Frum: Why NRA wins while other conservatives lose

A more illiberal and un-PC person than myself might summarize Frum's arguments thusly: the NRA speaks to the racial prejudices and economic insecurities of conservative rednecks.

Well, duh.

Why Gun-Rights Backers Win While Other Conservative Causes Lose

By David Frum

April 29, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/why-gun-rights-supporters-win-when-other-conservative-causes-lose/361396/

Hard to classify

OK, I admit it, I'm struggling with how to label this story.... Zombie preppers gone wild? Life imitating art? Accessible firearms escalate stupid argument to a life-and-death struggle? Rednecks are nuts?  

But here's the weirdest part: after he shot her in the back, the redneck boyfriend drove his girlfriend to the hospital for treatment. Like, he made his point, he shot her, that proves he's right and she's wrong and all the rest is bygones. He's now charged with attempted second-degree murder.  

Anyhoo... is season 3 of The Walking Dead the best ever or what?  Michonne should have finished off the Governor when she had the chance, am I right?  I sure hope he gets what's coming to him!....

"So you guys call walkers 'biters,' huh?"

Man Shoots Girlfriend in the Back for Not Taking the Possibility of a Zombie Apocalypse Seriously

By Neetzan Zimmerman

December 5, 2012 | Gawker

URL: http://gawker.com/5965883/man-shoots-girlfriend-in-the-back-for-not-taking-the-possibility-of-a-zombie-apocalypse-seriously

Texas judge preparing for post-Obama uprising

Stop teasing us and just do it. Please!

It really is the 90s all over again.  I mean, there is not even a whiff of Obama making some move toward the UN, yet the same crazy conspiracy theories are rising up again.  

These people are ridiculous hicks and paranoid freaks.  The problem is that there are too many of them.  So Romney is joining in, encouraging the hysteria.  Once again, he's saying anything to win.  

Tom Head, Texas Judge: Obama Reelection Could Lead To 'Civil War,' I'm Ready To 'Take Up Arms'

By Nick Wing

August 22, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/QqRP7l

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. needs $27 M from taxpayers

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. salutes our troops... but won't give 'em any freebies. Wouldn't be American.

Yo, Tea Parties, where you at?  You down with this?

Anyway, if Earnhardt is such a southern patriot, why can't he give Uncle Sam a discount, or better yet, free ad space on his Chevy for our troops?

Going further, if NASCAR is such an effective channel for communications to the key redneck demographic, then maybe Big Government should pay for Surgeon General's warnings about tobacco use on the Skoal Bandit car, too?  Maybe we should pay $ millions to paint on reminders from the CDC to get kids vaccinated?  The possibilities for useful public communications via cars driving in circles in front of captive audiences are practically endless.  

Drunk redneck idiot today; potential military hero tomorrow.

NC members fight to preserve military spending on NASCAR

By by Franco Ordonez

July 19, 2012 | McClatchy 

URL:  http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2012/07/nc-members-fight-to-preserve-military-spending-on-nascar.html

Tennessee losing the PR war for America

Thanks, Murfreesboro, TN for making Americans look like a bunch of intolerant redneck clowns. Again.

How many America-haters did this town and this bigoted judge create, I wonder?  How many Americans in Afghanistan and elsewhere will face reprisals because of state-sanctioned discrimination against Muslims in Tennessee?

Anyway... happy Ramadan!

Tennessee Mosque Wins Petition To Open

July 18, 2012 | AP

URL:  http://n.pr/OHoKUa 

Politico: White Americans have been duped before

The more things change the more they stay the same? You'd think folks would wise up.

Still fighting against own cause

By Robert McElvaine

January 13, 2011 | Politico

Mississippi seceded from the Union 150 years ago this week (Jan. 9). But the intermittent, sometimes bitter, argument over whether the Civil War was "about slavery" again is the focus of public debate.

Actually, both sides are right. And deciphering this paradox can go a long way toward explaining a perplexing aspect of our current political struggles.

Many have been puzzling over why so many middle-class Americans were persuaded to demonstrate and vote against their own interests — supporting low taxes for the very rich.

Here in Mississippi, we have a lot of experience with that sort of thing.

On one side of the debate over whether the South seceded and fought because of slavery is irrefutable evidence. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," the Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union begins, "the greatest material interest of the world."

The sentiment in the Union, the declaration complains, "denies the right of property in slaves."

On the other side are those Mississippians who point out that their great-to-x-power granddaddy, who fought valiantly for the Rebel cause, owned no slaves — so clearly, he was not fighting for slavery.

Obviously, Mississippi and the other Southern states seceded and fought the Civil War to protect their "peculiar institution" — as they plainly stated in their documents of secession. When South Carolina seceded, three weeks before Mississippi, its declaration focused on the North's attacks on slavery and the "election of a man to the high office of president of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."

The Confederate Constitution contained a provision that no law denying "the right of property in negro [sic] slaves" could ever be passed.

Yet it should be almost equally obvious that the vast majority of those who fought on the Confederate side but owned no slaves were not fighting to defend slavery. Rather, they were duped by the planter aristocracy into fighting to protect the slave "property" of the rich.

Slaveholders riled the region's less affluent whites by talk of a struggle to maintain their freedom from the federal government that, the planters told them, wanted to take away their liberty.

The slaveholders were able to persuade other white Southerners to fight, kill and die for a cause that was, in fact, against their own interests. Slavery worked against whites who owned no slaves. They had to compete with those who had this cheap source of labor. Protecting slavery also made the South hostile to other reforms, including industrialization, that could have benefited less affluent whites.

This story line should sound familiar to us now.

What is happening in the nation's political economy today is all too similar to what transpired a century and a half ago. The benefits now accruing to middle-class Americans from concentrating more and more wealth and power at the very top — like the benefits 150 years ago of slavery to non-slaveholding whites — can be measured in negative numbers. Unemployment remains high in large part because a consumption-based economy is dependent on a less inequitable distribution of income.

Once again, talk about putative threats to "freedom" and "liberty" is being used to scare ordinary citizens into acting in the interests of the wealthy, who are focused on their own concerns, not on behalf of the people they are stirring to anger.

As was true 150 years ago, one way less affluent people are being misled into acting against their own interest is through the argument that the threat to their well-being comes from people with darker skins — now Latino immigrants — rather than from those with much greater wealth.

To my knowledge, slaveholders never thought of the brilliant marketing ploy of using something like the tea party as their symbol. But they found it expedient to identify their cause with that of the American War for Independence. They sold their undertaking as the War for Southern Independence — in which the Confederates were fighting for freedom against the federal government in the same way that Americans had fought for freedom against the British.

"For far less cause than this," the Mississippi declaration asserts, "our fathers separated from the Crown of England. ... We follow their footsteps."

The Civil War, however, was far from a "war for Southern independence." It was a "war to maintain Southern dependence." Its objective, for the members of the white Southern elite who had engineered secession, was to preserve their dependence on slaves to work their land.

Unlike the Spirit of '76, the Spirit of '61 saw no contradiction between liberty and slavery. Rather, it defined liberty in terms of the right to deny liberty to others. It was not about states' rights but about states' wrongs.

Slaveholders lost on the battlefields in the 1860s. But the cause of the top 2 percent of the nation won at the polls in 2010, when politicians opposed to any increase in top tax rates and any meaningful regulation of financial institutions were victorious. For less affluent people, who voted against their interests last year, the cause remains what it was for the less affluent people deceived into fighting against their own interests 150 years ago: a Lost Cause.

Robert McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm professor of arts and letters at Millsaps College. He is the author of "The Great Depression: America 1929-1941" and is finishing a book, "'Oh, Freedom!' — The Young '60s."

KY man forced by local Talibanis to eat own beard

Hey Taliban, take notes from your fundamentalist, gun-toting counterparts in the lawless provinces of Kentucky! You never thought of this one, had you? Now you know. Making a man who cheated you eat his own beard, his pride and joy, is way worse than making him eat with his poo-hand.

Man Forced To Eat Own Beard In Kentucky (VIDEO)

November 12, 2010 | Huffington Post/AP

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/12/man-forced-to-eat-beard-i_n_782942.html

KY wins another #1 national ranking

Nothing says "Independence" like a shitload of guns.

I already knew that Kentucky was 1st in number of smoking deaths, the 6th worst state in which to start a business, the 7th fattest state in America and also the 7th poorest* (coincidence? I think not), 41st in childcare affordability, 42nd in terms of federal funds received per dollar of taxes, the 46th least-educated workforce, and 49th in terms of people's wellbeing. (*12 of Kentucky's 120 counties are among the 25 poorest counties in all of America.) And I've long suspected that Kentucky ranks up there in mullets and cutoff jeans per 100,000 residents, but I couldn't find any available statistics.

But now I find out that by a WIDE margin KY is the most heavily armed state in the union. KY blows #2 Utah away, (pardon the pun), it's not even close.

If you're a math genius, you'll notice there are more firearms background checks than people, meaning there are way more guns than people in KY, especially if we assume these numbers hold steady from year to year.

Seriously though, what's wrong with us?? Why do we poor, fat, uneducated, heavy-smoking people need so many guns? What are we doing with them all?

UPDATE 07.21.2010: To answer my rhetorical question, it later occurred to me to check the latest data on suicide rates by state. It turns out KY ranked an unhealthy 10th in 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Again, an eyeballing seems to show a strong correlation between the most suicidal and the most heavily armed U.S. states.

Kind of makes me nervous about coming home....

This stat is ironic because the most armed states correlate nicely with the states that are the biggest federal welfare queens, i.e. they receive more federal spending than they contribute in federal taxes. But if Obama tried to take their guns away... it'd spark a revolution for independence! That is, until all those Kentuckians became fatigued from hunger because Obama cancelled their EBT cards.

The Most Armed States

June 28, 2010 | The Daily Beast

1. Kentucky

Population: 4,314,113

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents (Dec. 2008 – May 2010): 134,028

2. Utah

Population: 2,784,572

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 30,315

3. Montana

Population: 974,989

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 25,745

4. Wyoming

Population: 544,270

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 22,827

5. Alaska

Population: 698,473

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 22,273

6. West Virginia

Population: 1,819,777

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 21,455

7. South Dakota

Population: 812,383

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 19,062

8. North Dakota

Population: 646,844

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 17,829

9. Arkansas

Population: 2,889,450

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 17,483

10. Alabama

Population: 4,708,708

NICS background checks per 100,000 residents: 16,860

SEND REINFORCEMENTS! Only 2,000 U.S. to 1 al Qaeda in Afghanistan

Can you believe this? Does anybody remember supposedly why we invaded Afghanistan in the first place? It was to deny al Qaeda a save haven and a base of operations there.
Now experts are saying there are probably fewer than 50 and no more than 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan! In fact, they're not there at all, they're in western Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Obama gave McChrystal most of what he wanted, with almost 98,000 troops on the ground, more than Dubya ever sent.
So, now we have a maximum ratio of almost 2,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for every 1 member of al Qaeda there; and a minimum of about 1,000 to 1.
You know, that sounds like enough troops to do the job. In fact, that sounds like way too many troops to do the job. No more al Qaeda in Afghanistan even kind of sounds like, well, "Mission Accomplished," doesn't it? I mean, put this in perspective: we can't restrict the flow of millions of Mexicans into the U.S., but we've managed to root out all but 50 al Qaeda from a country that's not even ours, with a border that nobody controls. I say it's time to pat each other on the back, give ourselves a laurel and a hearty handshake and say, "See ya, Afghanistan!" Let's bring our victorious troops home to a big hoopla parade! Whoopee! WE WON!!!!

What?... nobody else is excited? Nobody does an endzone dance anymore? What's wrong with you people?

Yeah, well, the truth, as we all know -- what neither Obama nor Dubya will admit -- is that we are not at war; we are an occupier stuck doing nation-building in Afghanistan. Our happenstance enemy there is the Taliban, who never threatened or attacked the United States until we invaded their country and took them out of power. To keep them out of power, we have to simultaneously (1) provide security against their harsh rule and retribution against cooperating Afghans, and (2) give the people "government in a box," as McChrystal put it, so that they don't look to said Taliban to provide freedom from chaos. Only thing is, that box with shiny wrapping and a pretty bow on top is empty. There's no such thing as government in a box. And even if there were, we've chosen the hardest place on earth to start a new government: a primitive, forbidding, uneducated, dirt poor, xenophobic, heavily armed, devoutly Islamic population with no history of democracy, power-to-the-people or rational civilized discourse. These are backward village idiots and crazy goat herders of the highest order. (No disrespect intended: all 3 major religions originated with such folk; so if God loves them so should we.)

Our task there is akin to convincing the majority of rural Mississipians or Alabamans -- by giving them the equivalent of 2-3x their average income in cash and in-kind -- to become slick, multicultural, gentrified, fast-talking New Yorkers and never revert to their poor, redneck ways once our support ends. They've tried this on Wife Swap a hundred times already and it's never worked.


Leon Panetta: There May Be Less Than 50 Al Qaeda Fighters In Afghanistan
June 27, 2010 | AP/Huffington Post
URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/27/leon-panetta-there-may-be_n_627012.html

Re: You might be a redneck if... A different take

Here's my slightly different take on the different take (see at bottom) that was forwarded to me by a conservative Republican:

You might be a redneck if: You think the phrase, 'One nation, under God,' excludes non-Christians.

You might be a redneck if: You've never protested seeing the 10 Commandments, of which you know 3 to 5, posted in public places like courthouses, where you appeared for that DUI, or in schools, which you opted not to attend.

*Bonus: You might be a redneck if: You think "home schooling" is when pappy took a belt to your hide and said, "That'll larn ya."

You might be a redneck if: You still say 'nigger/kike/spick/camel jockey' instead of 'African-American/Jewish/Latino/Arab'.

You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays, as you plot to grab the extra-crispy drumstick first.

You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem and hold your 32-oz Bud at a respectful gut level.

You might be a redneck if: You treat our armed forces veterans with great respect, and always have, because you are an armed forces veteran.

You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag, nor intend to, nor have you ever taken down your treasonous Confederate flag, nor intend to.

You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening, even if the TV screen or bartender can't understand your slurred speech.

You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders (after all, granny is 42 and gramps is almost 50!) and raised yer youngins to do the same.

You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend, because he gave you his last dollar the week before, and you him the week before that, etc., etc.


IF YOU DON'T FEEL LIKE STANDING IN FRONT OF OUR TROOPS, TELL EVERYONE LOUDLY AND PATRIOTICALLY THAT YOU STAND BEHIND THEM!
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You Might Be a Redneck....a different take

We have enjoyed the redneck jokes for years. It's time to take a reflective look at the core beliefs of a culture that values home, family, country and God. If I had to stand before a dozen terrorists who threaten my life, I'd choose a half dozen or so rednecks to back me up. Tire irons, squirrel guns and grit -- that's what rednecks are made of. I hope I am one of those. If you feel the same, pass this on to your redneck friends. Ya'll know who ya'll are.

You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to be offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God.'

You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing the 10 Commandments posted in public places.

You might be a redneck if: You still say ' Christmas' instead of 'Winter Festival.'

You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when someone prays.

You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem.

You might be a redneck if: You treat our armed forces veterans with great respect, and always have.

You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an American flag, nor intend to.

You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.

You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and raised your kids to do the same.

You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to a friend.

If you got this email from me, it is because I believe that you, like me, have just enough Red Neck in you to have the same beliefs as those talked about in this email.

God Bless the USA!

Keep the fire burning, redneck friend.


IF YOU DON'T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS FEEL FREE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM.