Category Archives: Social Commentary

October 31, 2010 · 3:49 pm

The Latest from Margaret and Helen-October Blog

Here’s an excerpt from our favorite senior citizens. Link to their full post is at the bottom:

Margaret, all it takes is ten minutes of channel surfing and you quickly find out that the number of problems facing America seem to correspond with the number of channels offered on cable television. I told Harold to cancel our subscription and get out the old rabbit ears.

If Glenn Beck hasn’t met a half-man-half-monkey yet, he didn’t get out much during his rally. There was more knuckle dragging on the National Mall that day than the National Zoo… about 89,000 more. And I find it odd that Sarah Palin can see November from her house but she couldn’t see a teen pregnancy coming if her life depended on it. Maybe if she spent more time at her house rather than at Tea Party rallies, one of her children might actually graduate from those abstinence only classes with a passing grade.

Folks, from where I sit, we’ve never had it so good. One less war. Most of the TARP money paid back and another Great Depression avoided. Unemployment numbers are shitty – yes – BUT imagine how bad it would be if Republicans had done away with unemployment benefits like they wanted. And as someone who has Medicare, I can assure you that government-run healthcare isn’t Obamacare, it’s common-decency-care.

The Tea Party wants to complain about Obama’s “run-away spending” but the fact is Bush spent billions on wars while Obama has spent billions on an economic stimulus package. Fact. More private sector jobs were created in the last 8 months than in the entire 8 years of the Bush presidency. Fact. The only thing the Republican Party has increased recently is the number of gay teen suicides.

MORE: Margaret and Helen.

Leave a comment

Filed under History, Politics, Social Commentary, The Economy

October 20, 2010 · 10:20 pm

Embracing Memory’s Tough places – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

Another wonderful column from one of my favorite columnists:

Actually, old times there are forgotten quite a bit.

For 145 years, ever since a grim-faced Robert E. Lee rode away from Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox, Va., where he had surrendered his army, apologists for the South have been trying to induce the rest of us to forget the causes of the Civil War, to imbue an act of treachery and treason with a nobility of purpose it did not, in fact, possess.

“State’s rights,” they say. “State’s rights to maintain a system of human slavery,” they do not say.

It is the social and political equivalent of an extreme makeover. The thinking seems to be: when history collides with cherished self image, change history.

Something very similar seems to be afoot with regard to a related event much closer to us in time: the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.

Just a few months ago, we saw conservative activist Glenn Beck claim ownership of that movement, in defiance of historical memory. “…[W]e were the people that did it in the first place!” he cried.

Last week, in an essay in the Washington Post, University of Virginia Professor Gerard Alexander analyzed voting trends from the civil rights era to bolster his thesis that social conservatism is not intolerant. Somehow, he never got around to explaining how it is, then, that social conservatives were always the ones standing in schoolhouse doors, blockading polling places, burning buses, and cracking skulls.

More: Embracing memory’s rough places – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com.

Leave a comment

Filed under Education, History, Politics, Religion, Social Commentary

October 19, 2010 · 10:33 pm

Margaret and Helen’s Pledge to America

Here is the latest from the girls!

Margaret, the problem with Populism is that the population includes asses like Sarah Palin and her Tea Party. Someone needs to remind them that this is America. The government is elected by the people. Questioning your government is patriotic. Hating your government, one the other hand, is simply a form of self loathing.

And let’s talk about that hatred. It seems so at odds with the supposed Christian morals they so proudly espouse. They hate big government but instead of taking issue with the largest part of that government – the military – they take issue with healthcare. They hate big government in healthcare but they have no issue with government being big enough to intervene in the private health decisions of a woman seeking to end a pregnancy or the private decisions of a husband wanting to end the decade long sufferings of his wife. They hate big government but they don’t seem to hate using government to legislate hate against homosexuals. And they hate big government, but they don’t seem to hate it when they can use it to fuel their hatred. Gosh I hate that…

And now those morons in Washington with the “R” after their names have made another pledge to America. I guess it’s just one more thing they can do today and then ignore tomorrow . A Contract With America. A Pledge to America. Mission Accomplished. For goodness sakes how many times are we going to fall for this prank? They spend years screwing everything up and then eventually pledge to not do it again. How about not doing it the first time… or the second time for that matter?

MORE: Margaret and Helen.

Leave a comment

Filed under Entertainment, History, Politics, Religion, Social Commentary, The Economy

October 19, 2010 · 9:18 pm

Chapter 31: Life with Granny | My Southern Gothic Life

New post up on the other Blog:

I know I have single-handedly destroyed the stereotype that all Gay Men adore their Mothers. But I did adore my Grandmother and my Aunt Goldie. I am far from a misogynist.

I’ll write about Goldie later, but let me talk about Granny first.

My Grandmother- Granny- was my Mother’s Mother. Bertha Quintral Sigmon. Two women could not have been more different. For all the flighty, Southern Belle manipulations that personified my Mother, Granny offset them by being a totally down to earth realist.

She had to be…

Click her to go to the entire post: Chapter 31: Life with Granny | My Southern Gothic Life.

Leave a comment

Filed under Danville, Health Care, History, Movies, My Journey, Religion, Social Commentary, The South, Virginia

October 17, 2010 · 9:54 am

Glenn Beck: Drawing On 1950s Extremism? : NPR

Great article on NPR. I encourage you to click the link and read the entire interview

In the Oct. 18 issue of The New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz examines “how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew — and why, this time, party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.”

Wilentz, who teaches at Princeton University, argues that the rhetoric expressed by both conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck and the Tea Party is nothing new — and is rooted in an extremist ideology that has been around since the Cold War, a view that the Republican Party is now embracing.

“I think what’s happening is the Republican Party is willing to chase after whatever it can to get the party back — to get power back,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “This is what’s happening in the Republican Party, so instead of drawing lines, they’re jumping over fences to look like they’re in the good graces of these Tea Party types.”

Wilentz says Beck, who has emerged as a unifying figure and intellectual guide for the Tea Party movement, finds fodder for his Fox News Channel and syndicated radio shows in the ideas espoused by the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative political group founded in 1958 that, Wilentz writes, “became synonymous with right-wing extremism.”

via Glenn Beck: Drawing On 1950s Extremism? : NPR.