Who is calling out lying snake-oil salesman John Linder?
That'd be Doug Heckman.
Attaboy.
In 1995, John Linder voted in support of a proposed constitutional amendment for 12-year term limits on lawmakers in the House and Senate. Sixteen years after Linder was first voted into office, he has retreated from his earlier promise and is running for re-election, hoping for at least two more years in Congress
"The stakes are too high for our Representatives to forget—as many have—that their job is to represent and seek progress for the American people. I think John Linder was right on term limits and he should honor his pledge. As with many of our representatives, the longer they remain in Washington, the further they are pulled from the interests of their constituents." said Heckman.
Labels: Doug Heckman, John Linder
How about Boondoggle?
We're supposed
to help name the new Gwinnett Braves mascot. Both the Hillbilly Rag and the DUNG (ok, WDUN) are involved.
We'll see if I can slip "Boonie" under the radar.
If I wind up flying out to the AA All-Star game in Portland, it'll be our little secret.
Labels: Gwinnett Braves
Jay Bookman, meet Doug Heckman...
Or, as I just thought to post
over at Jay's AJC blog:Jay, you know that Fair Tax co-author and noted right wing neocon clown John Linder is facing a challenge to his seat by an Iraq and Afghanistan (Special Forces) war vet, Doug Heckman. Of course Linder has money up the wazoo, and his whole Fair Tax cult (and Boortz’ knuckle-dragging listener base, presumably) surrounding him, but you never know, particularly if all those new uppity minorities and all them Yankee transplants were to get motivated to vote this year.
You think maybe that might be worth a column or two? Everyone likes a David v. Goliath story, right?
Given Jay's on-the-record takedowns of the Fair Tax, and his personal dislike for the book's other co-author (
Boortz has refused to allow Jay to come on his radio show, insisting instead on a rigged town-hall meeting that would be packed with FairTax cultists shouting down naysayers), I think it's just a matter of time before we see Jay visiting this topic.
Hope it's in a dead-tree column, and not just online.
Labels: Fair Tax
Better late than never
The AJC finally got around to publishing Pitts' take on act of domestic terrorism at TVUCC, cited below.
Labels: Domestic terrorism
Just two dead liberals. Nothing worth writing about.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that nobody from the Rag's stable of local and syndicated pundits bothered to comment, even in passing, on the two murders committed inside a UU church while elementary-school children were performing last Sunday.
Nothing from
Bill Shipp, nor
Todd Cline, certainly not
Darrell Huckabee nor was anything forthcoming from
Nate, who surely loves his stepkids, but not enough to fret so much about anyone else's, I guess.
That nothing appeared from the desk of the AJC's Jim Wooten, on the other hand, actually kinda shocked me a bit. Nor from Cynthia Tucker, nor anyone else. As far as I was able to ascertain, there was precisely
one (1) AP wire story published about the incident; not one mention about it on their editorial pages, no follow-ups, nothing more.
At the end of the day, though, these are just a couple of dead liberals,
shot and murdered in a church for the crime of being liberal, in a state that shares a border with ours. Nothing worth fretting about, at least not locally.
According to the minds of my local print media, there is no point in asking what role the radical right-wing rabble-rouser class might play. No point in wondering what equating terrorism with liberalism, as Sean Hannity did in
the subtitle to one of his best selling books, might do in the minds of those who've been less than financially and socially blessed in the past ten, twenty years. (The murderer owned a Hannity tome.) No point in questioning whether
calling liberalism a "mental disorder", as does Michael "Savage" Weiner, might justify culling the herd in the mind of an actual sufferer of mental illness. (The murderer owned a Weiner tome.)
Fortunately Leonard Pitts, who lives in a state that also shares a border with ours, and who is widely published,
did bother to ask. And it pains me that I have to go to a syndicated columnist, and not someone local, to quote a passage everyone ought to be intimately familiar with by now:
[I]t is increasingly the case that what we are being presented isn't a debate between competing worldviews so much as it is a morality play: righteous good versus unholy evil. Conservatives have cast themselves in the former role, leaving liberals the latter. It's a libel to which liberals have responded as the bug does to the windshield: splat.Unable to say what they believe or to frame it any compelling way, they have allowed themselves to be defined instead from without, standing ineffectual in a mudstorm of invective. They are, the propaganda goes, effete, unpatriotic, unstable, un-American, anti-God, evil, and the source of a voter's every problem, down to and including the death of his goldfish and the breakup of his marriage.
It is so over the top, so patently ridiculous, it's almost funny. Until you remember that dehumanizing people inevitably has consequences.
That's what Knoxville is, a consequence.
No, conservatives did not cause this bloodbath. Jim Adkisson allegedly did. But in telling him ''liberals'' were the source of his every disaffection and woe, conservatives certainly validated the hatred and madness that drove him.
Labels: Domestic terrorism, Hannity, Savage Weiner, TVUUC
