Osborne Ink ::

“Call me a traitor, tell me to shut up and sit silent while the republic is ruined, and I’ll show you the symbol of freedom located between my index and ring fingers. And I will be anything but quiet about it.” Sunday, February 11, 2007

I had to get rid of my land line a couple of years ago. Not only was it unnecessary — I had a cell phone — but every new letter or mention in the Times Daily would bring THE CALLS. Fearless free speech comes at the price of some privacy given over to anonymous assholes, drunken old ladies, gibbering idiots… I’m actually talking about the fans, here. The ones who wanted to argue were bad enough.

The Times Daily published my letter today, and I just happened to be at mom’s house for two minutes to pick something up when the phone rang. Mom answered it and stopped me three feet from the door: “It’s for you.” It was a very nice lady from Russellville, Alabama, calling to tell me that she agrees with every single thing I write.

I asked my mom if this had happened before. “No,” she said, “but it was a good letter.”

I guess so.

Now, let’s assume that lady called every ‘Osborne’ in the phone book before she got the right house on the right day at exactly the right moment. Fate, in other words. But a disconcerting fate, for I have taken great pains to be hard to find. Something cosmic is at work here; I hope the poor lady hasn’t fulfilled her greatest wish and condemned herself to an ironic demise, or something.

I hate fame. I don’t want to be famous. In fact, I tried like hell to keep my name out of the article that ran with that picture.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Times Daily didn’t run my response to this tinfoil-hat hackery.

To the Editor:

Lawrence Swift blames a “shallow, misinformed and apathetic citizenry” for “acquiescence in the face of egregious usurpations of power.”

For “shallow, misinformed and apathetic,” substitute ‘scared, lied to, and spied on.’ That is how Bush invaded a country that never attacked the United States and had no plans to attack the United States. The resulting boondoggle has run up a trillion dollars in public debt, squandered all the international goodwill of 9/11, and mired our military in Iraq.

Eight years of waterboarding, domestic surveillance, and disastrous policy by the “Unitary Executive” weren’t enough to raise Swift’s ire, but now that we’ve elected a Democrat to fix things it’s time for…what, exactly? Sedition? Treason? Hoarding food and ammunition in your basement? Please.

And who shall we blame for the global financial meltdown? ACORN was not in the room when Alan Greenspan inflated the housing bubble. When hedge fund managers created phantom stock, destroying American companies for fun and profit with ‘naked short selling,’ Obama was not there.

When mortgage brokers approved subprime loans regardless of ability to pay, lied to buyers, and buried extortionary terms in the fine print, Bush’s regulators were asleep at the switch. Financial geniuses called toxic bonds “safe,” leveraged them, and insured the losses. No one twisted their arms.

Consider Obama’s mortgage relief bill ($80 billion) against Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which destroyed some $60 billion and counting. It is just one of the many Ponzi schemes we are learning about. According to Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, forty-five percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by schemes both legal and illegal.

All this fancy financial gimmickry was designed to sap every penny of real value into executive bonuses. Now that this house of cards has collapsed, Swift will excuse me if I don’t shed tears for the 2% of Americans making more than $250,000. They caused this mess; I am happy to see them clean it up. “Eat the rich?” Yes – in tiny bites. If you make $300,000 a year, new marginal rates increase your tax burden about $4.10 a day. That’s a Starbucks venti latté. Deal with it.

The alternative is a depression. The alternative is millions of Americans, the 98% that didn’t cause this debacle, out of work and out of their homes. The alternative is to let foreclosure rates destroy neighborhoods and erase property values for people who didn’t take part in mortgage-mania. The alternative truly is “shallow, misinformed, and apathetic.”

They printed my letter! Yay! Just last night at the steakhouse where my family took me for birthday dinner, two fans stopped to introduce themselves and say how much they liked my letters to the editor, and I had to tell them the paper was not printing me anymore — because they haven’t been. I’ll gladly eat those words today.

Now when I say “fans,” I don’t mean these are adoring strangers. They’re my mom and dad’s friends. We all live in a small southern town where everyone knows exactly everything about everybody else. And everyone always asks me about THE BOOK because they’ve all heard marvelous things from the people who’ve kindly reviewed the earlier drafts.

Which is why my birthday present to myself is to bang out another chapter.

If anyone out there is interested in giving me a birthday present, they can read my story and leave a comment at the end.

To the Editor:

In 2001, unemployment stood at four percent. Less than thirteen percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. Only one-half of one percent of homeowners faced foreclosure. Seventeen million Americans relied on food stamps. The treasury saw its first budgetary surplus in decades.

Yet President Bush declared: “A warning light is flashing on the dashboard of our economy, and we just can’t drive on and hope for the best. We need tax relief now.” Congressional Republicans echoed this alarmist rhetoric in passing a $1.3 trillion tax cut bill.

That ‘bill’ is now due. Today, we enjoy nearly double the unemployment rate of 2001; seventeen percent of us live under the poverty line; foreclosure rates have almost tripled; and the number of Americans on food stamps has doubled. Our treasury faces a trillion-dollar deficit.

Yet Congressional Republicans now balk at a stimulus package costing $400 billion dollars less than the Bush tax cuts, even though almost half of the stimulus package is tax cuts. And in an Orwellian turn, the nattering nabobs of negativism accuse the president of fearmongering – as if the economic forecast was all flowers and candy.

Economists say we will experience a deep recession lasting until at least 2011. Hearing Republicans complain that spending won’t be fast enough, but will peak in two years, is like someone saying you only need to prepare for four weeks of winter, and never mind that it’s early November.

Republicans have no credibility to talk about the economy, taxation, or fiscal stimulus. None.

Their ‘facts’ are completely inverted. The Congressional Budget Office says government spending has a minimum return of one dollar in economic activity for every dollar spent, while the best tax cuts can return is fifty cents. This is the same office Republicans misquoted all last weekend on cable talks shows; but facts have a well-known liberal bias, so they continue chanting their tax-cut mantra.

Senate Republicans are doing their best to make us all drink the Kool-Aid. They’ve already removed the most critical spending: aid to cash-strapped states like Alabama. When police, teachers, and firefighters are laid off, they will cut back on private spending and nullify much of what any stimulus achieves. The GOP is counting on this, for their answer to last November’s trouncing at the polls is to double-down on obstructionism and hope they can make Obama fail.

Republicans have rallied around Rush Limbaugh. They have placed party before country. Hopefully Obama has learned a critical lesson, and will forgo any more efforts at bipartisanship.

From now on, he should use his majority to ram his agenda right down their lying throats.

The Times Daily did not print this.

The email address to send them a letter is VENT @ TIMES DAILY (DOT) COM.

This letter ran today in the Times Daily. It’s a response to a classic of hooplehead wisdom from a Mr. Jimmy Wayne Cosby. (Don’t serial killers go by all three names?) Wayne Cosby has a habit of using the president-elect’s middle name whenever possible; turnabout is fair play.

To the Editor:

Recently, Mr. Wayne Cosby said “there may be good reason to question the accuracy of some Internet information, but it represents a forum where we, the average citizens, can get what the national media has covered up.” This much is true. We bloggers do engage in journalism – in every phase of it, including the editorial process. No one can quash our stories if they might offend advertisers or public figures.

The flip side is that we have no Mike Goens to check our facts or quotes, either. Yes, bloggers report all kinds of things withheld by the gatekeepers of media; for example, depending on the Web site you visit, Earth is controlled by Zionist Jews, the Masons, aliens, or a subterranean race of reptilian-human hybrids.

Thus, when stories cross over from the Web to the so-called “mainstream media,” or MSM, reporters and editors exercise more than the usual diligence. Of a dozen leads on Joe the Plumber developed by bloggers, only three penetrated the mainstream media; the others were misleading or mistaken.

Mr. Wayne Cosby has fallen victim to the dark side of Internet journalism. “The fact … is that Arabs, Muslims, were responsible for 9/11,” he says. (Several Web sites aggressively disagree with this presumption, but I digress.) “It is reasonable that persons with like ethnic and religious affiliation should be viewed with suspicion.”

What rot. Islam requires the public confession of faith. There is no such thing as a “secret Muslim;” ask any professor of comparative religion. And Obama is no more an Arab than is Wayne Cosby – ask any ethnologist. These inventions don’t become true just because someone posts them on the Internet.

Fantasists have made a handsome profit convincing people like Wayne Cosby that Obama was already perpetrating a vast fraud while in the womb. When he says “The crisis looming over (Obama’s) place of birth will not go away,” what he really means is that a few million people want to believe in a conspiracy so much that they will see one. Occam’s Razor has never convinced UFO enthusiasts or 9/11 theorists; neither will it convince Mr. Wayne Cosby. Regardless of the evidence – or lack thereof – they will not let it go for eight years.

The paranoid will always be with us.

Matt “Hussein” Osborne

Florence

It appears that I will spend the next eight years shooting down letter-writers to the Times Daily who perpetuate stupid myths about the president-elect. Tonight I’m working on a reply to this gem. I’ll post it here when it’s done.