Monroe Anderson

Hey, Blue States, why don't we secede from the Union?

       We're got an old wound that Sarah Palin and her running buddy, John McCain, have ripped off the scab and torn open and exposed for all the world to see: The Divided States of America.
    Although George W. Bush contributed mightily to the whole Red State/Blue State development and, before him, Ronald Reagan launched the Southern Strategy, until recently we sorta, kinda thought of ourselves as the United States of America.
    No more. Thanks to McPalin, we've now come to realize there are real Americans and the rest of us. We now know there are pro-American parts of America and then there are those other parts in our nation.
   Channeling Joseph McCarthy, Michele Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, even pointed out that Barack and Michelle Obama are anti-American and called for the MSM to do a congressional investigation to discover which of her Democratic colleagues were anti-American.
    This may sound like a bunch of nonsense to many of you, but I suggest we think about it. If the McCain, Palin, Bachmann crowd really don’t think we’re one of them—then maybe we shouldn’t be.
   I’m startin to believe that the First Dude, Todd Palin, was on to somethin when he was pallin around with members of the Alaska Independence Party and lookin into the movement to have his and Sarah's state secede from the Lower 48.  I’m now believin that he was right in spirit, but wrong in who ought to be leavin who.
   I'm figurin that those of us in the Blue States should let all those true Americans in the Red States keep it real. And I just received a viral email from my Jewish, suspected socialist-sympathizing friend, Chuck Halevi, spelling out just what we should do and what we'll get in the process and what we'll be leavin to the not anti-Americans.

   Read it and smile:

Dear Red States:
We've decided we're leaving.  We intend to form our
own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with
us.  In case you aren't aware, that includes California , Hawaii ,
Oregon , Washington , Minnesota , Wisconsin , Michigan ,
Illinois and the entire Northeast.
We believe this split will be beneficial to the
nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New
California

To sum up briefly:
You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states.  We
get stem cell research and the best beaches.
We get the Statue of Liberty.  You get Dollywood.
We get Intel and Microsoft.  You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard.  You get Ole' Miss.
We get 85 percent of America 's venture capital and
entrepreneurs. You get Alabama .
We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make
the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower
than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy
families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be
pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back
from Iraq at once.
If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals.
They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for
  no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their
 children's caskets coming home.
 We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs
  turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's
Quagmire.
  With the Blue States in hand, we will have:
 firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh
 water more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce
92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit
95 percent of America 's quality wines (you can serve
 French wines at state dinners)
90 percent of all cheese
90 percent of the high tech industry - most of the
  U.S. low-sulfur coal all living redwoods, sequoias and condors all the
Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus ... - Stanford , Cal
Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have
 to cope with:
   -  88 percent of all obese  Americans (and their
 projected health care costs)
   -  92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes,
   -  nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes,
  -  90 percent of the hurricanes,
  -  virtually 100 percent of all televangelists and
their buddies like Rush Limbaugh, as well as Bob Jones University ,
Clemson College and the Univ. of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite , thank you very much.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states
believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe
 life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws,
44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that
Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you nincompoops believe
you are people with higher morals then we lefties.
 
 
Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have the Mexican stuff when they knock your wall down.

 
Peace out, 

     Oh, and one last thing. Keeping in the spirit of who gets the short end of the stick, y'all can have Mavericks John McCain and Sarah Palin. We get Vice-President Joe Biden and, the Leader of the Really Free World, President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

 

Impalin Palin on a need to know basis

      

 This much we know for sure: Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain's choice for his running mate for vice president, is a woman.

       There are a few other things we should know. "Sarah was raised amongst the tribe," reports Mudflats, a blog that prides itself in tiptoeing through the Muck of Alaskan Politics, "that believes creationism should be taught in our public schools, 
homosexuality is a sin, and life begins at conception.  She’s a gun-
toting, hang ‘em high conservative."

      So now we know why McCain picked her. We also know that McCain's maverick cred is about as valid as George W. Bush's curiosity cred. But here are some other things we need to know. For example, her own stepmother, Faye Palin, is not sure she's going to vote for her. Her foreign experience boils down to her being in charge of the Alaska's National Guard--with a grand total of 1,875 men and women.  And that we should, "Be afraid...Be very afraid," if McCain wins this election, according to the Angry African on the Loose blog because  "We are in serious danger if McCain wins this election. Serious danger."

    Angry African's blog posts a series of YouTube virals to make his point, while Mudflats runs it all down. Here's the beginning to the Alaskan-based blog.

“Is this a joke?”  That seemed to be the question du jour when my phone started ringing off the hook at 6:45am here in Alaska.  I mean, we’re sort of excited that our humble state has gotten some kind of national ‘nod’….but seriously?  Sarah Palin for Vice President?  Yes, she’s a popular governor.  Her all time high approval rating hovered around 90% at one point.  But bear in mind that the 90% approval rating came from one of the most conservative, and reddest-of-the-red states out there.  And that approval rating came before a series of events that have lead many Alaskans to question the governor’s once pristine image.

There is no doubt in my mind that many Alaskans are feeling pretty excited about this.  But we live in our own little bubble up here, and most of the attention we get is because of The Bridge to Nowhere, polar bears, the indictment of Ted Stevens, and the ongoing investigation and conviction of the string of legislators and oil executives who literally called themselves “The Corrupt Bastards Club”.

So seeing our governor out there in the national spotlight accepting the nomination for Vice Presidential candidate is just downright surreal.  Just months ago, when rumors surfaced that she was on the long version of the short list, she was questioned if she’d be interested in the position.  She said she couldn’t answer  “until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day. I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here….”

There is no doubt that Palin has fierce territorial loyalties.  When elected governor there was much concern because she came right out and said she would favor her own home town of Wasilla (where she was mayor) and its surrounding environs collectively known as “the Valley” while leading the state.  And it’s obvious from her statement that Alaska was on her mind when accepting the VP nod (see my emphasis above).

So what is it that we’re “trying to accomplish up here”?

• Palin is currently in the middle of a controversial gas pipeline project in Alaska.  She’s favored the ‘Trans Canada’ proposal that will run the pipeline through Canada, in effect shipping US jobs over the border.  Many Alaskans, including former governors, have favored the “All Alaska Route”.
• She is also sueing the federal government over listing the polar bears as a threatened species.  The science was even compelling enough to convince the Secretery of the Interior that the bears needed to be listed.  But acknowlegement of this issue, and the potential disruption to development on Alaska’s oil-rich north slope spurred Palin to attempt to stop the listing.
• Does she want to open ANWR?  Yes.  Every politician in Alaska wants to open ANWR.  It’s basically a requirement if you ever hope to get elected for anything.  Even Mark Begich, the progressive Democrat running against the indicted Senator and Alaskan institution Ted Stevens, is pro-drilling.  That’s the sea we swim in up here.  There are a few anti-drilling folks, but you have to look hard to find them, and work hard to have them admit it.

Will all this wash with voters in the ‘Lower 48′?  Time will tell.

 

 To read more of what Mudflats reports, click here.

    To see all of what Angry African on the Loose posts, click here.

Straight talk expressed on sounding racist

    Here’s some solid advice on how to tell people they sound racist from Jay Smooth, host of the hip hop video blog, Ill Doctrine, and founder of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad.   
    In this political season where race is the 800 pound, tired-ass gorilla in the room, it's difficult not to get pissed off and call it like it is. To yell out a bunch of "racist" mfs before you start taking off your jacket and removing your ice.
    But Jay says no way.
    He wisely warns against calling someone a racist, no matter what you believe, but rather, pointing out to them how what they said sounds racist.  Check it out. What he says is bulletproof logic that we all should take to heart--Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and all the other usual suspects not withstanding.

Hillary for VEEP--or maybe not

    Hillary Clinton is done. How done she is was made evident yesterday when Patti Solis Doyle was hired as the chief of staff for Obama’s unnamed vice presidential running mate.
    In case you’ve forgotten, Doyle was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager earlier this year, blamed for strategic errors in the campaign during the early primaries. Some have attributed those blunders and loses to Mark Penn, Clinton's top political advisor.
    Whoever is to blame, Hillary was done long before earlier this month when she finally got around to publicly admitting as much. But even as the New York senator was finished, her Hillites kept trying to make her undone.
    The former First Lady’s speech backing Obama earlier this month was still in analysis when her supporters launched a draft Hillary for Veep campaign.
    "No one brings to a ticket what Hillary brings," California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on ABC's "This Week," the Sunday after Hillary’s concession.
    “For me and millions of other Democrats, I believe that the most important step that you can take now is to encourage the Congressional Black Caucus to urge Senator Obama to select Senator Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential running mate," Billionaire Bob Johnson said in a letter to House Majority Whip James Clyburn, who heads the CBC.
    Listening to what these two have had to say at the time—and other Hillites, like hubby Bill, and Terry McAuliffe, Clinton campaign chair and chief cheerleader, I was of two minds on whether the second place winner in the party’s presidential sweeps ought to be placed in the number two spot on the ticket.
    Part of me said, “Let it be,” while the other part of me asked, “are you losing your ever-loving mind?”
    Depending on whose argument I heard or read last, I went back and forth for a while. Finally, I sat down and had a long talk with myself.
    Self: You learned your ABC’s before you went to kindergarten. Have you forgotten them in your advancing years? Anybody But Clinton.
    Other Self: Since you want to play with acronyms, how about DT or SFW or DH? Barack and Hillary would be the Democrats’ dream team. They would be sure-fire winners. They would be double-history, the first African American president and the first woman vice-president.
    Self: Not dream team, nightmare. It would be an unmitigated disaster. Did you listen to Jimmy Carter when he said that if Barack picked Hillary it "would be the worst mistake that could be made”? It would highlight the negatives from both candidates while their positives would suffer in the joining.
Other Self: Did you forget how good the Clintons were to black people? Why do you think so many black politicians backed them over Obama?
    Self: Don’t dare go there.
    Other Self: Well, what about those 18 million Americans who voted for Hillary? That’s no small number. She can deliver them to Obama in November, assuring him victory.
    Self: Hillary does have a hard-core following of older white women but their numbers aren’t as great as her vote tally suggests. Some of those 18 million were Republicans that right-wing mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh encouraged to vote for Hillary just to create chaos on the Democratic ticket. Some of the blue-collar vote, when forced to choose between a white woman and a black man, stayed in their comfort zone, so when it comes to president, John McCain’s their guy.
    Other Self: Skip the Republicans and the racists, what about all the feminists who have waited all their lives and are sorely disappointed because there won’t be a woman in the White House? What if they stay home or vote GOP.
Self: Wicked right-wing wordsmith Ann Coulter was going to vote for Hillary if McCain became the presumptive Republican nominee. She quickly talked herself out of that notion. When Hillary’s women stop to think about McCain’s positions on civil rights and women’s rights, they’ll be giving themselves a good talking to as well.
    Other Self: OK, let’s talk turkey: We had good times in the 1990s under President Clinton. Americans had extra cash in their pockets and a debt-free, peace-loving nation. Besides, with Hillary, you get a two-fer. You get her tenacity and true grit and you get Bill with all his contacts and REAL presidential experience.
    Self: We may get a two-fer but President Obama would be getting too much. He’d have to worry about the husband and wife tag-team backstabbing and undermining him every chance they got.  As former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out, the vice president’s office is not that far from the Oval Office and with Bhillary as his Veep, Obama would have a government-in-exile and a government-in-waiting right down the hall. And, what kind of signal do you think Patti Solis Doyle was to the Clinton cult?
    Other Self: Hmmmm, never mind.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse. Not this dubious dozen, not this year

 

                    2007 Keystone Props

George W. Bush–For seven long years of being stuck on stupid. When the worst president in our nation’s history isn’t incompetent, he’s dishonest or foolhardy.

Dick Cheney–For not being a straight shooter in any right, at any time.

 

Ann Coulter–For her statement on Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show The Big Idea which says it all: "That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."

Leona Helmsley–For taking her “Queen of Mean” moniker to her grave by leaving a $12 million inheritance to her pet dog.

Alberto Gonzales–For instituting cockeyed hiring and firing practices in the U.S. Department of Justice and not having a clue what “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” means.

O.J. Simpson–For not being content to have gotten away with murder, insisting on retrying his luck over some of his tacky sports memorabilia.

Katt Williams–For wearing a noose around his neck as a fashion accessory with his shiny pink suit and at the BET Hip-Hop Awards while introducing two of the Jena 6, Bryant Purvis and Carwin Jones.

 

Andy Young–For mouthing his squirrelly theory that screwing a lot of black woman makes Bill Clinton more black than Barack Obama.

Roy Pearson–For flaunting his foolish judgment by attempting to take a small Korean cleaners to the cleaners in insisting on a $57 million lawsuit over a pair of his pants.

Bill O’Reilly–For decrying “the anti-Christmas jihad,” for exclaiming that surprisingly black people at Sylvia’s in Harlem are no different from other people and for blow-harding other disingenuous neo-con banalities on his nightly Fox Cable ego show.

Rush Limbaugh–For the mouthpiece of the right-wing's ever-predictable hypocrisy and his racist buffoonery, most notably his airing of the dumb ditty, Barack the Magic Negro.

Erik Rush–For taking his screwball right-wing Christian blog from dumb to dumber while lusting for his 15 minutes of fame by comparing Chicago’s Trinity United Christian Church, where Barack Obama and thousands of other middle-class African Americans from the Windy City worship, to the Branch Davidians because of its pro-black mission.

The Obama One

    

    When it comes to Barack Obama, Andrew Sullivan, the self-confessed libertarian conservative journalist, is now a true believer. In his essay, “Goodbye to All That,” in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly, Sullivan writes about Obama as if the African American presidential contender is, like Neo from The Matrix, The One.
    “Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us,” writes Sullivan. “So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.”
    Sullivan repeated and expanded his vision of Obama as our nation’s savior during an On Point with Tom Ashbrook appearance on Boston’s public radio station, stating: “I think that the country needs this man” to end the struggle between the left and the right, the blue states and the red states.
    Both the Atlantic Monthly piece and the WBUR-FM radio program are long but worth the read and listen.
    That said, let me expand: I believe Sullivan has gone way beyond the pale.   
    Now, don’t get me wrong. I, too, think Obama would be good for America.  I will trip the light fantastic if, a year from today, the news is 24/7 about President-elect Barack Obama. But, as a Baby Boomer, I don’t like Obama’s saber rattling, which verges on a declaration of generational war. And I definitely don’t like Sullivan’s argument that declaring a truce in America’s cultural war would be a good thing.
    For the past generation and a half, an evil cabal of conservative power brokers has steered our nation into a sour spot that is un-American and disturbing to any true patriot. The greedy routinely exploit the needy. Our constitutional rights have been put on hold. Compassion has been labeled a weakness rather than a virtue.
    We can thank George W. Bush’s slow-wittedness and blundering ways for flipping over that polished rock and exposing its slimy underbelly. We can thank Bush and his fellow neo-cons for, like al-Qaida in Iraq, going too far. The empty-hearted neo-cons are ducking for cover.
    So, just as we’re headed back to the future, where ideas take precedent over bumper-sticker slogans and Americans can care for their fellow Americans without stigma, Sullivan would like to see the radical right let off the hook. He sees the genesis of the American culture war born out of the 1960s ideological clash of the Boomers. Something that hardened into a Hatfields and McCoys feud or a Crypts and Bloods rumble.  He thinks that during the inauguration the newly sworn-in President Obama would proclaim those immortal words of Rodney King–“Can’t we all get along”–and then it will happily ever after happen.
    I don’t think so. I suspect Sullivan, a 44-year-old Englishman, may be too young and too foreign to fully understand the genesis of our nation’s historical divide: slavery. The roots of our nation’s culture war can be traced directly to the Civil War and the South’s fight for state’s rights and the right to continue its peculiar institution.
    During Reconstruction, the North ceded the culture war to the South. The culture war  broke out again in the 1950s as the civil rights movement. In the 60s, it morphed into the struggle between those who were against the Vietnam War and those who were for it. Today, the culture clash is more geographically and generationally diverse but is still alive and well and pitching.
    And unless Obama is truly “Barack the magic Negro” as Rush Limbaugh, the radical right’s mouthpiece, parodied him earlier this year, then we liberals need to keep our communications lines open and our minds clear.