Chris Hedges

Posted at truthdig:

The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement. 

From The Comments Section

...on a Daniel Larison post at The American Conservative:

• You don’t have to be a liberal to be OK with pre-Bush 2 tax rates.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to resist wasteful Defense spending levels and to see the wisdom of staying out of wars.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to live with a health care system many Republicans endorsed two decades ago.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to practice a productive legislative relationship with the other party.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to allow that at least some regulation is essential for a trustworthy business environment.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to quit gratuitously insulting minorities and women.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to quit using sneaky ways to circumvent democratically representative voting results.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to use your small-state Senate seat responsibly.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to have a gun policy that respects Second Amendment rights, but isn’t written by the firearms industry.
• You don’t have to be a liberal to conserve our natural resources.

Today's Quote

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.” --HP Lovecraft, 1936

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Fight The Power

I think this is what revolution should look like.

A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

Bad Lip Reading

It's unfortunate, but I hafta to believe there's a fair probability that when a whole buncha the Wingnuts "listen", this is what they actually hear.

It's Pretty Sad, Really

In general, I can get with anybody who has the smarts and the ingenuity to make stuff work.  I just wish we could move the culture forward enough to convince these Gun Geniuses to turn their talents towards Distributed Power Generation or Bio-Mechanics or Robotic Waste Recovery or or or.

Today's Best Post

a perfect little quickie from Democratic Underground:

...women don't belong in combat.  Neither do men.

Please Try This At Home

...but call me first so I can watch.

Numbers Don't Lie

Sometimes people say you can get numbers to say anything you want them to say, and in a sense that's kinda true, but the real deal is pretty simple.  In almost every case, it's a matter of people lying about the numbers; or people claiming the numbers are saying something that's not quite the truth.  So, to borrow a meme - Numbers don't lie to people; people lie to people.  Or somethin'.  Grains of salt are in order here, but...

Anyway, here's some interesting math for ya via Democratic Underground regarding the Virginia GOP's attempts to change the way Electoral College votes are apportioned in a presidential election:

Barack Obama won 51.16% of the vote. Under the new bill he would have won four of the states 13 electoral votes.

And do you know how much it counts an Obama voter as? (It's 4/13 divided by 51.16%. I'll wait. Do it. Get a calculator. You'll crap yourself.)

Yup - it's right about three fifths.  Each Obama voter would be counted as 3/5 of a Romney voter.  Ring any bells for anybody?

So the Repubs hold their little confab at an Antebellum Plantation - where one of the main Party Strategy topics was how to appeal to minority voters - and this is one of the things they came up with?  How is it these guys even stay in business?

Another Quick Look

...back on one of the best nights this country's ever had.