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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.”
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.
Mitt Romney was describing his efforts to recruit women cabinet members while he was governor of Massachusetts — utter bullshit, of course — when he used the bizarre phrase “binders full of women.” I imagined some kinky Mormon rite taking place in the basement of Salt Lake Temple. Some viewers of the debate were inspired to set the phrase to music. Rock on, Romneybot!
Standing up to lying scoundrels was never your strong suit, Barry, and you hit a new low in the first debate, so it was a relief to see you kick butt when the Romneybot unleashed a fusillade of new lies in the second.
You said “What Governor Romney said just isn’t true” early on, when he lied about his reasons for opposing the bailout of the auto industry. You told him it was “offensive” to play politics regarding the death of four Americans at a diplomatic mission in Libya, and you said “Get the transcript” when he lied about what you said the day after the Americans were killed. You nailed him on his absurd claim that he could both install tax cuts and reduce the federal deficit.
Your best moment came when you articulated what’s at the rotten core of his plan to revitalize the economy:
Romney says he’s got a five-point plan. Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector; that’s been his philosophy as governor; that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less. You can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money.
Unfortunately for you and the rest of us, you revealed next to nothing about your plan. What about jobs, Mr. Cool? What about those millions of people who can’t find work and the millions who have jobs but aren’t making as much money as their parents did? What will you do to help generate good jobs in your second term that you didn’t do in your first? Be specific.
Only a wealthy person or an idiot would vote for a smug corporatist like Romney, but there are a lot of smart, decent people who were put off by your refusal in your first term to walk the walk when it came to fighting for the working class. You’ve got to do better on what Bush the Elder called the vision thing, and do better in a hurry, or the cold-blooded creep you lit into Tuesday night is going to win by default.
Matt Taibbi made a good point regarding Joe Biden’s demeanor in his debate with Paul Ryan — laughter is entirely appropriate when your opponent’s lies are so big and so numerous that you can’t keep up with correcting them. From Rolling Stone:
We all should be [laughing]. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called “objective” news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, “Come back when you’re serious.”
The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn’t even a real platform, it’s a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda – cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill.
The other day, Ryan underscored Taibbi’s point by presenting himself as a compassionate conservative, the antithesis of the guy who has said that the main reason he got into politics was Ayn Rand, the “philosopher” known primarily for her contempt of the working class. From The Washington Post:
The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week “ramrodded their way” into the group’s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall.
Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, said that he was not contacted by the Romney campaign ahead of the Saturday morning visit by Ryan, who stopped by the soup kitchen after a town hall at Youngstown State University.
“We’re a faith-based organization; we are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations,” Antal said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. “It’s strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there, and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors.”
He added: “The photo-op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”
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