Tune in with your new assault rifle

Posted on August 9, 2012 by oddmanout215

One can only wonder who would have ended up owning this mail-order killing machine, and what he would have done with it. Taken it to the movies, maybe:

Police in Washington are looking into how a local resident who ordered a color TV set via Amazon.com ended up with a high-powered semi-automatic assault rifle instead.

Seth Horvitz, who lives in the northeast quadrant of the US capital, said he contacted police immediately after a parcel delivery service left the military-style SIG Sauer SIG716 at his apartment door.

“They were a little confused at first. They’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he told Fox 5, a local television station.

“They just took my information and then said: ‘We’ll handle this weapon because it’s illegal to keep here.’ It’s illegal to transport in a car, so it can’t be returned.”

While the box was addressed to Horvitz, who had ordered a flat-screen television from a third-party retailer via Amazon.com, an invoice inside the box suggested the gun was supposed to go to a Pennsylvania gun shop…

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Texas executes retarded man after Scalia rejects stay

Posted on August 8, 2012 by oddmanout215

Recently, the good old boys who oversee the prison system in cruel and unusual Texas made the news in connection with the heat-related deaths of ten inmates. Yesterday, the boys were back in the news, this time for executing a retarded inmate after a stay of execution was denied by buffoonish states-rights zealot Anthony Scalia:

Marvin Wilson, 54, had challenged his execution as unconstitutional under the 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, which banned executing mentally retarded people but gave states some discretion in deciding who qualified for protection.

The defendant was convicted of murder for the November 1992 killing of a 21-year-old police drug informant, Jerry Robert Williams, and was sentenced to death in April 1994.

“The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice Scalia and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the court said in an order early on Tuesday evening.

Justice Antonin Scalia handles emergency appeals from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Texas.

Wilson’s IQ has been measured as low as 61, below the 70 level sometimes used to delineate mental retardation.

Texas argued that the test pegging Wilson’s IQ at 61 was conducted by an inexperienced intern, and that several other tests showed an IQ above 70.

The state also said it had discretion under Atkins v. Virginia to consider seven factors in determining whether someone like Wilson should be executed, including his ability to lead, his ability to lie, and whether family and friends thought he was mentally retarded.

Lawyers for Wilson countered that this allowed the state effectively to ignore the Atkins ruling by unreasonably applying “non-clinical” factors to disqualify Wilson from its protections.

Texas is the only state to use such a test, Wilson’s lawyer, Lee Kovarsky said on Monday.

Wilson’s lawyers also said Texas has apparently recently received evidence suggesting that Wilson was not the shooter, undermining assumptions that led to the death sentence. The Supreme Court did not address that issue…

Posted in cruel and unusual Texas, dirty rotten scoundrels | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Cruel and unusual Texas

Posted on August 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

I wondered for a moment last week if it has occurred to the good old boys who run the Texas prison system that their Christian sky-god, if he existed, might send them straight to hell:

Last summer’s record-breaking heat wave had a grim impact on Texas, playing a role in the deaths of roughly 150 people. Many of them were found in their homes or apartments, but a few were discovered somewhere else — in their prison cells.

Ten inmates of the state prison system died of heat-related causes last summer in a 26-day period in July and August, a death toll that has alarmed prisoners’ rights advocates who believe that the lack of air-conditioning in most state prisons puts inmates’ lives at risk…

But then I remembered that people tend to create gods in their own image, and that the good old boys, therefore, would probably tell you they’re doing God’s work.

So it was nice to see this story, a few days later, in Huffington Post:

A former inmate claiming a Texas prison reached dangerously high temperatures without relief may sue the state, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

At its worst, the heat index inside the South Texas prison that held Eugene Blackmon soared to as high as 130 degrees, according to court documents…

In addition to asking for compensation, Blackmon is suing to force prison officials to install proper ventilation and provide inmates with access to cold water. The case will be heard by a jury.

“The Constitution doesn’t require [prison] to be comfortable, but it requires it to be safe and humane,” said Scott Medlock, Blackmon’s attorney and director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. “You just can’t put people in temperatures that high. He’s frankly lucky that nothing worse happened to him.”

Posted in police state | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Obama the bold: Criminals shouldn’t have AK-47s

Posted on July 27, 2012 by oddmanout215

On gun control, as on most issues, Mitt Romney is a double-talking wimp who contradicts his own prior views. Even if he personally believed in laws against civilian access to assault weapons, he would toe the NRA line out of fear that the offending the gun-nut lobby might have grim consequences for him on Election Day. Wouldn’t it be refreshing, and inspiring, if Barack Obama’s stated views on gun control were in striking contrast to those of Mittens?

But they’re not, of course:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday night vowed to do everything he could to prevent “not just of gun violence but violence at every level” in the wake of the Colorado theater mass shooting.

“I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation, that hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage,” he said in New Orleans at the Urban League Convention.

“But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals. That they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”

This is as close as Obama is likely to come to calling for stricter gun control laws. Another profile in courage from our commander-in-chief.

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The new journalism

Posted on July 19, 2012 by oddmanout215

Odd Man thinks of himself as jaded, but maybe he’s just naive and way out of the loop. He was shocked to read Bill Boyarsky’s piece about censorship, inspired by a New York Times story by Jeremy Peters. Boyarsky wrote:

…[Peters] revealed how politicians and their advisers “are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations.” Such approval is now routine in the White House and President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago. Those interviewing Gov. Mitt Romney’s five sons must submit their quotes to the press office for approval. “And,” Peters wrote, “Romney advisors almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.”

He said organizations such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Reuters have agreed to these restrictions.

Submitting to such censorship is another sign of how the Internet and cable TV news have changed the business of reporting on politics, as well as other areas such as sports and business.

There is a great hunger for trivial news and the reporters must feed it. In political campaigns, the reporters compete intensely for stories with so-called inside information about tactics. What’s Obama going to say in Ohio? Is he going to apologize to Romney? When and where is Romney going to announce his vice presidential choice? Who’s up in the campaign hierarchy and who’s down?

In answering such questions, the campaign staff is more than likely to lie, obfuscate or use language that is bland and uninformative. And if the staff member is to be quoted, apparently, censorship is imposed…

…This atmosphere has given the campaigns great power to reward and punish reporters. Presumably a journalist who refuses to submit to censorship will be deprived of even the crumbs doled out by the campaign crew. Reporters, by The New York Times account, have become prisoners of their sources…

Posted in mainstream media, New York Times, Politics | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Anne Romney losing patience with ‘you people’

Posted on July 19, 2012 by oddmanout215

Questions about Mitt Romney’s tax returns remain unanswered, as does the question of whether Mitt is a made-on-Earth android or a pod creature from deep space sent by the angel Moroni. The Romney people don’t intend to budge on the tax returns, if the candidate’s wife is to be believed:

Anne Romney… on Thursday insisted that she and her husband would not be giving voters any more information about their tax returns because they had “given all you people need to know.”

“You know, you should really look at where Mitt has led his life, and where he’s been financially,” Ann Romney told ABC’s Robin Roberts. “He’s a very generous person. We give 10 percent of our income to our church every year. Do you think that is the kind of person who is trying to hide things, or do things? No. He is so good about it. Then, when he was governor of Massachusetts, didn’t take a salary for four years.”

“We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life,” the candidate’s wife added.

Regarding the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s connection to jobs that were sent overseas by his former company, Bain Capital, Ann Romney said that “it was beneath the dignity of the office of the president to do something as egregious as that.”

Pretty feeble stuff. Tithing is standard procedure for Mormons, and is one of the reasons so many people suspect Mormonism is a cult. “You people” arguably was a reference to the media, but Anne sounds like the sort of person who applies that phrase to commoners in general. And it doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind that the adjective “egregious” aptly describes those who have a hand in off-shoring jobs.

Posted in globalization, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Obama, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

A major glitch in the Romneybot

Posted on July 15, 2012 by oddmanout215

Mitt Romney is quick to spout racist slurs and lies about the economy, but most Republicans can’t really warm up to him, not even the wing nuts.

From the always-quotable Matt Taibbi:

Most presidents have something under the hood – wit, warmth, approachability, something. Even the most liberal football fan could enjoy watching an NFL game with George Bush. And even a Klansman probably would have found some of LBJ’s jokes funny. The biggest office in the world requires someone who buzzes with enough personality to fill the job, and most of them have it.

But Romney doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.

Taibbi’s words were in response to Romney’s recent speech to the NAACP, and to his speeches the next day to Republican crowds in Montana. In his false attempt to reach out to the NAACP, Romney offered up the standard Republican talking points — Obama’s health care bill is a sham, government is evil, and so on. His speeches in Montana were to remind his core constituency — white, ring-wing males — that he had tried but failed to find common ground with the sort of people who support “Obamacare,” those who want “more free stuff.”

The Montana crowds cheered Romney, but even the dopiest right-wingers know he once supported Obama-style health care and is incapable of taking a principled stand on important issues. His candidacy is hard for them to accept. It’s as if Karl Rove and a team of fascist engineers tried to create the ideal Republican robot/android but screwed up the coding and produced a monster of falseness, grotesquely awkward and cold, embarrassing to the very people they were hoping he would impress.

But Romney is all they’ve got, so he will eventually help answer a big question: Is there any candidate, no matter how shallow and unscrupulous, who can’t be sold to voters if super-rich power brokers are permitted to spend unlimited amounts of cash on his or her campaign?

Posted in campaign finance reform, economic collapse, liar, Mitt Romney | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

U.S. Olympic team uniforms made in China

Posted on July 12, 2012 by oddmanout215

How fitting — so to speak:

When the United States Olympic Team enters the Games’ opening ceremony at Olympic Stadium in London, it will be outfitted in official uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren. And though the 530 men and women who make up the team are the best athletes the country has to offer, the same cannot be said for the uniforms they’ll be wearing.

That’s because Ralph Lauren manufactured each piece of the uniform, from the unique hat to the designer jacket to the shoes, in China…

The U.S. Olympic Committee didn’t exactly have an explanation for why its uniforms were made in China. “The U.S. Olympic team is privately funded and we’re grateful for the support of our sponsors,” the committee told ABC News. “We’re proud of our partnership with Ralph Lauren, an iconic American company.”

Yes indeed-y, the committee has many reasons to be proud, starting with the fact that, as ThinkProgress put it:

Outsourcing practices like those used by companies like Ralph Lauren have resulted in the loss of 2.8 million jobs to China since 2001, and the apparel and accessories and textile industries were among the hardest hit. China is notorious for its lack of labor standards — its workers often toil for long hours for low pay in horrendous working conditions. But even with American workers struggling to regain a foothold after millions of jobs were lost in the Great Recession, Ralph Lauren and the U.S. Olympic Team think its more important to make more money than make their products in the United States.

Footnote: Check out the photo on the ThinkProgress link. Not only is Ralph Lauren a high-achieving hustler — and, arguably, a traitor — but his uniforms make American Olympic team members look more like bellhops than athletes.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, humor, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Moyers: ‘You can only push your subjects so far’

Posted on July 12, 2012 by oddmanout215

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney and his handlers flaunted the Republican Party’s contempt for the 99 percent by holding several fund-raisers in the Hamptons, one of them at the estate of billionaire right-wing activist David Koch. This classic “let them eat cake” event indicated the GOP is literally banking on the belief that the poor and near-poor will be awed into voting for the very people who continue to exploit them.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as usual, at what point Americans will realize these arrogant would-be aristocrats, with plenty of help from our elected officials and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, have made a sick joke of democracy by and for the people.

Mild-mannered, compassionate Bill Moyers wondered the same thing. How much blatant celebration of the widening gap between rich and poor is too much for average Americans to stomach? He thinks we might be at the tipping point:

… Three things don’t go together: Money. Secrecy. Democracy. And that’s the nub of the matter. This is all a sham for invalidating democracy in the name of democracy. It’s the trick authoritarians always use to hide their real intention – in this case absolute power over our public life and institutions: the privatization of everything. The Supreme Court is pointing the way. Instead of mitigating the worst excesses of both the state and the private sector, the Court has taken sides. Saying to the massed wealth of the one percent: America is yours for the taking, for the buying.

That’s what George III thought, too. Which brings us back to our celebration of the 4th of July, to the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have thought that a little uprising now and then would be good for what ails us. This time the overweening power is not the monarchy but plutocracy, the convergence of the political, religious and corporate right that would keep us in the dark about where all that money is coming from, and who it’s buying, until one day we wake up and our country is no longer our own… So remember, moneyed lords and ladies, what King George learned the hard way – you can only push your subjects so far.

I’m not as optimistic as Moyers that Americans are capable of the sort of uprising Jefferson advocated, but I think the GOP’s campaign strategy regarding Romney — i.e., we’re pigs and proud of it — will backfire, if only because people don’t like to have their noses rubbed in their own stupidity.

Footnote: This is a few days early, but Happy Bastille Day, America.

Posted in campaign finance reform, Great Recession, history, Mitt Romney, Occupy Wall Street, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Happy trails, Lonesome Rhodes

Posted on July 7, 2012 by oddmanout215

Andy Samuel Griffith (June 1, 1926 – July 3, 2012)

Before Andy Griffith became the famously easy-going Sheriff Andy on TV, he shocked movie critics with his amusingly brutal portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes, the hick troubadour who ended up aspiring to be a right-wing power broker in Elia Kazan’s classic A Face In the Crowd (1957). This was a long time before Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other right-wing media con men became real-life power brokers.

Griffith’s over-the-top antics were neatly counterbalanced by the understated performance of Patricia Neal, as a radio talent scout bowled over (for a while) by the sexy beast she helped create.

Footnote: In Sept. 2010, the Odd Man argued that Keith Olbermann — the former MSNBC host and the only prime-timer on that network with an independent streak — was overestimating Beck’s significance by comparing him to the force of nature played by Griffith. At this point, it seems a safe bet that A Face In the Crowd will be analyzed and enjoyed long after the noxious but wimpy Beck has been forgotten.

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