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Apparently, Mitt Full of Dollars Romney had a bit of an incident at a campaign stop in Florida this morning, when he refused to answer questions from reporters and, in fact, tried to prevent them from getting anywhere near him.

Has exactly as much credibility as Mitt Romney

It seems a strange strategy for a presidential candidate, but I can see how it makes sense from Mitt’s point of view.  The core of his support comes from people who would vote for Bozo the Clown over Obama and as long as Mitt Romney doesn’t actually say anything those people may continue to think, erroneously, that the Mittster actually has more of a clue than our big footed, red nosed friend.

Still, in the interest of livening up a campaign which has been godawful dull since Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann are no longer in it, I propose the following game for journalists.  It’s called “Ask Mitt Romney a Question!” and it goes like this: You get two points each time you get a question in, regardless of whether it’s answered.  One point each for follow up questions.   5 bonus points if you are physically expelled from the event where the question is asked.  You are allowed to ask the same question any number of times, until it is answered. It can be shouted from across a room, if that’s as close as the secret service will let you get.
Suggested questions: Is it assault if a gang of high school students holds one boy down and cuts his hair? Do you think it’s funny to trick a blind person into walking into a door? Is bullying a natural and necessary part of adolescence?  When did you stop being an arrogant jerk, what was the moment of enlightenment? What would you do to create jobs? (tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count) Which endorsement are you prouder of, Donald Trump’s or George Bush’s? How many homes do you own? How many servants do you have? When you attack Iran, will you send in troops or just drop bombs and kill random civilians? What newspapers do you read? (That’s kind of a lame question, but it worked before) How is Romneycare different than Obamacare? What is the correct height for a tree, anyway?

Have fun, journalists!  Winner will receive the thanks of a grateful nation.

One of my self-imposed rules for this blog is that I will only write about topics where my opinion is somehow original, an angle that is being overlooked by the punditocracy.  Today’s news stories offer me little inspiration.  Sure, that crook Jamie Dimon should resign from the Fed, but I’m hardly the 1st person to say that.  Mitt Romney is being super slimy with his insinuations that Obama and Clinton don’t get along, but it seems like half of my columns lately are about just what a weasel Willard is and besides, I don’t really care if the two are bosom buddies, as long as they work well together.  I’ve heard that Abbott and Costello couldn’t stand each other, either.  I considered writing about the Greek Nazi party’s strong showing in recent elections, but I’m sure that my opinion on that (Greek Nazis are not very nice people) is the majority one, and where’s the fun in that?  I tried to think of something humorous and/or profound about lightning striking French President Hollande’s plane, but I haven’t really formed an opinion on him yet and lightning strikes the righteous as well as the douchebags.   So, I’ll just write about my day.

Highly Overrated Author and Mystic Aleister Crowley

It was a pleasant day.  I only had 4 classes scheduled and 2 of them canceled.  My 9 a.m.  student called me just after 8, but said don’t worry about it, I’d get paid anyway, so that pleased me, and I actually got a couple of things done in the a.m.: did a little proofreading, wrote a short poem and finally finished that piece of crap Aleister Crowley book I’ve been reading, “Moonchild”.

The poem goes like this:

We are what we are,

what will be, will be

it is what it is – tautology

Anyway, next time the conversation turns to the occult and somebody mentions Aleister Crowley, they’re going to get an earful.  His talk about magic is mostly various stylings on voodoo, with some of the mumbo-jumbo in Latin and Greek, but he doesn’t really make it real or believable.  Also, he was an unbelievably sexist pig and I’m not buying that “context of the times” line in this case.  It was 1917, not ancient Greece.

He says, several times, out of the mouths of both  good guy characters and bad guy characters, that women like being beaten – makes them feel appreciated.  That’s the reason, according to Crowley, that the Suffragettes “provoked” the police.

The man was an asshole, plain and simple.

Walked to my 2nd class, unhurried, sat in the park for a while.

After that, I had a new class.  That’s always interesting, just in the getting there for one thing.  It will get boring soon enough, but today it was a pleasant change of pace.

And that was that.  And this is this.

Like most people who comment on the Huffington Post from time to time (O.K., kind of obsessively, like way more than anybody is interested in) I have run up against the comment moderation policy more than once.

I’m not complaining (too much).  A site like that has to have some kind of moderation policy, or else it would be filled with posts that say nothing more than BWAHAHAHA!!1!, or one word repeated 100 times because somebody’s figured out how to do that with their computer and thinks it’s cute, or, near the top of the thread (but usually not right AT the top) a couple of dozen posters writing First!  I know this because it used to be like that, before they instituted their current commenting policy.

Edward Goldberg, Putz

Still, it can be frustrating sometimes.  Here are some hints to help you deal with the censors over there, if you ever post over there.

1.  Don’t use bad words.  Really, that’s an easy one for them to spot and throw out, and they can be seriously Puritan.  Also, I think robots might be moderating some of the articles.  If you say, for instance, “I wish it weren’t so,” they might see the sh and the it and not the space.  Actually, I don’t remember if that was Huffpo, but it happened to me somewhere.

2.  The columns on the side, their guest opinion people, seem to be allowed to moderate their own comments section.  They tend to be moderated much more heavy-handedly than the news articles in the middle.

3.  A reply to another comment will usually go in right away.  I guess the mods are just worn down by that point.

4.  Sometimes you just aren’t going to get through because, although it’s basically just a big news aggregation site, Arianna is a strange old bird who made her fortune by marrying and then divorcing a gay Republican, and there are certain subjects she does not want discussed.  The name Lori Klausitis is not going to make it into the comments section (the young intern who was found dead one day on the floor of Joe Scarborough’s office), and neither is anything to do with building 7.  Area 51 is no problem, but building 7 is off limits.

Anyway, I responded to a column over on the left hand side today by a man named Edward Goldberg (Professor, Zicklin Graduate School of Business, Baruch College; president, Annisa Group) in which he wrote that Obama might LOOSE the election if the Euro collapses.

I wrote in and said hey, you seem like a pretty smart guy, college professor and all, how come you don’t know how to spell “lose”?  Needless to say, it did not get printed.  So, I wrote again and said “Hey, how come you didn’t print my comment, LOSER”, which I thought was pretty funny.

It still didn’t get printed.  And the misspelling didn’t get corrected.  Oh, well.  I do what I can.

Just a couple of points on the John Lauber incident that I think the press has glossed over, or missed entirely.

Mitt Romney, cca. 1965

First, to recap:  Some time in the mid-60s (I’m kind of surprised that no news outlets have been able to pinpoint the month and the year, but Romney graduated in ’65) Romney and four of his droogies at Cranbrook Academy (think Dead Poet’s Society or Catcher in the Rye) pinned John Lauber to the ground and, while he screamed for help and cried, Mitt chopped his hair off with a pair of scissors.

Now, Mitt has pointed out that he didn’t know Lauber was gay and I believe him.  If they’d known he was gay they might have done worse.

No, this was just about the long hair.  In 1965, long hair on men was a big deal.  A very big deal.  I graduated from High School in 1972 and it was still socially divisive, but in 1965 it really stood out.  When the Beatles hit the scene (their first trip to America was early in ’64) parents, politicians and other protectors of the status quo were horrified, and if you look at a photo of the Beatles from that era, their hair was actually pretty short.

But each rock band had to top the others and eventually hair got long enough that the only way to go was back and then came punk and mohawks and big spikes and hair dyed in colors that don’t actually exist in nature, and tattoos and piercings and I don’t know where we’ll go next but at each stage, there have been pricks like Mitt Romney who appoint themselves to protecting the status quo.  Totally in vain, because styles keep changing and always will.

It is not too much of a surprise that a man of Mitt’s age (65) would be the uptight conservative that he is.  The weird thing is that Mitt was a 65 year old man when he was 18.  He probably hated the Beatles.

Here’s a link to yet another story about yet another article about how conservatives and liberals are different, not just because conservatives are soulless shells of human beings, facades of humanity, narrow minded, bigoted, greedy, anti-intellectual troglodytes and liberals are generally fairly agreeable people although pretty flaky sometimes, but because there are specific differences within our brains, for instance, conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala, the section that’s all about fight or flight, and liberals brains are better at actually thinking about stuff.

Not surprisingly, this makes liberals more neurotic.  Ignorance being bliss, the conservatives go through life dumb and happy.  There could be something to that.  I still wouldn’t trade places with them.

Scientists have become pretty good at examining the brain with their fancy dyes and microscopic implants and wires attached to people’s heads.  They look at the screen and see different areas light up, I think you can actually see images of specific thoughts. I saw that on House once, anyway, and I’m  sure it’s coming.  But, I was fairly unimpressed with this particular study.  We know that conservatives and liberals think differently.  Conservatives think like conservatives and liberals think like liberals.  That’s why they call them that.

The study also tried to claim that one’s political tendencies are hereditary, because they do seem to run in families.  Well, duh.  That doesn’t prove heredity, there’s still the old heredity v. environment thing to worry about, nature v. nurture.  Of course, most people grow up accepting their parents’ political belief system.  If you grow up as a Baptist, you are likely to stay a Baptist your whole life.  If you grow up in Wisconsin, you will probably always support the Packers.

So, I don’t really think it’s hereditary, no.  Conservatives are crazy, though.