THE FIRST TEABAGGER

I was thinking about the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. He would describe in great geographical detail some horrendous weather front about to deliver thunderous devastation to the relevant area where his fictional audience resides. Then he would announce that the weather radar is also picking up the advance of hundreds of Russian ICBM's over the Atlantic and conclude:

"So I wouldn't sweat the cold front."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBRc0VtRiQ&NR=1

I usually do not agree with the particular focus of MSM on any given day, but the devastation caused by this oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico calls for constant media coverage.  I mean why sweat the size of our national debt when we are about to lose 25% of our coastline. Others at Café are doing such a fine job of relating their worries concerning this latest corporate scandal--and that is what it is after all--that there is little I could add except by way of comment on those blogs.

So I digress into other issues as usual.

It seems that fundamental assumptions I have held for decades are being challenged.

I mean the world has always sucked. Going back to say 1969, the government and the mainstream media, for the most part were telling me that world-wide communism was threatening to send us all to some Russian Gulag. So naturally, we had to fight the commies over there so that we would not have to fight them here.

Instead of 6,000 dead over a period of seven or eight years, we lost 58,000 soldiers over the same period of time fighting them over there. And in defiance of the dictates of the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, millions of young men were being conscripted into the Armed Forces so that we could fight them over there. And millions were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam all the while facing bullets and smoke grenades and lines of soldiers and police officers. It was quite a PARTY.

And those millions of protesters represented a distinct minority in our democracy and there was no fricking way they could be victorious in their united attempt to stop the damn war.

But there was no national media outlet giving much time or attention to those who wished to abolish the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. I know George Wallace garnered a lot of attention and tens of millions of people loved that man.  Southern racist Democrats were moving to the repub party, certainly.

But you would not ever hear Cronkite or Brinkley or any major media type saying:

Hey, that George Wallace has a real point here.

Certainly there were local Southern media outlets spouting that filth but not in the North or the West. That just did not happen.

I mean you might hit William Buckley on PBS spouting some nonsense about Federalist Paper #56 or something, but he despised Wallace.

The cover for these racists over the following four decades was the anti-Affirmative Action movement. This has morphed into an anti-Reparations movement ala Rush Limbaugh and others. You could pretend to be for Civil Rights but against giving any special favors or attention to ethnic minorities in this country and be invited into the homes of all Americans through most media outlets with impunity.

And media giants like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Brit Hume and Michael Savage fell into the tactic of calling all the spokesmen for ethnic minorities racists.  This back fired on Beck recently when he called our President a racist. I guess that was because Beck is so inept in his racist talk or something. Limbaugh does it all the time.

It was perfectly all right for rush to call Colin Powell a racist for backing Obama in 2008 for instance.

It is the frequency of these attacks against Civil Rights by these racist pricks that got to me the last few years. It seems like the racially motivated attacks come every minute of every day on the radio and on TV.  

Then I thought with African Americans being seen regularly on television and in the movies and in the highest offices one can achieve in this country, that the attacks would at least abate if not stop altogether. I mean we have a real African-American President, an African-American Republican Chairman, and an African-American Whip in the House...

And witness all the members of ethnic minorities who appear on or host the news panels on cable every single day.

It seems to me that just a few years ago there were real discussions and arguments and confrontations over the concept of the Badge of Slavery. 

There were tomes written about the differences between de facto discrimination and de jure discrimination.

If over one half of all inmates of our prisons and jails are minorities, there can only be two conclusions. Either there is racial profiling on almost every street in Urban America or minorities have some genetic defects that make them more prone toward criminal conduct.

After following the scandals on Wall Street over the last two decades, the genetic argument just does not wash.

But issues concerning poverty and de facto discrimination and other important issues now go by the way side. Instead we are forced to go back to square one again.

After centuries of dealing with the very origins of this country, we have to go back fifty years and argue about lunch counters all over again.

The Texas Board of Education is initiating a brand new propaganda campaign that is massive in scope and just plain evil in intent.

The fifteen members of this TEA were elected in 2007 and sit for four years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Education_Agency

Now you must grasp the fact that ten of the fifteen members on this panel are Texas Republicans. I mean it explains everything.

Elites who treat the efforts of Texas officials to balance their otherwise politically correct textbooks as a scandal are missing an even bigger outrage in the Lone Star State's public schools. "Decisions that are made in Texas have a ripple effect across the country," Phillip VanFossen, head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a professor of social studies education at Purdue University told Amanda Paulson, a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor.

Meanwhile, on May 22, 2010, April Castro of the Associated Press reported that "The Texas State Board of Education adopted a social studies and history curriculum Friday that amends or waters down the teaching of the civil rights movement, slavery, America's relationship with the U.N. and hundreds of other items."

Paulson went on to report that Professor VanFossen "was bothered by a new requirement that students analyze the decline in value of the US dollar and abandonment of the gold standard, without input from economists, and by amendments that would try to cast a more positive spin on Sen. Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt."

The professor might ponder the old adage, "Be careful what you ask for: You might get it." Bringing in economists on the first lesson could lead to an investigation of why there has been more inflation in the past 100 years than in the 700 years that preceded that century. As well, a thorough examination of McCarthy's charges would likely show that the overwhelming bulk of them were accurate as the only journalist to thoroughly investigate the primary sources on them--native-born Texan M. Stanton Evans--has found.  http://www.academia.org/texas-sidestep/

Another Republican board member, David Bradley, said the curriculum revision process has always been political - but this time, the ruling faction had changed since the last time social studies standards were adopted.

"We took our licks, we got outvoted," he said referring to the debate from 10 years earlier. "Now it's 10-5 in the other direction ... we're an elected body, this is a political process. Outside that, go find yourself a benevolent dictator." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/21/texas-board-of-education-_n_584697.html

I don't know. Even though I am no economist, I could write a hundred pages on the idiocy of the gold standard for a nation of 300 million people, but who cares? And old Joltin Joe McCarthy should certainly be in the text books, but only as the comic book monster he was. All this crap just keeps coming back.

Remember now, the Texans have only voted in standards, I mean they do not write the books. And I assume that the standards do not provide equal time for Jefferson Davis and Lincoln.

But this event was so disturbing to Californians that their legislature has voted to ban all Texas text books in their schools. http://www.palibandaily.com/2010/05/17/california-moves-to-keep-texas-curriculum-out/

Meanwhile, FOX is attacking the TEA for being too liberal. I mean what the hell do they want? Ten out of fifteen of these 'lawmakers' are southern fundamentalist racist repubs. How much better could it be? http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201003100032

So now we have Rand Paul; evidently the son of Ron Paul and that psycho Ayn Rand who would have us believe that life would be better with segregated lunch counters. Although he has 'reversed' his position for political correctness reasons in order to get the big money from the 'covered' repub racists who fund such campaigns.

So Rand is just an anomaly? No, not with FOX NEWS CHIMING IN:

STOSSEL: Totally. I'm in total agreement with Rand Paul. You can call it public accommodation, and it is, but it's a private business. And if a private business wants to say, "We don't want any blond anchorwomen or mustached guys," it ought to be their right. Are we going to say to the black students' association they have to take white people, or the gay softball association they have to take straight people? We should have freedom of association in America.

....

STOSSEL: Absolutely. But those -- Jim Crow -- those were government rules. Government was saying we have white and black drinking fountains. That's very different from saying private people can't discriminate.

STOSSEL: Because eventually they would have lost business. The free market competition would have cleaned the clocks of the people who didn't serve most customers.  http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005200033

Make no mistake about it. There is a movement out there to:

Destroy the Department of Education

Destroy the IRS

Destroy the Civil Rights Laws

Destroy the SEC

Destroy the Interior Department

.....

All in the 'belief' that free enterprise will cure all of our ills.

After everything we have seen as a nation, after everything we have lost as a nation, after our resources have been plundered with the fruits going to the top one percent...we are supposed to believe that free enterprise will free us all.

So do not buy this 'reasonable tea bagger' crap.