Author: odd man out

WP: Arctic warmth is ‘stunning’ scientists

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

polar-bear-on-ice-838x0_q80

Swamp Rabbit and I stopped for an overnight at a motel midway through a sales trip in upstate PA – Trump country. Some cadaver in camo gear checked us in and said there would be no meals until 7 a.m., so we settled for pork rinds and coffee from the vending machines. The coffee was rotgut, so we added sugar and a powdered milk substitute made of mercury or something.

We sat on a couch in the lobby, not far from a paneled wall hung with an elk head looking down on us with black marble eyes, very judgmental. Its jumbo antlers seemed to reach for me.

Swamp Rabbit told me gun-toting rednecks were less of a threat to wild things these days than human-made toxins, that scientists were finding tiny bits of plastic on polar ice, thousands of bits every square foot.

Not that there was much ice left at the North Pole, as the Washington Post noted yesterday. Swamp Rabbit pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of a polar bear standing on a small slab of it, surrounded by a thawing-out sea.

“I feel like that bear,” I said.

He threw a pork rind at me. “How you know how that bear feels? I don’t know how he feels.”

I told him all the bear wanted was a decent meal and a safe place to hang out, but there it was in the middle of nowhere, on a surface that becomes more fragile by the day, thanks to guys like Trump’s boy Scott Pruitt, the climate-change denier who heads the Environmental Protection Agency.

Swamp Rabbit said, “You’ll feel better once we’re out of Trump country. Even better when Trump and his gang get kicked out of office.”

“That’s the problem,” I replied. “Climate change is happening now. By the time Trump gets kicked out, the whole world might be Trump country.”

Trump’s plan to stop school shootings

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

Donald Trump thinks real life is reality TV, or an old cowboy movie. To counter the threat of more mass shootings in schools, he wants to issue guns to 20 percent of schoolteachers in America. The movie version of his idea should star Clint Eastwood as an octogenarian teacher:

FADE IN
Young wacko enters schoolroom toting a semi-automatic rifle. A teacher confronts him. The wacko squares off with the teacher while students hide under their desks.

WACKO (Smiling) This school ain’t big enough for the both of us, old man.
TEACHER (Smiling) Feelin’ lucky, punk? You better git while the gittin’s good.

Wacko raises rifle and aims. Teacher whips out concealed handgun and shoots wacko dead before he can kill any students. Skinny student emerges from under desk.

STUDENT (Shouting) You killed him, Mr. Callahan! You shot him with your gun!
TEACHER: (Whispering) I did, Johnny. You run along now and tell the principal the showdown is over. The rest of you boys and girls can go home now. Tomorrow I’ll get back to learnin’ you how to read and write.

Patriotic music swells. Credits roll. Teacher slips gun into concealed holster and puts on cowboy hat.

CUT TO:
Setting sun faces teacher as he strolls out of school and into parking lot, casting a long shadow.
FADE OUT

Trump’s defense: A house is not a hole

~ odd man out

Leave it to the worst U.S. president in history to bring the office down a few more notches by making this remark at a meeting about immigration last week: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

The Washington Post reported the quotation, and that was that for a day or so, until it dawned on the dummy-in-chief that people outside his base thought his remark had been despicable.

So then, of course, he tweeted “…this was not the language used at the meeting.”

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, who was present at the meeting, rebuked Trump and added that the “shithole” remark was in keeping with the rest of what Trump had said to those in attendance: “He said these hate-filled things and he said them repeatedly.” And Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, also at the meeting, more-or-less went along with the Post’s account.

But then, incredibly, Trump attempted to turn the shitstorm in his favor by trotting out two Republican lackeys — Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, both at the meeting — who reportedly said that our fearless leader had said “shithouse” countries, not “shithole” countries.

Scholars took note. The leader of the free world might have said “shithouse” instead of “shithole.” Untold millions had begun to wonder if Trump harbored cruelly racist feelings about poor, non-white peoples and was stupid enough to voice those feelings in front of congressional leaders at a meeting about immigration.

Thank God he cleared that up!

A big victory for the vile but discreet

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Last week, after Roy Moore lost the race for a Senate seat in Alabama, I wrote “Old-guard Senate Republicans don’t like over-the-top vile. They like guys who are vile but discreet.”

In other words, they prefer colleagues who are like themselves. But there’s always room under their tent for guys like Moore and Donald Trump, faux-populists who convince low-information voters (gotta love the euphemism!) that the GOP is more than just the party of the rich.

But that’s exactly what the GOP is. Congressional Republicans invariably push for legislation like the newly passed tax bill, which is nothing but a huge giveaway to the corporations and individuals that fund their campaigns and set their agendas.

Vile but discreet Republicans — the McConnells and Grassleys and Cornyns and so on — don’t grab pussies or wave pistols or publicly dismiss Mexicans as criminals. They pretend to be appalled by the antics of their overtly vile colleagues. They pretend to serve both rich and poor constituents, and to worry about the federal deficit.

Some of them — the pipsqueak Bob Corker comes to mind — even pretended to doubt the wisdom of the new tax bill before adjustments were made to ensure the bill would benefit them personally.

In the end, all the Republicans in the Senate and all but twelve in the House voted yes to the bill, because it will further enrich their masters and themselves.

Maybe passage of the tax bill will wake Democrats to their great opportunity to retake both houses of Congress next year in the midterms. But don’t bet on it too early — Dems are experts at blowing opportunities.

Why Comcast sucks, in case you need a reminder

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

Bayou Shack.

The Swamp Rabbit and I were weatherproofing his new shack in Tinicum Swamp and discussing the repeal of net neutrality rules. There is no end to a plutocrat’s money lust, I said, or to an oligarch’s lust for power.

“What’s the difference between a pluto-cat and an oligarch?” Swamp Rabbit said.

I had to think about that. “A plutocrat is a rich businessperson who is obsessed with becoming even richer,” I said. “An oligarch is one of a small gang of people who control the government. You can be a oligarch without being a plutocrat, but oligarchs these days are almost always plutocrats.”

Swamp Rabbit drove a nail into a crossbeam and said, “You mean like Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast? How much you think him and his pluto-cat friends spent on killing net neutrality?”

Good question. Comcast runs an empire of media outlets and has spent multi-millions on lobbyists. Verizon and AT&T other mega-corporations have also spent huge amounts. I said, “I’m not sure, but you can bet your scrawny rabbit ass that a lot of their lobbying money came from overcharging cable customers.”

You have to be persistent to become an oligarch, I explained. Comcast lobbied extra-hard to deep-six net neutrality rules installed in 2015, when Obama was president. Their efforts paid off bigly after Trump got elected and appointed Republican and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai to chair the FCC.

“Damn!” Swamp Rabbit said. “Now the pluto-cats can make us pay more for faster internet connections, and they can block websites they don’t like.”

He drank from a bottle of Wild Turkey and coughed for a minute. Then he said, “I get it that a gang of corporate scumbags owns the media. But shouldn’t the gov’mint be worried that scumbags have all that power?”

“That’s just it,” I replied. “The scumbags are the gov’mint. They’re oligarchs, remember? Pass me that bottle.”

Dylan’s reaction to the big prize was… Dylanesque

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

“Philip Roth just bought an acoustic guitar.”

That’s what novelist Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers, posted on Facebook soon after it was announced that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perrotta was either taking a shot at the Swedish Academy for not giving the $900,000 award to Roth, who is arguably long overdue for it, or he was just making a good joke.

A lot of writers and critics and even a member of the Swedish Academy took shots at Dylan last week. How could a mere singer-songwriter not acknowledge what an honor and privilege it was to be in the company of the great novelists Faulkner and Bellow and the great poet Eliot?

A whole other crew wanted Dylan to reject the Nobel – to say “Aw shucks, pop songs ain’t literature, I don’t deserve your prize.”

How dare he not respond at all?

The obvious answer – this is just Dylan being Dylan – wasn’t good enough for James Wolcott and other critics, but I’ll accept it.

Dylan has been putting his poetry to music for more than a half-century, more or less on his own terms, inspired by Elvis and Woody, Eliot and Pound, Ma Rainey and Beethoven.

He defied his folkie fan base by going electric in the mid-1960s, a move that resulted in the back-to-back masterpieces Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. Then did an about-face with the quietly cryptic John Wesley Harding. He surprised everybody with his mid-1970s comeback, Blood On the Tracks.

He never pretended to be a hippie or a punk or a disco duck. Or the voice of a generation.

He lets his work speak for him. There were no soul-baring profiles in People magazine, no deep reveals to Terry Gross, no acceptance of the notion that an artist must surrender to convention and become a celebrity.

Dylan might show up to accept the Nobel in December, as he has done for other awards, but his early silence regarding the big prize is his way of saying awards are bullshit – that they have more to do with fashion than with originality, or even quality.

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” he once sang. And “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Or do you?

Killing dissent softly at the DNC

~ odd man out ~ 7 Comments

I like to run the streets to calm the demons in my head before bedtime. It’s like meditation or prayer, except you need good shoes and plenty of water, especially during heat waves like the one we endured while the Democratic National Convention was in Philly.

As I mentioned last time, the DNC took place near Broad Street, at the Wells Fargo Center, not far from the swamp where I live. It was capped Thursday night by Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech, which had an intro from her daughter Chelsea, who raised the event to a new level of kitsch while reminiscing about Mom and Dad and even Grandma, who would have been “so, so proud” of Hillary last night.

After a few minutes of her dreck, I left the house and ran to Broad Street. I was serenaded by droning police helicopters to the south, circling the convention site, where protesters had gathered for the fourth straight day to show contempt for the Democratic nominee and the nomination process.

I knew the humidity was high because I could feel the sweat dripping off my fingers, and that protesters were active because cop cars were racing down Broad, followed by a big white police bus used to haul large groups of prisoners to jail.

And I knew from being at the site on previous nights that the protesters — there may have been a few thousand at times — wouldn’t get anywhere near the convention center because the “protest zone” created by the feds was hundreds of yards away from the center and fenced off like a cattle pen.

So I ran a few miles and went home just in time to see the end of Hillary’s dreadfully well-rehearsed speech. Then she and hubby Bill and other luminaries, flashing ultra-bright grins, pushed and poked at red, white and blue balloons, which had been released by the thousands after the speech.

The point is, convention planners made sure nothing inside or outside the convention venue was spontaneous or real — at least not for long. Even the balloon-poking seemed rehearsed.

Kudos to the cops for not engaging in the heavy-handed tactics that made Philly look bad during the 2000 RNC convention. This time around, in the name of keeping the peace, and with lots of help from the Democratic National Committee and federal agents, they smothered dissent almost before it could rear its feeble head.

So America can breathe easy now. The homeland is safe from those bomb-throwing Bernie bros. Everything is under control. We’re all in the same cattle pen.

The DNC celebrity fest, from a distance

~ odd man out ~ 8 Comments

This week, more reminders that police and the major parties have mastered the trick of keeping protesters at a distance from national conventions without making mass arrests that might result in bad publicity.

That’s why this year’s DNC is at the Wells Fargo Center, one of several sports venues on Philly’s southern fringe, far removed from any actual street life. You can see for miles down there, but all you can see are parking lots, ballparks and arenas.

Hardcore Bernie loyalists, Jill Stein supporters and other protesters are permitted to march down Broad Street and gather in FDR Park, to the west of Wells Fargo Center, in the unrelenting July heat, but fences prevent them from getting anywhere near the center itself.

In fact, they can do little more than march past one another chanting slogans — preaching to the choir, as it were — with the knowledge they will be herded into police vans and face federal charges if they do anything cops deem disruptive.

Philly is my hometown. I’ve biked to the convention scene several times to join the protesters, but the setting raises an age-old question: If thousands of protesters chant in a place where no one else can hear them, do they really make a sound?

Inside the convention center rich celebrities, one after another, have taken the stage to tell us commoners why we should vote for Hillary, who in the past has taken exactly the wrong stand on many issues important to progressives.

Paul Simon sang and so did Alicia Keys. Meryl Streep’s speech was a testimonial for Hillary. And so on. The message of the event is that Democrats must unite in order to make sure Donald Trump is defeated. A good message, but why all the celebrity kitsch?

On Monday, former Bernie supporter Sarah Silverman went so far as to admonish nay-sayers in the building. She said, “To the Bernie-or-bust people, you’re being ridiculous.”

To which I would have replied, “To me, Sarah, the fact that you can scold Bernie die-hards on national TV, just because you’re a celebrity, is ridiculous. Your presumption that you can influence my vote, just because you’re a celebrity, is insulting. Vote for whomever you prefer. Meanwhile, please shut the fuck up.”

Update on Melania’s cribbing – the ballerina did it!

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

#News:  Penulis Pidato Melania Trump Minta Maaf0

I was updating Swamp Rabbit on the screw-up at the RNC, where Melania Trump made a speech that was partly cribbed from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 DNC.

“You were part right,” I said. “Melania rejected the original speech, written by two guys who used to work for George W. Bush. Then she apparently did a rewrite with Meredith McIver, an ex-ballerina who helped Trump write some of his books. Yesterday, McIver took responsibility for the plagiarized sections.”

Swamp Rabbit gnawed on a carrot. “But why would the ballerina want to crib from a speech by Obama’s wife, of all people? Republicans think Obama is the Great Satan.”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “The ballerina said she put in the Michele stuff, almost word for word, then forgot to remove them from the final draft.”

The rabbit spit into the swamp. “That don’t make no sense. Why did she put them in there in the first place?”

I shrugged. “Because Melania liked Michelle’s speech. I think it gets back to what I said yesterday — Trump is too cheap and disorganized to hire reliable staffers, or to check on what they’re up to. He doesn’t understand it’s dangerous to let cronies and family members make campaign decisions. He has the attention span of a gnat, and he’s too vain to own up to mistakes.”

“So are you,” Swamp Rabbit said. “You thought Melania might be the victim but she’s the one did the cribbing. She let the ballerina take the fall instead of owning up to it. She and her freaky husband deserve each other.”

Melania’s rude awakening?

~ odd man out

Here’s my friend Swamp Rabbit imagining Melania Trump and the Donald after she found out part of her speech at the 2016 Republican convention was lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic convention:

“How could you do zis to me? All over country zee peoples are laugh-ink. Vy you hire writer who is thief? Do not touch me. I sink maybe you are mad man.”

“The accent’s not quite right,” I told Swamp Rabbit. “You sound like Zsa Zsa Gabor. Melania is Slovenian, not Hungarian.”

“Same difference,” he said, opening another bottle of Wild Turkey. “The point is she’ll never forgive that goofy-looking bastard for trotting her out there to make a fool of herself on national TV.”

He tried to pass the bottle but I declined the offer. “How do you know she didn’t steal those words on her own?” I said. “Before she gave the speech, she told reporters she wrote it.”

“Hahahahaha,” he said. “That’s what they all say. But why would she dip into a stream of cliches — reach for your dreams, work hard, keep your nose clean, blah blah — from Obama’s wife, of all people, and recite them almost word for word on national TV? No way, dude, somebody did this to her. Probably some hack who was hired because Trump is too cheap to fork over the big bucks for a good speechwriter.”

I told Swamp Rabbit he might be right, but I predicted Melania wouldn’t stay angry. She’ll remember that her hubby, the self-obsessed fraud with the Orange Crush weave, is capable of anything. He says the world is flat one day and round the next. He praises his wife as he sends her out to deliver a plagiarized speech. Then he asks his fans who they believe, him or their lying eyes.

Swamp Rabbit nipped at his bourbon and said, “I sink maybe he is a mad man.”

“Could be,” I replied. “But what’s that say about the millions of people who voted for him? What’s it say about Melania?”