Category Archives: Politics

Occupy Oakland: From Flowers in Your Hair to the Dark Side


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

Oakland Protestors

TIME TO TAKE THE HIGH GROUND – The Occupy Oakland movement is at the crossroads of peaceful demonstration and violence. It’s time for the ‘organic’ movement to learn how to better cultivate allies.

The San Francisco Bay area has a long history of protest – much of it gone violent. At 1960s UC Berkeley, Vietnam war opponents started as idealistic, flowers in your hair protesters who morphed into glass breakers, nascent fire bugs, and building grabbers with a few Molotov hurlers for good measure. Next door, the hard-scrabble neighborhoods of East Oakland are now the perfect breeding ground for discontent.  It would seem to be the right place for the Occupy movement to set up tents. Plenty of people with grievances and lots of rich people to snub.

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God Needs a Better PR Team


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

God Wants Low Wages

GOD WANTS LOW WAGES – Pay them nothing and they will teach.

I’ve only half-joked for years that God really needs a better PR team here in the temporal world. Some of the most log-headed charlatans, grifters, and just plain logically-challenged people claim to speak on His behalf. Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and the ethically inept Newt Gingrich are just a few who work non-stop to tarnish God’s image.

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BANG! You’re Very Poor


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

The Old Homestead

THE OLD HOMESTEAD – It’s not my grandparents’ shack, but it is a close facsimile. If Mitt Romney would live in a place like this for a week, I’d vote for him.

Much has been said about how multi-millionaire candidates relate to the middle class. Most of them advize Americans who are part of the shrinking middle class to simply get new  jobs. They’re understandably silent on just how to pull that off in the recession they’ve created. In their opinion, any grousing from Americans caught in the vice of diminishing means is just class warfare against the wealthy, Cayman Island, tax-dodging, outsourcing, politically powerful. BANG! You’re very poor.

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I Know How Copernicus Must Have Felt


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

Copernicus

NICOLAUS COPERNICUS – 21st Century man.

I know how Copernicus must have felt.  He’s the fellow who first posited that the Sun, and not Earth, was at the center of the universe. For his trouble he was branded a heretic and ostracized by the Catholic church. It turns out Nicolaus was right and the Pope, not so much. It’s a familiar story. It has legs. It’s still happening at the hands of the far right ignorati.

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When Candidates Don’t Get Video and Audio Tape


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

Barack Obama for CNN“BARACK OBAMA REPORTING FROM CAPITOL HILL” – Every politician will run afoul of evil video or audio tape. The good ones will get the hang of it and mostly stay off the Daily Show, the bad ones will get virtually bludgeoned on the evening news.

Six years after noted grifter and late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens showed his impeccable technology credentials by likening the Internet to a “series of tubes”, our erstwhile Presidential nominees struggle with the most basic pre-21st Century gadgets. Gadgets like cameras and audio tape. This is a disturbing trend for a gaggle of walking egos intent on becoming the most audio and video-taped person on the planet.

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