Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jun 2013
Source: Pasadena Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2013 Southland Publishing
Contact:  http://www.pasadenaweekly.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4323
Author: Carl Kozlowski
Note: Jimmy Dore can be heard on "The Jimmy Dore Show" at 3 p.m. 
Fridays on 90.7 KPFK-FM and can be seen on "The Young Turks" online 
on Current TV's Web site at youtube.com/tytcomedy. His Web site is 
www.jimmydorecomedy.com .

ORACLE OF OUTRAGE

Comic Jimmy Dore Scowls About the World While Loving Life in Pasadena

Jimmy Dore has a lot to say about the state of America, and he uses 
many different platforms to say it. He's a nationally headlining club 
comedian who has regularly performed on the Jimmy Kimmel and Craig 
Ferguson shows and earned the honor of having two solo one-hour 
Comedy Central specials. He's also one of the pundits on Current TV's 
"The Young Turks," as well as the host of his own bitingly hilarious, 
nationally syndicated radio program, "The Jimmy Dore Show."

Yet, while the radio show emanates from North Hollywood's KPFK-FM 
station each week, Dore is a proud Pasadenan. He enjoys the fact that 
Pasadena is a cultural hub, but is even more appreciative of its 
distance from the behind-the-scenes game playing of the show-business 
scene. That combination helps him maintain the same kind of grounded 
life he experienced during his boyhood on the blue-collar South Side 
of Chicago.

"I grew up in what I like to call a very blue-collar neighborhood, 
very blue. I would say it was a navy-blue-collar neighborhood on the 
southwest side of Chicago," Dore recalls. "The people worked hard all 
day and then went home at night and watched reruns of Archie Bunker 
and laughed for all the wrong reasons."

As the youngest of 12 kids in an Irish-Catholic family, Dore learned 
early on that he needed to fight for attention if he wanted to 
receive any, even from his parents. For him, being funny was the way 
to get a response, and eventually having such a large and built-in 
audience meant he had plenty of practice by the first time he took the stage.

"As soon as I figured out I was replaceable, I knew I had to try 
comedy," Dore says. "There was an open mic night near my house at a 
comedy club called the Comedy Womb - 'Where Comedians Are Born' was 
their motto. I started in the early '90s, when all you needed was a 
pulse and suit jacket and you could get a paying comedy gig."

One thing that quickly helped Dore stand out was the fact that he 
wasn't shy about his political views, which are often labeled as 
strictly progressive. But he's actually more of a free thinker who 
demands the truth from our leaders and the institutions of 
government, with a particular focus on fighting the hypocrisy of the drug war.

Dore is a passionate advocate for ending the war on pot and 
legalizing medical use of marijuana. He not only was a 
writer-performer of the smash off-Broadway hit "The 
Marijuana-Logues," but he also believes that using medical marijuana 
saved his sanity and possibly his life, due to its strong role in 
helping alleviate chronic and debilitating pain caused by problems 
with vertebrae.

"I describe myself as politically aware, a progressive along the 
lines of Teddy Roosevelt," explains Dore. "I see that the real 
problems facing our country are not left-right, but top-down. The 
plutocrats against the rest of us, and the plutocrats are on a 
30-year winning streak."

As the Obama administration battles concurrent allegations of at 
least three different scandals - regarding the terrorist attack on 
the US Embassy in Benghazi, the targeting of conservative groups by 
the IRS, and the wiretappings of reporters at the Associated Press 
and FOX News - Dore believes that the accusations and interrogations 
are acting as distractions from the bigger problems facing the nation.

"Two of those three could be called 'the scandals that weren't,'" he 
says. "So a political organization applying for tax-exempt status was 
first given extra scrutiny before actually being granted tax-exempt 
status. There's a scandal there somewhere, right?

"Of course, the real scandal is that the true criminals in our 
country will never be prosecuted: The criminal bankers who raped our 
economy and pocketed the profits while it crashed," he continues. 
"And the people who ordered torture and war crimes and lied our 
nation into an illegal war ... We don't prosecute those crimes 
anymore, but we did get Martha Stewart."

Thanks to living in a relatively laid-back state like California, 
Dore doesn't have to worry much about getting arrested for using 
medical marijuana. Suffering from problems with his back, he can 
lapse into having pain so great it threatened to debilitate him a few 
years ago.

Even though he has the right to be prescribed marijuana, Dore finds 
the process of receiving it from a clinic to be utterly absurd.

"I can buy liquor at a gas station in the United States but I have to 
see a doctor and go to a clinic and be buzzed into a back room in 
order to buy a joint," he says, with rising sarcasm. "Are you kidding 
me? You guys should be embarrassed to be doing this to me. You say, 
'I don't think you're sick enough.' Well, you're not sick and you can 
buy Everclear and no one makes you take a test to buy it. You should 
feel bad that you make a guy jump through hoops to get his drug of 
choice when you don't have to.'"
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom