Tag: Joe Biden

Mike Gold’s As Is: Everybody Look What’s Going Down!

“He don’t know me very well, do he?” – Bugs Bunny, “Rebel Rabbit,” 1949

I’ve been taking some time off from political proselytizing. The truth has been quite blatant and either you recognize it for what it is or you are so deep in the Rabid Right’s tank that reality testing is a waste of energy. There’s extraordinarily little middle ground anymore, and you don’t need this fool on the hill to tell you squat.

On the other hand, I’ve been pontificating since 1965 and this doesn’t feel like the right time to stop. As Bob Dylan said, “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” So I’m going to pundit on, with the proviso “he that pundits is verily full of shit.”

There’s been a great deal of talk about the 2024 presidential election. I don’t know why; political years are akin to dog years and there’s a lot of dogs to be wagged. But I do recognize what is missing from our uncivil discourse.

Everybody is acting like the race will be between the current president and the criminal poser with the giant Mussolini complex. I’m not as certain that’s the way it will come down. Both men are really, really old – several years older than I am, in fact – and one of them has a digestive track that is as rotted out as his moral compass. If, next year, the Republicans fail to take back the house, which is an if that is somewhat larger than those other pundits let on, our nation’s dipshit il duce will likely be under indictment if not in prison – unless he picks up an AR-15 and starts murdering Black Lives Matter Wisconsinites, which is now perfectly legal.

The current White House keyholder presently enjoys a popularity rating only slightly higher than his predecessor, so, of course, now the wags are predicting he won’t run for reelection and/or his party will dump him. Yeah. Um tut sut.

This reveals the Democratic Party’s overwhelming dilemma. It’s always something, but this time at this moment they’re completely screwed and those other soothsayers ain’t ponying up much in the way of revelation. Not me. I’m always the guy who farts loudist in the swimming pool.

People don’t like the incumbent as much as they did a year ago. Well, that will happen – but those running down-ticket don’t want to risk drowning in the undertow. As we learn time and time again, politicians love their phony-baloney jobs more than they love America.

But if they dump Joe Biden, or if he dumps himself, the pressure to promote the candidacy of Vice President Kamila Harris will be enormous. A whole lot of people went blue last year with that very understanding. The non-White vote will have a hard time backing another old White man – promises inferred are promises made. The non-male vote will have a hard time voting for any man. In politics, perception is reality and such “promises” are nothing more than perceptions.

So let’s say the Democrats back Harris. That will prove interesting. You might remember Barack Obama, the president who recently inducted Jay-Z into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. His election and his subsequent reelection empowered the Pathetic Right and titillated the big money monsters who want to keep all the loot they’ve stolen from what once was the middle class. These people either could not abide by the concept of a Black president or have profited enormously from the reaction one-third of Americans have to the reality of a Black president.

Just imagine how these liquored up bible-babbling assault weapon hugging democracy hating marionettes are going to react to the concept of a Black WOMAN as president! It’s like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all rolled into one! The very prospect will make the little bigots crawl out of their heads. They will come out en masse to prevent Harris from ever putting her hand on any bible. They will do so more aggressively than they have been doing since The Great Pumpkin floated down his escalator informing us the Mexicans are all drug dealing rapists, Satanists, and Communists.

As the kids say, these people will lose their shit. You know, like they did, literally, when they invaded the Capitol building this past January.

In other words, the Democrats are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Roll on, roll on. Keep a happy thought.

And happy Thanksgiving.

 

Happy 420. We’ve Still Got A Long Way To Go

“Please don’t waste your energy on me my friend / cause we still got a long way to go / We’ll meet again someday / but right now just go away / ‘cause I still got a long way to go.” Michael Bruce, Long Way To Go, 1971

Happy 420, a holiday that, I dare say, gets happier each year.

In the past six months, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, South Dakota and Virginia have legalized the recreational use of marijuana. That means as of this writing, its use is legal for adults in 16 states, the “District” of Columbia, and Guam – not to mention Canada, Mexico, and a rapidly increasing number of industrial nations.

Another 20 states have legalized the medicinal use of marijuana and most of those are entertaining complete legalization. More than two-thirds of all Americans support legalization, and this cuts across both political parties and those who identify as liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian, and Anglo-Saxon.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, we spend nearly four billion dollars each and every year enforcing the existing marijuana laws. 45% of all inmates in federal prisons are there for drug-related offenses (source: Federal Bureau of Prisons). 1.5 million people are arrested each year for drug-related offenses and over 500,000 are behind bars (source: The Economist). We are spending in excess of twenty billion dollars keeping these miscreants behind bars each and every year.

Of course, a highly disproportionate number of weed inmates are not white men and certainly not white men who are “of a certain age.” It bears noting that a young person with a prison record is extremely likely to be marginalized throughout his or her “career,” and, thus, is equally likely to be a financial burden on society. This should go without saying, but if it did, then it wouldn’t be an issue.

You’d think there would be more productive ways to spend our tax dollars, including (but not limited to) reducing taxes.

But if you did, you wouldn’t be President Joe Biden. He’s opposed to national legalization efforts, and his schedule has been tied up firing some of his staff members who have admitted to prior weed use. This liberal icon has been very busy putting our money where his mouth is. It should be noted that Joe Biden, like his legal predecessor and like this writer, does not consume alcohol.

Of course, there are people who are opposed to legalization. There are the usual religious totalitarians who are convinced their invisible hoary thunderer gets angry every time anybody receives any enjoyment out of life. There also are the self-appointed moral monitors who believe Reefer Madness was a documentary.

And, of course, there’s the prison-for-profit racket, a gaggle of soulless entrepreneurs and investors who are all too happy to feel your pain all the way to their bank.

I firmly believe in the original conservative philosophy that demands we “mind our own business.” Here’s a fun fact: when Benjamin Franklin designed the very first American coin, one side states “Mind Your Business” and the other side declares “We Are One.”

I think we would do well by remembering those two phrases, particularly during these difficult times when our nation and its values are under armed attack by those Anglo-Saxon separatists.

Or… maybe… let’s legalize marijuana just to save the money and to free resources that actually will inure to the benefit of our society. Old school Republicans — who seem to have been purged from the party that carries their name — should embrace this idea just to kick big government in its big ass.

Of course, there are other ways to celebrate 420. Personally, I’m partying down at my local vaccine clinic and getting my second jab. I’m told I will likely get sick for a couple of days, and I appreciate the wisdom of the “but it beats getting Covid” mantra.

Hey… party on, Mike!

And have a safe, healthy, and amusing 420. After what we’ve all been through, we deserve it.

Weird Scenes #124: Smoke on the Rotter

Weird Scenes #124: Smoke on the Rotter

“Just ‘cause somebody can’t handle anything don’t mean we have to pay for their pain / Nicotine, caffeine, chainsaws and guns gotta, make your own regulations / Psychedelic mushrooms good for your mind. If you’re ready to use ‘em, then ya outta try ‘em / How did freedom mess up your life? Decide for yourself what’s wrong and what’s right.” Mojo Nixon, Legalize It!, 1985

Yeah, I’m gonna bray about weed again… and I’m gonna launch my first verbal attack on our present president. You know, Joe Biden. Nice guy, but…

As you read this, dozens if not hundreds of White House staffers have been “suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use,” according to the Daily Beast. Five such staffers have been fired already.

Well, that’s liberalism for you.

Personally, I would be inclined to think that any potential White House staffers who haven’t smoked weed – first or second hand – or haven’t tried an edible or had a medical condition that warrants such use has been living under a rock and therefore has been too isolated to function properly in the job.

Or, perhaps, that cat is simply lying. This might very well be the point. If you’re working at the White House lying is pretty much in the job description.

According to the Daily Beast article, “For the FBI, an applicant can’t have used marijuana in the past three years; at the NSA, it’s only one. The White House … (states) that as long as past use was ‘limited’ and the candidate wasn’t pursuing a position that required a security clearance, past use may be excused.”

But if you’ve toked around a bit, for whatever reason, at any time, the Biden White House thinks you are a security risk. You can put away as much alcohol as you want, but if you’re doing your job and you don’t use politically incorrect language, they’re completely fine that you won’t blab our secrets to Putin.

This is not the matter of following a law that can’t get through the RepubilQan filibuster. As we have seen during the previous administration, the president has the final word on who gets a security clearance.

Let us also note that Joe Biden has appointed Dr. Rahul Gupta as his Drug Czar, a.k.a. the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Gupta was public health commissioner in West Virginia from 2015 to 2018. He ripped apart that state’s needle exchange program, showing a lack of concern about HIV and hepatitis. This is the moral position known as “Shoot up and die, creep!”

By the way, West Virginia is a national leader in drug overdose deaths, so maybe his policy wasn’t exactly a “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you” kind of moment. According to Filter Magazine “West Virginia also had the highest rate of hepatitis C infections in 2015. Today, West Virginia is experiencing multiple HIV and hepatitis C outbreaks.” Continue reading “Weird Scenes #124: Smoke on the Rotter”

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #115: The Whiny Little Bitches Ride Again!

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #115: The Whiny Little Bitches Ride Again!

He is the president but wants to be the king / Know what I like about the guy? Not a goddamn thing / I want to know, how can four years seem so long? / Lord have mercy, what the hell is going on? – “What The Hell,” written by Elvin Bishop, 2020.

I like Bill Maher’s show, but I haven’t been watching it much lately. Semi-populated audiences and well-distanced guests are quite appropriate these days, but I find it creepy on a comedy panel show. No biggie; one way or another, all this will pass.

So I can’t say for certain Maher continues to refer to Baby Don as “that whiny little bitch.” He was on the money when he started this, and either he’s right today or you really do think Hillary Clinton has been running a pederasty ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint – one that, I hasten to add, doesn’t even have a basement.

Oh. Right. Sorry. I’m talking about that whiny little bitch and not QAnon… per se.

I’m not going to whine about Trump. He is what he is (whatever that is) and, as Anderson Cooper said last Friday, Trump is no longer relevant. He is a loser reacting to his mammoth defeat exactly the way we knew he would react, and if he had made a sincere attempt at being a human being we might think “hey, look, an Elvis impersonator finally landed a new gig!”

Nope. Like Caligula, Trump is history. It’s his supporters that vex me. People who are or at least once were otherwise intelligent. People who truly believe the election was stolen, despite the fact that every state’s attorney general has affirmed the validity of their election results. Despite the fact that every judge, be he or she a Democrat or a Republican with a track record of drifting left or drifting right. They all have chucked the Trumpsters’ cases out of court. Trump lost at least his first 16 challenges, as of this writing. If he had one leg to stand on, he’d be Dudley Moore.

Trumpsters are crawing about how close this election was and, in their flea-ridden brainpans, any shift in the vote count most certainly would keep their savior in office. Really? Trump lost by five million votes (and counting), which is two million more votes than he lost by in 2016. But, as we all know, the United States is a republic and not a democracy, so the popular vote is merely a means to the end. It’s the electoral college that votes according to the laws of the elector’s individual states, and Trump lost that one 306 to 232.

57% to 43% is not close. In fact, four years ago when Trump won the electoral college by the exact same count Trump’s acolytes could not stop braying that 306 to 232 was a “landslide victory.” Well, numbskulls, if 306 to 232 was a landslide victory for Trump in 2016 then 306 to 232 is a landslide victory for Biden in 2020.

It has been well established that Trumpsters are science deniers. Let us remember that mathematics is a science and in the murky mentality of these mindless mopes, 232 Trump electoral votes is closer to 306 Biden votes than 306 Trump votes was to Clinton’s 232 a mere four years ago.

This weekend, literally hundreds of reason-challenged paranoids took to the streets of Washington DC to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to have their disease spreading hissy fit. That’s fine by me. Make your voice heard. Stand up for your beliefs. Four years ago, I was at an anti-Trump demonstration held a mere three days after Trump’s election that was organized by high school kids – it attracted a couple thousand people. I gotta wonder what took the Trumpsters so long to get their act on the road.

Oh. Yeah. I get it. Cellphones and social networking also are products of science. They know how to whine online under the cover of their witless pseudonyms but most of them lack the courage and the skill to actually stand up for their beliefs. They are cowards who, fortunately for the rest of us, think Covid-19 isn’t a big deal and therefore are hellbent on killing one another. You know, just like the maskless imbeciles who invaded Sturges, South Dakota last August causing, according to USA Today, at least 414 COVID-19 cases and at least one death, as of September 8.

Whine on, little bitches, whine on.

Bye-bye Baby, bye-bye.

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #114: Premortem 2024

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #114: Premortem 2024

Consider how small you are / Compared to your scream / The human dream / Doesn’t mean shit to a tree. Eskimo Blue Day, lyric by Grace Slick, 1969

Toronto Star

“The media do not get to determine who the president is. The people do,” brayed Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri. “When all lawful votes have been counted, recounts finished, and allegations of fraud addressed, we will know who the winner is.” Well, actually, it is the media’s job to report the facts. The vote comes in slowly and we always get to a point where one side can draw no more water from the well. It doesn’t matter who the candidates are. If Satan had been running against Christ and Satan were to acquire enough votes in the right states, Satan would win, the media would report it as such. My question is, would Christ proclaim such coverage to be fake news?

Math works. It’s very reliable. By definition, math and the other sciences are not dependent upon faith and, usually, mistakes can be corrected quickly. An election call is not a prediction. It is not magical thinking. It is mathematics.

However, math is a science so the fanatics and flat-Earthers will cry bullshit.

Trump, his sons Uday and Qusay, his pet sycophant Lindsey Graham and their ilk refuse to accept simple math. To nobody’s surprise, Trump wallows in petulant frenzy. But this doesn’t mean shit to a tree. Hiss and piss and groan and moan, at 12 noon January 20, 2021, Joe Biden becomes president. He doesn’t need Trump to act like an adult, he doesn’t even need a judge or a bible or a parade – he automatically becomes president. That’s not because of the media, that’s not because of the gaggle of the Pizzagate pederasts, and that’s not in spite of America’s goosestepping militias. It is because math works.

Why should Trump recite a ham-fisted concession speech? Nobody will believe him, and quite frankly, nobody cares. However, there is a very serious reality that the Biden supporters must accept.

Little Steven Van Zant, musician, actor, producer, and low society bon vivant, said it best. To paraphrase, he pointed out that as you walk down the street, no matter who you are or what you think, just about every other person who walks by you disagrees with your politics.

Yeah, okay, so what? As of Sunday at 6 PM EST, Biden received 75,370,055 votes to Trump’s 71,096,558. That’s a margin of 4,273,497 votes. Round it off a teeny bit and Van Sant is absolutely right. In the past, such a split would not be a problem.

These days we’ve got gun-toting losers who think putting on a mask to lessen the risk of death to their fellow Americans and kidnapping and murdering governors who advocate such a horrific abridgment of rights that have no basis in law. We’ve got the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Scums and their ilk burning down buildings, looting, and spreading disease through our neighborhoods. Little Steven is right on the money.

We are only four years away from the next presidential election, one where it seems likely (right now) that a Black/Asian American woman who is slightly left of center will be heading the Democratic Party ticket. The great horde of right-wing American tiny-dicks will not take that well. Be prepared; the worst might be yet to come.

Until then, maybe we can get back to “normal” American behavior. You know, a return to the murder of children by assault-weapon toting psychopaths. The spread of in-bred nut groups like QAnon, where everybody to the left of Mussolini is a pederast pizza delivery boy. Where Covid is no worse than the flu and can be cured by shoving a bright light up your ass. Where old feeble white religious bigots continue to demand control of women’s minds as well as their bodies. Where global warming does not exist, and the acceptance of LGBTQ equality will bring the apocalypse.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, work that might be a bit easier with the orange plague out of office but whose policies and attitudes were affirmed by over 70,000,000 Americans. Take the well-earned victory lap, but this is not time to be less diligent. We remain a nation so split folks in the Irelands take pity on us.

One out of every two. No matter where you land on the political spectrum, one out of every two means you sleep with one eye open.

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #113: Blame The Pollsters?

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #113: Blame The Pollsters?

I get it. We want to have the election results at, roughly, 7:01 PM Eastern Time on election night. More so this year — the Blues want their long national nightmare to come to an end, and the Reds want to get back to uncovering pederasts in the basements of Democratic Party pizza parlors. We all have important stuff to do.

So we’ve got to find a meaningful way to twiddle our thumbs. We can blame Covid for screwing up the process, but we really don’t want to piss it off. We can blame long lines or rigged mail deliveries or drive-by militia members sorely deprived of pizza. Or, being a gaggle of pussies, we can do what we’ve been doing since Florida discovered Chads without Jeremys twenty years ago: we can blame the polls.

This is stupid. The polls are not the province of seers. They do not, and are not supposed to, tell you in advance who is going to win any election. If you’ve got money riding on the outcome, and I used to before my daughter started warning my marks, looking to the polls for relief is a waste of good mojo. The polls are nothing more than tools for political organizers and for reporters desperate to fill time or space. Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #113: Blame The Pollsters?”

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind  #101 — Everyday Surrealism

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #101 — Everyday Surrealism

There’s danger on the edge of town / Ride the King’s highway, baby / Weird scenes inside the gold mine / Ride the highway west, baby — The End, written by The Doors, 1967

As I walked upstairs to my Scribbler’s Sanctorum to write these words, I noticed daughter was watching a hockey game. That’s hardly unusual in this house; both of us are hockey fans and unless otherwise occupied we will watch any game that has a puck and a dearth of New York Rangers fans. But instead of nodding my head in regret, I was thinking of how surreal our times have become.

I do not believe we have ever had the privilege of watching the Stanley Cup playoff games in the middle of a workday afternoon. I’m pretty damned certain we never had new playoff games aired live in August. Hockey in the height of summer just feels wrong. To be fair, so does a team in Las Vegas, where it is (as I type) 106°. And I know for a fact that the Las Vegas Golden Knights, who dress like Doctor Fate on stakes, beat the Chicago Blackhawks Tuesday night. Las Vegas, very hot. Chicago, very cold. The only thing we’re missing here is Porky Pig’s landing at Wackyland. Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #101 — Everyday Surrealism”

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind  #100: Black Like He?

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #100: Black Like He?

I miss the old Kanye, straight from the ‘Go Kanye / Chop up the soul Kanye, set on his goals Kanye / I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye / The always rude Kanye, spaz in the news Kanye / I miss the sweet Kanye, chop up the beats Kanye / I gotta to say at that time I’d like to meet Kanye – I Love Kanye, written by Kanye West, 2016.

You may have heard of Kanye Omari West. He is a very successful rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and fashion designer… and now, he’s a presidential candidate.

When it comes to businessmen as presidential candidates, I will say this: he is far more qualified, experienced and successful then the current clown-in-chief, President Orangeface. But he’s probably no more qualified than, oh, let’s say, you are. Or either of my cats. I’m just playing the odds here.

Don’t matter none. Orangeface has set the presidential bar so low it doubles as a sewer pipe. Yeah, West has made it onto a couple state ballots and doubtlessly will do so in a couple more — mostly swing-states, and that is for a reason.

As it turns out, major Republican campaign operators have been “assisting” West’s efforts to become our next president. You’d think they would be working for the reelection of Orangeface. Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #100: Black Like He?”

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #065: Grinding My Gears

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #065: Grinding My Gears

I recognize that having column inches such as I do grants me a public space to air my grievances. A place, in plain sight, to shoot straight and vent with hope in finding sympathetic ears. Such as it were, we all have these spaces — take the social media platform of choice, and let loose. But here, on Pop Culture Squad, I’m given a bit more leeway to stretch a would-be status message and let it get some height. Normally I’d save my ire for something specifically in the pop culture space (#relevancy), but, here I am stuck in quarantine — a nebulous vacuum of pop culture at present. So, I’m detailing several things in my life that are at very least pop culture adjacent that have been grinding my gears. Hopefully with a little venting, this tightening in my chest might relieve itself a bit. On with the ranting!

1. Virtual Events

With remote learning, and businesses needing to flock to tele-meeting spaces like Zoom, Facebook rooms, Skype, and the like… the population is tired of virtual fraternization. Save perhaps the concerts being put on by various musical artists who all happen to have sophisticated recording equipment in their homes… Zoom and the like are fast becoming tiresome. Yes, we all get it. You throw on a normal shirt, and keep the pajamas on under the gaze of your web cam. Ha ha. Woo. But every virtual event remains the same. We speak over one another, or have dueling monologues. Our kids crash in, and suddenly we’re juggling staying engaged, and remembering we’d literally like to be anywhere else. Continue reading “So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #065: Grinding My Gears”

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #078: Weaponizing Nostalgia

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #078: Weaponizing Nostalgia

I used to be on an endless run / Believe in miracles ’cause I’m one / I have been blessed with the power to survive / After all these years I’m still alive • “I Believe In Miracles,” written by
Dee Dee Ramone & Daniel Rey, 1989

Mindless, vicious and deceitful red baiting is not a good look for the Democratic Party. Not even under the cover of NeverTrump.

If you think that Joe Biden kicked Bernie Sanders’ ass because South Carolina is a “more representative” than the previous primary states, then I’ve got a box of used face-masks to sell you. Three top “centrist leaders” quit the race immediately and tossed their support to Biden because, according to the purveyors of Fake News, Barack Obama told them that would unite the party and protect us from a horrible socialist. Each of these doddering hacks said they would be in the race “until the end.”

Well, this is the end, beautiful friend. The end. Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #078: Weaponizing Nostalgia”