No, Mr. Oliver, you can’t attempt to incite lynch violence and murder, and then get off with an apology

Karl Oliver, an odious little creep who got elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in part with the generous backing of the Koch Brothers, as well as the bankers (including Wells Fargo), realtors, home builders, a local power company, and even the chicken farmers of Mississippi, got himself into deep manure recently. 

He stepped into it by advocating lynching for those who want to remove civil war monuments to slave-holding heroes of the Confederacy in neighboring Louisiana.

The resulting outrage got Oliver, who is a former county coroner, lots of national attention. Little wonder. In calling for lynching he was essentially calling upon his friends and neighbors to form a lawless mob and murder people. Well, perhaps even more than murder. The American Way of Lynching can involve slow strangulation while hanging from a tree, or burning at the stake, or dismemberment — and more.

Or, in the case of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, it involved stopping people on a rural road in a car at midnight, brutally beating one of them with a chain, then shooting them and burying them under an earthen dam — a charming Mississippi coda to a wave of church burnings and beatings that were taking place at the time.

FBI photograph of the bodies of three lynching victims, Mississippi 1964,

uncovered after having been buried in mud under a dam.

Once his advocacy of lynching blew up in his face, Oliver realized he was in very serious trouble and tried to wriggle out of it by issuing an  apology. You may, like me, find his apology insincere.

“I am very sorry,” he said, referring to his attempt to incite mob violence through lynching. “It is in no way ever an appropriate term. I deeply regret that I chose this word, and I do not condone the actions I referenced, nor do I believe them in my heart. I freely admit my choice of words was horribly wrong, and I humbly ask your forgiveness.”

Yeah, right. He referred to those who wish to take down monuments to a culture of slave holding “Nazi-ish.” He made the extra effort  to hit the cap key so that the word “LYNCHED!” would stand out. And if he wasn’t making an extra effort to advocate that people get “LYNCHED,” what was he advocating?

Not for a moment do the racists who put him into office think he meant it when he apologized. Nor, I think, did he. The journal Mississippi Today checked among Oliver's constituents in his home town of Winona and reported:

For some of Oliver’s constituents, his comments weren’t as much a surprise as a relief. In a picturesque storefront within view of Forrest’s front porch, but across the train tracks that bisect this small town, Kathryn Harrison, an older woman with a smart white bob, folds donated clothes and stacks them in a bin.

Like Forrest, she has known Oliver and his family for years. And his willingness to say what others won’t is one of the things she likes best about him. 

“He’s a true Southern gentleman and a Christian, and he’s speaking his convictions,” Harrison said. “And most everybody here, they wanted him elected because he would stand on his convictions.”

So obviously, what America needs is a good Christian lynch mob. 

And that’s Oliver’s conviction, too. It was supported — it bears repeating — by the Koch brothers, the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, the Mississippi Home Builders Association, the Mississippi Poultry Association, the Mississippi Association of Realtors, the Mississippi Power Company, and the Mississippi Bankers Association whose members include Wells Fargo Bank, those wonderful folks who brought you the fake bank account scandal.

Thus, Karl Oliver has demonstrated not only the propensity for lynching still exists barely below the surface in Mississippi, but also that when a bank is rotten in one way, you can bet it's also rotten to the core.

New York Crank announces he is running for the Republican presidential nomination

A recent artist's drawing of The New York Crank. Signed and numbered copies will

be given to the first fifty members of the One Percent who contribute $50 million or

more to the Crank's campaign. However, all cash contributions from grateful PACs

 will be accepted and appreciated, plus you get a free night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

NEW YORK: The New York Crank, a curmudgeonly old fogey who for a long time has cleverly passed himself off as some kind of a liberal-left, internationally progressive, socially-permissive, economically-Keynsian, democratic-socialist-leaning, redundancy-loving Democrat has announced that he will run for nomination as the Republican candidate for President of the United States.

“I am finally coming out and declaring what I really am,” he said in his announcement speech. “I am a Tea Party Wing Republican. And I would welcome a generous campaign contribution from the Koch Brothers. But I’m not greedy like some Republican candidates I could name. Half a billion dollars would be plenty for me.”

The Crank promised that if nominated and then elected as President, he would put the interests of his largest campaign donors “miles ahead” of the perceived interests of the masses of voters.

“You have to remember,” said the Crank, “that although few people realize it yet, the interests of the nation are the interests of the largest campaign donors. The people who are making and keeping the most money are the same ones who are raising the average income and average net worth of the American people. It’s  simple Ayn Randian economics, or as I like to all it, RSM — Real Simple Math.”

Asked to justify his point of view he explained, “If you have one person making a dollar a week, and one person making a million dollars a week, their average income is half a million bucks and fifty cents a week. Now I ask you, what hard-working Joe The Plumber-type patriotic American wouldn’t want to have an average income as high as that? And who’s going to tell me that high average incomes aren’t good for America? It's elementary dribble-out, spritz around economics. And also, I think, the Law of Averages.”

Asked why he had chosen this moment to announce his candidacy, the Crank said he felt he had to do so at this time because, “There are already more Republican candidates than you can count on the fingers of both hands. I didn’t want to wait until Republican voters run out of toes, too.”

The Crank said he was willing and eager to participate in televised Republican debates, but admitted that the chances of getting an invitation to do so are slim. One possible reason for that, he explained, is that, “I will not become a victim of Big Government paperwork and bureaucracy and petition-signing and all that legalistic Big Government crap. I will simply ask people during the primaries to demand the right to write in my name. New…York…Crank. What part of that can’t you spell? Oh wait, I have Tea Party supporters.”

The man who’d literally run over kittens with a train (and his far-right-wing billionaire backers) gear up in New York to smash liberal mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio

Joe Lhota said he'd have no problem
running them over with a train

New York City is about to become a proxy battleground between the progressive wing of the Democrats and far right wing Republicans.

I hope the nation is paying attention, because ultra-conservative, union-smashing, tax-the-poor, enrich-the-billionaires individuals like the Koch brothers certainly are.

The story so far

In case you’re either a New Yorker who just got home from a six months vacation on Mars, or an out-of-towner who understandably pays less than full attention to New York politics, here’s the story – a story notably worthy of your attention.

Bill DeBlasio, a progressive Democrat with an interesting background (he has a black wife and two mixed race kids) appears to have won the Democratic nomination for mayor. (There are complications, but you can mortgage the farm to put money on the likelihood of his candidacy.)

One of DeBlasio’s campaign promises is that he’ll try his darndest (the odds of succeeding are daunting) to raise the marginal tax rate by half a percent on the incomes of city residents who earn over half a million dollars annually. The money would be used to pay for a desperately needed pre-school program.

For your average, run-the-mill New York rich guy (there are 27,000 thousand of them earning between $500,000 and $1,000,000 a year) the average tax increase would come to $973 a year – which is less than a pair of imported tan summer loafers or a new frock for his wife would cost in a neighborhood Madison Avenue boutique on the Upper East Side.

Holy crap! You’d think DeBlasio was proposing mass extermination of anyone with more than two dollars in his pocket.

Joe Lhota's head explodes

“Class warfare!” exploded Joe Lhota, the Republican nominee for mayor in his acceptance speech — reviving a favorite whine of the greedy one-percent.

Only in America could the formidably rich declare financial war on the poor and middle class, and  then complain about "class warfare" when the poor and middle class push back.

The one percent crashed the financial system, got a bailout from the 99 percent of American taxpayers who never see much, if any financial security, and now grumble about “class warfare” when asked to chip in an hour’s pay or less for the benefit of the people they milk dry.

Not surprising that Joe (“Mr. Warmth”) Lhota is so kindly, so empathetic, that when — during the primary campaign, yet! — some stray kittens were found wandering the city’s subway tracks, Lhota favored crushing them with a train rather than stopping the subway to save them.

Bloomberg fires up desperate
(but empty) charges of "racism"

Michael Bloomberg took another tack. He accused DeBlasio of “racism” for showing his multi-racial family in television campaign spots. As if no political candidate has ever shown his family in campaign advertising! (I guess it’s okay if they’re all lily-white, like Mitt Romney’s family.) What did Bloomberg want DeBlasio to do — put whiteface on his wife and kids? Did he want them to wear mime suits, too?

Most ominous of all, the multi-billionaire Koch family has contributed more thusfar to Lhota's campaign than they’d pay in a good part of a century if Deblasio’s tax increase should ever come through.

A popular movement?

And that’s what it’s really about. New York could be the beginning of a popular voter movement, at long last — of the average working stiff, the under-employed recent graduate, the squeezed middle class and the strangled poor — against the one percent.

Billionaires like the Koches and Bloombergs are afraid it’ll spread and that, given enough time, voters might restore the financial equilibrium of the 1950s and 1960s, and the rich will have to pay their fair share again. O, the horror of it all!

Expect to see mountains of right wing dollars poured in to make that right wing iceberg Lhota look good, and to cover up what he really stands for.

Here in New York, the election is really a proxy battle of the super-rich against everybody else. What happens here may not stay here. And that’s what’s terrifying the billionaires and the corrupt politicians who live off them.

And now this: