Gut Out the Vote 3
Plus ca change.
This website does not track you.
It contains no private information. It does not drop persistent cookies, does not collect data other than incoming ip addresses and page views (the internet is a public place), and certainly does not collect and sell your information to others.
Some sites that I link to may try to track you, but that's between you and them, not you and me.
I do collect statistics, but I use a simple stand-alone Wordpress plugin, not third-party services such as Google Analitics over which I have no control.
Finally, this is website is a hobby. It's a hobby in which I am deeply invested, about which I care deeply, and which has enabled me to learn a lot about computers and computing, but it is still ultimately an avocation, not a vocation; it is certainly not a money-making enterprise (unless you click the "Donate" button--go ahead, you can be the first!).
I appreciate your visiting this site, and I desire not to violate your trust.
June 28, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Johnson, who was Texan, was President when the Voting Rights Act was finally completed. And he ordered Hoover’s FBI into Mississippi to destroy the Klan, which it did. Hoover had always kept the agency out of such matters because the FBI knew the Klan was strongly represented in local government in the south. It was proof Reconstruction had failed. We’re at some kind of point again. The nagging central question of what to do about the southern sentiment, the Tea Party point of view, is one that is not localized to the classic Confederacy but which is crippling to the country. Another perfect example today, the GOP extremist in the state lege of Pennsy, gone ballistic over the gay politician from Philadelphia. There can’t be a unity. Does the country need a casus belli to shock it into action? The GOP is too clever to easily fall into one, nullifications and disenfranchisement legislation just coming up to the line but not crossing over. Is there a point where parts of the country can’t deal with each other anymore?
Remember the stink last year from the right when one of US war college professors published a what-if scenario and discussion of how the US military might be ordered in to put down an insurrection in a small town in the south? That really touched an exposed nerve. The authors who have dealt with this, Phillips in American Theocracy, and others, very much see the ramifications of this festering but don’t furnish or suggest answers. One thing is clear. Allowing one political party to use its power to regular attack its enemies isn’t going to have a good end.
June 28, 2013 at 10:32 pm
I saw that story out of Pennsy, as I visit the Inky every day. God’s law my anatomy! Republicans kowtow to a god of hate.
I tend to agree with you. Just as the last Dred Scott decision presaged a clash, so too will this one. Slavery is America’s original sin, and it demands penance.
Did you see this, by Harold Myerson?
I live maybe two miles in a straight line from the airport for the city in question (more by road, because there’s a reservoir in the way).
June 29, 2013 at 1:11 am
No, but thanks for pointing out. I can probably use it. Coincidentally, I just started reading Shelby Foote’s 3-volume set on the Civil War with special attention on the first book which devotes a lot of space to the run-up. There is some significant similarity between opposing attitudes, then and now, and it’s a century and half apart. This burning resentment permeates everything and the North was not hegemonic. It was in danger of flying apart after 1st and 2nd waves of southern state secession. Lincoln and everyone else were acutely aware of the southern belief in the border states, the west and portions of the union. So he needed a catalyzing event in which he maneuvered the south into firing on Fort Sumter believing this would create a great deal of unifying outrage, the attack being made on an outnumbered garrison that was running out of food. The diplomacy in it, practiced by Seward in his communications to the Confederacy over what the plans were for the fort are interesting and clever. Anyway, the Confederacy clung to the belief that Europe would come to its aid because of cotton. Economically, it thought it could engineer an advantage over the North when it seceded and offered Europe trade without tariffs imposed on finished goods coming back from the continent. Well, that was depending on slave labor. Today, we have Euro firms which use the US south and it’s right-to-work-for-less laws to put manufacturing here which escapes the social contract legislation in place within their borders. The South badly overestimated its ability to build or maintain any trade advantage with Europe during the Civil War. Paradoxically, the same is not so today. What has lived on is the philosophy the believes in imposition of a feudal system economy in which labor is stolen. This is its DNA, the genetic code of the GOP. It’s not removable, it cannot be altered. Meyerson sees it, anyone with half a brain does. The central dilemma is whether or not demographic extincting comes fast enough. Meyerson calls the southern sentiment “all around fruitcakery” but they’re not having it and never will. I can take quotes from the southern slave holder politicians/gentry after secession but prior to armed hostilities, publish them, and it reads much like the Tea Party GOP. There is this common emphatic jabber about fighting for liberty, freedom and respect to the Constitution.