Joe the Plumber | The Electron Pencil

05/28/2014

Bloomington Board of Park Commissioners, Guns, Hoosier Hills Food Bank, Isla Vista Killings, Joe the Plumber, NRA, Wayne LaPierre, White Buffalo Inc.

Hot Air

Fresh Meat

Now that the city o’Bloomington has inked a deal with White Buffalo, Inc. to cull the deer pop. around Griffy Lake, I will give the plan The Electron Pencil seal of approval.

That’s because the contract between the wildlife management outfit and our parks board calls for the unlucky critters — up to 100 of them can be whacked from late fall through February 2015 — to be processed for distribution at the Hoosier Hills Food Bank. As long as hungry folk are going to be able to make midnight snacks out of deer sausage sandwiches, I’m cool with the whole idea.

White Buffalo Staffers At Work

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And this despite the fact that White Buffalo has gussied itself up using ripped off Native American mythical iconography. The company’s website proudly proclaims:

Native American legend tells of the White Buffalo Woman who offered a sacred pipe to a Dakota tribe, explaining that the pipe symbolized that all things were connected. Its purpose, and ours through educational efforts, was to remind people of their tie to nature, what nature gives and what should be done in return.

I suppose a co. would have to dress itself up in quasi-insulting Noble Savage togs if it’s in the biz of assassinating cute little deer. Pretending you’re following in the great tradition of our proto-American predecessors makes the messy business of shooting Bambi in the brain a tad more palatable to the general public.

In any case, nobody would argue the fact that the deer are aggravating the bejesus out of residents around B-town. In fact, some dear friends of this correspondent and The Loved One are aghast that we put out corn and salt licks for deer. They claim the deer eat up all their flowers and vegetables and we are aiding and abetting them in these nefarious acts. I counter that they ought to plant something the deer don’t care for. Problem solved, no?

I’m not terribly eager to see a deer shot down in the prime of life. But as long as its meat feeds those less fortunate than I am, I’m all in.

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Guns

Speaking of The Loved One, she brought up a compelling scenario last night during our ride home from downtown B.

“What are they going to say,” she observed, referring to the NRA and other gun fetishists, “when somebody shoots up a gun show?”

You know, I’d never thought of that. Wayne LaPierre and the rest of the folk who cuddle with Glocks always screech whenever some armed psychotic opens fire in a school or a Wendy’s. If more of us carried artillery, they shriek, we’d all feel safer.

In fact, the thankfully-almost-forgotten Joe the Plumber grunted on his website that the father of one of the people killed Friday in the Isla Vista shooting, the one who blamed the NRA and chicken-hearted pols for the spate of shoot-’em-ups these days, was just tragically and ignorantly wrong.

[I bet you didn’t know J the P even had a website. He does and I wish I didn’t know it.]

No Real Joe

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Joe the Plumber (his name’s not Joe and he’s not a plumber, but what’s a few facts among Me Party-ists?) gurgled and snorted about how it’s a daddy-o’s duty to protect his litter with guns in every pocket as well as an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. The implication being the father of the aforementioned victim was a pussy for not accompanying his son while bandalero’d.

The father, his face distorted by anguish, had cried, “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live?”

Joe the Plumber’s retort? “As harsh as this sounds — your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”

My guess? Joe’s nightly ejaculation into his gun barrel was of an extremely copious nature after he wrote that.

Back to T-Lo’s original point. What will Pan troglodytes like J the P say when a sick bastard mows down a few gun enthusiasts at the next NRA convention or any of the countless big gun shows around the nation? It’s going to happen, right? Gun-ophiles obviously count among their number a healthy population of borderline lunatics. And they carry guns. And no one at the convention or any of those shows will think twice when they see a guy walk in with two rifles and a hip belt full of pistols. And then that guy will open fire, dropping a few or even a few dozen gun-ists before someone drops him.

No doubt they’ll crow that the guy’s kill count would have been far greater had they not all been caressing firearms at the moment of his outburst. The fact that the convention hall floor will resemble nothing so much as a meat processing plant will seem to escape their notice.

I’ve got bad news for The Loved One: I think we already know what they’ll say.

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12/03/2013

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2000 Presidential Election, 9/11, Comet ISON, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Great Depression, Great Recession, Iraq War, Joe the Plumber, McMansions, Obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Terri Schiavo, US Supreme Court

Unseasonably Warm Hot Air

Comet, Heal Thyself

Too bad about Comet ISON, no? Goddamned Obamacare.

R.I.P.

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Zero From The ‘Aughts

Perhaps this is obvious to everybody else, but it just occurred to me this morning as I washed the dishes that the first decade of this 21st Century really and truly sucked.

Dig: The decade/century/millennium began with a double whammy of slam. The great tech bubble blew up, costing countless entitled middle- and upper-middle class white computer geeks their previously privileged spots atop the human pyramid. And a lot of middle class investors lost their little all after betting that tech stocks would carry them through their dotage. Then there was the non-election election of George W. Bush, a putsch pushed along by Supreme Court justices installed by his daddy-o and their patron saint, Ronald Reagan.

The next year, our holy land’s spies and spooks fell asleep at their CCTV security consoles and allowed a couple of dozen lunatic fundamentalist religionists to stage the scariest disaster movie scenes ever seen in New York City and Washington, DC.

What followed, natch, was an overreaction of monumental proportions as this holy land turned into a fighting, spying, hating-on-ragheads military machine. Now, I’d bet more money is spent on making sure American air travelers don’t sneak bottles of mouthwash onto airplanes than is earmarked for useless things like school libraries.

Meanwhile, Americans were urged by their popularly un-elected president to go back to shopping, chop-chop, just to show the world how much we love, love, love freedom. And Americans fell into line, buying anything and everything, including TV screens wide enough to display the entirety of the Grand Canyon. We Americans got so giddy pissing our hard-earned dough away that we began looking upon our happy homes not as safe harbors from the cruel world and anchors of our communities but as ostentatious, in-your-face ATMs-slash-McMansions. We bought and sold houses the way teenaged boys trafficked in baseball cards in the 1980s.

And then that bubble popped, leading to the greatest economic collapse since the Greatest Economic Collapse.

But wait — before that, the president, who, I might remind you, had been elected by a minority of voters, told us Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was perhaps a half hour away from decorating the skies above our greatest cities with pretty and colorful mushroom clouds. To prove his assertion, he sent out his minions and assistants to tell us and the world blah, blah, blah, blah — none of which had a whit to do with Iraq’s capacity to build nuclear weapons, and so we promptly fell into line and gave the Prez the go-ahead to commit our nation to a decade-long pointless war. We did get to see Saddam Hussein’s tonsils, though.

Say Ah-h-h

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Anyway, back to the housing bubble. Wall Street banksters, quants, and fellow travelers discovered fascinating new ways to fleece investors with mortgage-backed securities and, while they were at it, make scads upon scads of dough for themselves no matter whether their financial instruments were successful or not, preferably unsuccessful because…, well, it’s pretty much impossible to explain why, but the banksters and quants and the rest are sitting pretty right now while the rest of us are still dusting ourselves off.

The banksters and quants and the others were punished by being named to high-level economic advisory positions in the Obama White House and as regulators of the operations they’d transformed into casino games. That’ll show ’em.

“This Is A Sound Investment, Sir.”

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So, today, municipalities that had invested in their crooked schemes are broke, school budgets are being slashed, social service agencies are closing their doors, and the poor are being blamed for all of it. The fiends.

As this was all going on, there arose in this great nation a grass-roots political movement dedicated to the age-old ideals of selfishness, savage competition, refusal to share any wealth whatsoever, anti-intellectualism, and reactionary demagoguery with a sprinkling of racism and misogyny thrown in. They called themselves the Tea Party, which seemed rather euphemistic. I might have suggested they call themselves a Bunch of Big Pricks.

Apple Pie Americanism

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Working feverishly behind the scenes, this nation’s spies and spooks, embarrassed by their failure to nab the 9/11 plotters before they struck, expanded their capabilities to eavesdrop on your Thanksgiving email exchanges with your aunt in Kokomo. By the way, you might want to let her know that three cups of sugar in her cranberry orange sauce is a tad much.

And, hey, here are two unforgettable names from the -zeroes: Joe the Plumber and Terry Schiavo.

So, kiddies, that was the ‘Aughts in a nutshell.

You might think I’m being pessimistic but, honest, the future actually looks brighter to me. Things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

Could they?

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07/05/2013

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Aaron Copland, Anarchism, Barack Obama, Conspiracy Theory, Dinesh D'Souza, Fanfare for the Common Man, Grover Cleveland, Joe DiMaggio, Joe the Plumber, Judson Phillips, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Ben Cramer, Rush Limbaugh, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Soma Coffee, Tea Party Nation, Ted Nugent

Your Daily Hot Air

Love It Or Hate It?

Barack Obama yesterday did what American presidents do every Fourth of July. He told us how fabulous we are, how rich our history is, what intractable problems we’ve solved, what insurmountable obstacles we’ve overcome, and how we have the unique ability to face all the challenges of the future.

Then an orchestra played the 1812 overture, a bunch of fireworks were shot off, everybody went home, and this morning some of us are back at work.

Obama On The Fourth

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More than some of us are bitter because we have to pay outlandish taxes to support lazy bums, welfare queens, and clever pimps. I’ve always held that the vast majority of flamboyant patriots love America but hate Americans.

Anyway, Obama fulfilled his presidential duties no better or worse than any of his 43 predecessors (actually, he has 42 predecessors; Grover Cleveland, having served non-consecutive terms, is counted twice). The nation’s Cheerleader in Chief is always the big star on Independence Day and normally no one doubts how loyal he is to this holy land.

Barack Obama, of course, is different. He is, according to many, a Kenyan-born Muslim, homosexual, terrorist. He’s not one of “us.”

One Of Us

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I have to wonder, therefore, what the lunocracy thinks when they see Obama waving the flag and celebrating the land they’re certain he’s not a part of.

Just for giggles’ sake, here’s a sampler of observations over the years from the Neptunian Right re: Barack Obama:

◗ “He is an evil, dangerous man who hates America and hates freedom.” — Ted Nugent

◗ “Barack Obama does not like the American system of government. He doesn’t like our founding fathers either…. Obama does not love America. He hates America.” — Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips

◗ “[Barack Obama holds] an ideology remote from what Americans believe in or care about… something completely separate from American thought altogether.” — Dinesh D’Souza

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◗ “[W]hen it comes down to his ideology and mine, there’s a difference. I love America, and I don’t know what he does.” — Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber”

◗ “I think it can now be said, without equivocation — without equivocation — that this man hates this country. He is trying — Barack Obama is trying — to dismantle, brick by brick, the American dream.” — Rush Limbaugh

So, what do these and other like-minded deep thinkers feel when Obama tells us how fab we are on the Fourth?

I know they don’t have him on their short list for the best American prez ever. But given the above citations, they have to believe he’s the finest actor our great nation has ever produced.

Funny thing is, not one of my go-to sources for wingnut-ism even mentions Obama’s appearance at the pep rally for the Fourth in Washington yesterday. Which is a shame; what a golden opportunity for them to write and rant about the man’s shameless hypocrisy and how pervasive and underhanded his efforts to overthrow this great land are.

Who knows, maybe the Deranged Right is losing its edge. That’d be too bad; I’ve long felt they are the comic geniuses of our time.

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Anarchy In The USA

Soma Coffee is The Electron Pencil’s alternate office, as you well know if you’ve been following these screeds for any length of time. The joint was open yesterday, which I didn’t even know about until I came in this morning. I spent my Fourth napping, writing, washing a dish or two, and sharing in a nice smoked beef brisket with my next door neighbors. Overall, it was my typical Independence Day.

I Wonder If I Can Write Off My Coffee

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Not so typical, as I learned today, at Soma. The place has a life-sized cardboard cut-out of that iconic Marilyn Monroe photo, the one where she’s standing over a subway grate and her skirt is being blown upward. (BTW, acc’d’g to the riveting biography of Joe DiMaggio by Richard Ben Cramer, The Hero’s Life, Joltin’ Joe whacked Marilyn around pretty handily after that particular photo shoot. The story goes that DiMagg didn’t want his wife to be viewed as a “slut” and so he punched her up, but only in places that would be hidden by her clothes. Ick.) Anyway, the cut-out is in the coffeehouse’s bathroom which, at least in these hinterlands of South Central Indiana, is noted far and wide for its compelling decor.

Sadly, some kid Anarchist with a Magic Marker® defaced the cut-out while the rest of us were congratulating ourselves for being Americans.

Recruitment Poster?

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Taciturn Mike, a mild-mannered electronics engineer for the Navy whom dedicated Anarchists might deem a vile tool of the military-industrial complex, wonders why the vandal didn’t decorate, say, the county courthouse or some other symbol of corrupt tyranny with the anarchists’ logo. He also wonders what the offender had in mind: Does he expect the graffito to goose this year’s Anarchist recruitment figures?

I have no such wonderment. The Anarchist in question is simply an asshole.

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Fanfare For The Common Man

This, babies, is the sound of patriotism.

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05/16/2012

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Andromeda Galaxy, Australopithecus, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Joe the Plumber, Kirkwood Observatory, Marcy Kaptur, Me Party, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Shana Alexander, Tea Party, Toledo Blade

The Pencil Today:

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THE QUOTE

“Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me, it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.” — Shana Alexander

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TINY

Just a reminder, you can broaden your visual horizon up to a trillion-fold tonight — for free.

Each Wednesday night, the astro-geeks who run IU’s Kirkwood Observatory, throw its doors open to the public. They’ll actually let you peer out at the universe through its main telescope, a 12-inch refractor, and they’ll show you tons of other cool, geeky things.

If you ever want to feel infinitesimally small, try sneaking a peek at some celestial landmark (or should I say spacemark?) sometime. Say, for instance, the Kirkwood astronuts point their device at the Andromeda Galaxy, the first cosmic structure to be identified as existing outside our own Milky Way Galaxy. The Andromeda is approximately 2.6M light years away from Earth.

M-31: The Andromeda Galaxy

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That is, if you picked up your hyper-strong flashlight, pointed it at the Andromeda, and flicked it on, it would take the its light more than two and a half million years to reach that galaxy.

Or, putting it another way, the Andromeda we’re looking at today actually existed when Australopithecus first started using stone tools in Africa.

Great-Great-Great-Great… Great-Great-Great Grandma

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Not even your grandfather walked that far to school in the middle of winter.

BTW: that trillion-fold reference I made earlier? Just a breezy estimation. It’s said that when a six-foot tall person stands at sea level, the horizon appears to be about three miles away. In other words, that’s pretty much haw far your horizontal vision range is on Earth.

Now, a light year is 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles. Let’s put that in English: that’s more than 5.8 trillion miles. Not million. Not billion. Trillion.

Now do you feel small?

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JOE THE SHOVELER

Do you want to feel even smaller?

Great-great… great-Grandma’s (pictured above) progeny — us, Homo Sapiens sapiens — includes within its ranks one Joe the Plumber.

That’s right, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher gained international fame when he confronted candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail during the 2008 race for the president.

At Least One Of These Guys Isn’t Telling The Truth

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Wurzelbacher told Obama that he was planning to buy his boss’s plumbing business and would probably make more than $250,000 a year after doing so. Therefore, Obama’s proposed tax hike on quarter-plus-millionaires would harm him or at the very least make his dream harder to achieve.

Obama responded by saying, in part, that some wealth ought to be redistributed.

Oh, did the Republicans jump on that! Next thing you knew, Obama was painted as the depraved spawn of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Son of Sam all rolled into one.

Obama’s Dad

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Not only that, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was rechristened “Joe the Plumber” and became the darling of the Right and eventually a standard bearer for the Me Party.

Only Joe the Plumber was not what he said he was. The Toledo Blade did some digging and found that, although J the P said he worked under his boss’s plumbing license, he was not legally permitted to do plumbing work in the state of Ohio. “He is… not registered to operate as a plumber in Ohio,” the Blade reported, “which means he’s not a plumber.”

Oh.

Turns out his “plan” to buy out his boss’s operation was casually discussed during his hiring process six years previously. In other words, J the P’s grand design was part of the normal bullshit bandied about during any job interview.

Additionally, a close examination of J the P’s finances revealed that he had precisely zero chance in the foreseeable future of buying out his boss’s successful firm.

So, at least J the P was revealed to posses one requisite talent for a plumber — he is expert at shoveling shit.

Joe Can Do This

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But wait — that’s not the end of the story. J the P is still with us. In fact, he may be reporting for work in the US Capitol come January. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher is running for Congress in Ohio’s 9th District. He faces long-time House Dem Marcy Kaptur.

And guess what — he has an awfully good chance of winning. Right-wingers and Me Party-ists from around the country are contributing to his campaign.

Darwin had it right: we didn’t ascend from the apes, we descended from them.

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DIMON IS A BOWL’S BEST FRIEND

I’m not a violent man so when the revolution comes I won’t be in favor of chopping off the heads of the greedy hyper-capitalist no-goodniks who’ve turned this holy land into a tin-horn banana republic.

I do have an idea for how we ought to deal with Jamie Dimon, though.

We, the new bosses after the overthrow, will force him to earn his daily bread by scrubbing public toilets. Those in parks, say, or in non-profit cultural institutions.

Why not? It’s good, honest work. Somebody has to do it. Why not Jamie?

Why Not, Jamie?

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In fact, what with his vaunted rep as a brilliant business strategist, he’d probably be able to form a very efficient operation employing hundreds or even thousands of people.

All of them doing real work that would benefit people.

But no matter how busy Jamie might be setting up his new biz empire, he would be compelled to personally scrub at least a half dozen porcelain princesses a day — we’d hate to have him lose that hands -on experience.

Ain’t I a dreamer?

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The Electron Pencil

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