Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Long Overdue

Long Overdue

by Shawn K. Inlow




A starving man was given a feast
And sent out into the world
But given only dry crackers
These will sustain you, they said,
But only so you can dream of the feast




A man dying of thirst 
Crawled to the edge of an oasis
And he swam
And the sweet water ran over his tongue
And made him alive




His journey was from somewhere to oblivion
And here his soul did rest
But the desert extended in every direction
He filled a bottle and hoped it would last
And he went into the hot sun
Dreaming of the shade

Monday, April 9, 2018

Paragon Ragtime Orchestra Performs "The Kid" Saturday at The Rowland

Paragon Orchestra last year performing at The Rowland. (credit CDT)
There are few cinematic events that you can attend that have more worldly class than the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, playing this Saturday at the Rowland Theater in Philipsburg.

If you think you like the silent greats like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, but you've never experienced those masters the way they were meant to be seen, with live musicians actually playing the scores that Chaplin himself wrote, well, then, you've never really seen Chaplin.

Let me explain.  Watch your favorite film but turn off the sound.  How long would it hold your attention?  Which is precisely what The Mountain is telling you.  If you admire Chaplin's "The Kid," which is the feature playing at the Rowland Saturday at 7 p.m. and have only seen it as a "silent movie," then you've never experienced one of the singular joys The Rowland Theater and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra can offer.

Think of "Jaws" without the murky deep score that sets you on the edge of your seat.  Or, perhaps more apropos, a Bugs Bunny cartoon without Carl Stalling's madcap genius orchestra behind it.

I've been in the balcony of the Rowland watching this performance in years past... marveling as the percussionist matches every kick in the seat of the pants with some odd rim shot, as the orchestra swells into a love sequence, or thrills into some death defying stunt.  The effect is true cinematic magic.  And you, dear reader, have the chance to witness it for yourself.

Just click HERE and click on the ticket link and you can reserve your seat ahead of time.  Just $25 and you will see something you can't get anywhere else.  Many like to sit as close to the orchestra pit (see picture above) as possible.  For myself, I like the long balcony view, just below.


The front row balcony seats at the largest movie screen in Pennsylvania are a treat to for soaking it all in and watching a great film be brought to vivid life.

The Mountain assumes you know what "The Kid" is about, but for the unwashed.... The story begins when a destitute woman leaves a baby with a note in a limousine and then goes off to commit suicide.  Hilarious right?  But the limo is stolen by thieves who deposit the baby by a trash can.  Enter Chaplin's beloved "Tramp" who finds the child and provides a loving home.  I will leave it there so you can enjoy it fully, friends.  Suffice to say we'll share a laugh and a tear.

Chaplin was once described as the most well known person on earth, so great was his fame and his art at the telling of a simple and pathetic story.  Even today, your heart will get stolen.  Trust me.

Just over there, to the right, is a still from the movie.  That's the kid, little Jackie Coogan, way back in 1921 with The Tramp himself.  What's not to love.

The Mountain makes no idle promises.  That $25 ticket you just clicked on will be one of the more pleasant evenings you'll have spent in a year.  Try not to miss it.

The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is a world-class orchestra, who've performed the Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Center, National Public Radio and the BBC, and world-wide.  If you've been to Disneyland or Disneyworld, you've heard PRO's music as the outdoor theme music at Main Street USA.

You're in for a treat, friends.  Try not to miss this Saturday's splendid concert/film.  You can come back to this tiny corner of the web and thank me later.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Why Red-Map Is Bad for America

Pennsylvania's Congressional District boundaries have been ruled unconstitutional.  Republicans have been rigging the game since 2010 with a strategy called "Redmap."  Here's why the strategy is bad for America and even bad for republicans.
By Shawn K. Inlow

IN A DEMOCRACY, you want a fair election.  You NEED a fair election.

Anyone who agrees you need fair elections in a representative democracy would then agree that undermining the one-person-one-vote paradigm is antithetical to the democracy.

In Pennsylvania, 37% of voters are republican.  How, then, do republicans control 61% and 80% of the state house and senate respectively?  How, then, does the republican 37% of the voters hold a 12-5 edge (one is currently vacant from a republican retirement) in the U.S. House of Representatives?

Republicans would have you believe that they are winning the political war of ideas.  The Mountain says their success has nothing to do with their political ideas.

It has everything to do with changing the rules of the game.

Republicans have always represented the business class, and that's okay, because rich businessmen need love too.  Because, you know, it's so soul-sucking when your only friends are in it because you're buying.  But, like their friends in business, they play politics in the way that a business might lay out a business plan.  They form committees to lay out strategies and then get billionaires to fund implementation.

Repubs (The Mountain is gonna call them "repubs" until conservatives quit using the pejorative "democrat" as a modifier of "democratic" policies.) have decided to undermine electoral fairness in two key ways: 1) change the boundary lines of districts state by state across the country and 2) suppress likely "democratic" voters.

Here is the official website of REDMAP.  When you hear repubs on teevee talking about massive voter fraud, you might want to hold the mirror of their own words up to their faces and see if the creature moving his lips casts a reflection.  By repubs' own admission, they are using pretzel logic to pen as many democratic voters into as few districts as possible, leaving repubs unopposed in much of the rest of the districts.  It tilts the playing field radically to the repub right.

I've heard it described this way.  Suppose the Steelers are playing the Ravens and come out of Baltimore with a 13 point loss.  But in the second game in Pittsburgh, the Steelers impose new rules for the game and the Ravens have to go 150 yards for a touchdown and the Steelers only have to go 50 yards to hit paydirt.  Second game, The Steelers walk all over the Ravens.  You would say that's unfair.  Unfair, but EFFECTIVE. 

On the left is a great example.  This is Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District, or as it is colloquially known, "Donald Duck Kicking Goofy."  You can see it on the large map in the masthead down around Philadelphia and Delaware.  Repubs drew this district when they took control of the legislature back in 2010 after the last census.  Now, you can drive in and out of three districts in one minute.  Crazy.

Further, look at the state map above.  Glenn Thompson represents The Mountain.  (The Mountain, itself, is roughly located on the "r" in Clearfield County.)  Good ol' GT is from Howard, out on the way east toward the point of Centre County.  What in the world does Glenn Thompson have to do with ERIE County?

The repub redistricting map HAS BEEN RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL.  And the legislature has until February 15th to redraw the districts with the governor's approval and file it with the state supreme court.  Failing this, the court will draw the map.  And this is happening in battleground states across America.  It's unfair and it basically means that democratic voters can pour out into the election with a two thirds majority and get one third of the representation.  In North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court has RULED that the redistricting is racist and disenfranchises black (read: "democratic") voters.

This is going on all over the place and, in a second arm of the repub plan, they have devised a strategy to stop likely democratic voters from even casting votes in the first place with a broad plan to initiate voter I.D. laws that The Mountain finds just as racist as the Redmap plan.  HERE IS A GREAT ARTICLE showing how big of an impact voter repression has on our elections.  When The Mountain considers Redmap in conjunction with vast voter suppression efforts,  you can see the repubs' fear.  They fear a brown America.

So, my friends, when you hear a repub on teevee talking about voter fraud, THEY are the ones perpetrating the fraud.  Even Donald Trump, who famously called for an investigation into how he lost the popular vote by over 3 million "illegal" votes, recently disbanded the commission without any proof of his claim.  BECAUSE IT'S FALSE, PEOPLE.  When my republican friends are sitting there watching Fox, and they're eating up stories about voter fraud, they are being LIED to.  Look around.  The ONLY "news" source pushing this line of propaganda is FOX.  Fox IS the fake news media, folks.  But 37% of Pennsylvanian republican's just don't get it.

Worse than all of that, it's a racist agenda pushed by a racist party who is embracing racist ideology.  (Hail Trump!)  And for those republican friends who can still think objectively, it's just unfair.  It's undemocratic.

The reason this is bad for America and democracy writ large is obvious.  But it is also bad for the repub party.  Ronald Reagan could not get elected by today's conservatives.  Old time public servants like John Heinz, who The Mountain voted for couldn't hang today.  What Redmap has done is make the republican party MORE strident.  Even well heeled republicans like the Bush family can't believe the racist and hate-filled bent they're seeing here. 

HERE is a story about how women in general are being repelled by republican politics.  Oh, don't get me started on how repubs have embraced the radical pro-life agenda nationwide.  How repubs everywhere are damaging women's health care, family planning and reproductive rights.  It's as if they've unleashed every nosy church lady all judging and gossiping onto the political landscape.  Pick-a-little-talk-a-little.  No matter how you slice it, the evangelical disconnect is insane in Trump-land.   I think it can be shown he's a self-entitled serial sex offender with three wives who PAYS HUSH MONEY TO PORN STARS!  Oh, my LAND!  They were all in a tizzy back in those quaint Clinton years when a married man lied under oath about a consensual blow job.  My how things change.  In the church-lady caucus, Bill Clinton=Bad; Donald Trump=Okay!

You get the feeling that the women's movement is chasing a lot of pervy repubs out of office before shit goes public.  You know, better to be retire than be blackmailed, right?  HERE is a story about the wave of Trumpist repubs who are gittin' while the gittin's good.  The Mountain wonders about Bill Shuster.  But just look at the way Redmap is producing hard-right crazies!  Roy Jones is breathtaking.

HERE is a story about how the reddening of repub districts is resulting in a degradation of their party.

If there was a home for moderate republicans or even old fashioned people like myself who often voted republican, there isn't now.  Right now, unless you are a corporate capitalist, fascist, neo-nazi or self-righteous evangelical, you have no business being a republican.

The Mountain will leave you with that to think about.  But one more thing.  While we're straightening out the partisan, racist, unfair repub electoral map, why don't we do something about Pennsylvania's state government?

The Pa. General Assembly has 253 members, consisting of a Senate with 50 members and a House of Representatives with 203 members, making it the second-largest state legislature in America and the largest full-time legislature.   As of 2014, members' base pay was $85,356 and THAT'S NOT EVEN THE HALF OF IT.

I ask you.  With the condition of central Pennsylvania and the rampant poverty that has existed all my life around these mountains, who needs that much representation?  There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania.  It can't be that difficult to get a representative government that is fair and doesn't bankrupt everyone else.

Of course, for that to happen, you'd have to get a large repub majority to vote against themselves.  Good luck with that.
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Thanks for stopping in, dear reader, and feel free to comment in the space below.  Please know that your comments gain weight when you sign your name.  I do.  You should too.

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Saturday, January 6, 2018

How to Get the Most Out of YOUR Tax Break

This is a lot of money.  Odds are you'll get about $60 or less from the republican tax reform legislation.
How much is a trillion dollars?  
The Mountain was asking itself that question.  It's not as simple as you might think.  In the context of the recent republican effort to pay their donors back in the form of a $1.5 Trillion tax cut , I was trying to figure out how much we might get in tax relief.

Experts have said that 85% of this $1.5 trillion (or $1.275 trillion) goes to the richest 1% of Americans.   There are 122 million "tax paying units" in this country.  And I was thinking how nice it would be to divide $1.275 trillion among "regular" Americans.  If our government is going to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the deficit , wouldn't it be nice if "the forgotten men" of America got the gravy instead of the crumbs?

To understand this impact and what our government is doing, let's start out small.

One thousand thousands equals one Million.  One thousand Millions equals one Billion.  And one thousand Billions equals one Trillion.  A Trillion can also be thought of as a Million Millions.  So if you divide $1.275 trillion evenly among all tax paying units in America, every one of us would be getting a $1 million tax break.  The Mountain says very little work would get done around here if that was going to happen.  But that's not what's going to happen.

Under this plan, President Donald Trump is going to make an estimated $1 Billion (one thousand millions).  So all this republican bluster I've heard about the national debt and deficit is plainly shown for what it is: pure 100% American Bullshit.  We (us, U.S. all of us) are not bailing out big banks this time.  We're being bilked up front.  The debt plane is being crashed again to benefit the very same people who destroyed the world economy under George W. Bush and handed us the bill.

And you know, I'm getting tired of republicans ripping us off at every turn.  According to Gary Dorrien in his book "The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective," it's the republicans who wipe out the economy over and over again and it's the democrats who get stuck cleaning up the mess.  Read along with Gary for a few paragraphs...

"Reagan led the Republican Party into temptation by persuading it that deficits don't matter because tax cuts pay for themselves, especially at the upper end.  When Reagan took office in 1981, the national debt was $907 billion, approximately 26 percent of gross domestic product.  Eight years later the debt stood at $2.7 trillion, representing 40% of GDP.  In eight years Reagan tripled the country's accumulated debt by cutting the marginal tax rate from 70% to 28% and cutting the top rate on capital gains from 49 to 20% -- social engineering on a staggering scale that fueled a huge inequality surge.  George H.W. Bush, vowing to maintain Reagan's winning approach, let the debt escalate to $3.9 trillion, which scared him enough to break his vow, raise the marginal rate to 35%, demoralize his party and lose a second term."

"The only break in America's post-1980 record of escalating the debt was the Clinton administration.  The national debt crossed the $4 trillion mark during Clinton's first year in office, 1993.  Clinton raised the marginal rate to 39.6%, which republicans warned would destroy the economy.  At the end of Clinton's presidency, the debt was $5,674,000,000 and heading downward as Clinton rang up budget surpluses of $70 billion in 1998, $124 billion in 1999 and $237 billion in 2000.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, had the United States stuck with Clinton's fiscal policy, the cumulative budget surplus would have reached $5.6 trillion by 2011, wiping out the national debt."

"All of that was quickly squandered by George W. Bush's tax cuts and ramped up military expenditures, plus a prescription benefit lacking a pay-for.  Bush's tax cuts blew a $2 trillion hole in the deficit.  He was the first president in American history not to raise taxes to pay for an expensive war.  Official expenses for the two wars that Bush charged exceeded $1 trillion with long term costs that will triple that figure.  He added a $1 trillion Medicare prescription drug benefit without paying for it either, a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry, creating the first entitlement in American history lacking a revenue source.  Then the casino economy that Bush deregulated crashed.  In eight years the Bush administration piled up new debt and new accrued obligations of $10.35 trillion and it doubled the national debt from $5.7 trillion to $11.3 trillion, not counting the $5.4 trillion of debt inherited from the federal takeovers of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac.  Bush amassed more debt in eight years than America's previous 42 presidents combined, breaking the record of the previous debt champion, Ronald Reagan, and the record keeps growing as three quarters of the debt amassed on Obama's watch is the outgrowth of Bush's unpaid tax cuts, unpaid wars, and unpaid drug benefit, and much of the rest is cleanup for the financial crash."

"Obama inherited a deflating economy teetering on an outright depression, a skyrocketing debt, the structural legacy of thirty years of politically engineered inequality, and two wars.  When he took office in January of 2009 the U.S. economy was losing 741,000 jobs per month and the Congressional Budget Office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009.  The economy had lost $13 trillion of net worth over the past 18 months and 2.6 million jobs over the past 12 months.  The government had pledged $9 trillion in loans, investments and guarantees to fill the chasm.  And the economy was shrinking by nearly 6% annually.  Had these losses continued the United States would have been in a depression by September.  Instead, by January 2010 the job loss figure had been cut to 20,000 and the economy was growing at nearly 6% annually."

Remember:  THIS time, the tax cut is good for us.  It's not good for Donald Trump.  Take his word for it.

Enjoy your chump change (or should we call it "Trump change"?) because in a couple years your tax bill, Joe Average, is going to go UP while the rich retain their benefits FOREVER. 

So I wanted to get to the bottom of how you can get the biggest bang for your tax cut dollar.  I'm not sure my tax plan is particularly well laid out, but here goes.  

I'd say invest in makeup and disguise items first.  Then look around and see if you can locate someone who owns a politician.  Owning a politician takes disgusting amounts of wealth.  Disguise yourself as that person and go to that person's house and, in a flattering way, ask for an autograph.   While having the person sign your autograph book, gently take him hostage and bind him, gently now, in the closet and wait for his tax return to come.  Use the autograph to forge the check and sign it over to yourself.

Because that's the only way regular people are going to get dick out of this deal.  Because while Donald Trump is getting a billion dollars, you can maybe afford to buy some hot dogs down at Sheetz while you wait for the republicans to come after your Social Security and Medicare when suddenly - Surprise! - there's not enough money left to go around.  Enjoy your lunch.

By Shawn K. Inlow
1.6.18

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Thanks for stopping by, dear reader.  You can comment below, just remember that your comments mean a lot more when you actually sign your name to them.  In the meantime, I'll see you down at Sheetz where you can get two death-dogs with everything for under $1!  Until next time, Enjoy!




 

Now Hear THIS!!

Streampad