Vote white, my homies. Vote for Barry.

Posted on November 5, 2012 by oddmanout215

Will Barack Obama once again win over enough of my fellow white voters? Maybe with help from Chris Rock:

Posted in humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, Obama, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

We hate you, big government. Love you, too.

Posted on November 4, 2012 by oddmanout215

An old friend just moved to an amorphous suburb of Philly, way out there in Whiteland, and was dismayed but not surprised to see Romney-for-president signs on the lawns of many of his new neighbors. “Who do these guys think they’re voting for?” he wondered.

Two key paragraphs from a recent piece by Matt Taibbi that indirectly addresses this question:

…Hurricane Sandy is a perfect, microcosmic example of America’s attitude toward government. We have millions of people who, most of the year, are ready to bash anyone who accepts government aid as a parasitic welfare queen, but the instant the water level rises a few feet too high in their own neighborhoods, those same folks transform into little Roosevelts, full of plaudits for the benefits of a strong state…

[skip]

…It’s this weird national paranoia about being seen as needy, or labeled a parasite who needs government aid, that leads to lunacies like the idea that having a strong disaster-relief agency qualifies as a “big government” concept, when in fact it’s just sensible. If everyone could just admit that government is a fact of life, we could probably do a much better job of fixing it and managing its costs. Instead, we have to play this silly game where millions of us pretend we’re above it all, that we don’t walk on regularly-cleaned streets or fly in protected skies. It shouldn’t take a once-in-a-generation hurricane for Americans to admit they need the government occasionally, but that’s apparently where we are.

Romney is the candidate for voters who think federal help for disaster-stricken states is “immoral” (that’s the word he used). It really does take a hurricane to change the minds of such people.

Posted in humor, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Philadelphia, taxes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

What would you say if Barry came knocking?

Posted on November 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

President Obama was at the Jersey shore yesterday to signal support for those who got slammed by Frankenstorm. If I lived there and Barry came to my door, I’d ask for help but expect him to say, “We’re gonna see a lot more freak storms like this, thanks to global warming. Why the hell do you live on a barrier island?”

No, seriously, I’d thank him for staying on the job even though the election is next week, and for not staging political rallies disguised as charity events. (I’m thinking of cheesy Mitt Romney, collecting canned goods in Ohio, refusing to admit that he’s the guy who vowed to get rid of FEMA.) I’d remind Obama that he’s in a tight race because he seemed in his first term to be more concerned with bailing out Wall Street crooks than with helping create jobs. I’d assure him that he has my vote, but only because his opponent is a human/robot hybrid programmed to tell dangerous lies.

What would you say to Barry?

Posted in climate change, economic collapse, environmentalism, humor, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Semantics

Posted on November 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

Professor Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University says some people don’t want to hear about global warming because “it gets in the way of their economic interests.”

Chris Matthews of MSNBC says, “Well, Professor Oppenheimer, back in the ‘60s, we called such people pigs.”

I say you can call Matthews impolite, but not incorrect.

Posted in climate change, environmentalism, humor, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fake story about Romney rings true

Posted on November 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

Satirist Andy Borowitz in New Yorker, on what “pro-life” really means to Mittens:

Hitting the campaign trail one day after the arrival of Superstorm Sandy, Republican nominee Mitt Romney tweaked his position on abortion today, saying he now supports it in cases where it makes people vote for him.
“I would make an exception for abortion in cases where the life of my campaign is at stake,” he told a crowd in Kettering, Ohio.
Sandy, which slammed into the East Coast last night, was such a powerful weather system that it prevented Mr. Romney from changing his position on abortion for twenty-four hours.
“It was important for Mitt to come up with a new position on abortion today,” said his campaign manager, Matt Rhoades. “It sends a message to the American people that in the aftermath of Sandy, things are getting back to normal.”
Mr. Romney made no reference to his comments about eliminating FEMA, which have been declared a disaster area.

Posted in humor, liar, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The whims of Frankenstorm

Posted on October 30, 2012 by oddmanout215

So I was holding my breath for about 24 hours as Frankenstorm surged and tried to decide where to strike next. Even in my zombie funk I knew that, if the Weather Channel was accurate and the weather gods so inclined, South Philly would be slammed with gusts of up to 75 miles per hour and with eight more inches of rain, and the huge weed tree just behind my house would not withstand the onslaught.

I phoned a friend for advice and he said, “Just wait it out. Too late to start sawing.”

In fact, branches big enough to knock me out already were crashing into my little backyard. I made a run to the 7-11 when the rain let up a bit, thinking it was the last calm before the storm, and that Hurricane Sandy would cost me more than I can afford, which is nothing.

Last year, when Hurricane Irene hit, I was ready to roll with it. This year is different. Bad weather is much scarier when you’re broke and out of options.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when the let-up persisted and Frankenstorm more-or-less spared Philly. Global warming is here and the weather guys and gals are getting more accurate, but there’s still room for the gods to smile when it comes to specific forecasts.

Too bad they didn’t smile on NYC and the Jersey shore.

Posted in climate change, life in the big city, mainstream media, NJ, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Banking on ‘low-information’ voters

Posted on October 30, 2012 by oddmanout215

Has any presidential candidate in history lied more frequently and with as much squeaky-clean earnestness as Mitt Romney? Mainstream reporters would ask this question if they weren’t trained to equate telling the truth with being biased. They don’t ask, or tell, so Democrats have to clean up after Romney as he slimes his way through Ohio:

Posted in dirty rotten scoundrels, economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Operation Caymans: Seeking Mitt’s buried treasure

Posted on October 29, 2012 by oddmanout215

A couple of Yes Men agents visit an island paradise to find out exactly where Mitt Romney and other corporate pirates buried their treasure to avoid paying taxes:

Support the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act.

Posted in Great Recession, humor, Mitt Romney, taxes, The New Depression | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Who’s scarier, Freddie Krueger or Philip Roth?

Posted on October 24, 2012 by oddmanout215

Reassessing an odd work of fiction, because I need a break from the mainstream media’s “facts”:

Novels and movies about ghosts and ghoulies are supposed to be scary but rarely are. If you want to enjoy a Halloween story that will chill you to the bone, read the National Book Award-winning Sabbath’s Theater (1995), by Philip Roth, master of morbid hyper-realism.

Just kidding. Sabbath’s Theater has nothing to do with Halloween, but read it anyway. Even if you don’t enjoy the novel, you’ll have to admire the author’s knack for brutally funny self-analysis and dark spiritual insights.

Or maybe not. Here’s Roth, from the point of view of his aging protagonist Mickey Sabbath, expressing what a dark-minded motorist might feel while approaching a dreaded destination. This could be me a few years ago, on my way to a new temp job in a suburban office park:

The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half-understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

Sabbath has turned his wife into a basket case and lost his home in the process. He has rejected old friends and abandoned his artistic goals. He’s his own worst enemy. My hunch is that the misanthropic Roth, in creating the misanthropic Sabbath, set out to present the most unattractive version of himself he could imagine, to see if he could somehow make him a sympathetic character.

You be the judge. I’ll say only that the book should have come with a warning label: “Think twice about reading this if you are more than 50 years old, poor and/or battling suicidal depression; inclined to react violently to misogynistic or racist rants; actively or latently anti-Semitic; averse to politically incorrect ideas; incapable of appreciating irony; offended by nostalgia for the World War II era, mockery of Alcoholics Anonymous, blasphemous interpretations of Biblical passages, or unusual sexual situations, including ritual masturbation in a graveyard.”

Footnote: Sabbath’s Theater deserved critical acclaim back in the day, but it may have gotten too much of it. Check out James Wolcott’s hilarious put-down of Roth’s “horny geezer with a white beard.”

Posted in arts, fiction | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Binders full of lies

Posted on October 20, 2012 by oddmanout215

The topic of Paul Krugman’s Friday column was Mitt Romney’s failure to propose a credible jobs plan to bring down the unemployment rate. The upshot of it was that Romney is far less serious about creating jobs than Barack Obama, who, as we know, has not exactly attacked the unemployment problem with the fervor of an FDR.

I’m buying much of Krugman’s argument, including his point that Congressional Republicans, from the get-go, did their best to block any effort to pass legislation that might have reflected well on Obama.

But the main reason to vote for Obama is that he’s not Romney. It is Romney’s phenomenal propensity for lying about matters large and small. It’s the Ted Bundy-esque gap between the facts of his life and how he describes his life to the rest of us.

An example from Krugman:

… Mr. Romney, who started as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity, insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.

I am not making this up. In Tuesday’s debate, he declared, “I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business.” In his speech at the Republican convention, he declared, “When I was 37, I helped start a small company.”

Ahem. It’s true that when Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37 million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn’t every plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing.. ?

Let’s not even dwell on the truism that great crimes often lurk behind great fortunes. The important thing to remember is that the profoundly bland and proper-seeming Romney makes up a new set of “facts” every time he makes a new speech. He rattles off lies in bunches — bundles, he might say — knowing that most of them will go uncorrected by the media and bolster his credibility with low-information voters, also known as morons.

Being a full-time liar used to be considered a drawback, but times have changed. This year it might turn out to exactly what most of the country wants.

Posted in dirty rotten scoundrels, economic collapse, Great Depression, liar, Mitt Romney, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment