Warren vs. Wall Street (and Obama)

Posted on September 8, 2012 by oddmanout215

There is an amazing disconnect between Elizabeth Warren and the man for whom she gave her excellent speech Wednesday night at the big Democratic pep rally:

“People feel like the system is rigged against them,” Warren said. “And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs — the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs — still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

“Anyone here have a problem with that?”

Warren sounded like a Democrat. Barack Obama did not sound like a Democrat — i.e., a New Deal Democrat — during his acceptance speech Thursday night. Predictably, the big chief paid lip service to the populist themes raised by Warren, but didn’t dare suggest doing anything specific to correct injustices that have undermined the credibility not only of the financial industry but also the justice system. Such as making the crooked Wall Street CEOs reimburse us for bailing out their banks.

James Fallows’ argument that Obama’s speech “‘did the job’ he needed it to do” is true only in regard to people who already are knee-jerk Obama fans. Obama said nothing to indicate he can be anything other than the Democrat-in-name-only who wasted his first term trying to buddy up to Republican wackos. The only reason to vote for him — and it’s reason enough — is to keep the Romneybot out of the White House.

Footnote: I’m imagining Obama crony Tim Geithner’s reaction as Warren spoke. He is not applauding. He definitely has a problem with anyone who disses his bros on Wall Street.

Posted in Obama, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Update on Ohio voter suppression efforts

Posted on September 8, 2012 by oddmanout215

It’s a presidential election year, so Ohio Republicans are up to their usual dirty tricks. Whether the feds will stop them from stealing the election this year is still up in the air:

Judge Peter Economus has set a hearing for September 13 to address Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s refusal to comply with the court’s ruling that the state must allow early voting on the three days leading up to the general election. Economus released a terse order Wednesday afternoon: “The Court ORDERS that Defendant Secretary of State Jon Husted personally attend the hearing.” The Obama campaign filed a motion earlier Wednesday asking the court to make Husted give way.

On Friday, Husted backed down, although the Republican Party quickly appealed the court ruling:

…The Republican secretary still hopes to forestall a federal court’s order that he set hours for voting during that run-up period to Nov. 6, asking to hold off at least until the state’s request to appeal is decided…Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, a Republican, immediately announced that Ohio would appeal…

The ruling was considered a victory for Democrats who are believed to have been the beneficiaries of a large number of in-person early voters in the final weekend in Democrat-rich counties, such as Cuyahoga, before the 2008 election, helping Obama win Ohio and the White House…

DeWine has said that he is appealing to fight for Ohio’s rights to set its own laws.

“States’ rights” regarding voting, as if the Civil War never happened!

Posted in dirty rotten scoundrels, voter suppression | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Rove: Don’t forget to vote white

Posted on August 30, 2012 by oddmanout215

From The Raw Story:

Republican strategist Karl Rove says that part of Mitt Romney’s plan to win the White House has to include getting “white Democrats” not to vote for President Barack Obama.

During a discussion with Politico’s Mike Allen on Monday, Rove made it clear that politics had actually become more racialized since the country elected its first black president.

“Obama has no chance of carrying Indiana,” the Fox News contributor explained. “I was having dinner with [Indiana Gov.] Mitch Daniels this spring, and I said, ‘Mitch, is there a white Democrat south of Indianapolis who’s supporting Obama who’s not a college professor in Bloomington?’ And he stopped for a minute over his green beans and says, ‘Not that I can think of…’”

“You know, Indiana’s gone,” he insisted, adding that North Carolina is also “gone” because “New South independents” — which The Atlantic‘s James Bennett says is code for “white independents” — and “racial moderates, economic conservatives, who in 2008 said this would be really good for our country, let’s put the issue of race behind us,” but now they are saying “we did the right thing” and the experiment failed…

Rove’s implication is that Obama has proven himself to be anti-white — an appalling lie by a vengeful nerd who is spending hundreds of millions of billionaires’ dollars to make the lie resonate. Let’s hope most voters understand the Turd Blossom’s outreach to white people is nothing more than a tactic to help elect those who represent the obscenely rich.

Footnote: My mother’s people came here from England more than 200 years ago, and my father’s people are from County Tyrone in Ireland, but I have nothing in common with the Romneys and Roves of the world. In fact, I wouldn’t want to live in the same city with such soulless creatures. Which means I’m not white, I guess — not in the way that Rove means.

Posted in dirty rotten scoundrels, humor, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Outburst by Ron Paul fans does not compute

Posted on August 29, 2012 by oddmanout215

Point of order! Point of order! Beep!

It didn’t get much mainstream media play compared to Ann Romney’s kitsch-y speech, but I’ll bet the chanting was almost disorderly enough to fry the Romneybot’s hard drive:

Delegates were finding their seats on the floor of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday when a commotion broke out in the back corner, near the Maine contingent.

Delegates and audience members erupted into chants of “Let him speak!” and “Seat them now!” Some waved signs proclaiming, “I am the Ron Paul Revolution,” and burst forth with a soccer ditty: “Olé, olé, olé, olé. Ron Paul, Ron Paul!”

Onto the floor, surrounded by cameras, microphones, stage lights and a crush of escorts and fans, strode Paul himself, in a purple lei bestowed upon him by Hawaii delegates. One delegate asked whether the libertarian gadfly came to stir up trouble for Mitt Romney…

…The Romney campaign had taken pains to stifle the Paul rebellion, by denying him a speaking role, expediting the roll call, changing party rules and even unseating Paul delegates from Maine. But as Romney and the Republicans have learned repeatedly this week, politics does not always go according to plan.

As the new rules disenfranchising the Paul delegates came to a vote, shouts of “no!” and a cascade of boos poured from Paul supporters across the hall. Maine delegates at one end of the arena and Texas delegates at the other began chanting, “Point of order!” Demonstrators shouted down the next speaker, a Republican National Committee member from Puerto Rico, and party chairman Reince Priebus hammered his gavel, pleading for quiet. A Nevada delegate raised his middle finger at Priebus and called him an “[expletive] tyrant…”

…The outcome of the dispute, in Romney’s favor, was never in doubt. But the episode illustrated a recurrent tension for the Republican nominee: the orderliness of his world colliding with chaotic reality. Romney is by many accounts a control freak, a stickler for rules and order. His campaign, following his instincts, runs the same way – and it has struggled mightily to stick to its script this week even as Hurricane Isaac zeroed in on New Orleans.

Footnote: The GOP tried to re-establish the illusion of solidarity by showing a film about Paul during the second night of the convention. Huffington Post: “The film was effectively a feel-good salute to Paul’s fiscally conservative credentials, but notably left out any mention of his foreign policy platform.”

Posted in humor, liar, mainstream media, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Who will call Romney on his lies? Not the MSN

Posted on August 24, 2012 by oddmanout215

Here’s Robert Reich again, almost sputtering with indignation regarding Mitt Romney’s incessant lying on the campaign trail:

…So Romney’s lying machine is working.

But what does all this tell us about the man who is running this lying machine? (Or if Romney’s not running it, what does it tell us about a man who would select the people who are?)

We knew he was a cypher – that he’ll say and do whatever is expedient, change positions like a chameleon, eschew any core principles.

Yet resorting to outright lies – and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies – reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process.

The question is whether someone who is willing to resort to such calculated lies, and build a campaign machine around them, can be worthy of the public’s trust with the most powerful office in the world…

Is Reich being disingenuous, or merely naive? He contradicts himself by describing Romney as a cypher but then professing to be shocked by the cypher’s “outright lies” and “disrespect of the democratic process.” What does he expect of the Romneybot, a figurehead for a “campaign machine” fueled by billionaire fascists and headed by Karl Rove, who makes Joseph Goebbels look like a paragon of ethics?

Also, Reich is flat-out wrong when he states that the mainstream media has called attention to Romney’s “whoppers.” The MSN will occasionally correct a Romney lie, but always as an afterthought, and always in the small print. If the media was doing its job, reporters and editors would smack Romney down, unambiguously, every time he distorted or completely misrepresented his record, or his opponent’s. But this won’t happen because the major media venues, where the “he said/she said” approach to journalism is enforced, are owned by the sort of people who hobnob with the Romneys of the world.

If The New York Times, the TV networks, NPR, et al., were doing their job, they’d present stories updating Romney’s biggest lies, from lists such as the one compiled by Daily Koz. A sample:

Here is Romney’s outrageous lie that Obama has increased the national debt more than all other presidents combined: http://romneytheliar.blogspot.com/…

Here is Romney’s lie about his plans to give huge tax cuts to people like himself:
http://romneytheliar.blogspot.com/…

Here is Romney’s infuriating lie about President Obama’s so-called “Apology Tour”: http://romneytheliar.blogspot.com/…

But they choose not to. There is something pathetic about Reich’s and the media’s — not to mention Barack Obama’s — unwillingness to take for granted the perfidy of those who run the GOP machine, and their reluctance to vigorously fight the machine as it cranks out lies nonstop.

It’s as if Reich is confused and disappointed, and passively waiting for voters to wake up to the GOP’s rotten agenda on their own.

Question for those who still find merit in choosing the lesser of two evils: Are (relatively) good guys really any good if they don’t have the balls to do battle with the bad?

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Jobless means invisible

Posted on August 23, 2012 by oddmanout215

The two-party system as it now exists is a fraud perpetrated by high-priced office-holding whores who feel it’s safe to ignore the millions of Americans who most need a healthy, functional, job-creating federal government. From Huffington Post:”

The share of jobless Americans receiving unemployment insurance is declining as Congress winds down long-term benefits.

While the unemployed population has fallen by less than 10 percent in the past year, the insurance rolls are down by nearly 25 percent. The latest numbers show 12.7 million unemployed and 5.6 million getting benefits, compared with 13.9 million jobless and 7.3 million receiving aid at the same time last year…

…Federal unemployment insurance will expire altogether at the end of the year, with benefits stopping abruptly for 2 million Americans, according to worker advocacy group the National Employment Law Project. Despite persistent long-term joblessness — more than 5 million workers have been unemployed six months or longer — members of Congress haven’t hinted at any plans to preserve the benefits. The National Conference of State Legislatures, for its part, has asked Congress to get on it.

The presidential candidates — surprise! — are ducking the issue. The Romneybot isn’t programmed to profess concern for the unemployed, but what is Obama’s excuse?

Footnote: The Odd Man should simply stop reading about Washington politics, it’s bad for his blood pressure.

Posted in Congress, globalization, Mitt Romney, Obama, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Ex-NRP reporter owns up to ‘colluding’

Posted on August 23, 2012 by oddmanout215

Newsflash: Reporting on Congress is like participating in the theater of the absurd. So why wait until you’re no longer covering D.C. to give us your honest opinion of the job? From Truthdig:

Andrea Seabrook left NPR this summer to start her own venture, DecodeDC, and she’s letting fly about what it’s like to “collude” with politicians as a daily news reporter.

As Seabrook explained to Politico: “I realized that there is a part of covering Congress, if you’re doing daily coverage, that is actually sort of colluding with the politicians themselves because so much of what I was doing was actually recording and playing what they say or repeating what they say. … And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

Peter Hart of FAIR put it this way on Twitter, “Ex NPR reporter says politicians lied to her every day. That would have been a great thing to, I dunno, report.”

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

Lawsuit against ‘ACORN pimp’ to proceed

Posted on August 16, 2012 by oddmanout215

James O’Keefe is what the Yes Men would be like if the latter were bigoted and had no social conscience:

A federal judge last week allowed a lawsuit against conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hanna Giles to proceed, according to Courthouse News Service.

Former ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera sued O’Keefe and Giles in 2010 for allegedly illegally taping their confidential conversation to make the now infamous “ACORN pimp” video. After the heavily-edited video was released in 2009, Vera was fired from ACORN and Congress later voted to defund the organization, which led to its bankruptcy…

Posted in dirty rotten scoundrels, humor, liar, mainstream media | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Crazy love

Posted on August 10, 2012 by oddmanout215

Bloody your hands on a cactus tree
Wipe ’em on your dress and send it to me

“Cactus” is by Frank Black, a.k.a. Black Francis, of the Pixies. Bowie’s studio version of the song is on his album Heathen.

Posted in arts, pop music, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Have you no sense of decency, sir…?

Posted on August 9, 2012 by oddmanout215

Frank Rich defends Harry Reid against illustrious Republicans Ann Coulter and RNC Chairman Reince “What Planet Am I From” Priebus:

Last week, Harry Reid claimed on the Senate floor that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for ten years. The head of the RNC called Reid a “dirty liar.” What’s Reid trying to do here? It’s entirely possible that Reid’s incendiary charge has nothing to back it up but (at best) an unsubstantiated rumor. That’s why the GOP is likening him to Joe McCarthy.

But there are two important distinctions between Reid and McCarthy. (1) Reid isn’t accusing Romney of being a traitor or even of breaking the law; he’s accusing him of paying no taxes, which can be perfectly legal for the super-rich if loopholes and ingenious accounting schemes align in their favor. (2) While McCarthy’s victims couldn’t empirically and instantly prove that they were not subversives, Romney can easily call Reid’s bluff and prove that he did pay taxes by releasing his tax returns. So if Romney releases his returns, which many Republicans feel he should do anyway as a matter of transparency and good politics, and it turns out Reid is indeed a dirty liar, end of story. Republicans in the Senate can then turn the heat on the Democrats, moving to censure Reid much as McCarthy’s Senate peers ultimately censured him.

But Romney isn’t likely to release his tax returns, is he? Good job, Harry.

Footnote: I’m picturing Mittens on the witness stand, being grilled by Joseph Nye Welch, who asked McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” That was the beginning of the end of Tail Gunner Joe, who was as big a liar as Romney, and a lot tougher.

Posted in humor, liar, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment