maybe farmers and other hardcore Trumpers will wise up after the midterms, but who knows? Zealots rarely defy their god, even when their livelihoods are at stake.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, humor, Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The windmills of Trump’s mind

Posted on September 19, 2026 by oddmanout215

“The news is bad, Swamp Rabbit. We’re keeping coal plants on life support, propping up super-emitters of methane, ignoring record heat and wildfires and long-term droughts, blocking production of electric cars and offshore wind farms, all because of one spiteful old fool.”

I was on my mangy neighbor’s rickety front porch, complaining about Donald Trump’s increasingly loony efforts to discourage development of renewable energy sources. For example, when recently asked in Ireland to comment on that country’s political future, the orange fruitcake responded with an unrelated rant about his favorite bugaboo, “windmills”:

“It’s the most expensive [energy source] — it’s so sad. You know, Ireland’s been very good at windmills. They have proportionately far less than Scotland. Scotland is—it’s a shame what they’ve done.”

Dear Leader was alluding to his failed legal attempt more than 15 years ago to halt construction of offshore wind turbines that, in his mind, spoiled the view from his golf course in Scotland. His opposition to wind farms — solar installations, too — has grown over the years into an obsessive desire to punish anyone who advocates their usage.

I kept thinking of that goofy Michel Legrand song, “Windmills of Your Mind.” Trump’s mind is like a wind tunnel swirling with perceived insults and injuries — fuel for his revenge schemes.

I sang a few lines from the song (lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman) for Swamp Rabbit: Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own/Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone.

Swamp Rabbit said, “That’s all well and good, Odd Man, but the warthog has two years left to do even more damage. What do we do about that?”

When I didn’t respond, he posed another question: “What’s the point of having a 25th Amendment if no one has the balls to use it?”

Posted in apocalypse, climate change, humor, mainstream media, pop music | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Labor organizers have (lots of) work to do

Posted on September 14, 2026 by oddmanout215

Last week on Labor Day I found a column I wrote in 2011 for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It’s what editors call an evergreen column, meaning it will always be topical. Plutocrats are still fighting to limit the progress made by organized labor in the aftermath of the Triangle disaster, in which dozens of young women, most of them recent immigrants, plummeted to their deaths to escape the fire raging behind the locked doors of the sweatshop where they worked. The overall death count was 146.

“That stuff don’t happen in this country no more,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “Ain’t no major fires in Amazon warehouses or at them other monster companies. You might drop dead from overwork, but you won’t go up in flames.”

I conceded his point but reminded him that reactionary forces have been chipping away at workers’ rights since Ronald Reagan’s election and have done grave damage under Donald Trump, “the most anti-union president in our modern history,” who has used executive orders to undermine collective bargaining.

A few Republicans in Congress have protested Trump’s anti-labor extremism but the seeds planted in previous eras have sprouted into measures that, in general, discourage unionization and encourage retaliation against workers who assert their rights.

One obstacle to a possible backlash is the Republicans’ ability to pit one wing of the working class against the other while claiming to be pro-jobs. Trump and anti-union legislators know how to tweak people’s fears — OMG, what if there were no jobs at all! — and most mainstream Democratic leaders are more afraid of making enemies of the wealthy than of helping the workers their party used to represent.

What Robert Reich wrote in 2011 still applies:

… We need a president who will fight for workers and fight against this assault – just as [Labor Secretary Frances] Perkins and FDR did.

We also need a pro-labor Congress and courts, especially now that billionaires like Jeff Bezos are intent on using digital technology to eliminate as many jobs as possible.

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “The peeps will put up with all kinds of crap so long as you distract them with something. Pro football, maybe. Or TikTok reels. Even better, a new war.”

“I’ll bet the czar said something like that back in 1917,” I said. “Look what happened to him.”

Posted in arts, Congress, history, humor, mainstream media, Nativism, plutocracy, Politics, sports, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The irony of anti-immigration efforts

Posted on September 7, 2026 by oddmanout215

“Remember when ICE locked up that guy from Guinea who lived in Philly legally for twenty years, just because they could? There are a million stories like his.”

I was telling my crusty neighbor Swamp Rabbit that the history of U.S. immigration policy is one of unintended consequences. Unstable conditions in poor countries compel armies of desperate people to pack up and move on. They settle here and are protected by the law until they’re snatched up and mistreated by ICE’s masked goons, who are cheered on by Republicans.

“You see where I’m going with this?” I said. “The MAGA dopes are up in arms about the mass migration of dark-skinned people to the United States — it’s their main issue — but they don’t think about what causes it.”

I told him the migrants — “refugees” is a more accurate term — are often fleeing brutal dictatorships that exist because of collusion between the U.S. government and transnational corporations. I mentioned the wave of poor people who fled north after the drug-running Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in Honduras. Hernandez eventually received a 45-year jail term in an America court but was pardoned by Donald Trump, partly because Hernandez had helped set up a tax-free zone in Honduras that serves the business interests of tech billionaires — Peter Thiel, in particular — who are allies of the Trump family.

“Trump absolved one of the biggest drug dealers ever,” I said. “Hernandez and his cartel friends were trying to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into this country.”

Swamp Rabbit sipped beer and looked bored. I reminded him that MAGA Republicans are blind to the crimes of the rich and powerful. They would rather blame drugs and crime on would-be immigrants who are dying in the desert or wasting away in detention centers.

My neighbor shook his head. “Democrats ain’t much better. Most of them didn’t care that the anti-immigrant policies are cruel, not until the orange hog monster came along and made the problem worse.”

It was a good point. Leaders of both parties have long been in thrall to rightwing propagandists who claim migrants are stealing jobs from native-born workers (untrue) and raising the national crime rate (also untrue). It’s a point repeatedly being made by journalist and author Jean Guerrero:

If working-class white Americans can be persuaded their real enemies are the oligarchs and warmongers enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense, not the migrants fleeing the chaos these oligarchs create, a different kind of politics could become possible.

“It’s pretty simple,” I said. “Vote Republican in November and you’re voting to get screwed over by corrupt politicians and oligarchs who use the immigrant problem to make non-wealthy, native-born Americans forget that the system is almost as unfair to them that it is to immigrants. Vote Democratic and there’s at least a chance we can start changing the situation.”

Swamp Rabbit was smiling at my political rant. “Don’t say anything,” I warned him. “Let me enjoy my pie-in-the-sky moment before I go back to full-time cynicism.”

Posted in globalization, humor, immigration, mainstream media, Nativism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Athletes and artists (Trump and Nero)

Posted on August 27, 2026 by oddmanout215

Another reminder of how much better off we’d be if the malicious buffoon in the White House cheated at golf fulltime instead of devoting his extra hours to wrecking the economy and pursuing his forever war with Iran:

The Winning Shot in the Bedminster Club Cand Championship! Thank you very much to all of those who participated. I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things. It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t! President DONALD J. TRUMP.

I told my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that The Art of the Deal‘s author is like the Roman emperor Nero, who was more dedicated to sports and the performance arts than to statecraft. I showed him the ancient Roman historian Suetonius’ description of Nero in Greece, playing the lyre and singing in various contests:

No one was allowed to leave the theater during his recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men who were so bored with the music and the applause that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear, or shammed death and were carried away for burial.

Who would dare interrupt Nero, let alone deny him first prize? He also fancied himself a great athlete:

On several occasions he took part in the chariot racing and at Olympia drove a ten-horse team… He lost his balance, fell from the chariot and had to be helped in again; but, though he failed to stay the course and retired before the finish, the judges nevertheless awarded him the prize.

Instead of a chariot, Trump has a speedy golf cart that allows him to rush ahead of other competitors and cheat after he makes an errant shot. And he has his body servant Natalie Harp to pick him up if he falls out of his cart.

Swamp Rabbit was annoyed. “One week you say Trump is like Nero, the next week it’s Caligula or Hitler or King George. If he’s as bad as Nero, why don’t the media say so? Why is he still president, Odd Man?”

“Because we don’t have a Praetorian Guard,” I joked. “We’ve got the 25th Amendment, but it only works if the vice-president and a majority of the president’s Cabinet members or ‘a body approved by law formed by Congress’ says he should be removed.”

I added, “The problem is that most of those peeps are Republican suck-ups, afraid to turn against Dear Leader. We’re stuck with a monster, and the corporate media owners are cool with that.”

Footnote: Nero didn’t fiddle as Rome burned, but he may have strummed his lyre as he watched the destruction. And there’s no evidence he started the fire. Trump probably hasn’t set any fires either, but he did destroy the East Wing of the White House and create an eyesore where he wants to build a ballroom. And he has ruined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and promised to demolish the Kennedy Center if it isn’t “renovated” to suit his garish taste.

Posted in arts, history, humor, mainstream media, plutocracy, Politics, sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Slipping through the loopholes

Posted on August 20, 2026 by oddmanout215

I figured my neighbor Swamp Rabbit would flip out when he saw my new dispatch, but hey — this is the biggest political story of our era and proof of how quickly an evil fraudster can slip through loopholes in the Constitution and assume the powers of a dictator if elected president.

Sure enough, Swamp Rabbit crumpled his copy of my rant and tossed it off his front porch. “Get a grip, Odd Man. Donald Trump ain’t the only story in the world these days.”

“That’s like saying the Black Plague wasn’t the only story in the 14th century,” I said.

I showed him John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece — “A Trump Grift Too Far?” — that focuses on a Trump plan that would allow trading firms “for up to a hundred thousand dollars a month” to use his Truth Social site to access advance information about possible stock market fluctuations. You want a hot tip on Trump’s latest tariff fiasco? Pay up and it’s all yours.

Will Trump, his family and cronies get away with this pay-to-play scheme? Possibly. The MAGA Republican Congress and the Dr. Frankensteins on the Supreme Court are in the monster’s corner. Cassidy quoted the director of a watchdog group on government oversight:

[The Trump gang has] discovered the cheat code. If you don’t care about the reaction, if you don’t care about public shaming, then you can basically do anything you want, because we have this strange legal framework that basically exempts the President from the law while he’s in office.

“Enough!” Swamp Rabbit shouted. “Don’t bother me again until somebody closes them loopholes.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said.

Posted in Congress, humor, mainstream media, Politics, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s alive! And it’s shredding the Constitution

Posted on August 16, 2026 by oddmanout215

When will the Dr. Frankenstein clones on the U.S. Supreme Court admit they helped create a monster they can’t control?

Let’s see… In June the Court re-explained the purpose of the 14th Amendment, which states that people born in the United States, with few exceptions, are citizens by birth. But the monster, Donald Trump, countered the Court’s ruling in August by issuing executive orders that limit birthright citizenship.

Which arguably means that Trump in effect is placing himself above the judicial and legislative branches of the government and implicitly embracing the role of dictator. (See “Trump to Supreme Court: Make Me” in the Bulwark.)

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was drunkenly indignant when I called his attention to Trump’s never-ending attack on constitutional democracy. “He can’t say ‘eff you’ to them Supremes. They’re gonna put him in his place, you watch.”

“How will they do that?” I said. “This is the same Court that decided former presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for most of the official acts they committed while president.”

Or, as Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in dissent of that 2024 ruling, official-acts immunity grants unprecedented power to “any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation.”

The irony is that Roberts and the other rightwing robe wearers seem to have thought their monster would issue executive orders to help them destroy existing laws they opposed — regarding abortion, voting rights, etc. — but wouldn’t defy them if he went rogue on their rulings and they tried to rein him in.

Footnote: I can’t see Chief Justice John Roberts getting super-excited about anything, but it’s easy to picture Justice Samuel Alito, in a white medical smock instead of black robes, shouting “It’s alive!” and “Now I know what it feels like to be God!”

Posted in history, humor, immigration, mainstream media, movies | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Another setback for campus free speech

Posted on August 11, 2026 by oddmanout215

“Oh no, some semi-educated college president in Florida just fired a professor for teaching an Ottessa Moshfegh story after a student complained that the story caused her ‘mild discomfort.’ Even the English teachers aren’t safe in that state.”

My crusty old neighbor Swamp Rabbit looked puzzled. “What’s an Ottessa Moshfegh?” he said.

“Ha-ha. You’re joking, right?”

He wasn’t joking. I told him Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist and short story writer who won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for her novel Eileen and the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for her short story collection Homesick for Another World (2017). “Bettering Myself,” from Homesick, is the story that got the Florida professor axed. The first-person narrator is a young teacher in a shabby high school in New York who’s struggling to control a class full of rowdy, underperforming teenagers. She resorts to desperate measures in order to cope:

I’d buy two or three forties and a pack of cigarettes on my way home from school each afternoon and go to bed and watch Married… with Children and Sally Jessy Raphael on my small black-and-white television, drink and smoke and snooze.

“It’s a slice of life story,” I told Swamp Rabbit. “There’s no real plot. It succeeds because the writing is lively and irreverent. The title is ironic, but the teacher’s blunt self-appraisals are funny and her decision to stay on the job instead of quitting makes her almost likable in the end.”

“She don’t sound likable,” said Swamp Rabbit, who’s always ready to argue. “You can’t blame that fuddy-duddy in Florida for firing the professor. He figured the story was a bad influence on students.”

I noted that we were talking about students at a college — South Florida State College. They’re old enough to evaluate the merits of the story and its protagonist without interference from the school president, Fred Hawkins, an ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the rabid foe of campus free speech who championed Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.

The fired professor, Vinita Prabhakar, is suing Hawkins in an effort to get her job back. She taught “Bettering Myself” for years at various schools without being blindsided by some fuddy-duddy. The student at South Florida State who supposedly complained ended up participating in class discussions about the story.

Footnote: I’m not sure how to describe Moshfegh’s short story writing style — highbrow punk, maybe. Her novels My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona all made The New York Times bestseller list. I hope the Florida lawsuit results in Prabhakar getting her job back and pushes sales of Homesick for Another World through the roof.

Posted in fiction, history, humor, mainstream media, police state | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

True colors (stroking the tyrant one last time)

Posted on August 8, 2026 by oddmanout215

These are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others. — Groucho Marx

How low can Republicans go? Look no further than Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who just delighted Donald Trump by casting the vote that ensured confirmation of the manifestly unqualified Todd Blanche as U.S. attorney general.

Cassidy hinted at paybacks this year after Trump ruined his chances for reelection by backing a senatorial candidate more to his liking. Bringing down Blanche, a corrupt and shamelessly servile Trumper (“I love you, sir”), would have been the perfect way for Cassidy to get even with Trump and redeem himself for casting the deciding vote that got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

It was not to be. Cassidy couldn’t summon enough self-respect to do the right thing, even though he’s on his way out the door.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit zipped open a beer and said, “Lighten up, Odd Man. Groucho would be laughing his ass off at these slimeballs.”

Both of us watch Marx Brothers movies on TCM and enjoy their crazy sendups of cranks and phonies. Mentioning the Marx Brothers today was Swamp Rabbit’s way of reminding me that Groucho would never allow frauds like Cassidy and Trump, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to get under his skin. We should vilify them but never forget to laugh at them. Laughter is preferable to blowing a gasket.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Most of the smart people in Germany laughed at Hitler but look who got the last laugh.”

Swamp Rabbit shook his head. “The good guys got the last laugh. Hitler ended up a charred piece of meat in a backyard ditch.”

But the Blanche thing is happening now, I told him. The Justice Department will be run by a guy who’s a slave to Trump’s whims and vendettas. A guy who tried to jail James Comey because of a message on a seashell. Who worked tirelessly to suppress details of Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Who has tried to permanently block the IRS from auditing Trump’s past tax returns. And so on.

“I still don’t get why that jellyfish Cassidy chose to disgrace himself,” I said. “He’ll be out of Congress soon and free to do what he wants. Maybe he loves the monster, despite all.”

Swamp Rabbit chuckled. “If he’s like his scumbag colleagues, he wants to make big money as a lobbyist. Trump and his cronies will block him from that unless he kisses ass right up until he slinks out of the Senate.”

Footnote: Cassidy was a doctor — a physician — before he went into politics. And yet he would later vote to make the unhinged anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. the head of HHS. You can’t make this shit up.

Posted in Congress, history, humor, mainstream media, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment