But country music has got to be the supreme example. People work like dogs, have few or no educational opportunities, live surly lives of struggle just trying to get by, get their cods shot off for the amusement of Cheney and Condi, yet, the country music industry sells even that identity back to the very people who are being screwed and should be pissed as hell about it but aren’t because of the cultural ghetto we poor whites are raised in. As the old Johnny Russell song says, “There’s no place I’d rather be than right here, with my red neck and white socks and blue ribbon beer.” And so the nine-buck-an-hour skidder operator with the double hernia and no health insurance listens to the song and says to himself: “Hey! That’s my life! And he’s a star and he’s singing a hit about it, so other people must be satisfied with it. I reckon there’s no place I rather be than right here! That was true in 1973 when Johnny Russell won a Grammy for the song and it’s still true. It’s a damned good song. I’m still playing it.
The country music industry helped sell the heartland working mook on the virtues of dying in Iraq. The skidder operator’s wife sits inputting billing data at the local hospital for $6.00 an hour, listening to a song about dead soldier’s cherried out car sitting in the garage, waiting for his son to become old enough to drive it with reverence under a heroic sky. In country music everybody is made hero. Truck drivers are bigger than life figures, hemorrhoids, stress and all. It’s much the same as some rap music mythologizing pointless street violence. Take a truly fucked situation and sell it back as bigger than life. And so the production people at dreary workplaces listen to country music all day, and the truck driver is hearing the same songs 3,000 miles away, and the house painter has it playing on his paint spattered portable radio, and identity is further hardened among millions of Americans: “I might be dumb, uneducated, and worked to death — but I am a hero. I AM America. More American than anyone who is not the same as me.” So anyone who listens to classical music is less American by inference. ” . . . and besides, I am willing to die in Iraq, just like the hometown boys in the songs. There is no better proof than that!”
September 13, 2007
Let’s Dump Prepackaged Class Identities
CHENEY ’08
Cheney has said he will not RUN for President. It’s a terrible thought, but is it possible he plans a different route to the presidency? It’s hard to believe that this madman will quietly give up his drive for absolute power and world domination when his term expires. Could this be what’s behind those scarey executive orders?
Patterson: Those Who Say Two Incomes Are Necessary Are “Ignorant”
In yet another example of the divide between religious fundamentalism and reality, Soutwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson claimed that those who belive that it is economically necessary for women to work outside the home are “ignorant.”
The statement comes as part of an interview with Reuter’s about the Bachelor of Arts degree in Home Making that is now available at one of the Baptist colleges. True to standard Southern Baptist form, the course is open only to women and has a goal of readying a woman “intellectually and in her basic skills” to accept a life of domestic servitude.
Patterson further displays his near-schizophrenic disconnection with modern society when he tries to tie divorce and domestic abuse to a lack of housekeeping skills. Several of the requirements of the degree program, such as years of Latin and classical Greek, have no practical application in the real world and even less of one when confined barefoot and pregnant in the house.
It’s decisions like the one to offer this degree program that exemplify why I am a former fundamentalist. Sure, it was bad enough to be seen as a second-class citizen because of my gender, but the idea of turning an institution of higher learning into a place of indoctrination into one’s inferiority is an unconscionable travesty.
Poor Eldrick…
According to today’s USA Today (Page 7E) Eldrick is tops in hitting the greens,
but he is ranked 134th for driving accuracy in 2007.
Poor guy, maybe he’d be better with practice?
Today’s Stories that you won’t see in the MSM
Russia tests Super Bomb:
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1155952320070911
Some Speculation about Missing Nuclear Weapon 6 shipped 5 arrive:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread302187/pg1
Putin Dissolves Russian Govt:
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2954274.ece
Links re Israel & Syria regarding Nuclear Weapons:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3448829,00.html
Mailbag
The Republican’s definition of a troop cut in Iraq is to increase the number of troops and promise to lower the troop levels to the point where they started, and then not keep the promise.
Republicans define success as the promise to get down to the same level a year from now as we were a year ago. It will be interesting to see what they are saying a year from now when they are trying to get reelected.
Marc Perkel
San Bruno, CA.
Polar Bears extinct by 2050?
By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s polar bears may be dead — including all in Alaska — because global warming has melted their Arctic ice home. That’s the conclusion of an analysis of nine studies released today by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The bears also will lose 42% of the Arctic range they need to live in during summer, the USGS says.
Arctic sea ice dissolves to all-time low
Arctic sea ice is at the lowest level ever recorded (left), scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported this week. The NSIDC reports that Arctic sea ice covers about 1.63 million square miles, 20% less than the previous all-time low of 2.05 million square miles set in 2005. The difference is about the size of Texas and California combined.
Bart says: Meanwhile. cavemen like Bush and Inhofe say global warming is a lie.
The feds should offer $10B to the first company with a viable non-fossil engine.
Let’s screw these oil bastards out of business.
Ye Olde Scribe Reveals: IT NEVER HAPPENED
Forget all that conspiracy nonsense about 9/11.Yes, the moon landing DID happen.
Lee Harvey Oswald in Texas, not with a candlestick in the kitchen, but from the Depository with a rifle.
But…
…BREAKING WIND NEWS REVEALS… (more…)
Bill Maher: 24-Hour Republican Party People
Bill Maher, The Huffington Post, September 13, 2007
New Rule: Republicans changed their party before — from the party that freed the slaves to the party that freed Scooter Libby — and they survived. Now it’s time for them to stop pretending they’re still the party of Reagan and take up a new banner: The Party of Superfreaky Superfreaks.
This week, the chairman of the St. Petersburg, Florida, City Council was accused of having sex with his two adopted daughters and their nanny. And he could have been in real trouble, too, if it turned out the nanny was an illegal. But he got ahead of the story when he killed himself by sitting in the garage with the doors closed and the riding lawn mower on.
Two guesses which party he was a member of. And the first guess doesn’t count.
And that’s not fair. You knew he was a Republican, because even in death, he was still wasting gas.
Second Woman Says Southwest Airlines Made Her Cover Up
The Associated Press, September 13, 2007
DALLAS, Texas (AP) — A second young woman has come forward to claim that Southwest Airlines employees made her cover up on a recent flight, leading jet-setters to ask: Will my outfit fly?
Southwest Airlines said it had no record that Setara Qassim ever complained about the alleged incident.
Setara Qassim said a flight attendant confronted her during the trip from Tucson, Arizona, to Burbank, California, and asked whether she had a sweater to go over her green halter-style dress.
Qassim, 21, told KNBC-TV in Los Angeles she was forced to wrap a blanket around herself for the rest of the flight. She complained that if Southwest wants passengers to dress a certain way, it should publish a dress code.
Last week, 23-year-old Kayla Ebbert said a Southwest employee pulled her aside as she was preparing to board a plane departing San Diego for Tucson in July and told her she was dressed too provocatively to fly.
Ebbert, who took her case to NBC’s “Today Show,” said she was allowed on the plane after adjusting her sweater and short skirt. She said she was humiliated and felt the stares of other passengers who had overheard the verbal dressing-down.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. acknowledged the incident involving Ebbert, but airline spokesman Chris Mainz said the company had no record that Qassim ever complained.
Eric Alterman: Beware the Ideas of Newt
Eric Alterman, The Center For American Progress, September 13, 2007
When a columnist needs to write a column and is lacking ideas (or reportage), they often, rather ironically, fall back on a column about “ideas” in general: Why there aren’t any good ones anymore, why the ones they like aren’t getting more attention, or, in this instance, why the people whose ideas they like aren’t being listened to. Case in point: Columnists on Newt Gingrich.
David Brooks of The New York Times wrote earlier this summer that Gingrich “articulates the transformational view [of the Republican party] in its purest form” and that he wishes “the GOP [had] Newt Gingrich’s brain lodged in Fred Thompson’s temperament.”
Jason Zengerle of The New Republic suggested a month later that the GOP install Gingrich as the “party ideologist.” He also cites Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s former spokesperson, who says that “Newt obviously has ideas, so he gains cachet from the contrast with people just wandering around repeating slogans.”
And believe it or not, an article in The New York Times invokes Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech to outline Gingrich’s commitment to changing the “sorry state of the Nation’s political discourse.” (Although I suppose it was fair, since Gingrich was speaking there and everyone who speaks there invokes Lincoln, including yours truly.)
The column is by nature such an abbreviated form that there’s no real opportunity to do justice to a genuine idea. But what exactly are Gingrichian ideas? After leaving Congress, Gingrich spent his years out of power writing and working at the American Enterprise Institute—and also posting a super-large number of reviews on Amazon. Flirting with (but apparently not consummating) the idea of a presidential campaign, he made statements such as:
“I’m going to tell you something, and whether or not it’s plausible given the world you come out of is your problem. I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.”
Still Wondering How Right Wingers Manage to Keep Getting Elected?
USAToday, September 11, 2007
AMERICANS’ VIEWS ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Beliefs reflected in an Aug. 16-26 survey:
• The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees: 25%
• Public schools should be allowed to put on Nativity reenactments with Christian music: 43%
• Teachers and public school officials should be allowed to lead prayers in schools: 58%
• Public school teachers should be able to use the Bible as literature in English class: 80%
• Public school students should be allowed to wear T-shirts with messages or pictures that might offend others: 22%
The Constitution establishes a Christian nation
• Agree: 55%
• Disagree: 41%
• Other: 4%
California Voters Can’t Change the 2008 Election Rules On Their Own
Doug Kendall, Slate Magazine, September 13, 2007
Republican presidential candidates are crossing the country promising voters that they’ll pick judges who will be “strict constructionists” of the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, Republican activists in California are trying to flout the Constitution in order to change the rules for the 2008 election. Last week, their bid to change the state’s method for meting out its electoral votes was endorsed by the state GOP and cleared by the California secretary of state, moving it closer to a place on the June 2008 ballot.
It’s easy to see the allure for Republicans of this voter referendum, which has a predictably misleading name, the Presidential Election Reform Act. The initiative aims to replace the state’s current “winner-take-all” allocation of its trove of 55 Electoral College votes. Instead of going to a single candidate, the state’s electoral votes would be divvied up among multiple ones, based on the popular vote outcomes in California’s 53 congressional districts. As several commentators have pointed out, including Jamin Raskin in Slate, this is all about political gamesmanship. (Bush won 22 of California’s congressional districts in 2004, and assuming that voting trend holds, the proposed referendum would shift approximately 20 electoral votes into the Republican column. That’s enough to determine the outcome of a close election.)
But there’s a big problem with this referendum that has so far gone unnoticed: It’s patently unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution prohibits a ballot measure that would trump a state legislature’s chosen method of appointing electors. In Article II, Section 1, the Constitution declares that electors shall be appointed by states “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” That’s legislature. California’s could scrap its current winner-take-all approach and adopt a district-by-district system for allocating electors (as only Maine and Nebraska currently do). But the voters—whom the initiative supporters have turned to because they don’t have the support of the Democratic-controlled legislature—cannot do this on their own.
Some of the Constitution’s provisions are famously elusive. But “the Legislature thereof” is not one of them. In the 1920 case Hawke v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative could not be used to undo a state legislature’s decision to ratify the Constitution’s 18th Amendment. The court found that the term legislatures is “plain, and admits no doubt in its interpretation.” Justice William Day wrote, “The framers of the Constitution clearly understood and carefully used the terms in which that instrument referred to the action of the legislatures of the states. When they intended that direct action by the people be had they were no less accurate in the use of apt phraseology to carry out such purpose.”
4th Amendment
Click To Play
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Here’s a video from February 2006 in response to Bush’s illegal wiretapping.
Originally posted at the Human Dog Laboratory.