– Official or not, The Great Renaming is a hell of a title (h/t to Robby on Facebook).
– Bumbershoot Lineup.
– Another Washington State newspaper gone.
– David Pauley has turned out to be pretty good.
– Mitt Romney is running on his business experience. For some reason.
I don’t mean to pick on Joni Balter here. Most people writing about a possible Dennis Kucinich Congressional run in Washington use the same dumbass term.
Republicans would love to run against Kucinich in a suburban congressional district because he is a fringe liberal sporting a carpetbagger label.
Look, if I still lived up North, I’d probably prefer Rodger Goodman or Marko Liias. I supported Ruderman before Inslee got in the race in 1998 and would certainly be willing to look at someone else. There’s a rich field of candidates to draw from, so it’s not like we need Kucinich. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to run from somewhere else.
And in fact the original carpetbaggers were pretty fucking awesome. After the Civil War, of course, many people from the North went South to seek out the new political climate of freedom and racial integration imposed by the Federal government. The people who went into elected office were smeared as carpetbaggers by their opponents. People like Adelbert Ames, a hero at Bull Run and Gettysburg who was appointed to the governorship of Mississippi during reconstruction before winning election to the US Senate and the governor’s office outright. While I probably wouldn’t agree with all of his policies, where it mattered the most, he was right: “he took several steps to advance the rights of freed slaves, appointing the first black office-holders in state history.”
But in the history of the Reconstruction South, the Carpetbaggers lost. After Ames won election as governor, political violence overtook the state. Appeals to the Federal government fell on deaf ears, and eventually he resigned under threat of impeachment and possible violence. And political violence won out throughout the South. The worst case was Colfax.
On April 13, 1873, violence erupted in Colfax, Louisiana. The White League, a paramilitary group intent on securing white rule in Louisiana, clashed with Louisiana’s almost all-black state militia. The resulting death toll was staggering. Only three members of the White League died. But some 100 black men were killed in the encounter. Of those, nearly half were murdered in cold blood after they had already surrendered. The incident once again showed President Ulysses S. Grant how hard it would be to guarantee the rights and the safety of blacks in the South.
…
Louisiana whites formed their own “shadow” government and their own army, the White League. The White League, similar to the Ku Klux Klan, intimidated and attacked Republicans and blacks all over the state. While the worst violence occurred in Colfax, other incidents were sparked in Coushatta, when the White League murdered six Republicans, and in New Orleans, when 30 were killed and 100 more wounded.
In response to these incidents and others throughout the South, President Grant ordered federal troops to restore order. But most of the relief was temporary. After Colfax, the federal government convicted only three whites for the murders. In the end, they were freed when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that they had been convicted unconstitutionally.
The plaque commemorating the incident, put up by the state of Louisiana, still says “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”
So that’s in a nutshell my problem with using carpetbagger as an attack. While obviously Balter and other political commentators aren’t trying to evoke the political violence and racial hatred that ended reconstruction, it’s there in the word. It means something more than just an outsider.
– As a feminist man, I’m still sometimes amazed at things that pass me by. I was caught off guard that there would be harassment on trains bad enough to make someone switch cars.
– While there is always more to do, Obama has certainly earned HRC’s endorsement.
– Seattle has been driving less even before McGinn.
– Fox News sounds like a terrible place to work.
– RIP Gil Scott-Heron.
Not to be outdone by Rep. Weiner, or Canadian politician George Lepp or this pervert from Redmond, or this unbalanced character near Skyway, or this resourceful Bangladeshi woman, Dick Cheney gave his own seven gun salute to the troops for Memorial day when he tweeted an old newspaper photo. It was from a Memorial day wiener roast of the past.
You might say, from Cheney’s glory days….
“Fuck Weiner…. He’s a goddamn whining amateur, isn’t he?” growled Cheney from his undisclosed Twittering location.
“The art is in doing the show without everyone noticing….”, came the next tweet, followed by, “…and making a big goddamn deal out of it. He loses.”
The former VP launched another salvo with, “I win on subtly…seriously, if you get a ‘-gate’ suffix, YOU LOSE!”
With that, Cheney tweeted a link to the Weiner photo:
.
“I win on dimensions, no? And you’d better agree with me @Breitbart or I’ll shoot you in the face. LOL!”
Shortly thereafter Cheney either realized or was informed that he was twittering instead of PMing.
The tweets vanished…seemingly flushing right down that hole sitting between the first and the second branches of government.
A few minutes later, Cheney’s final message of Memorial Day was tweeted.
“Goddamn Scooter hacked my account!”
This piece on Jim Tressel is pretty amazing. I’m not a big college football person: If I wanted to watch a violent corrupt game whose best years are in the rear view, I’d follow boxing because at least they pay their athletes something. But when a game is on on Saturday, I don’t care about any of that.
And now, we’ll hear about how everybody does it. And we’ll hear how it’s just what you have to do to keep competitive. But like those sorts of excuses in politics, I don’t buy it. If we hold corrupt people accountable, and we take away some of the incentives for corruption, this doesn’t have to happen.
Also like in politics, people substitute other people’s piety for judgement. Oh, he’s a Christian, he can’t be stalking men’s rooms for sex. Oh he’s a Christian, he can’t be a corrupt coach. But the truth is that the most and the least religious people are perfectly capable of disgusting things. If I had to bet, I’d say he probably believes the Christian stuff he preaches. I obviously don’t know, but people have a way of compartmentalizing.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this rambling piece. It was just supposed to be a one sentence link in an open thread, but I’m still writing. I guess to sort of make it local, we’ve all seen the decline of the Huskies since Rick Neuheisel’s recruiting violations, and I can’t imagine that Ohio State won’t suffer as well. Doesn’t really seem worth it, but I don’t suppose they thought they’d get caught.
The Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally meets tonight, and we will be celebrating the 8th anniversary of Drinking Liberally. It all began in a bar in New York…now there are 228 chapters of Drinking Liberally and Living Liberally worldwide.
Please join us for a pint and a toast. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00 pm, but a few folks show up around 7:00 pm for dinner.
Speaking of toast, I can just imagine this clip as the intro to a Palin-on-wheels video with the Lynyrd Skynyrd song That Smell as the sound track:
Can’t make it tonight? The Tacoma Chapter of Drinking Liberally meets on Thursday (June 2nd) at 7:00 pm at the Hub Restaurant, 203 Tacoma Ave S.
(Note…this IS an open thread.)
Crosscut’s Ted Van Dyk writes:
As it happened, I was in Prescott, Arizona over Memorial Day weekend and thus got a first-hand view of the current version of the Sarah Palin Show.
Yes…Van Dyk “happened” to be in Arizona. When he eventually gets around to writing about Sarah Palin, he makes a remarkable observation (my emphasis):
A friend of ours, the insurgent/reform candidate for mayor, running against the good-ole-boy GOP incumbent, approached Palin and asked that she sign her mayoral petititon.
Palin did so (even though, as a non-resident, her signature would of course be disqualified).
Sure…as a non-resident, her signature would have to be disqualified, but wasn’t this an act of election fraud?!?
Here it is…under title 16 of the Arizona Revised Statutes:
16-1020. Signing of petitions; violation; classification
A person knowingly signing any name other than his own to a nomination petition or a petition for formation, alteration or dissolution of a special district […] or who is not at the time of signing a qualified elector entitled to vote at the election initiated by the petition, is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanor.
For years Republicans have engaged in fetishistic hand-wringing over voter fraud, even as numerous investigations find little evidence of actual voter fraud. Its a good issue for Republicans, because under the guise of “election integrity” they can systematically disenfranchise, en masse, voters who tend to vote Democratic. And, man, have they been disenfranchising voters. (Apparently, blocking people entitled to vote from exercising their right isn’t an equally important integrity issue.)
So I hope Republican voters will stay true to their fetish strategy convictions and express shock and outrage over Sarah Palin’s demonstrably blatant act of election fraud. If so, one might expect enraged calls for her prosecution, if not angry mobs chanting something about a hanging.
As for me…I am truly shocked beyond belief over this matter.
Breaking news from Ted Van Dyk?!?
– This Thursday, June 2, multiple former world leaders, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, and others will be holding a press conference to release a report and call for a change in global drug policies. The group will be advocating that we move away from criminalization and begin exploring ways to regulate markets for currently illegal drugs.
– That message is one that’s needed quite badly here in the U.S. where the Obama Administration is still failing in its promises to put science over ideology when it comes to the medical uses of marijuana.
– Locally, State Representative Roger Goodman is planning a press conference and rally to demand that the Obama Administration back off and let Washington regulate medical marijuana. The press conference will be at Green Hope Patient Network at 15021 Aurora Ave. N in Shoreline.
– I’m continuing to do a lot of work with Sensible Washington, trying to get as much done before I start up at a new job in June. The group is still working hard to get I-1149 on the ballot. This week, I’m traveling to Sunnyside to speak with some farmers about hemp. And I’m also working with some other Sensible Washington folks to put together a video about the abuses of the WestNET drug task force, who’ve left a trail of destruction across Kitsap County. Much of the abuses out there have focused on longtime officer Roy Alloway, who has now been indicted for illegal gun sales.
Last week’s contest was won by Dan. It was the Bonnet Carré Spillway, just west of New Orleans.
Here’s this week’s contest, just a random location somewhere in the world. Good luck!
Job 3:2
He said:
Discuss.
A lot of language is being thrown around on the topic of political prostitution lately. It is, of course, metaphorical and largely hyperbolic.
The real thing is much more disturbing than anything that happens in the political arena….
The Rapture experiences technical difficulties.
Sam Seder: G.O.P.er suggests rape is like getting a flat tire.
Mark Fiore: Doin’ time.
Life’s Been Good To Him, So Far:
Jon and John: Fixing the U.S. Pakistan relationship.
President Obama addresses the British Parliament.
Ed Shultz Calls Some Right-wing Whore a “Right-wing Slut” and “Talk Slut”:
Ann Telnaes: G.O.P. race is shaping up.
Pres. O’Bama addresses the Irish people.
Cenk: Right-wing grassroots CON JOB.
Auto Bail-outs Pay Off for America:
Thom: Judge declares foul on Republicans
Young Turks: G.O.P. refuses to give relief aid to tornado victims.
Pap: Teabagger racism reaches the boiling point.
G.O.P. Presidential hopefull Herman Cain lecture on reading the Constitution cites passages from the Declaration of Independence (via ThinkProgress).
Thom: Can Texas secede from the TSA?
Maddow does George Takei.
Liberal Viewer: FAUX News forgot first amendment forbids Christian graduation from public school.
Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal:
Young Turks: Dick Cheney worships Paul Ryan.
Ann Telnaes: The U.S–British special relationship.
Very Special Election:
Young Turks: Daughter of Arnold’s mistress speaks out.
Thom: Is there a “shadow Patriot Act” behind the Patriot Act?
White House: West Wing Week.
Sam Seder: For GOP & Scarborough healthcare for Americans is nothing short of hedonism.
The G.O.P. Primary Carnival Freak Show:
Newsy: TN Governor signs anti-gay bill into law.
Young Turks: FAUX News claims that Obama already cut Medicare.
Maddow: Minnesota’s anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment.
Cenk: George Takei on Tennessee’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill:
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
The Stranger’s Paul Constant highlights a statement from Joe Walsh, the freshman douchebag of a congressman from Illinois, not the former Eagle (my emphasis):
“Why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was black, he was historic. And there’s nothing racist about this. It is what it is. If he had been a dynamic, white, state senator elected to Congress he wouldn’t have gotten in the game this fast. This is what made him different. That, combined with the fact that your profession”—another friendly tap of the bumper sticker—”not you, but your profession, was just absolutely compliant. They made up their minds early that they were in love with him. They were in love with him because they thought he was a good liberal guy and they were in love with him because he pushed that magical button: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white guilt, all of that.”
A shorter Joe Walsh: Obama was elected because he’s a Magic Negro.
Paul has a salient, if too generous, take on Walsh’s statement…check it out.
Right wing slut Tim Eyman has gotten his John back.
Michael Dunmire, who apparently took a hit during the Bush Recession forcing him into a one-year hiatus from political bestiality, has come back this year and bought himself some more gen-u-wine Horses’ ass! $100,000 worth, paid right into Eyman’s personal services fund. (Apparently, Dunmire is okay with Kemper Freeman’s sloppy seconds.)
You have to give Eyman some credit for turning his life around and breaking into the big-leagues of political prostitution. It seems like just yesterday he was literally stealing money from his Johns….
– Maybe this explains why it’s so painful to read the Seattle Times’ editorials.
– Google Correlate is clearly not Google Causation.
– The money for that Queen Anne bike bridge could have gone to, um, bike infrastructure somewhere else.
– This looks like a really terrible movie.
– So I’ll be at Folklife instead.
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!