Five Years Already

Has been gone for five years now.

As someone living in a world in which you no longer inhabit, I can say wholeheartedly that it, and several things in it, are worse without you.

RIP.

Of Nabobs and Neds

You know my personal positions on the birther and truther issues, right?

Just in case you don’t, I think the birther issue is coming straight from Rahm and Axelrod, in a lame attempt to create a diversion, a pied piper, to distract the right’s attention away from the President’s policies.  So far, knock on wood, it hasn’t worked.  Some think it came from the Clintons, as a last minute Hail Mary in the spring of 2008 to derail Obama and give the nomination to HRC.  The reason I think it’s a Rahm/Axelrod thing (i.e. Obama himself) rather than a Clinton thing is that Obama has not yet produced the birth certificate that proves that he was born in Honolulu (yes, I think it exists).  I think he would have already coughed it up if it were a Clinton tactic, to discredit the Clintons forever.  That he has not I think is anecdotal evidence that he’s the one who is pushing the issue.  I think that if the birther issue doesn’t gain any more legs on the right, i.e. serious Republican elected officials or non-elected credible figures latch onto it, the diversion tactic will have failed, and Obama will produce the b/c.

As far as 9/11, I don’t think the official story is the complete story.  I think when all is said and done, we will find out that there was some level of perfidy, perhaps deliberate, perhaps incompetence, on the part of the government agencies, intelligence and law enforcement, charged with preventing terrorist attacks.  You can’t have an event as big as 9/11 and someone deep down in the bowels and recesses of the black hat/black suitcase/black budget crowd of the CIA, MI5 and the Mossad not see it coming.  However, I don’t think any President knew, neither Bush 43 nor Clinton, because one of the paradoxes of American government in the last century is that while the Executive Branch grew more powerful, the Presidents themselves who oversee the Executive Branch became weaker relative to the Branch.  The CIA and Federal law enforcement are absolutely out of control, and no President can do anything about it, so it seems, as I found out during the Tom Sell saga.  I could also add that I don’t think that any British PM knew (Tony Blair being the only PM while 9/11 was being hatched), and no Israeli PM knew (Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon were PMs during the 9/11 narrative).   The oft-cited Popular Mechanics rebuttals, which a lot of lamers are e-mailing around and hawking on Twitter, are lame IMHO; most of their bullet points don’t rebut much of anything, and the few kernels of truths in it are things I already knew or deduced through common sense.  I have a lot of other opines about this matter, but they’re too involved for the subject at hand.

The reason my views on these matters are relevant today is because the whole issue of birtherism/trutherism vis-a-vis the Tea Party Movement is starting to come to a head.  What is forcing the issue up to the front is the upstart candidacy of one Debra Medina for Governor of Texas in the GOP primary.  Until now, it was a two-person race, between incumbent Rick Perry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  I am not impressed with either one for the most part.  While Perry likes to mouth off about secession and states rights, it’s only election year posturing.  He’s pro-Mexico and pro-globalist all the way.  If it weren’t for John McCain, Linsdey Grahamnesty and Samnesty Brownback, KBH would be the Senate’s queen of amnesty and open borders.  However, Medina’s move in the polls has now made it a three-way race.  She is very good on most of the issues, and that she is on the fence when it comes to trutherism/birtherism is driving some people crazy to no end, and that has created the row in question.  (DISCONCERTING NOTE:  Medina is against E-Verify.  Perry also.  Strangely enough, KBH is for it, and until then, she was the biggest xenophile of the three.  In case you’re wondering E-Verify is the mechanism which allows employers to extricate themselves from the Catch-22, to get out from between the rock of committing a Federal crime by hiring illegal aliens, and the hard place of committing a Federal tort or crime of racially discriminating.  Being against E-Verify is effectively saying you want amnesty, because E-Verify is by far the best way to keep illegals from getting legit jobs.)

One of those people is someone on Twitter whose screen name is nedryun (http://www.twitter.com/nedryun).  He and I (http://www.twitter.com/countenanceblog) have had an ongoing sniping session at each other over the weekend and continuing into today.  It started when nedryun tweeted “All birthers or truthers should be dismissed out of hand and drummed out of the tea party movement” on Friday.  Saturday afternoon, I responded that “I’ll take 100 birthers or truthers neday of da week over one snobby neocon blogger.”  Since then, it’s been nothing but a food fight between the two of us, replete with slur words, near-personal insults and pejoratives.

The reason I need to bring the issue into the blogosphere is that what I’m about to say is too nuanced to compress into 140 characters.

What bothers me about the rhetoric coming from nedryun and many other neocons and lamestream conservatives about “birthers,” “truthers,” “crackpots,” “conspiracy theorists,” and that they should have no place in “our tea parties” isn’t so much that nedryun and everyone like him has problems with the rhetoric, diction and tone of birthers and truthers.  I have some problems with birthers and truthers myself, as you can read above, and as you have read in this medium many times before.  It’s a free country (at least for a little while longer), and you’re free to embrace conspiracy theories and reject conspiracy theories.  You’re free to default to a conspiracy theory mentality just as you’re free to reject them out of hand as explanations for phenomena.

What bothers me about the nedruyns of the world is their conceit.

The Tea Party movement is just that, a movement.  As such, anyone can organize one, anyone can attend one, anyone can bring any sign or placard they want to one.  And there’s nothing any soi distant “leader” of a tea party movement on a national or local basis can do about it.  As someone who was involved in street theater surrounding an acutal organization (the Council of Conservative Citizens) in the past, I can tell you that organizations can do things that movements cannot.  If the protest or rally is a project of an organization, the org’s leaders can allow and disallow whatever individuals it wants, notwithstanding some other factors.  Nedryun might style himself as a tea party leader on a national basis or in his particular locality (where that is I cannot discern), and Dana Loesch, and someone I have absolutely use for due to a run-in we had in the recent past, as such he can FOAD ASAP AFAIC, Bill Hennessy, might cast themselves as the “leaders” in the St. Louis Tea Parties, but they don’t have any cards or papers indicating that they have some sort official imprimatur.

That the Tea Parties are a movement and not a formal organization is both a good and bad thing.  The good news is that, since it has no central leadership, and no coterie of individuals with agency power of it, it confounds the leftists/Obamaites, because there is no single individual to demonize and besmirch on a constant basis, as the Alinskyite tactic suggests in the Rules for Radicals.  One of the reasons why the GOP in the House and Senate might have had some success in keeping much of the left wing extremist policy agenda of the White House at bay is because the GOP doesn’t have a central face among its elected officials, and therefore, that particular tool in the Alinsky RfR toolbox won’t work.  Can’t nail jello to wall, don’t ya know.  Another positive feature of the TPM being a movement and not an org is just what I said — all bloviating aside, nedryun, Dana Loesch, and Bill Hennessy (FOAD) don’t have any real power outside their ethereal credibility within an ethereal movement, so their mouths aren’t the Bible.  If “birthers” and “truthers” want to bring their selves and their signs to tea parties, nedryun can’t stop them.  Unfortunately, that sort of thing can also be a bad side to the TPM.  If anyone can show up with a sign, then anyone can show up with a sign, including “anarchists,” i.e. neo-Marxist college students egged on by their professors, with signs reading “Heil Hitler” and “Kill all the N*****s,” with TV news crews conveniently in tow.  I predict that, the closer we get to November, and if the TPM stays at its current level of strength and popularity or increases, and if Republicans are leading in the polls, you’re gonna see a lot of attempts at such sabotage from leftist goons/college professors/Democrat Party community organizers.  At that time, the TPM might have to organize formally, but it will have to walk a fine line between pitching a tent too big and a tent too small.

To sum up, nedryun:  It’s not your literal position that pisses me off, it’s your conceited attitude.

Disagree With Guy White, Part II

As the Toast Burns.

GW:

Liberals have their words. Southerners never did. They frequently stepped out of line.

Watching someone scream, “I hate them niggers” is good TV. Even if the media was not biased, it would still show these people.

Less offensive things by leaders were also bad. Instead of arguing “Segregation now, Segregation forever”, would it not have been better to present it as freedom (to choose your child’s school) and democracy (majority opinion rules)?

instead of putting the focus on 10-year-old black girls and their rights, it would shift the focus on 10-year-old white girls.

This was used with some success to stop school busing.

(The overly legalistic arguments about States’ Rights were not good. Nobody will come out against a child and for some legal concept they don’t quite understand.)

The big difference between integrationists and segregationists was the leaders commitment level.

I’ve written before about Gov. Wallace being a fake who was endorsed by the NAACP, lost and decided he “won’t be outniggered again” in a future election.

I’ve read this sort of bigmouth rhetoric before re Wallace and his “impurities,” and, like GW, it always comes from the cloak of people who hide behind screen names, blog names and general anonymity.  (Yeah, I know, pot kettle black.  I’ll eat some humble pie a little later on today.)

The problem is, neither GW, nor any of the aforementioned anonymous founts of courage, nor I, were seeking or held serious political power in Alabama between 1958 and 1987.  What is it the Indians say?  Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.  None of us were walking those miles in George Wallace’s shoes, but George Wallace WAS.  Therefore, just based on that alone, I’ll give Wallace the benefit of the doubt.  Hell, I wasn’t even living during the peak of Wallace’s credibility/power/vitality, so everything I know about him comes from either books, TV or conversations with those on the scene.  So just beyond the moccasins and the miles, from what I have come to understand about all the parties involved, in the time, place, manner and circumstance they were involved, I think George Corley Wallace did the best job he could have possibly done both as Governor and as a thrice Presidential Candidate.  Let’s face it, there hasn’t been a perfect person to walk this Earth for over 2,000 years, and Wallace fits into the subset of humanity called “not perfect.”  If he didn’t accomplish everything he wanted, it was because of some external factor he couldn’t control, such as Strom Thurmond’s perfidy, Richard Nixon’s perfidy, the out and outright force of Yankee guns, several bullets from Arthur Bremer (et al., IMHO).  If he didn’t accomplish everything some of us die-hards thinks he should have, then maybe it was because he wasn’t as radical as the rest of us, and perhaps he had a good reason for not being that radical.  (Maybe we don’t have any good reason to be as radical as we are, if you want to look at the half-empty glass of water another way.)  Don’t forget, his formative years were during the Great Depression, in a county that was about half white half black.  While he was a seg pretty much his whole life, he was always a moderate seg.  Today’s racial liberals might react “to-may-to, to-mah-to,” when reading that, but in 1950s Alabama, it was a big difference and a big distinction.  Politically, he was most influenced by Alabama’s Post-WWII Governor, James “Big Jim” Folsom, who was Governor when Wallace won his first political races.  While Folsom was a moderate seggy, he was also populist, and an enthusiastic supporter of social welfare and transfer payments, even to blacks, who would far more receive instead of pay, though the beaux ideal of a Folsom/Wallace welfare state would seem paltry compared to today’s liberal Democrats.  Folsom and Wallace were not loath to loosening up on segregation, but later events would complicate matters.

That leads me to Guy White’s inconsistency here, both in what I blockquoted, and in his treatment of the same subject matter last week.  He can’t have it both ways — On the one hand, he says that civil rights era white Southern conservatives were too extremist and careless in their rhetoric, and too much given to using racial slurs and pejoratives.  On the other hand, he faults George Wallace for being too moderate in his 1958 run for Governor, to the point where the NAACP endorsed him, NOT because they liked him, but because his main opponent, a man named Patterson who won the Democrat Primary then Governor in 1958, knowingly and happily cavorted with the KKK.  It’s just that the NAACP in Alabama figured in 1958 that either Wallace or Patterson would win, but Wallace was far less “repugnant” (to the NAACP) than Patterson, so they took their chances with Wallace.  Was there anything close to a white liberal or black that could have won, the NAACP would have endorsed him or her.  But their choice of Wallace was pure pragmatism.  (While we’re on that subject, I get the sense that the only reason Patterson won was because the Yankees and libs were starting to push integration in an arrogant way, and without the participation, countenance or care of the existing politicians of the states that would have been most affected.  If there were no outside external factors, I get a feeling that Wallace would have beat Patterson in ’58, because Folsom proved that a “progressive,” at least for time and place, could win.)  Even after Wallace’s first term as Gov. between ’62 and ’66, which of course was far less to the NAACP’s liking than the ’58 version of Wallace, there was a significant percentage of blacks who voted for Lurleen Wallace for Governor in 1966, mainly because her husband wasn’t a raging lunatic bigot, and his administration did accrue to the benefit of blacks somewhat.  (Governors in AL couldn’t serve consecutive terms until 1970, so Lurleen Wallace ran as her husband’s placeholder).  During Wallace’s first term as Gov, the Federal Voting Rights Act was passed, so far many more blacks were able to vote in the 1966 Gov. election in Alabama compared to 1962.  Still, this didn’t preclude Lurleen Wallace from winning in ’66 and from George Wallace from winning three more terms as Governor, in 1970, 1974 and in a comeback role in 1982.

What Guy White is trying to say that Wallace et al. were too radical and they weren’t radical enough at the same time.  Politics isn’t quantum mechanics, so FAIL.

UPDATE 2/16: A historian of Alabama politics e-mailed me to remind me that part of the reason a good percentage of black voters picked Lurleen Wallace in 1966 was because her main opposition was John Patterson, the very same John Patterson who beat George Wallace in 1958, the very same John Patterson who cavorted with the Klan.  (Ironically, I am told, Patterson, who is still living, endorsed Obama for President.)  So, just as it was eight years earlier, blacks picked the lesser of two “evils.”  One more thing I should add is that all these contested elections I write about here were all within the Democrat Primary.  Republicans were a non-factor, and it wasn’t until after Wallace left office that a Republican could win Governor, that being Guy Hunt in 1986.  Fob James, who was Gov. within a Wallace interregnum period, and again after the fall of Guy Hunt, was an elected Democrat in his 1979-83 term and a Republican in his 1995-99 term.  Acutally, the whole recent history of Alabama Gubernatorial politics is nothing more than a horse race among people named Wallace, James, Hunt and Folsom.

Crime and “Punishment”

A forum called Canadian Gun Nutz has been throwing my parody news story post from Saturday a lot of traffic.  While browsing CGN, I found this story from the Toronto Star:

Judge uses gang case to send message on guns

In `rare’ move, sentence includes 10-year weapons ban for 4 teens involved in slaying

A judge sent a zero-tolerance message on handguns Thursday when sentencing four teen gang members connected to the public stripping, beating and fatal knifing of Omar Wellington.

As part of the penalty, Crown and defence lawyers unanimously proposed that all four be banned from possessing firearms, ammunitions and explosives for five years.

“Only in rare cases” would a judge put aside a joint submission by experienced lawyers, Ontario Superior Court Justice John McMahon told the court.

“I am satisfied that this is one of the rarest cases.”

He set the weapons ban at 10 years, emphasizing that the Wellington killing was “another case of a handgun being at the centre of violent activity.”

Wow, what a harsh punishment.  That’ll teach ‘em a lesson.  The prosecution and defense agreed to five years, but the judge threw it out and set it at ten years.  Then again, they were all minors, so they probably weren’t allowed to have guns anyway.

One can understand the defense lawyers wanting no jail time.  But couldn’t the prosecution be bothered to demand that they do some time?  After all, they killed a man.

Here’s why they couldn’t:

The two guilty of aggravated assault, 15 and 16 at the time, were sentenced to two years probation, having served more than two years in pretrial custody.

The other two, 14 and 13 at the time, were sentenced to 18 months and one year probation respectively. Both spent more than 20 months in jail awaiting trial.

The maximum jail sentence for young offenders on any of the charges is two years, the judge said.

So you can murder someone and only have to do two years in the joint, and that includes pre-trial incarceration.  But look on the bright side:  At least they can’t have guns for a whole ten years.  An edict which I’m sure they’ll obey, just as well as they obeyed those laws against murder and minors having guns.

Look at it this way — In this matter, the guns got five times as much punishment than the human beings who used the guns to kill the man.  One word:  Huuuuuuuuuuuuh?

Also, note the racial cover-up.  The original article mentions that the murder took place at a public housing project, at the hands of those involved with a gang which was organized in the project.  You get one guess.

I get the feeling that, with such lenient sentences for juveniles, Canadian gangs are using the “minors” to do their dirty work.

Canadian justice system.  FAIL.

Monday Wrap-Up

Gotta run through all the other interesting news of the day in shortened form.  Got stuff to do 2nite.

(1)  The UK Home Office starting new public service campaign to discourage young men ages 13 to 18 from physically abusing their girlfriends.  Does this mean that you can whack you woman around when you turn 19?

(2)  The BNP is seeing red — Pauline Hanson is moving to England, fleeing excessive harassment in her native Australia.  Here’s hoping that she’s the most successful Australia-to-England export since the soap opera Neighbours.

(3)  Did you know that British prisoners have their own association?  Furthermore, they want prisoners to have the franchise.  If they don’t get it, they’re suing for a kilopound per day per hoosegowbird that they’re not allowed to vote.  Maybe Nick Griffin ought to go to prison — He’d have more civil rights and public sympathy inside than outside.

(4)  Henry Louis Gates donates the handcuffs which the Cambridge P.D. used to arrest him last July to the Smithsonian’s black history section.  I might be a bigot, but I’m not that much of a bigot to think that handcuffs should go in the black history wing of the Smithsonian.  You mean that even a black “intellectual” like Gates should only be remembered for his one brush with the law?  Kook that he might be, there are probably a thousand things you could display about him before a pair of cuffs.  Imagine what the outrage that would come from the same people who aren’t saying boo if, for example, Drue Lackey of the Montgomery, Ala. P.D. donated the handcuffs he used to arrest Rosa Parks to an Alabama history museum.

(5)  While I have said in this medium in the past that I’m in favor of mandatory internet education, on matters such as avoiding threats and scams, protecting your personal privacy, securing your operating system and browser of choice, knowing the ins and outs of certain basic fundamentals of CS/IT, and a little bit of common decency, I am not in favor of a mandatory “drivers license” proposal advanced by MSFT’s Craig Mundie at Davos, and in fact, is a scheme so restrictive that China rejected it.  Part of the concern about Mundie’s proposal is that it would pretty much end guaranteed anonymity on the web.  Ironically, from what I have read, the MSFT projects for which Mundie spearheads are run like little politburos, with team members asked to maintain total secrecy, and leaks punished swiftly and mightily.  Meaning that the secrecy Craig Mundie doesn’t want me to have in the medium you are reading right now is the sort that he demands in whatever skunk works project he supervises at Redmond.

Gerald Warner, writing in the UK Telegraph, writes these strangely familiar paragraphs:

American protesters are most vociferous in defence of their rights because that is their culture. Some of them claim that British people are being dangerously indifferent to the long-term potential for censorship of the so-called Digital Economy Bill being slithered through Parliament by Lord Mandelson. The inference they draw is that, just as Britons supinely submitted to firearms legislation that has led to a situation where “only the bad guys have guns”, we may be sleepwalking into internet slavery.

The technique is familiar. The powers-that-be allow a scandalous situation to develop whereby no serious attempt is made to police paedophile, pornographic and criminal activity on the web. Then the authorities use the excuse of public concern to overreact and impose Draconian controls that police ordinary citizens but are usually circumvented by criminals. It is a familiar scenario, offline as well as in cyberspace.

It’s called Anarcho-Tyranny.  Sam Francis (RIP, five years today) coined the phrase.  Lookitup.

(6)  A Utah politician wants to allow for graduation from high school after the junior year if the student has earned enough credits.  In other words, no more senior year.  It’s a shame, because for most people, senior year is the only time in their lives when nobody has the authority to dunk their heads in a toilet, give them wedgies, tape them up on a wall or make them sing the school song in falsetto.

Fun With Titilating Headlines

UK Daily Mail:  The girl whose hair fell out in handfuls when she tried her new Pantene shampoo

When the commercial said, “Feel the rain on your skin,” I didn’t think they meant your scalp.

CNS:  Hillary Clinton Says Iran Is Becoming A Military Dictatorship

Cue Alanis Morrisettee — Someone locked up in the dippy farm thinks he might be going crazy.

James Edwards:  Backward Southerners blamed for UAH shooting

Another day, another thing blamed on white Southerners.

P-D:  Snowstorm shuts down highways in KC area

It’s Kansas City we’re talking about here.  Why are we so sure that those banged-up cars got banged-up in the snowstorm?  That’s probably the way they already were.

Slashdot:  Operation Titstorm Hits the Streets

Tit storm?  Quick, lead me to the nearest street.

WND:  Ready for feds in your kitchen?

The same people who want the Feds out of your bedroom want them in your kitchen.  I think I’ll go hide in the closet.  At least there, I can eat any food and fuck any adult that I want, even if it is simultaneously.

Examiner:  Why do illegal aliens feel they have a ‘right’ to be here?

Because the Republocrats tell them so, and it would be “racist” to tell them they can’t.