Showing posts with label Oklahoma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oklahoma. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Brown v Warren


Boy, did the Republicans show Elizabeth Warren! They denied her the leadership of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington—the bureau she conceived of and created—only to see her starting to run away with their Senate seat in Massachusetts. A UMass Lowell-Boston Herald poll shows her leading Republican Senator Scott Brown by a 7 percent margin, 49 to 42. According to MSNBC show host Lawrence O’Donnell, who knows politics from the inside, “That is an absolutely devastating poll for any incumbent senator. Any sitting senator running for reelection goes into full panic mode as soon as his or her polling number drops below 50 percent. The rule in politics is: an incumbent polling at 42 percent absolutely cannot win reelection…” Did they give it to her!

It’s so beautiful it positively shines. Let’s follow the bouncing balls. Scott Brown bared himself—again—this time by defying his party’s marching orders and endorsing President Obama's nominee to lead the GOP-dreaded bureau, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray—who was aggressively going after his state’s banks for foreclosure fraud when he was ousted by a Republican challenger—who was subsequently hired for the consumer protection bureau by Elizabeth Warren, the GOP’s bete noire who’s beating the tail off Brown and on the verge of taking Ted Kennedy’s coveted seat back from the Republicans. Now, Senator Brown, that’s what I call being hoisted on your own petard!

And why would Scott Brown do such a reckless thing? Because it wasn’t reckless, it was cynical. Both he and the GOP knew the party had the votes for a filibuster: they could easily deprive Cordray of the up-and-down vote they routinely rail about being deprived of. It’s conceivable, if not likely, that Brown’s GOP guidance counselor(s) advised him to “defy” the party to impress his constituency. See how well that’s working!


Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Elizabeth Warren hasn’t won yet, not by a long shot! Be warned, Warreniks, the Republicans have her number. You’ve got to hand it to them! They’ve already exposed the college professor who’s never run for public office for being “a Harvard elitist and an
outsider,” and what’s more, they’re “stressing that she was born and raised in Oklahoma.”

Where do I start? “Harvard Elitist?” Where’s the problem here? Is it with Harvard, or with being educated or skilled, or, truth be told, with simply not being ignorant? And if ignorance is so glorious, as it seems to have become—particularly to roughly 50% of American voters in presidential election years—aren’t the ignorant the Ignorant Elitists?


“Outsider?” With every Republican presidential candidate turning him or her self inside out to be seen as
The Washington Outsider, while in actuality none of them qualify for being anything but insiders—an incumbent congressman and congresswoman, a former congressman who was the 58th Speaker of the House of Representatives, a former senator, a former governor and a present one, and a former ambassador—how can any Republican legitimately brand and denounce Elizabeth Warren for being “an outsider”? Haven’t they heard of the advice for people who live in glass houses? Surely it ought to be part of the platform of the Ignorant Elitists.

Finally… this is not for the faint of heart… let’s not mix words, I’ll just come right out and say it… the audacious Ms. Warren is so outside she was “born and raised in Oklahoma.” “Okla-Okla-Okla-Oklahoma!” “Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain,” or at least probably did when Warren was born and raised there. Can you get more outside than that? Take note, Massachusetts independents, undecideds and, lest we forget—Republicans. Do they ever have her nailed!

Sunday, November 22, 2009

There Oughta Be A Law


When comic books were comic, a syndicated two-panel cartoon strip, There Oughta Be a Law, gave voice and vent to Americans’ frustrations with just about anything they thought was unfair and should be redressed by a law. Between the 1940s and the 80s, Broadway’s biggest musical, Oklahoma!—with its significant exclamation point—ran for an unprecedented five years; the Mad Ave-hyped Ford Edsel lasted for only three; but There Oughta Be a Law stayed popularly in print for four decades.

I wish “Oughta Be” were around today. I would write cartoonist-creator Harry Shorten to say there oughta be a law in New York City that states anything that isn’t good for the city is unlawful. What has me fuming right now is—brace yourself—a bedbug billboard in Times Square. That’s right, a bedbug. On a billboard. If you haven’t seen it, avert your eyes if you come to it… cover the eyes of your children (and pets)… and, by all means, do not let a visitor to New York see it. Detour, sidle past, walk backwards, but take that tourist dearest to you and to the New York economy and jay-walk the hell out of there.

A bedbug on Broadway! Mayor Bloomberg, where are you? A big, ugly, crawly bug is straddling skyscrapers half its size across a billboard sprawling above a pizza parlor! You eat pizza! The villain is an ad—a tawdry, tacky scare ad for a company called Protect-A-Bed, a crass merchant telling us, “Protect Yourself.” But who’s going to protect Broadway theaters and Manhattan hotels and city restaurants from Protect-A-Bed?

Protect-A-Bed claims its same mattress covers protect against bedwetting. Will people come from all over the world to be sobered by a display of a man pissing on a New York skyline? Above a salad bar?

I don’t believe in curtailing free speech, Mayor B., but this isn’t speech, this is visual assault. There oughta be a law! It isn’t free enterprise, it is economic depravity. Why not a bill-boarded illustration of a bedbug taking a juicy bite out of The Big Apple?!

You spent 69 million dollars—and changed a law a lot of New Yorkers thought oughta be—just to keep your job. Let your affluence do the talking. Why not buy the billboard and change it to something all New Yorkers inherently take pride in?
_____

Curious to know what you, the reader, think there oughta be a law about. That’s what the “Comments” section below is for.