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Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’

Dear Iraq

Posted in Global Affairs, tagged , , , , , on September 1, 2010| Leave a Comment »

What can I say? It’s been no fun at all. And yet all horrible things must come to an end.

It was a messy relationship; maybe we shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. You were violent and volatile, ruled by a tyrannical father. We were idealistic and naive and had been hurt before. But still, we were impulsive; we took the plunge quickly. We were addicted to drama. And you had no choice. You just fell for us.

But oh how quickly things change. You became much too hot to handle. You spurned us almost as soon as you welcomed us. First you threw roses at us, and we thought it meant you loved us. But maybe you just meant, “Please don’t kill me.” As soon as our honeymoon ended, you turned schizophrenic. You acted like you didn’t know from one minute to the next what you wanted or who you were or which mosque you should attend. Sometimes you wanted your mean father back; sometimes you just wanted to blow us up. You turned to outsiders who poured poison in your ear and said lots of nasty untrue things about us and offered to help you get rid of us in horrible ways. You craved our stability and guiding hand and mentoring one moment but hated us for it at the same time. A typical Pygmalion relationship. We should have known, you can’t carve the perfect lovers out of stone. You have to let them just be who they are. Even if that means letting them hate you. Or letting them go.

The Flag of Iraq


We acted like the boss, but we weren’t. We couldn’t even get you to take out the garbage. You were so passive aggressive you put roadside IEDs in it.

You were insecure. And by that I mean your internal security forces were politicized and mercenary and graft-ridden. You were unstable. And by that I mean you had a nasty case of pyromania. It’s never as sexy as Def Leppard makes it out to be. You were proud and had to fight for every inch of property. You wouldn’t get organized. When somebody tried to help you get organized, boom! They were dead to you.

You crumbled into many mental and physical states. We binged (on oil) and you purged (each other of heretics). We were very curious to see your dad’s guns. Turned out he didn’t have any. Later, you did away with your dad entirely, and it wasn’t the victory either one of us thought it was going to be. In fact, it just made our relationship that much more sour.

Sometime in the second year, we knew, both of us that, that our relationship was a mistake. Yet we were too proud and embarrassed to end it. We insisted foolishly that we could make it work. Sometimes we went at each other without having enough protection. Isn’t that America all over–giddy and never properly sheathed.

But it’s silly to ask now what might have happened if we hadn’t gotten involved. That was a long time ago, and the choices can’t be unmade. We’re different people now, and can’t live in the past. Our mistakes are ours, and they make us who we are. Hopefully they help us become better. And hopefully we can end this bad blood on good terms, with no mutual recrimination, without debts and without too much rotting infrastructure. You seem to have gotten your shit together a bit. We went into debt trying to make you happy, of course, but we’ll be OK, because we work hard and have good government jobs to tide us over.

But we’re finally pulling the plug. This is it, Iraq. We’re leaving you. We’ve fallen in love with somebody else and her name is Snooki. She’s a mess, too, but we think we can help her. In the meantime, don’t cry. We hold no grudges toward you. After all, we have to thank you for not lasting anywhere near as long as our horrible engagement with Vietnam. That was probably the worst relationship ever. So wipe the tears from your eyes, Iraq. In the words of Luther Vandross:

We’re so in love but wrong for each other
Each hurt that heals brings on another
Both of us abusing
Both of us using
Darling
It’s time to stop pretending
There’s just no way to rewrite our ending
We’re caught in this game
And we both know we’re losing, but

How many times can we say good-bye?

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Hypocrisy at Ground Zero

Posted in Essay, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 29, 2010| 2 Comments »

It seems like whenever you tear down a building, rats always come out.

Likewise, there’s a certain stink of hypocrisy that always surrounds controversial topics like Park 51, (also known as the Cordoba Project), the 13-story Muslim cultural center (and small mosque) planned for construction in Lower Manhattan. If you haven’t heard, it’s a mere two blocks from the World Trade Center site, where thousands of Americans (of all faiths) lost their lives in a jihad carried out in the name of Islam by extremists almost nine years ago.

Because 9/11 is such a sensitive topic for so many Americans (especially New Yorkers), it requires extra critical thinking by both sides–especially, I hate to say, by those hurting the most. Those most inclined to yell and those in best stead to do harm to other people.  But instead of tolerance or listening or ratiocination, we have instead the pastiche and passion play that now pass for democracy: screaming tantrums, threatening, bulling, political posturing, recrimination and thumb sucking cries of persecution by the people who actually hold the real power.

And of course there are lies. Stinking piles of them reeking like a colony of dead rats behind your drywall. Untruth can be found on both sides of the debate. Opponents who know nothing about New York City think the mosque is going up right on the site, not two blocks away (and if you’re not familiar with the place, two blocks in New York City can take you through as many cultural dynamics as the Epcot Center). Some liberals (even, sadly, the otherwise heroic Keith Olbermann) have said there will be no mosque at all, which is odd considering that the Park51 site itself advertises a small mosque.

But it’s probably no surprise that Cordoba House opponents are the ones lying more, not only about the specifics but about the big picture. Do they have a good reason? After all, politics play a role in how we use our space. Yes, the First Amendment protects Muslims and whatever the hell they want to build even if they want to build it within homogeneous white enclaves. That’s an irrefutable fact.

But you’ve got to pick your battles. Law is not the only yardstick with which we measure our relationships to each other and at some point you have to turn to the Cordoba House builders and ask … did you have to plan one so close to the World Trade Center? It’s just two blocks away. If the objective of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam, was to build interfaith bridges and span the gulf between cultures, as he says, I would argue that not every beachhead is a good one for a bridge. You have to find the shortest span where the goods are really going to flow and where there can be some real commerce between us. It might be right for you to fight on legal points, but it wouldn’t further your stated cause.

If you are going to fight, I would have to start arguing again, for opponents, that lots of churches in the United States get denied permission to build for all sorts of reasons all the time. It mostly happens because they run afoul of municipal ordinances–their domes are too high, or their driveways cause traffic problems, or the planned use of the adjacent community centers do not square with local zoning and cause disruption. If I were on the New York City planning commission, I might make a reasonable argument that safety and traffic and historic use of the land are all factors to take into account before I let, say, Oral Roberts build a giant golden egg in an overdeveloped downtown. Some have argued to protect the building that’s already there with landmark status. A nice argument unless you’ve seen the building. There’s also the argument that the developer is a bit unsavory, so why should the city help him out?

But if it’s reason you’re looking for, why do I feel the Muslims have more of it?

Hopefully, if you are paying attention, the month of debate has reinforced the point for you that bigoted conservative pundits lie as easily as Kelly Slater surfs. After fanning across the country for the past year and a half like self-flagellating monks, they have cried that their Constitution has been under attack–and by that they mean the universally prescriptive, strictly constructionist view of the Constitution that allows no “experiments” like Social Security, the Federal Reserve, Medicare, the CIA,  presidential cabinets or greenback money. If you want proof, you have only to go to YouTube where these zealots insist that their freedom has been hijacked by extra-Constitutional chicanery, thus they have every right to harass health care reform supporters and bray like mouth-frothing fanatical anabaptists.

Yet when the time comes for them to defend the actual text itself, the Elephants are no longer in the room. Not one high profile Republican has stood up for the First Amendment in this case except for always reliable libertarian Ron Paul. Who’s against? Palin. McCain. Gingrich. Giuliani. The Tea Party leadership. Meanwhile, others such as George W. and Mitt Romney are conspicuous by their silence.

Of course, some high profile Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid have also showed us the white feather, turning tail against the haters and coming out against. But in a courageous move (one badly needed from him lately) Barack Obama did, and for that he was falsely labeled a Muslim (again). Mike Bloomberg stood up for freedom of religion, and for that he was called a hypocrite for not supporting the Second Amendment also. In other words, no other notable right winger (unless you label Paul right wing) will fight the merits of the issue itself. Nobody supports the First Amendment here when it’s a Muslim right that’s being discussed. Why? They are playing a game of reverses and switchbacks. They want only to win.

I had hoped that eight years of George Bush running up enormous deficits and doing away with civil liberties by creating a law outside the law would expose the simple truth that most conservatives don’t believe what they say about big government. They have had plenty of chances to prove the purity of their libertarianism and they fail repeatedly. Only recently have some of them come around to the idea that gay marriage is an issue that ought to be accommodated by their “leave me alone” view of government. But most of them haven’t, and the 9/11 mosque just shows us again that right wing libertarianism is a smokescreen for conservatives whose biggest desire isn’t freedom but power. I’m talking about the usual suspects: Rush, Newt, Side Show Glenn, Laura, Ann … etc.

But those are just extremists. Let’s talk about the people who really matter: New Yorkers and 9/11 victims’ families. Most New Yorkers don’t want this mosque. But in Manhattan proper, the vote swings toward Park51. (The borough most against is dependable Republican bastion Staten Island, whose opponents are 73% strong and a good five miles away by boat.) Even if most New Yorkers don’t want the mosque built, they have also said Imam Rauf has a right to build it. That might seem like an unimportant distinction to you (or The New York Post), but it isn’t. When New Yorkers say “I don’t like what you’re doing, but you have a right to do it,” it’s important for you to read the inflection because it defines the statement. It suggests that New Yorkers might understand the bigger picture here–individual liberty–than the people from Scottsdale operating Web sites.

We also have to remember that Muslims are New Yorkers, too. “A small community!” you say. Try about 600,000 (according to one conservative estimate). Let’s do some math people: the Muslim population in New York might be bigger than the total population of all other U.S. cities except the top 25 or 26. If I told Christians in any city under 600,000 in this country that they couldn’t build a new church there because of Christian persecution of the Indians, I’d be laughed out of town.

Which brings me to the next point about 9/11 victims. The idea that we were attacked by Islam rather than Islamic fanatics is a fantastically awful meme that has to stop in this country. If you are a well-meaning Christian, you must be aware that this sort of criticism opens you up to personal responsibility for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the genocide of indigenous American peoples. Newt Gingrich, a man considered a serious contender for president in 2012, has made the comparison that a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero would be the same thing as hanging swastikas near a Holocaust museum (in other words, he’s calling a mosque an implied threat). Honestly, if you really find it odious that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a hoax, how can you sit still when such a high profile American politician calls a quarter of the world’s population murderers?

Then we have to talk calmly with the victims’ families. Not all of them are against the Mosque. Those who are against have to concede a few points for their pain. They refer to this crime scene as hallowed ground. I’d like to say you had me at “hallowed.” But as we all know from The Wall Street Journal and the phone book, there are topless bars right around the corner from this hallowed ground that nobody has ever complained about. And as much as we might like to see the entire area turned into a park, the fact is that we’re putting up new giant commercial buildings with vast business space. That’s political reality and ought to be a much bigger pain to victims’ families. Helpless to do anything else, it’s much easier to project anger on Muslims. The families opposed now seemed not to care that there have been other mosques in the area over the last decade (within four blocks, if not two). Why are they bothered now by something that hasn’t bothered them before? If anybody is injuring them more, I’d say it’s the people inciting them to hatred. In fact, since the horrible day that our country was attacked (a day in which the ashes of the World Trade Center flew down on my house in Brooklyn), the people we have had to distrust the most are the people telling us whom to be angry at. Newt Gingrich is Iago. Sarah Palin is Cardinal Richelieu. Glenn Beck is Lady MacBeck. It was bad enough that we had to attack Muslims in the street after 9/11. But it was people who used that hatred to convince us to invade Iraq, a country that had not attacked us, that are just as culpable. They have the same strategies. They have the same political interests. Your pain is their gain. Your anger is their medicine show.

If your family member was a victim on 9/11 and you are at peace with this strategy … you find you must indeed continue to hate all Muslims for what happened on 9/11, then I can’t tell you anything other than that’s a war you’re never going to win.

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Snooki and the Tax Bills

Posted in Business and the Economy, Essay, tagged , , , , , , , on August 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Snooki is overtaxed. MTV

One of my favorite shows on television (let’s be fair, 50% of what I watch on TV) is “The Soup,” with Joel McHale, the kind of show that the brilliant (if right now sadly ill) cultural critic Christopher Hitchens might call “low humor,” but one that actually gives its viewers a way to deconstruct the shows that currently pass for cultural communication–mainly the malady of reality TV for which there seem to be no antibodies. For some reason, these shows fulfill a need in our psychology to watch a lot of emotionally limited and brutish people fight, fuck, fall in love, and get drunk without ever having to balance a check book or pay the cable bill. Why do we watch? Maybe it’s because we know that the sloe-eyed, pneumatic, contumacious and inebriated Snooki is slowly (very slowly) gaining the path to wisdom. This makes her picaresque journey useful to us in invisible ways. We now know how not to behave and hopefully not to hit a lady in the face, even if we think she has it coming.

There is another conversation going on in America that’s not on cable TV, but you are likely familiar with it if you have a living grandparent with access to e-mail, a back channel of communication where Americans buy their penis creme as well as similarly specious topical anodynes from anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Often these e-mails are spiced with the names of legitimate news organizations so that they look like properly vetted journalism. But they aren’t. In reality, they are usually written directly by special interest groups and are meant to fool the rank and file into making Chicken Little decisions about their money. My late mother, a tax preparer and bankruptcy attorney, told me that people were coming to her asking to irresponsibly liquidate their holdings because of what they read in these e-mails (and saw on Fox News)–decisions that could have destroyed them financially.

Thursday an e-mail came across my desk talking about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011. The e-mail informs the reader that marginal tax rates are set to rise and that folks at all income levels will see increases next year, that their family farms will all of a sudden be subject to a 55% estate tax, that normal folks will see penalties for being married, having children and owning businesses. In other words, we’d be going back to the tax schedules of the Clinton era. Advertised as one of the largest tax hikes facing average Americans in U.S. history, these increases promise a new recession because they will overburden U.S. businesses, murder stock prices, kill investment and strangle innovation.

In other words, all the stuff that happened during the Internet boom. And who should you blame for the new recession? That’s a no-brainer. Democrats! They tax and spend, after all.

Or do they? The Democrats actually have a bill to continue the Bush era cuts–at least for 98% of us. It would keep marginal tax rates at the same level for all but the top two brackets, the highest of which will go back up to 39.6%. In fact, the rich will still see a small tax benefit because of the way income margins are staggered (they see the cuts at the lower rates, too, until they reach $200,000).

The Republican version of this bill extends the cuts for everybody, of course, which increases the deficit by more than $36 billion and relinquishes almost that entire amount to millionaires, according to a report by the Joint Committee on Taxation. If you are a millionaire, I respectfully say to you that you are sitting on this money these days anyway more than you are investing it, and you don’t need it.

You don’t hear much about the Democrats’ extension from your grandparents because Americans tend to hew to the prevailing political narrative the same way they do to Snooki’s progress through the vomit-skinned hot tubs of Jersey and Miami. It is much easier to repeat the meme that Democrats tax and spend. It is a story line that writes itself in our heads and thus we fail to break down the numbers, even when they show the story is patently false. The Democrats are your mother. They want to save the world but can’t. They are idealists who will spend your money for failed ideas of the public good. They are the reason for the recession. (Hopefully you don’t remember back that far.)

Storytelling is one of the quickest ways people learn. But it also allows people to program us. What if I told you that I knew for a fact Snooki, in her darkest moments, turns to quiet contemplation and reads Baudelaire; if that were true, you would likely not accept that news, and MTV would fire her. We all need her instead to be drunk, vulgar and provincial because then it feels better when somebody hits her in the face. Two thousand plus years ago, we were the same way, only we wanted to hit that smack-talking bitch Antigone. These days, we want to smack Barack Obama in the face. We want to punish him for his eternal ideal of commonwealth. The desire is so strong we aren’t even smart enough to notice that the freakin’ taxes haven’t even risen yet. We argue smugly that the stimulus package failed because that fits the welfare mother storyline but we don’t acknowledge that obscenely low tax rates haven’t helped either.

The truth of Grover Norquist’s statement, cramped as it is, is that the Bush tax cuts, if left to expire, would indeed bring us back to Clinton-era tax levels. What he won’t tell you, obsessed as he is with chimeras, is that Bush’s tax cuts mostly helped the wealthy in the first place. What he won’t tell you is that Clinton-era taxation helped us balance the budget. What he also won’t tell you is that most of what we have to pay for is two wars that Americans overwhelmingly approved in 2001 and 2003. The U.S. government is not taking YOUR money. The U.S. government is asking you to pay for something you already bought. OK, to be fair, maybe it has put one other item on layaway–better health care. Why? You said for years you wanted that too.

But nobody can deny that your taxes will definitely rise if a gridlocked Congress cannot come to agreement. And it’s not because of oppression but because of game theory. Republicans themselves have a vested interest in killing the Democratic version of the tax cut extension. Because then they can claim it was an example of Democrats taxing and spending, which you know, is as true as the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Jesus walking on water. They only want you to go along with the Republican version, which will require the government to keep borrowing from the Chinese to pay our teachers, repave our roads and keep former employees of our nation’s manufacturing base from living in Hoovervilles. Why do Republicans want to keep borrowing? Because they like unsustainable short term solutions and because Americans don’t really understand what their economy is made of right now: credit based on past economic strength. Sooner or later, Peter Luger is not going to take our white credit card.

If you don’t believe,  you have only to realize that some roads in this country are going back to dirt, teachers are being laid off, and unemployment benefits are being threatened.

If you do understand this, you must be able to fight this storyline wherever you encounter it (from Republicans or “centrist” Democrats alike): “Your tax bill is not going up under Obama, Grandpa. But frankly, it should.”

If you don’t understand this, there’s a crab lice infested hot tub I’d love to sell you in Little Silver.

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Washington, D.C. Stripper Blasted for Incompetence

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on March 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Sally Jessie Rose, a 52-year-old stripper who works at the Bare Elegance Lounge in Washington, D.C., was blasted yesterday by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike for her horrible dance routine and shocking disregard for quality adult cabaret entertainment.

“This stripper is just terrible,” said Rep. Jackson Peyton (D-Idaho). “I mean, it’s OK to tease, but it’s not a tease anymore if it lasts for, like, four hours. At what point does she just take it off?”

“There is no inspiration in her moves at all,” said Jefferson Potlach, a Republican representative from Wisconsin. “It’s like she can barely be bothered to take off her clothes in front of us.”

Rose did her strip routine some four hours after the Senate agreed to pass a bipartisan bill extending unemployment compensation, legislation that passed in a highly polarized political atmosphere in which gridlock has become the order of the day. However, the jobs bill and Sally Jessie Rose’s horrible and chafing lap dance were encouraging areas of bipartisan consensus, said President Barack Obama.

Though we have differences about execution, both Republicans and Democrats agree that unemployment is a top priority, and that Sally Jessie Rose’s feather boa routine was lackluster and hostile, just the sort of negative, ‘I don’t care’ attitude that brings us all down.”

Senator Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, had threatened to hold up the jobs bill because he thought it would add to the deficit.

“This is a free market economy,” said Rep. Jim McAllen of Utah. “At some point, the market must sustain itself, and the market will take care of those who are responsible and those who are irresponsible. This Sally Jessie Rose person, for instance, is not getting any sort of tip from me. The market knows what to do with her drag-ass, low burlesque routine.”

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Rant! The Problem With Massachusetts

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on January 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I have often promised that I wouldn’t ever turn my blog into a strictly political forum. I hate to sound shrill, even when I’m right. Among other things that I don’t do on this blog anymore are post my poetry, blast my home-made music, or post pictures of Dallas star Victoria Principal naked. Well, I would do the last one, but I don’t own the copyright.

And yet I must say that I feel a bit sad about what happened in Massachusetts last night. There are a lot of people who think that with the state’s election of Scott Brown, a conservative Republican now ironically representing the bluest of states in the U.S. Senate, the political center has turned against President Barack Obama, and my friends on the other side of the political divide insist that I have to take their grievances seriously.

I don’t. Much of what I hear about Barack Obama from his opponents after his first year in office is still bullshit. You may argue with some of his political miscalculations–such as his pursuit of universal health care in the middle of a recession. But that just leads to more questions I would ask of the inquisitors: When is a good time for health care? When is it a good time to raise taxes that are ridiculously and dangerously low, especially when taxes are not what got us into our current financial crisis but unfettered globalization? I am reminded of Bert and Ernie arguing on Sesame Street about when it’s a good time to fix a hole in the roof–you don’t want to when it’s raining out. But why it’s not raining, you no longer see the need.

At some point, somebody has to fix the hole.

Democrats seem to have this unwarranted reputation that they “tax and spend.” That argument is easily eclipsed by the more venial image forming of Republicans in the last 20 years–that they simply spend. No, not just spend. They borrow truckloads of other people’s money, mainly the money of the Chinese and Saudis, so that they can do their big, big spending. They easily outspent Democrats when their great heroes Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in office. A Democrat who taxes and spends ought to look pretty responsible by comparison. Taxing and spending allows you to balance the budget, as Bill Clinton did. Just spending allows you to run up monstrously high deficits, like Bush and Reagan did.

So what’s got me so steamed about the seemingly Blue State of Massachusetts suddenly turning red in an off-election year?

Let’s start with some insights from a biz conference today (I do write about finance, as some of you know):

A former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, not exactly a bomb-throwing communist, said that the problem with populist outrage like the sort seen in Massachusetts last night is that it tends to discount all government activity, whether it’s useful or not, helpful or not, wasteful or not, necessary or not. Many of those “independent” voters of Massachusetts who voted for Republican Scott Brown likely do not make more than $200,000 a year and probably haven’t looked at the tax rebates and incentives they’re getting from the federal government this year. Instead, they’re listening to fire-breathing demagogues and end-of-the-world types. Exit polls found that voters were simply unhappy with everybody in Congress and so they masochistically took it out on themselves and voted for somebody whom they disagree with on most issues. Cutting off your nose to spite your face much?

Then we get to the elephant in the room, and in this case, it’s a raging male elephant suffering from a case of musth:

Unemployment is at 10% and is probably going to stay high. This is not a result of George Bush’s or Barack Obama’s stimulus packages in the last 13 months. If these two had not responsibly come to the rescue of the economy, most economists would agree that unemployment would probably be a lot higher, since, after all, our financial system would have collapsed. Twenty percent unemployment? Thirty? Fifty? How ambitious are the Tea Party Republicans feeling? My friend Gene used to wear an anarchy jacket, and I wonder if he would like to hand it over to the real anarchists of today: Dick Armey, Grover Norquist and Glenn Beck.

Our recession, in terms of business productivity, is over, something Obama didn’t talk about enough with the good people of the Bay State. But globalization is amplifying the unemployment problem: When the labor comes back on line, this time it’s going to go to China and India, where it’s cheaper. U.S. wages for low-skill labor are going to drop in this environment (they are already) and they’re not coming back up. Meanwhile, capital is flowing back to the U.S. in the form of reserve currency, causing interest rates to dip and asset bubbles to form. The only thing that’s really going to help American employment in this global economy is to boost exports. Which ironically means we need foreigners to buy our stuff and our services. In other words, we need the Chinese to turn into Americans.

All of this has nothing to do with the health care bill or taxes or Obama. It has to do with free enterprise, which I thought we had all signed on for (most of us). Any Reagan Republican who tells you otherwise is giving you a reach-around.

The idea that Obama exacerbated unemployment (not globalization) or that somehow it’s high taxes that have hobbled the American economy (not globalization) is so laughable on its face that it sends you into a kind of denial about people and what they will believe. I say this because we’re in an age of total government irresponsibility brought on not just by too much spending but too much borrowing. Taxes right now are irresponsibly low and have been since Bush II and maybe even Reagan, the first and best Republican liar on the subject. You can’t start a $2 trillion war without raising taxes. That’s a fact any economist (or historian) worth his or her salt will tell you. Maybe the health care bill was ill-timed, but since people had the political will to start a war with money they didn’t have, Obama gambled that they would also pay for universal health care–something the majority of Americans have INDISPUTABLY wanted for years. I still have a hard time sympathizing with the widespread antipathy to the current health legislation since its opponents lied about it constantly in a highly flashy campaign sponsored by the insurance industry and voters ate up the misinformation like it was all-you-can-eat night at Mr. Spriggs.

So to recap: Obama was slimed by the people of Massachusetts for letting the free markets be free on one hand (not creating government jobs himself) and then for being too interventionist on the other (stopping a catastrophe with bailouts). Yes, the voters were mad. If you mean crazy, I agree.

One of my friends said today that we Democrats are obviously in denial today. I’m not in denial about Massachusetts. We’ve seen bullies and liars get their way a lot in the past 10 years simply by bullying and lying. When so many so-called centrists get rope-a-doped into a bullshit argument because of a timorous inability to fight off these bullies, you can only weep.

So that is all. Tomorrow expect poetry, and perhaps some of my rockin’ music.

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Who Do We Think We Are?

Posted in Life, tagged , , on November 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

–*The guy who’s going to eat your lunch.

–*The guy who’s going to eat that whole pizza.

–*The woman who’s going to break up your marriage.

–*The photographer who’s going to make this the best high school reunion ever.

–*The radio host who’s going to ruin Barack Obama’s day.

–*The man who’s going to snort a couple of bumps and then drop dead playing racquetball.

–*The man who’s keeping the Fed funds rate at 2% so that the resulting weakened dollar will cause net export numbers to spike.

–*The guy who told you all along that gutting the Glass-Steagall Act was a bad idea and would wreck the economy.

–*The grocery clerk who’s going to force you to use that gun.

–*The Lesbian your mom’s gonna move in with.

–*The lady astronaut who will drive all night, not even stopping to change her soiled astronaut diapers, to win back your love.

–*The man who opened the Berlin Wall by accident.

–*The man who taught Anna Nicole how to love.

–*The woman who taught Grover Norquist how to love.

–*The woman who gave the most guys chlamydia at South Beach last spring break

–*The guy whose potato looks more like Jesus than any other potato in this part of Nebraska.

–*The guy with the biggest opening weekend in box office history

–*God

–*Jesus

–*John Lennon

–*James Cameron

–*It doesn’t matter who I think I am, because existence precedes essence, and only my actions define me.

–*I don’t know who I am, but maybe I’ll have it figured out by the time my reality show begins its third season.

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Barack Obama Wins Oscar For 1993 Film “The Piano”

Posted in Film & TV, Politics, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Hollywood (API) — Scrapping tradition and handing out awards in mid-season, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today awarded the Oscar for best actor to Barack Obama for the 1993 film The Piano, a movie about a mute New Zealand woman who wins her prized piano back by giving sexual favors to an illiterate ex-sailor. The decision to give untested and green president Barack Obama the award shocked actors, directors and moviegoers the world over.

“Barack Obama has been a guiding light since his historic election last year,” said academy president Tom Sherak. “There are some who might think it a little odd that we break precedent by giving him this prize at this point. But we felt that it was important to send a signal. Granted, we don’t know what that signal is. But we have decided to be very forceful in sending it.”

The news sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry for many reasons, not least of which was that the movie is almost two decades old, the subject matter is quite risqué and Barack Obama is not in it.

“I know that there are some who will say that Obama has not earned this Oscar yet, and that he is not even an actor. But when we were making the decision, we said to ourselves, ‘We can’t wait three years! It might be too late by then.'”

The Piano caused a minor sensation when it hit American shores 17 years ago. Made by New Zealand feminist filmmaker Jane Campion, the story touched on the sensitive themes of male domination, female sexual submissiveness, the brutality of eroticism, the exploitation of natives, the commodification of female value and suicidal despair. There was also a lot of sex and Harvey Keitel showed his penis.

About this time, Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor and a community organizer with Project Vote, which registered African-American voters in the state of Illinois. There is no evidence that Obama was anywhere near the set of The Piano or that he had any say over its outré subject matter and themes.

“I’ve got to say I’m scratching my head over this,” said Campion. “I mean, I quite like Barack Obama. But my general feeling, and I say this with much respect, is that maybe the American president should have done some acting first. That is only my feeling.”

Right wing-aligned actor Jon Voight was less sanguine.

“I worked for years to get my Oscar. I struggled and built from nothing. Barack Obama is a false messiah. A man whose mellifluous, honeyed words make him seem like a god when he is anything but and he’s instead a false prophet of socialism and hedonist, communist depravity. But hey … you don’t have to listen to a lot of cantankerous crazy talk from me. Just let me remind you: He wasn’t in the g** d***** Piano. Am I losing my mind? Am I having a stroke? Is the light on?”

Even the president’s defenders were a little wary of embracing the prize wholeheartedly, and sensed that maybe there was a strange agenda at work.

“I believe the president can do anything,” said his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. “But we’re only nine months into his presidency and the only acting he’s done was two seconds in an SNL skit. It kind of cheapens the award a bit if you just hand out freebies. But I guess he’ll take it. Sure! Why not?”

Officially, said the Academy, it awarded him the prize for “making the world a better place through his tireless efforts to speak in front of people.”

Obama himself said forcefully after the announcement that even though he’s humbled by the award and proud that people see in him such a stirring symbol of human aspiration, he can in no way endorse the act of trading sexual favors for chattel goods such as musical instruments and thus he must distance himself from the film.

“I applaud Holly Hunter’s performance,” he said. “But how would it look for me to say to the young women of America, ‘Hey girls, be careful if Harvey Keitel tries to turn you into a whore because you just might like it too much.”

Opined film critic Roger Ebert:

“I sort of feel like they gave the award to Obama more because of what they’re hoping he can do rather than for what he’s actually done. Because even though I like him a lot, he hasn’t had a chance to do a whole hell of a lot yet. Maybe a key to the city might have been a bit less gushy and obsequious.”

“But then again, if I know Hollywood and American politics, I’d also say there’s a more insidious game going on here … at this point I think somebody’s really just trying to rub Winona Ryder’s nose in it that she didn’t win that year. Everybody really hates her.”

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How Are We Getting Out of This?

Posted in Life, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , on October 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »

–*Deflecting the situation with jokes.

–*Promising we’ll never do it again.

–*Deflecting the situation with lead paint remediation

–*Promising to make amends.

–*Deflecting the anger with gifts.

–*Deflecting the situation with both jokes and lead paint remediation.

–*Yelling fire, running away.

–*Dropping to our knees and begging forgiveness.

–*Dropping to our knees, begging forgiveness, offering up tickets to Maroon 5.

–*Grabbing an innocent bystander as a human shield.

–*Kissing the baby.

–*Grabbing a baby as a human shield, kissing innocent bystander, promising lead paint remediation.

–*Telling a dead baby joke, using Maroon 5 as a human shield, yelling fire and running away.

–*Kissing mother in law.

–*Giving mother-in-law Maroon 5 tickets, running away.

–*Yelling fire and running away.

–*Telling jokes, enjoying playful banter with Woody Harrelson.

–*Promising Woody Harrelson Maroon 5 tickets and lead paint remediation.

–*Stopping sandblasting work on the Williamsburg Bridge and offering lead paint remediation to local residents suffering adverse health effects

–*Offering $300 tax rebate checks in the mail as an apologia for invading Iraq.

–*Saying Chicago doesn’t need the god damned Olympics anyhow.

–*Enjoying playful badinage with Woody Harrelson and Maroon 5 until running away and yelling fire while holding up a baby to deflect criticism, scorn, lawsuits and/or gunfire.

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You Don’t Want To Go There, Says D.C. Protester

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , , on September 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Washington, D.C. (API) Shelly McAdams, a 9/12 protester from Barnwell, South Carolina, was marching along with thousands of others last Friday to rally against what she saw as the overreach of federal government when suddenly a reporter asked her a question that made her blood boil.

“Don’t go there,” she said to a reporter who asked her if the health care legislation currently in the Congress might bring affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. “I was a nurse for 20 years. I had people puking on me. There was blood and vomit and brain and skull and kneecaps all over the place. Don’t even start talking about that.”

McAdams had come exhorted by Glenn Beck to fight the creeping threat of fascism and socialism and communism. When told that many of those political philosophies were incompatible and stemmed from different schools of economic and social thought, she raised a big index finger in the air covered with acrylic nail polish.

“Now you just stop right there,” she said, as her nostrils briskly dilated and the hair on her ears stood up, “You don’t want to bring up that stuff with me because my step-daughter came from Korea and she ate out of trash cans. You can’t even say the word communism to me because I might start spitting blood right now if you ever remotely decide to go there. That is an off-limits topic for me because I know first hand that pain she felt when she told me about it second hand.”

McAdams, who was holding a sign up that said, “Sean Hannetie [sic] for president,” was then asked if other government actions by the previous administration, like the invasion of Iraq, codified approval of torture and illegal wiretapping, might have merited more of a protest than a simple change in health care policy.

“Now you just wait one minute!” McAdams said, a yellow-purple phlebitis jumping around from her neck to her face. “I don’t know if you know who you’re speaking to, but my grandfather was on the beaches of Normandy and he fought for this country. So I hope I’m just deaf and you didn’t even dare bring up something army related. If I thought for a minute you were putting down my grandpappy’s service on that sandy hell-hole, making the ultimate sacrifice for those Frenchies, well I’d be so angry that I might start sneezing pink-colored phlegm through my eye sockets!”

McAdams went on a stammering tirade about several other things having to do with taking her country back and bailouts and Ted Kennedy.

“Oh boy, you do not want to talk to me about Ted Kennedy. My second cousin Maybell drowned in 1962. I take that very personal that Chappaquiddick business. If you even bring that up, it’s like you’re hitting me in the genitals with a shovel and I’ll have no choice but to fight back.”

McAdams was also wearing a shirt that said, “We want a Christian president, not a Muslim.”

When asked whether she thought the libertarian message of Beck was possibly at odds with the demand for a Christian president, McAdams’ eyes rolled back in her head, and a sap-colored fluid started to come out of her ears.

“You did not just attack the Baby Jesus I hope. Don’t deny you did it. Oh my God … if you were even for two seconds to go near the topic of the Baby Jesus, well I’d be fully justified in pulling out a gun because that’s just a personal, off-limits topic. I’d be so angry that I’d go blind and a little alien creature might just start coming out of my stomach with sharp teeth and that creature would eat all of you alive.”

When asked if her grandchild was enjoying the nice weather, McAdams dropped down on all fours and said,

“That’s it. You elite liberal media types have gone too far when you bring my special needs baby into this. Oh my God I’m having a stroke or an aneurysm. I swallo ma ton….floffle floflle bizzle bozzle mum mum mum mum…..”

When asked if maybe she was not understanding the true nature of the debate she was having or what exactly she was protesting, McAdams jumped down in the mud and began rolling and whining and kicking with her 12-year-old dachshund Joe.

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Obama’s Health Care Speech to Congress

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

What were some of the highlights of President Barack Obama’s address to Congress Wednesday night?

8:15 p.m. Obama thanks the health insurance industry for making the 111th Congress possible.

8:20 p.m. Obama name checks a distinguished pantheon of Americans who have so far totally failed to bring you decent health care, including Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Kennedy, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, George Bush and Alan Alda.

8:25 p.m. Obama stops and smokes a cigarette.

8:30 p.m. Obama excoriates those who have tried to kill reform altogether by spreading lies about the health care bill. Though he doesn’t name them personally, those people pretty much admit their guilt by sitting down and not clapping for this statement. We thank those people for telling us who they are.

8:40 p.m. Obama stops briefly while the field crew sweeps the floor and dances to “YMCA”

8:45 p.m. Obama stops to remind people that the Bratz dolls still dress like sluts

8:50 p.m. Obama suddenly inserts orders for American children to kill their parents according to plans laid out in his Tuesday speech to classrooms. “You know where the forks are. Like we talked about. On three!”

9:00 p.m. Obama is heckled by South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson for the “take her home like a six pack” joke.

9:01 p.m. Wilson yells “You lie!” after Obama says that illegal immigrants are not covered by the health care bill, after Obama says Teddy Roosevelt was president, and after Obama reads the list of specials in the Congressional cafeteria

9:10 p.m. Joe Biden still has something in his eye

9:15 p.m. Obama says that amid the health care debate, America has seen Congress at its worst (when it does nothing) and at its best (when it does nothing).

9:16 p.m. Rahm Emanuel eats a severed human hand.

9:18 p.m. Wow, after three beers … Nancy Pelosi man … I’m just sayin’.

9:20 p.m. Obama thanks the pharmaceutical companies for making Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh possible.

9:25 p.m. Obama wonders aloud why such strident political ideology is hindering progress. He just can’t imagine why influential Republican swing voter Sen. Charles Grassley, for example, would be so ideological about this health care bill.

9:30 p.m. Obama makes some controversial statements about how much his health care plan would cost, saying a lot of it was money already being spent anyway. This rankles Republicans who insist that only they be allowed to run up crippling deficits, because they do it for good reasons, after all.

9:31 p.m. Katie Couric says Obama shouldn’t kiss so many people what with swine flu running rampant.

9:31 p.m. Actually, kissing up to pigs happens a lot in this business.

9:32 p.m. Republicans several times fail to get up to clap, showing that, as an abrasive and loud minority, they are not afraid to use their thumb-sucking petulance as a weapon.

9:35 p.m. In response to Obama’s remarks, several Republicans hold up copies of a booklet which, given their complete lack of interest in reforming health care, is probably a copy of the new “Harry Potter.”

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