Al Franken writes about the most important free speech issue of our time. Come to think of it, it’s pretty amazing they haven’t shut us bloggers down already. I suspect the only reason they haven’t is that rightie blogtopia is a useful enough tool.
Elsewhere — Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says he doesn’t remember the civil rights era of 50 years ago as being all that bad. Yes, and I’m sure there are a great many other things the governor doesn’t remember.
Ol’ Haley’s trying to whitewash history. Literally, ‘white’ wash it.
Oh, it wan’t sooooo bad! Liberals and their black constituency were just over-reacting at the time, and have exagerated everything since then.
The dogs? Black people LOVE dogs. What are you trying to say, that they don’t?
The firehoses? It was hot, and the police were saving the black people in the streets the trouble of opening up the fire hydrants themselves.
If you minimize what happened at that time, you trivialize the survivors of those times, and make it easier to rewrite what actually transpired.
He’s dog-whistling through Dixie, hoping those outside The South will buy his BS. And never underestimate the stupidity, ignorance and gullibility of the American eople. Especially not with the resources of talk radio, FOX News, and conservative Op-ed writers, available to them.
As for Net Neutrality (which may literally be the most important free speach issue of our lifetime), and how they can seperate the right from the left blogs, allowing higher speeds for the right it’s easy. As everyone knows, since this is such a center-right nation, giving access to conservative sites would be the responsible thing to do, since it would give the majority of the people the fastest access. Why, after all, should a small minority get the same access? If you buy in bulk, as opposed to small numbers, you get a discount. So, it’s totally free market capitalism at its finest.
As crazy as the last 18 years have been, I don’t think we’ve yet scratched the surface of their insanity.
Double-dipping here:
Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
Did you go? I asked.
“Sure, I was there with some of my friends.”
I asked him why he went out.
“We wanted to hear him speak.”
I asked what King had said that day.
“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
Does Ol’ Haley actually think people will believe that? That he was such an open-minded, sensitive and noble young man that he actually went to a MLK speach? How f’in’ stupid do you think we really are? Haley, not all of us are that FOXed-up-in the-head, you know?
What’s next? He’s going to tell us he was the guy holding the camera when Neil Armstrong took mans first step on the moon?
That he and his friends went to a civil rights rally to pick up girls? Some things I don’t even want to think about.
Haley say’s they went there to pick up girls? This I’m sure was a stragetic statement if he says he went to hear MLK that won’t sit well.with his constituents, I suspect if he was there at all it was as a protestor of course he can’t admit that now, why even bring it up?
Clearly Barbour has a poor memory.
maha,
D’OH!!!
It never occured to me that the girls he’d be looking at or trying to pick up, if he was there, which he wasn’t, would be black!
Don’t ask me what was going through my mind to make me think some white teenage or early ’20’s girls from the South would EVAH be be at an MLK speach in 1962. There may have been a couple, but if they were there they definitely came from some Liberal college like Vassar. I wasn’t thinking along those lines.
That should have been the first thing that came to mind, now that I think about it.
There’s one rightie blog that I occasionally comment on, and the topic of net neutrality came up. Of course, they opposed “big government” telling Godly corporations like AT&T, Cox Cable and Verizon what they could and could not block (net neutrality, of course, says they can’t block anything). Anyway, the righties were mostly opposed to any kind of guvmint regulation, even one that would protect their rights to foam at the mouth online.
I did point out that the very blog we were reading could be blocked if we didn’t have net neutrality, and they scoffed at the notion. Then I reminded them that the Marxist Obama and his ACORNS thugs are currently in power – for a brief moment they paused in their usual Rush Limbaugh rhetoric – you could almost hear their heads explode.
I had a similar episode a few months ago, when there was a discussion about growth hormones being fed or injected in American cows (both dairy and meat cows). In pretty much every other country in the world this is prohibited because the hormones remain in the final product. And growth hormones are designed to cause obesity, something that the USA has a lot of.
Again, the righties were all for the God-given right to have hormones added to their hamburgers and ice cream. I pointed out that many countries prohibit US dairy products because of the hormones, including the country where I live. Their reaction, of course, was that the US government should retaliate against said countries with tariffs or prohibiting their products for sale in America. If hormones really do cause obesity, then the sacred “free market” would provide hormone-free beef and dairy for Americans. Again, it was useless to point out that consumers would have no way of knowing which products did/didn’t contain hormones, unless there was a big guvmint regulation that required product labeling, which of course they were against.
But I got their heads to explode again when I suggested that hormones in beef/dairy might be causing their kids to become gay. I bet a lot of them went vegan for a few days after reading that.
Doesn’t Barbour’s comment remind you of why a chicken and a pig will have different reactions to providing a bacon and egg breakfast? Any lie can be passed off and nodded politely by if uttered to the right people in the right place with the right degree of in-group accent.
As far as net neutrality, all they have to do is get it to the corporation-loving Supremes and it will be a goner, I think.
Gov. Barbour went to a MLK rally to impress chicks and doesn’t recall that the civil rights struggle was all that bad. Does he think MLK died of old age?
Barbour reminds me of Jabba the Hut.
Come to think of it, it’s pretty amazing they haven’t shut us bloggers down already. I suspect the only reason they haven’t is that rightie blogtopia is a useful enough tool.
Sadly, I suspect quite the opposite is true: it’s because the left is so totally impotent, that it’s quite harmless as well as useful to leave an “opposition” media alone. Not only is the left impotent, but it’s so easily conned into donating buzz and money around marketing campaigns disguised as candidates (see Obama, Barack). It’s useful to have an “opposition”, to hide the fact that the game is rigged.