Da Skins

By Capt. Fogg

Redskins - that's what we call the tourists with their New Jersey complexions who come down here in the Winter to expose themselves to old Sol in all his ultraviolet glory.   Mad dogs and Northerners go out in the noonday sun.

But anyway, I wouldn't dream of calling one of our proud Seminoles a 'redskin' and for more reasons than that they're actually not red at all, having the sense to stay out of the sun, but none the less, they are an indigenous population which is not really the case with a Washington professional football team or its owner. No thought has been give to calling them the whiteskins or blackskins despite the player's origins.  But this is America now and  the right to make money, even if it defames or mocks the innocent is sacred.  Daniel Snyder, even though as a Jew he should know far, far better, still thinks it's OK. 

I'm sure I don't have to waste time illustrating how obnoxious this team name is even if the owner is too stupid or too greedy (or both) to realize it but for someone who loves irony, it's fun to speculate about a buyout.  If the Florida Seminole tribes could buy the Hard Rock Cafe franchise for a billion dollars, perhaps the Washington Redskins might become available and particularly if Snyder gets tired of the ridicule he so richly deserves.  It's fun to speculate about a name, but I'll keep it to myself and I have a feeling the tribe has too much class and business sense to consider any of my suggestions.

Reality bites Reality Show

By Capt. Fogg

I think we have to hold this truth self-evident: bigotry doesn't pay. Bible-Based or not, and even expressed in private, Racism, Homophobia, and Bigotry can cost you almost everything. Nobody will hire you other than Fox News and other GOP franchises.

David and Jason Benham were about to get their own HGTV 'reality TV series until it came out on Right Wing Watch that David, one of the twin Biblievers had been ranting outside the Democratic National Convention at Charlotte, NC in 2012 about "homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation" and "demonic ideologies" taking hold in colleges and public schools.  Hot Potato time again at HGTV.  Gay people and people who are tired of people who rant about what their toothless old threadbare god hates watch HGTV and in sufficient numbers that bigotry doesn't pay.  Hey who said the market doesn't sometimes correct itself? Who says Capitalism can't force bad products off the market?

Hey -- that reality real enough for ya?

Party like it's 1964

By Capt. Fogg

If you haven't been so immersed in sports and entertainment that you haven't read or listened to the news, you probably know about the rash of  state level legislative efforts to affirm the "right" of business owners to refuse service to people whose private lives include amorous proclivities inimical to religious bigots.  Yes, if you won't give a glass of water to a thirsty homosexual person you're a bigot and most definitely not the sort of Christian who credits the canonized teachings of Jesus. If you don't agree, I maintain the right to call you a bigot anyway and worse, actually. 

"I think anybody that owns a business can choose who they work with or who they don't work with, but I don't know that it needs to be statutory. In my life and in my businesses, if I don't want to do business or if I don't want to deal with a particular company or person or whatever, I'm not interested. That's America. That's freedom."  

Said Arizona governor Jan Brewer, obviously a Republican, who has not yet signed the bill and  has, to her credit, vetoed a previous effort. The question of course is whether freedom really means the right to do anything one wants without concern for the freedom of others. There are other questions as well and amongst those might be the question of how absolute personal freedom for one person affects or relates to the personal freedom of all others.  After all, if  no one will do business with me, I'm no longer free to live in the place where such "freedom" prevails.  A comparison to the freedom of wild animals seems inviting, as well as a discussion of whether this kind of liberty is compatible with any definition of civilization, much less a Democratic one.

Of course on the practical level, such a business model will not favor businesses who refuse service to any significant group and I certainly wouldn't patronize any establishment that decides that no Irish may apply and neither would a a significant number of others -- and that doesn't offer a bright future to any business that restricts itself to skinheads, Nazis and Reverend Phelps types?  Government sanctioned discrimination would of course bring down the Federal government on Arizona like a wolf on the fold as such abuses have been illegal for longer than many of us have been alive and hard fought for it was.  It would be likely to make Arizona a laughing stock and certain to clog the streets with protests and sit-ins if not riots, and certain to clog the courts with sufficient lawsuits to bankrupt any hotels, restaurants, gas stations and convenience stores stupid enough to demonstrate their "freedom" in this way.  Lets not even discuss doctors, clinics, drug stores and hospitals who decide to seceed from civilization and all semblance of decency in favor of practicing their "beliefs."

Actually I would rather welcome this dying gasp of the ultra right and the pseudo-right who support them the way Hindenburg supported the Nazis, as I would welcome anything that displays their true and swastika emblazoned colors and hastens their ignominious demise.  Of course it won't happen, but wouldn't it be nice to see Arizona legislators  jailed for passing laws that are illegal in full knowledge thereof?  Ah well, it's a beautiful warm, dreamy Florida Saturday morning and perhaps I can be forgiven a flight or two of fancy.

Brave-ery in Cobb County

I'm late to this flap over moving the Atlanta Braves out of a perfectly good park, but it's worth mentioning if only for how brazen Republicans have become in their bigotry.

Joe Dendy, chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, says that he has two conditions for supporting the Braves' proposed move (h/t Jim Galloway):

1.) That Cobb County citizens won't have to pay higher taxes as a result, and
2.) “It is absolutely necessary the (transportation) solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from our north and east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta."

And by people, he means "those" people who can't afford to live in Cobb and wouldn't be welcome even if they could because... wrong hue. But whatever you do, don't call it racist. I'm sure Mr. Dendy has a very good friend of a different color.

Church of Hate

By Capt. Fogg

The old cliche has rats leaving a sinking ship.  Southern Baptists aren't that smart and it seems they do intend to go down with their foul and foundering wreck of antique bigotry.

Lifelong member President Jimmy Carter left that self-righteous ship of fools about 4 years ago over Church teachings about the subservient role of women and I'm waiting to see who tumbles into the lifeboats over the latest decision to dump the Boy Scouts because they decided on May 24th that they no longer are going to excommunicate gay Scouts.

It's a "Moral" thing you see and it's not really bigotry because they justify

it with some ancient political propaganda they somehow attribute to some god and so they can, in all good and righteous confidence recommend that Southern Baptist Churches all over the South withdraw support from about 100,000 scouts.  I wonder how many of those will, lacking something decent to do after school or in the Summer, lacking the impetus toward self-improvement will wander toward making bad personal decisions and wind up getting into trouble and into jail where predatory Southern Baptists can recruit them for the faith as though youth homes and penitentiaries  were prep schools and seminaries. 

Of course the SBC was a supporter of Slavery and Segregation because it was a moral thing and a Biblical one - not because they're a bunch of bigots and moral cowards. It's what God wants and who can question the absolute truth of anything someone put into God's mouth for his own purposes?

Yes, yes, they decided to stop beating that dead horse and renounced all that back in 1995 -- decades after the horse died but perhaps that's only because they had gays and women to turn to while blathering about God's word.  One wonders what they will choose as the next life raft when the world of decency, respect and morality, in due course rejects once again that rotting prison hulk of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Those little town blues

By Capt. Fogg

Small town newspapers.  When I first moved here over 11 years ago, Little Boots was in the white house and although the fear machine was running on afterburner and everyone was in the process of never forgetting and sending money to Taiwan manufacturers of plastic automobile flag holders, you still had headlines declaring that some local fisherman had caught a record Snook or irate letters about litter in the park.  Now it's outrage.  Every day. Even the fish are angry.

Printed opprobrium grew over the Bush years, at least those quasi-literate, misspelled, cliche-ridden  letters to the editor written in impotent rage at Mexican farm workers, people on food stamps, Liberals, immigrants, ethnic minorities, liberals, Muslims, atheists, Jews, Democrats -- did I mention Liberals?  Yes, sure, I and a few others sometimes wrote ( brilliantly, I must admit) alternate opinons, much to the further wrath of the toothless unwashed, but it's a small town as I said, and word gets around and  I really don't want to carry a gun in my bathing suit or they may think I'm happy to see them.   Discretion, valor and all that.

Of course it's hardly new.  I remember, back in the mid 60's, living in long hair and sandals in the tiny, rural, University town of Hamilton New York.  I remember when the school had an open symposium on Communism, and the good, go-to-church and keep-Christ-in-Christmas locals flooded the opinion page with demands to bomb the bastards back to the stone age - now.  Small town newspapers.  I wish I could believe that they didn't represent America, that they weren't just some boil on the ass of an otherwise great nation.

Take the Lincoln Journal, of Lincoln County, West Virginia.  Seems public sentiment supported the termination of a teacher for fear she would "turn her students gay."  Faced with a reader's  voice mail (I used reader loosely here)  asserting that

 “We were really glad to hear that School Board is getting rid of them queers, The next thing is we need to get rid of all the niggers, the spics, the kikes and the wops.”

they decided to print it.  I don't fault them. Such people should be heard so we know what we're dealing with -- and where they are.  Now my local paper would probably not have, and it doesn't have a voice-mail line for illiterates.  Most of us here after all, come from elsewhere where literacy of a certain minimal level is fairly common, but those sentiments aren't exactly rare with the locals either.

“You know even them Catholics, they are wrong as baby eaters. We need to clear them people out and have good, white, God fearing Christians and everybody else needs to be put to death for their abominations. We’ll keep Lincoln County white and right. Thank you. "

You're welcome. White and Right indeed. I hope you do just that and perhaps building a wall will help the local economy for a while.  In fact I hope everyone like you moves to Lincoln County. It would be nice to have all y'all in one place and  I hope there's room. I'd hate to have to use up more than one of our precious nukes, but as for the stone age -- are you sure you're ready for that big an upgrade?

Hate is in the blood, says Lyin' bill

By Capt. Fogg

So lyin' Bill is still at it.  I don't go looking for his wisdom any more than I go around opening manhole covers looking for a pleasant smell, but sometimes you just stumble into it - like you might step into some dog shit on the sidewalk.  Anyway,  here we have him again running his foul mouth for his foul audience hoping to promote evil and ugliness and hate wherever he can -- and get rich from doing it.

So Barack Obama hates half the country, says O'Reilly -- the white half, of course, because even though the only family he ever knew was white, he must hate white people because he's black -- even though he's every bit  as white as he is black, unless of course, the old Confederate, Secessionist USA hating bigots like Lyin' Bill  are right that one drop of "black" blood means you're black and inferior. Old Confederate, Secessionist bigots like Lyin' Bill must think that "black blood" is mighty powerful stuff though, if one drop of it can pollute an ocean of whiteness and all the superiority it conveys. Lyin' Bill must believe in "black power!"  Whattaya know!

But Dennis Miller, that other Fox bastard who, back when he was funny and before he sold his soul for a buck thirty seven used to try to impress us all with his brilliance and erudition and vocabulary is reduced to making a living with pusillanimous persiflage for the amusement of the stupidest fraction of mediocre American minds by bantering with Bill would none the less opine that he seeth not the anger of blackness but the haughtiness of the educated.  Fox and grapes, Dennis? Nobody thinks you're smart or funny any more.

So they're back to this -- still at this, since every factual seeming accusation has been erased like grafitti under the blast from a power washer.  The face numbers, the fake stories, the false identification with George Bush's blunders misdeeds, blunders and frauds -- it all has a shelf life and perhaps the lies have gone past it and are beginning to spoil and so it's back to racists and Bolshevik class warfare:  he's a racist, he's a snob, he's consumed with hate (just like us.)