Seven Genuine Political Nightmares That You Haven’t Had Yet (But I Have)

Note: Please don’t tell me these nightmares are inconsistent with each other. These are nightmares, damnit, not legal briefs or footnoted term papers.

Ms. Gingrich wearing the
official platinum- painted steel
helmet that comes in sizes S,
M, L, and XL

1. I have gone to sleep. I wake up because the TV is blaring that there has been a coup d’état. The good news is, Donald Trump has been deposed. The bad news is, he has been deposed by Newt Gingrich. Gingrich’s first decree is that every woman must wear a hairdo like his wife, Callista’s. Those who for reasons of incompatible hair cannot do so will be issued platinum-painted steel helmets in the shape of Ms. Gingrich’s hair. In the midst of all this, I go to the men’s room, where some nincompoop who thinks he’s playing a practical joke slaps a Calista helmet on my head. Next thing I know, I am arrested by an enraged cop bearing a strange resemblance to Mike Pence, for using the wrong bathroom.

2. Government employees, entering their ninth year without pay, go on strike. President For Life By Popular Acclaim Trump calls out the Army to arrest them. The next day the employees go to court, insisting their arrest is illegal under the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude. Within 24 hours, working on an expedited basis, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, Speaker of the House Rick Santorum, and the Republican governors of 57 of the 60 states (California has been divided into six smaller states; Wyoming and Montana have each been divided into two, and something else happened in Texas but I forget what ) ratify the 13th Amendment’s repeal. While they are at it, they outlaw contraceptives and restore Prohibition.

3. A big scandal arises when Ann Coulter is caught in bed with Donald Trump. Enterprising journalists discover that Rudy Giuliani has paid Melania Trump $170,000 to shut up about it. But she still keeps bringing it up with Donald, night after night, making it impossible for him to tweet.

4. The following week, Trump is found in bed with Rudy Giuliani.

                          

5. While Sarah Sanders is on vacation at an evangelical summer camp, a crazed atheist activist with an icepick runs up to her and stabs her in the backside. This sets off a spurting nine foot high geyser of yellow fat that will not stop, and cannot be stopped no matter what paramedics from a nearby ambulance corps and a team of doctors attempt. The fat forms a mighty river, complete with rapids, that flows into the ocean and creates a massive bloom of purple algae that kills all sea life and also peels the paint off boat bottoms. I wake up from this nightmare feeling terribly shaken and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. However, water from the tap is full of purple algae. I then realize that waking up from the nightmare is part of the nightmare, too. I slap myself across the face several times, and finally really wake up.Then I turn on the television set. Donald Trump is still president. Now I’m not sure whether I’m still having the nightmare or not.

6. I am at sea in a lifeboat with Mayor Bill De Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, both of New York. Suddenly, a malevolent swordfish comes by and pokes a hole in the bottom of the boat with his bill. The boat begins taking on water fast. I grab an empty coffee can that for some reason has Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s picture on it, and begin to bale out the boat. It is exhausting work. I can barely keep up. Finally, panting, I tell De Blasio and Cuomo I can’t do it any more, and ask them to help. They immediately begin arguing, each insisting the other should bale out the boat. Finally, the lifeboat sinks. De Blasio and Cuomo both swim away. I start to drown. Fortunately, the swordfish comes by again, feels some remorse, and lets me climb on his back while he swims to shore. When I finally stumble onto the beach, I am personally arrested by Donald Trump on suspicion of being an illegal alien because I did not enter the country at a legal port of entry.

7. There is a sea of humanity. A massive wave of people —tens of thousands of them — are waving placards bearing political slogans. Suddenly, Kim Jong Un parachutes from a helicopter to a platform on the Mall in Washington, D.C., carrying a big red box wrapped in festive paper and ribbons. He walks up to Donald Trump, who happens to be sitting on the platform on a folding chair, and tries to hand him the package. “Season’s greetings!” Kim says to Trump. “From now on, we’re all saying Merry Christmas,” says Trump. He folds his arms across his chest and refuses to accept the package. “Season’s Greetings, you slimebag,” Kim says. “Get ‘him out of here!” yells Trump. “Get him the hell out of here. Rough him up on the way out!” Just then, Kim presses a previously unnoticed button on the side of the box and the nuclear bomb inside explodes. Washington D.C. goes up in a mushroom cloud. When the smoke clears, the city is a flattened wasteland of ashes and rubble. Just then, a manhole cover in the street is pushed up from below. Mitt Romney climbs out of the hole and declares himself President.

Pssst! What's gonna happen in the hush-hush meeting between Mitt and Jeb?

The New York Times reports this morning that Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are on the verge of, as they  used to say in Hollywood, taking a meeting. I wonder what that could be about? My imagination runs wild.

• In one scenario, Mitt and Jeb decide one will run for President and the other for Vice President, but then beat each other to death with their bare fists in an argument over whose banana will be top banana. Chris Christie delivers eulogies at the funerals of both, but inexplicably gains so much weight and girth despite his lap band surgery that he becomes unelectable, leaving the nomination to a runoff between Rick Perry and opportunity-seizing Joni Ernst.

• In another, Mitt and Jeb iron out the vice president issue and decide they'll play good cop/bad cop, with one of them acknowledging citizens' concerns over wages and global warming and the other denying the same and declaring that the only way to save the economy and the planet is to put all unemployed Americans to work laying Keystone XL oil pipe for less than minimum wages.  The idea is, whatever you're for or against, you can find somebody on the ticket who'll make you want to vote Republican.

• In yet another, the purpose of the meeting turns out to be that Bush merely wants to rent some of Mitt's residential garage space when Jeb goes on fund-raising visits to Malibu. In exchange for parking in Mitt's elevator-accessed garage, Jeb offers Mitt a percentage of the fund raising proceeds.

• Or perhaps it's just this: both admit at the meeting that neither of them can beat Hillary, but instead plan a post-election joint career for themselves on FoxTV – an hour of weekly wit and wisdom called The Mitt and Jeb Show. Their long-term aim: to turn the TV talk show into a Broadway musical with songs that have titles like: "If it's getting so hot, how come everybody tells me I'm cold?" And "My solution to pollution is a coal mine in Wyoming." Plus the big, bring-down-the-curtain romantic song at the end of the first act: "I'm 47 percent in love with you."

Stay tuned.

Just when you think things can't get any stupider, they get....well, you know

I really have to get busier. I’ve spent far too much time wallowing in the mud with idiots today, and some of the idiocy I've been fending off is going to come out right on this post about stupid news.

For example, if you think I’m having a slow day, think of all the people whose jockey shorts are in a twist because of a TV advertising spot showing a brain surgeon (actor) manipulating the brain of a patient (actor) to punch a surgical nurse (actor) and make travel reservations on Kayak.

An English newspaper called The Mirror reports:

Of the 441 complaints received by the Advertising Standards Authority, "a number" found it offensive, 25 were concerned that it could be distressing to children and 16 believed it was insulting to surgeons and the medical profession in general.

Oh please!

But then there’s graver stuff. Over at Time Magazine, heads are about to roll. 500 of them, to be precise, says a story in Ad Age. It’s all the usual grief over falling circulation, falling advertising revenues, and failing business models. But what got my attention is that the people are getting axed not because revenues are falling (although Time is still profitable) but that the recommendations about axing jobs came following a “top to bottom” review from…wait for it…

You guessed it.

Mitt Romney’s firm, Bain Capital. In other words, more job lost after an analysis from the very bowels of Mr. Job Creator himself. Aintcha glad he didn’t get elected President?

Interestingly, although management came to a decisive conclusion about axing human beings after the Bain review, Time just can’t seem to make up its mind about its very valuable real estate holdings in New York according to an exclusive story from Reuters.

Should they sell the Time-Warner building and move? Sell it and lease it back? Move more employees into it from other office locations around town and give up those locations?

Oh, never mind. That stuff’s too hard. Just fire 500 people and give yourself a bonus.

"In an attempt to save a 4-month-old fetus they killed my 30-year-old daughter. How is that fair? You tell me." (P.S. The fetus died, too.)

The woman who died was 31 years old, married, and a well-educated professional – a practicing dentist. She was starting to miscarry her 17-weeks-old fetus.

But she was in Ireland, a country where the law forbids abortions and doctors are terrified of prosecution. So they had to wait until the fetus died to “abort” it. Unfortunately, they were too late. The woman died too, of blood poisoning caused by the dying and then suppurating fetus. Story here.

"Right to Life" movement?

It's really a Right to Murder movement.

When the insanely “conservative” and increasingly sociopathic right wing in our own country talk about outlawing abortions, even in cases of medical necessity like the one in Ireland, they’re talking, quite cavalierly, about murdering – yes murdering – women. These were the people behind Mitt Romney, and to whom Romney would have owed some payback legislation, had he been elected.

Moreover, after his “47 percent” speech to fat cat donors became a scandal, Romey looked straight into the cameras just before the election and all but took a blood oath that he would be a staunch defender of all Americans, including middle and working class Americans. Now Romney is taking it all back.

His loss of the election, he clearly seems to be saying  to his donors, was not because of his own policies, or flip-flopping, or his lying. It’s because, Romney says,  President Obama showered his voters with “gifts.” Where I come from, Mr. Romney, they call those things policies. 

Human rights aren't gifts

We're talking about ways to extend medical insurance to the young, and to overhaul our broken healthcare system, for example. In other countries,  they call those human rights. What you wanted to give the two percent in this nation – a continuation of the Bush tax cuts, plus other tax cuts – that was a bloated gift, to people who don’t need gifts. And the money for your two percent would have come straight from the pockets of of the rest of us.

So good riddance to you, Mr. Romney. It looks like, by sending you back to your many vacation homes and cars, and car elevators, and offshore bank accounts, the citizens of the United States dodged a bullet. And maybe also the horrible deaths of pregnant mothers in need of medically necessary abortions.

New York in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: the bad, the worse, and the revolting

If all politics is local, then all local hurricanes are political, not to mention personal. All it takes is living through one "perfect storm" to learn how personal and political they can really get, and how fast.

Personally, the worst was over for me at 1 a.m. Saturday. (A neighbor, putting an extra-fine point on it, insists that the power in our building actually  came on at 12: 59 a.m.  I won’t quibble with a woman who carries around a teeth-baring Chihuahua-Jack Russell Terrier mix in her shoulder bag. If you ask me, the power outage irked the dog even worse than it irked me.) 

I had gone to sleep in the silence of a blacked out Friday night, huddled under a blanket in my uncomfortably chilly apartment. I woke up with a bright table lamp shining in my eyes and the television set booming.

The simple joy

of flushing a toilet

I turned off the TV, headed to the bathroom, and did something I had been yearning to do for five days. I flushed the toilet. It had been unflushable since the power went out, disabling our building's water supply and turning my apartment into a reeking hovel.  Then I flushed again, and still again a third time before getting back into bed.

First thing the next morning, I took a long, hot shower. And believe me, Saturday was also a good day in New York for the makers of Lysol, Toilet Duck and Tidy Bowl.

But although the worst of it was over for me, the hurricane left a long wake of despair, squalor, high-handedness and political opportunism that won’t disperse any time soon.

An icy case in point:

misery in the Rockaways

Out in the Rockaways, a stretch of barrier beach that runs along the Atlantic coasts of Brooklyn and Queens near JFK Airport, there was still no electricity as of early this morning. There are basically two kinds of residential real estate out there: small private homes on individual lots, and high-rise apartment buildings, some of them low income "project" housing. Many of the private homes had been destroyed by the storm. The high-rises were a continuing disaster – still no power or heat, and now the temperatures, at least at night, are headed toward freezing.

I can’t blame this one on Con Edison. For some reason, the public utility out there is LIPA, the Long Island Power Authority. LIPA blithely changed its estimate for the restoration of power from a week to “seven weeks,” according to Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, quoted in a Queens community newspaper. 

Seven weeks? Heck, why not put it off until late Spring, when thousands of people freezing to death won’t be such a pressing issue?

Not that LIPA isn’t doing something in the Rockaways. They’re working to restore traffic lights, according to their own website. 

What doesn’t quite pass the sniff test is that they claim to have 100 restoration crews in the Rockaways. One hundred crews? And all they can work on are traffic lights while thousands freeze in the dark? Even Mayor Bloomberg’s feathers are getting a bit ruffled by this. It’s about time. Earlier, he was busy getting huffy about the fact that New Yorkers are complaining there’s no power, slipping into his oh-stop-your-bellyaching mode.

 

The mayor’s just fine --

so you’d better shut up

“People pay more, generally, to be closer to the water, even though you could argue they should pay less because it’s more dangerous,” he announced sagely. “But people are willing to run the risk.”

Oh really? Actually, Mr. Mayor, there are lots of people living in low-income, high-rise housing projects in the Rockaways who don’t live there for the sea air and the nearby ocean visitas. They live there because that’s where the New York City Housing Authority stuck them. Remember the verse from that song about the Titanic?

“Well, they sailed from England
And were almost to our shore
When the rich refused
To associate with the poor
So they put ‘em down below
Where they were the first to go
It was sad when that great ship went down.” 

Perhaps Mayor Bloomberg, who lives in an above-decks neigborhood in the comfort of his East 79^th Street mansion, where the power and heat and water never went off, and the deluxe food market Citarella is a short walk for one of mansion’s household staff ... perhaps he feels that if he’s as snug as a bug in a rug, everybody else should just shut up.

The truth is, the mayor actually encourages low-lying housing, while claiming the city can’t possibly build high bulkheads to prevent the water from rushing in to damage the housing he encourages. (Perhaps he’s never heard of Holland.) 

Says a respected New York real estate blog:

Hurricane Sandy has caused flooding in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, including in several areas where the Bloomberg Administration has supported increased residential development, such as Williamsburg. Even the Gowanus Canal overflowed, close to an area that was rezoned several years ago to allow additional development.

The Gowanus is a canal whose waters are known for their high toxicity. It's also, they say, where the Mafia would go to dump its bodies, since whatever the cops tried pulled out of there was likely to be half dissolved by the Gowanus chemical soup, and therefore unidentifiable.

And then the blog tossed out this Bloombergian nugget:

Bloomberg added that it wasn’t necessary to make investments in infrastructure in these areas that could help control storm surges. The city cannot build an offshore barrier reef or big bulkheads, he said. “I think we’ve done a lot of preparation in terms of roads, strengthening things,” he said. 

Yes, Mr. Mayor, I noticed the strength as the hurricane hit, and in its aftermath. That’s why people are still freezing, supermarkets below 39^th Street still had no food on their shelves as of Sunday evening (other than ketchup and some junk candy) , while hundreds of dry cleaners, restaurants, delis, shoe repair shops, hardware stores, boutiques, and even franchises like McDonalds took financial hits – hits which some of the smaller businesses won’t survive.

That’s also why, in order to buy milk and meat, I had to travel uptown, to the Mayor’s neighborhood. And that was on Sunday, after the power came on. The supermarkets in blackout neighborhoods had thrown out all their old perishables after the power went off, and still hadn’t received fresh deliveries. Ditto most of the restaurants.

The Marathon, the cancellation,

and the grumpy aftermath

Meanwhile, the mayor focused a considerable amount of concern on the New York City Marathon, even while the citizens of his city were freezing in the dark. People pleaded with him to cancel the thing.

But the mayor hung on, evidently heeding the self-entitled concerns of the New York Road Runners Club president Mary Wittenberg, instead of the pleas of the rest of the city’s citizens. They said, “We are cold, we are homeless, we are hungry.” And Mayor Bloomberg replied, in effect, hey, the Marathon is good for gross receipts.

Somebody must have finally sat the mayor down and said (not in these exact words, of course) “Look, jerk! The symbolism of diverting gasoline-powered electric generators to Central Park in order to heat massage tents while New Yorkers freeze in the dark is going to make you look very bad.”

There was also the problem of a hotel room shortage, with nearly every hotel south of 39^th Street closed for want of power. (That includes six high rise hotels in my immediate neighborhood, ranging from the deluxe Kitano to middle-of-the-road establishments like the Dumont Affinia.) There was also word creeping out concerning New Yorkers, who had found shelter in hotels further uptown, getting told to leave to make room for marathoners.

So finally, with the grudging assent of the New York Road Runners, (Mary Wittenberg stood next to him, looking grim while he spoke) the mayor cancelled the marathon late on Friday.

Unfortunately his shilly-shallying made it too late for some of the marathon contestants, who had already flown here, some from abroad, often at a cost of thousands of dollars, to participate in the event. “I would have understood this – if it did it a couple of days earlier,” one marathon contestant said.

Exactly.

Then Mitt gets in our faces with

a hill of bean cans and granola bars

It took an out-of-towner to show New Yorkers what self-aggrandizing opportunism is all about in the face of disastrous losses of homes, incomes, and even lives. I’m talking, of course, about Mitt Romney, whose “misguided” (that’s a press word; I’d use the adjective disgusting)... whose disgusting display all but turned the stomachs of so many commentators that it’s hard to pick just one online expression of ire as an example.

However, I’ll take this one from the Washington Post, where a blogger points out that when Romney decide to do a photo-op in Kettering, Ohio, and “accept donations” on behalf (he said) of the Red Cross, for storm victims on the East Coast, he was actually all but sabotaging relief.

He collected canned goods, granola bars, and Gatorade which, if they got here at all, would have had to have been expensively shipped over six hundred miles. The Red Cross strongly urged cash donations, which can be turned into the precisely appropriate form of relief that's needed, close to where it’s needed. And Romney, if you remember the Republican debates, will casually write checks for a ten thousand dollar bet. But hey, a check doesn’t make nearly the picture that you can get with a pile of bean cans, granola bars and Gatorade bottles.

Susan Brooks Thistelthwaite, the angry blogger for the Washington Post declared:

Anyone who has ever volunteered for relief efforts following a disaster knows that it only adds work to the relief organizations of their volunteers have to collect canned goods and granola bars. Today’s informed volunteer raises funds so experienced organizations can fund local efforts on the ground and don’t have to lug around often useless items.

In addition, Romney was photographed loading what “appeared to be multiple bags of uncooked rice” onto a truck. What good is uncooked rice for people whose power has gone out?

This is both clueless and heartless.

But I'm sure Romney didn't give a damn. His objective was free publicity, not helping the needy.

All the same, it’s nice to know, I suppose, that even if  Romney becomes President and then, as he has promised (some of the time), he cuts FEMA funding, which will worsen the situation of Americans caught in floods, earthquakes and blizzards; and he cuts food stamps so that poor people whose jobs have been flooded out will have less to eat; and he cuts Obamacare so that people who can’t get health insurance will die, or go bankrupt and lose their homes and then die; and he raises taxes on the, umm, “greedy poor,” while lowering them on the richest people in the history of this planet; then, even if we’re sleeping on the streets, kind, dear Mr. Romney will come around and hand us a tin can of cold beans. What a guy!

Apres-hurricane acronomia

New Yorker real estate interests have a way of renaming gentrifying neighborhoods with acronymic descriptors, so the neighborhoods will sound cool and new. A weakness for acronomia is the reason we have SoHo (“south of Houston” Street), NoLiTa (North of Little Italy), and DUMBO (“down under the Manhattan  Bridge Overpass,”) among others.

My friend and fellow blogger Buce has tipped me off that now the Atlantic Wire has drawn a line horizontally bisecting Manhattan at 39^th Street, renaming the entire area south of the line SoPo, for “South of Power.”

And for the real optics of what half a disempowered city looks like, at least from the air, take a look at the photograph, gracing the cover of New York Magazine. 

The infrastructure opportunity is

screaming for government money

Regardless of what New York’s in-denial mayor has to say about it, New York can and should have a system of high-tech dikes and sea walls. It’s not impossible. The Dutch were keeping the sea out, in a nation that in most places is at or below sea level, over nine centuries before Michael Bloomberg and Mitt Romney outgrew their diapers. 

We can play the Republican game of Let’s Pretend, continuing to deny that the seas are rising due to climate change or that anything can be done about it. Or we can put a lot of people, from engineers and hydrologists to construction workers and laborers to work, not only in New York but also along the Gulf  and the seacoast from New Jersey to Florida, to make America a stronger and more waterproof nation. 

But private enterprise can’t and won’t do this job if left to its own devices. New York’s local electric power utility, Con Edison, can’t or won’t bother even to build a waterproof power transfer station, which is why we had a power outage in New York in the first place.  Nor has it installed a working backup or a route-around to instantly move power in from distant power stations. Well, that's private enterprise for you. And consider: It was the U.S. Government that set up the program that got us to the moon. So you’d better believe that, if anybody does it, it will finally be the U.S. government that flood-proofs America.

Some things, from flood protection, to healthcare, to national security are just too important to be left to a bunch of greedy guys whose first priority is to make a buck.

And this just in...

Soon after I posted this, I came across an e-mail from my State Senator Liz Kreuger. It turns out things are worse than I thought. Still. And I quote her:

Additionally, some Manhattan residents dependent on steam still do not have heat or hot water because the steam plant which serves their area is not yet operational. [Cranky note: Con Edison runs the steam plant.] As temperatures continue to drop, this is a significant concern and efforts are being made to bring in emergency generators and heaters. The City has opened daytime warming centers for residents living in impacted buildings. A full list of these centers is available athttp://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2012/warming_ctr.html. Additionally, residents living without heat are welcome at the City's emergency storm shelters. The City is running buses to take people to shelters if they need a place to stay warm overnight. The bus pickups are listed here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2012/overnight_shelter.html.

Attaway! Come to New York, rent or buy an apartment for top dollar, then live like a homeless person!

Yucky toilets, stinky bodies, pissed off bus riders and other New York tales of horror from the Con Edison disaster

No, I’m not calling it the Hurricane Sandy disaster. Hurricane Sandy came and went. What we have now is a Con Edison disaster caused by an explosion of unknown cause in Con Edison equipment. (Watch the full video.)

Con Edison, New York’s electrical utility, gets the villain’s hat, thanks to a lack of redundancy in Manhattan’s electrical distribution system, and a doltishly-wired local grid that evidently doesn’t allow the utility to distribute current around the downed substation transformer that has knocked out nearly all of Manhattan from 39^th Street south to the financial district.

An eerie irony

Case in point: My apartment building has no electricity, as a consequence of which my fellow 300-or-so occupants and I have no running water (electric pumps raise the water to rooftop reservoirs in Manhattan), no land line telephones, no Internet, no television, no elevator to our high rise digs (my apartment is on the 10th floor) and not even a functioning toilet. Yet at night, my apartment is ironically bathed in an eerie glow from the art-deco zig-zagging neon lights atop the Chrysler building, six blocks to the north.

With a more intelligently designed – or redesigned – electrical grid, the wasted late night art deco razz-a-ma-tazz in a desolated city could be routed as spare power and sent south long enough to pump water up to the reservoirs on our roofs, so that we could flush our toilets once, and fill up our water pitchers. But no such luck. Why should Con Ed care? They're in this business strictly to make a profit, not to help their customers.

What does all this mean on a personal level? Well, I’m going to tell you what it’s like living with the Con Edison mess. Warning: some of this stuff is beyond disgusting.

Keep reading, but hold your nose

After two-plus days of unflushable toilets, my bathroom reeks like the outhouse from hell. I’ve saved bowel movements for my office, north of 39^th Street, where the toilets are working. Even so, the nauseating odor of standing urine is slowly creeping through my apartment despite my best efforts to keep the toilet covered and the bathroom door shut when the toilet’s not in use.

Showers are impossible. Yesterday morning, for the second time, I took about a cupful of my precious stored drinking water, put it in a Pyrex bowl, and heated the water on my stovetop after lighting a burner with a match.

Then I carried the bowl to the bathtub in my stinking bathroom, dipped a washcloth in the warm water, soaped it, and scrubbed myself down.

Even so, after two days I could smell myself. It was time to beg a favor. I called friends who have power on the Upper West Side. “Look,” I said, “I need a shower and a shampoo. And I have over two pounds of sirloin and a prime rib that are defrosting in my dead freezer. I’ll swap, steak for a shower.”

“Come on over and help us eat it,” they told me. “We’ll prepare some fluffy towels for you.” So last night I had my first hot shower in over two days, followed by a great steak dinner. Even so, it was a horrid evening.

With the power nightmare

comes a transportation nightmare

It was no picnic getting from midtown east side to the Upper West. The trip to my friends’ apartment usually takes about 45 minutes by public transportation. But last night, at 6:30 p.m.,  there was still no subway service. People who have to work here had driven into the city and were now trying to drive out again. (The mayor made no attempt I know of to discourage this.) That surge of extraordinary commuter automobile traffic, combined with an overabundance of busses, meant to substitute for nonexistent subway service, turned my Third Avenue route into a hyper-gridlocked nightmare. Available taxis? Don’t make me laugh. Besides, they would have been just another element of the gridlock.

It took me 45 minutes to ride from 38^th Street to 46^th Street. Realizing I’d never get where I was going if I went by bus alone, I got off the bus and walked briskly almost a mile up Third Avenue, past the gridlock to the East 60s, with my plastic grocery bag of bleeding defrosted steak. Then I re-boarded a bus when one arrived to East 96^th Street, and then took the East 96^th Street crosstown bus to West End Avenue. Total time for a trip of approximately three and a half miles? Two hours and fifty minutes.

The hot shower was worth it. The steak was great. (My friends have a gas barbecue on their terrace.) At midnight, when I headed home, the gridlock had passed and I was able to take a taxi to my apartment (twenty-two bucks including tip.) The taxi and the $16-a-pound steak may have made this the most expensive shower of my life. But hey, when you’re aware of your own stink, you gotta do what you gotta do.

With the pocket flashlight that I now guard as closely as I guard my wallet, I walked up ten flights of darkened stairs to my apartment, opened the door, and tried to ignore the reek of urine. It  had grown even worse by this morning when I woke up.

Con Ed congratulates itself

At the office, I was finally able to check the news. I discovered that Con Edison is patting itself on the back because it got power restored to a tiny corner of lower Manhattan, and it thinks it can have the rest of the bottom half of the island powered up by Friday. Well, if not by Friday, then probably Saturday, they then say. Maybe. I’ll believe it when I can flush my toilet.

And some passing thoughts

There are women in their eighties in my building, trapped on high floors and unable to navigate, seven, fifteen, even twenty-one stories of staircases. One person or another knocks on their doors to make sure they have food and water to drink. But I keep worrying about the ones I don’t know about and others don’t know about. In a building with over 230 apartments, it’s impossible to know everybody. The shy ones, the infirm ones, could be slowly starving to death inside their own reeking apartments.

Fortunately, the weather has been more-or-less cooperative, remaining in the 50s. With a sudden cold snap, some of those old women might freeze to death even if they don’t starve.

If the Con Edison power outage goes on much longer, people will die as a consequence. Not to mention businesses. From 39^th Street south there’s not an open supermarket, deli, pizzeria, restaurant, shoe repair shop, drug store (what if people need their life-saving prescriptions refilled?) or other business. Some of the small merchants are assuredly taking a powerful hit, and some, perhaps many small businesses will fail as a consequence. (Give yourself another pat on the back, Con Ed.)

“Mayor Mike” Bloomberg is been remarkably unvocal during this disaster, at least from what I can tell from my Internet reading. Politician that he is, he’s too smart to get publicly involved with this reeking and rage-breeding mess. Ditto Kevin Burke, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Con Edison.

What if it had been a terrorist?

But Burke, Bloomberg and their pals need to take responsibiity for this mess. And to realize how serious it is, think of it this way:

 If a foreign terrorist had blown up the transformer that evidently caused this half-of-Manhattan outage, bringing a great city to a stop, ruining thousands of businesses, inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of lives, destroying a few, and causing, I’m guessing here, $2 billion worth of business losses, U.S. Navy Seals might be in the process of blowing his head off as you read this.

What consequences will Burke face? His board will probably give him a bonus on top of is already outsized compensation package, which came to $11 million in 2011, part of which he earned by locking out experienced union Con Ed hands who might have known how to prevent the explosion.

Update: A few minutes before 4 pm today I received an anonymous robo-call. I assume it was from Con Edison, but they never said who they were. The terse message told me that "power in your area" "should be" back by 11:30 p.m. Saturday. That's not the four days they were promising on their website. It's 30 minutes short of six days if they deliver. Meanwhile, the weather's growing colder.

And on more thing….

The next time Willard Romney tells you private enterprise can do things better than government, remind him that the government Tennessee Valley Authority electrified millions of acres and hundreds of thousands of homes, factories and farms back in the Roosevelt era. Then remind  him to about New  York’s disaster and tell him to take a Con Edison smokestack and stick it where the sun don’t shine

Are you ready to embrace your own poverty, misery and enslavement? You’d better be when Mitt Romney gets to the White House.

 

Cranky negativist that I am, I’m going to assume that it’s over for Obama. Just read the Gallup poll.

Incredibly, despite the overt deviousness of Willard Romney and the flat out declarations of Paul Ryan, Americans are liking them better and better. And the trend is growing at a dangerous rate for a nation this close to election. So don’t be surprised by any of the following:

If you’re old: Your Social Security income will fall farther and farther behind inflation and may be cut entirely. Ditto Medicare. Especially Medicare. You’ll get a voucher for a few thousand bucks, and good luck. What’s that? You say Romney and Ryan are promising this will only apply to young people? Think about what happens when the Medicare and Social Security deductions for younger people get applied to a different program. Where’s the funding for yours? You’re screwed.

If you’re under 55:  Healthcare? Ha! The first time you get an unexplained headache, a visit to the doctor and some followup diagnostic tests will eat up your voucher. And no retirement for you either, friend, until you’re 75. But since your corporate employer will be entitled to fire you for any reason or no reason at all, and nobody will hire you past fifty, be prepared to panhandle for a living starting late middle age, at least until the panhandlers are all rounded up. Get your hands on a cardboard refrigerator box and guard it carefully. You’ll need it to sleep in. Learn to scrounge meals from garbage cans. There’s good eating in some of that trash. Sandwich crusts only a few days old. A rotten banana or two. Maggoty mea won’t kill you. It’s good protein. Dog doo on it? Wipe it off.

If you’re young: The super-rich nobility will need a few serfs to drive cars, haul the garbage, patch building roofs and sweep the streets. They’ll even need a few technicians, who may get to go to junior college. The rest of you? Who specifically said you’re entitled to a higher education? Not the original language of the constitution.

If you’re a union member they’re coming for you. On November 15^th, 1919, a time many Republicans yearn to go back to, a labor organizer named Joe Hill was executed by firing squad after – it turned you many years later – he was framed for the murder of a grocer. Did his union activities have anything to do with it? Everything to do with it, said his lawyer.  And in what state did all this take place? Why, of all coincidences, in Mitt’s native state of Utah.

If you’re an immigrant: You’re officially cannon fodder, amigo. The USA under Romney will have a problem. We have a war in Afghanistan that Romney doesn't want to get out of. We still have some troops in Iraq. And the Romney Republican war machine is just chomping at the bit to go into Syria and Iran. When that happens, the likelihood is that the war will spread throughout the Middle East. Yemen, for example. Kuwait. Libya. Maybe all of North Africa. Romney’s going to need lots of soldiers to get killed and maimed in those wars, and he’s sure as hell not going to rely on people like himself, whose missionary “work” was more important than the Viet Nam War. Instead, innocent children of undocumented immigrants will have a chance to become permanent residents “by serving honorably in the United States military.” Not by become badly needed educators, or cops, or firemen, or scientists, or engineers. Just by getting their arms and legs and heads shot off. No such demands are getting put on any other group. And that will hold things, until Romeny can reinstitute a military draft for the poor and what’s left of the shredded middle class.

Got a gun? You’re fine if you’re wealthy and living I a gated or well-patrolled community. Your firepower can back up the Hessian at the gagte. I was in Quito, Ecuador a few years ago where I noticed that the difference between the rich and the superrich was that the superrich had two guards with automatic rifles protecting their front doors. But if you’re common folk? Well, Malcolm X once advised Afro Americans to get guns, saying that “Violence is as American as Apple Pie.” He was assassinated under less than perfectly clear circumstances. And  BlackPanther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated in his sleep by a joint task force of cops and FBI.  You will only have a right to bear arms if you happen to agree on nearly everything with Mitt.

They’re also coming for you if… You are a doctor who performed an abortion, even before the all-conservative Supreme Court which Romney will appoint outlaws abortion. Or if you worked in a clinic where abortions were performed. Or if you referred or counseled anyone for an abotion. Or if you had an abortion. Or if you sold, bought or swallowed a morning after pill. The legal theory? That because the fetus is a human, destruction of a fetus was murder even if there once had been an “incorrect” law about it on the book.

So feel free. Vote for Romney. Or stay at home while other fools vote for him, based on a “feeling” they have about him, rather than what he’s going to do.

Americans get the country we deserve. And it looks as if we’re about to start deserving medieval serfdom.

Excuse me, Mr. Romney, but you make half of America want to puke

So now comes word that Mitt Romney has decided that 47 percent of Americans are just a bunch of freeloaders who think we’re “entitled” to healthcare, a modest retirement, maybe even to live.

And after the word leaked out, he wouldn’t take it back. (Not that I’d believe him if he did.)

Mr. Romney, the deductions for Social Security and Medicare from your staggeringly huge paychecks may have been so small in comparison to your earnings that you didn’t notice, sir, but we paid for those entitlements, as did our employers. We paid week after week, year after year, decade after decade. We paid premiums for Social Security. We paid premiums for Medicare. And we have every right in the world to collect what we paid for.

If a con man charges me tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for insurance premiums, and then says to me, “Hey, sorry, but you’re a dependent freeloader and you're not entitled to collect on your insurance,” I will call the cops. I will get him sent to jail. He’s a crook. He’s another Bernie Madoff.

So Mr. Romney, when you make it clear that you intend to pull the same stuff if you become president, you’ve also made it clear what you are.

And perhaps “crook” or “another Bernie Madoff” is too mild a characterization.

Pax Americana marches on. (Mitt Romney, please take note.)

When I was a young kid and went to Europe for the first time, France really was a foreign country. Today, not so much.

Although my knowledge of French is better than fair and Frenchmen praise my accent, I often find it difficult to speak French in Paris. The minute Parisians discover I'm an American, they want to practice their English on me. And their English, for the most part, is remarkably good.

Some years ago, I visited Paris and discovered that McDonald's had established a Parisian beachhead. Well, several beachheads, actually. The French even have their own take on the name of the hamburger chain. They call it "McDo." (Pronounce that, "Mac-Dough.")

A few years later I came back and suddenly Starbucks was planting its flags around Paris. Why anyone in Paris would want to stand in line for a paper cup full of coffee, often not as good as the ubiquitous "express" or a latte-like "cafe creme" (the real stuff, in a real cup) escapes me, especially since you can simply sit down at a table and have a waiter bring it to you for roughly the same price. But hey, Starbucks, the French think, is American-style, so the French like it.

This year, on the square facing the Sorbonne, I looked up and, lo! The Gap had just invaded, not only in the ancient Latin Quarter, but, as I discovered walking around town, in several other locations around Paris.

I bring this up largely for the sake of a simple political moral. When you're at peace with a country, there's a good chance they'll learn to like you and adopt some of your ways. There's a whole lot to like about America and most people, left to their own devices, really want to like us.

On the other hand, start using strident language, or rattling your saber, or threatening what sounds like war before you're even certain of what the situation is, and pretty soon Americans start getting killed. Especially if some idiot makes a film whose sole intent seems to be to insult Muslims for the hell of it.

So Mitt, if you shut your fat, dangerous mouth and stop saying whatever pops into your head in the hope that somehow that'll get you elected, we may sooner or later get somewhere with the Muslim world.

Or does the prospect of more innocent Americans lying dead in foreign streets not bother you, so long as you get elected President?

Is we Americans stoopid enough yet? Not if Republicans have their way!

A few posts back I wrote about the amazing move in Texas to outlaw lessons in critical thinking in Texas schools. (That’s stuff like clear-headed logic, seeking out and evaluating the sources of information, not confusing symbols with actual things, and parsing language.)

I mentioned Wonkette’s right-on comment, “Texas Republicans promise they’ll nip that thinky-learny shit right in the bud.”

But Republican stupidity seems to have grown with the advent of Todd Akin of Missouri’s brilliant discovery that raped women can’t get pregnant, unless, of course, they was askin’ for it, or really wanted it, or something. At least that’s the implication of what he said when discussing whether women can get pregnant because of a rape.

“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare," declared Akin. "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

Yeah right. That was so stupid it resonated around the the nation. More and more people are beginning to notice that Republicans seem not only to be stupid, but also that Republicans want to promulgate national stupidity.

“Having developed an extremist culture that encourages figures such as Akin to seek legislative office, GOP leaders should hardly be surprised when idiotic and reprehensible remarks spill from the mouths of their candidates,” comments the National Memo.

“On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates and insulates these knuckle-draggers,” observed Timothy Egan, a New York Times columnist and blogger.

“Republicans don't want to educate you. They don't want to educate your children. The less education you have, the more they can manipulate you. The more they can get you to believe that money in the pockets of their choice somehow benefits you, the better for them,” said Isa Lee Wolf from the Yahoo Contributor Network.

Then there was this bundle of razzle-dazzle self-contradiction from Mitt Romney, who plainly must have been hoping that his fast-babble approach to explaining himself would confuse all us rubes:

Mitt Romney in 2002: ''I respect and will protect a woman's right to choose.'' 

Mitt Romney in 2007: ''Look, I was pro-choice. I am pro-life. You can go back to YouTube and look at what I said in 1994. I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice. I changed my position. And I get tired of people that are holier-than-thou because they've been pro-life longer than I have.''

The Republican dumbing down of America has made Americans and the United States the laughingstock of the world. The question is, will we vote out every one of these pro-idiocy Republicans – from Congressioal candidates to the White House candidate?

Or are we already way too stupid to get rid of these idiots?

Mitt Romney, job-killing Republican conservative

Is your job on the line? Bet your life on it if Romney becomes president.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from a Texas Republican conservative. And nevermind that you’re reading a progressive blog. This is one of Romney’s fellow conservatives saying it on ultra-conservative Fox News:

No wonder the Obama campaign finds it so easy to find out-of-work victims of Romney’s job killing. Like this:

A vote for Romney is a vote for putting yourself out of a job. Or if you''re already out of a job, it's a vote to make sure you stay there.

Let’s start calling people APPROPRIATE derogatory names. We can begin by changing the language we use to characterize Rush Limbaugh.

The trouble with most obscene and derogatory words is that they’re so over-used, they’ve lost their oomph. Sixty years ago, when he wrote The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer had to make up the word “fug,” in attempt to replicate the speech of soldiers during a war. Printing the actual F-word would have landed him and his publishers in the clink and might have resulted in his best-selling book getting yanked off the bookshelves.

These days, anything goes, and far too many words are either overused or inaccurately used, with a resulting loss of impact.

We can start with the misplaced notion that Rush Limbaugh is somehow an ‘entertainer.” (Google his name and the word “entertainer” and something like 312,000 references come up.)

Calling what Rush Limbaugh puts out “entertainment” is as ghastly as calling a public decapitation “a comedy show.”  Rush Limbaugh is no entertainer. He’s just an abusive gasbag. He tells lies. He twists meanings. And when he libels and slanders people in public broadcasts, those people could, and should find a legal avenue to sue him off his perch.

Case in point, Limbaugh recently slandered a law student who dared to testify before a Congressional committee in favor of medical coverage for birth control. He called her a prostitute. He called her a slut. He declared, "She's having so much sex she can't afford contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex." No such thing, as this video of her testimony clearly demonstrates. 

In light of this, words like “liar” and “slanderer” ought to be used by the press to describe Limbaugh, rather than a mild statement like “not true,” that characterizes what he says, but not the personality that issues the words.

As for the rest of decent America, declaring that “Rush Limbaugh is a liar and a gas bag,” would probably have triple the impact of calling him an “asshole,” which may be true in a metaphorical sense, but which is overused and considerably less specific about what Limbaugh has done to deserve an opprobrious epithet.

Not completely dissimilarly, when Mitt Romney, or Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum state things about Obama, or the economy, or American history that have little or no basis in truth, the press shouldn’t label them “false” or “not true.” They should be labeled what they are. They’re lies. Clear, boldfaced, deliberate, disingenuous, and often malicious lies.

Which makse the Republican candidates who issue these liars little more than self-serving liars.

But back to Limbaugh’s slander of a law student. In today’s foulmouthed, free-spewing climate, “self-serving liar” delivers a powerful counter-impact to anybody who dares label an innocent woman a “whore” or  a “slut” because Limbaugh doesn’t agree with her political point of view.

Another thing to call Limbaugh would be a “profit killer,” whose appearance on a broadcast station tends to suck the revenue out of its bottom line. Reminding national advertisers that sponsoring Limbaugh tends to interrupt their advertising plans and suck the black ink out of their bottom lines would go a long way toward keeping Limbaugh off the air, and in the sewer, where his outrageous personal attacks belong.  

How to tell if Chief Justice Roberts (and Mitt Romney) are correct when they say a corporation is a person

You can  blame a good part the present disgusting state of political affairs on the five- member majority of the Roberts Supreme Court who, in the Citizens United Case, declared that corporations are people. 

They opened the floodgates of corporate “free speech money” that in some of the primaries (and guaranteed in the coming Presidential election) drown out any voice that isn’t as rich as America’s richest corporations.

Now Willard (“Mitt”) Romney has joined the chorus, declaring in Iowa, “Corporations are people, my friend.” Well, anyway, it’s looking as if the corporations are Romney's friends.

But are corporations really people? Here’s a simple three-step test you can perform with the corporation nearest you:

1. Stand the corporation up against a wall.
2. Blindfold it and offer it a cigarette.
3. Shoot it through the heart. 

If it falls down, bleeds and dies, it’s a corporation. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.

Quick, what’s the difference between these two things?

The baseball mitt is smarter than Mitt Romney.

Case in point: Romney gets up the other day and introduces Ann Coulter. He says, "I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!"

Then Ann Coulter gets up and does some nasty gay bashing. She says, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards."

Defenders of the Clueless Mitthead insist, “he didn’t know what she was going to say.” Read it in this National Journal article that recounts the event: http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/03/ann_coulter_sla.html

Oh, that poor baby! And on what was Mitt (the candidate, not the baseball glove) basing his happiness that the audience would hear from Ann after hearing from him?

Perhaps it was her kindly, thoughtful and oh-so-incisive comment about the widows of 9-11 victims, “I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." She called the grieving widows “harpies.”

Did I mention that she has also favored poisoning a United States Supreme Court justice? And bombing the New York Times?

A real sweetheart, this gal!

The National Journal, usually a fortress of reasonably thoughtful conservatism, was excoriated to shreds by its own readers when it tried to defend Romney for introducing her. Go to the URL above and scroll down to the reader postings to see what I mean.

Despite the outrage of Conservatives as well as anti-Conservatives to her unapologetic and in-character utterances, I’m glad she makes them. That’s because her behavior allows a tit-for-tat response, without any apologies required of this cranky commentator.

I mean, if the Mitthead has any kind brain at all, even a vestigial one, he must have figured that he’d get something in return for saying nice things about this five-star witch. Maybe he thought he’d get into her pants.

Mitt, pal, don’t ever go there. I have an uncomfortable premonition that if Ann Coulter ever spreads her legs for you, a huge swarm of flies, worms, gnats, millipedes and bedbugs will come streaming out.

No no, don’t blame me for that last statement. I really didn’t know what I was going to write.