Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Published on Apr 29, 2014
A Townes Van Zandt Song. Emmylou gave him his first big hit .1982

Thanks to orvsha.

Cliven Bundy: Clown Car or Trojan Horse?

William Rivers Pitt is soooo good!

Fox News, and especially Sean Hannity, immediately began hyping the story all day and night, elevating Bundy to the status of instant Founding Father. How could they resist? Here was a guy who denies the existence of the US government while riding his horse on federal lands with an American flag strapped to his saddle. Cognitive dissonance is the meat and mead of Fox News, and the dissonance in that one image was weighty enough to bend the very light (my em).

It took about two weeks for everything to go sideways.

First, Mr. Bundy delivered his now-infamous rant about Black people being happier picking cotton as slaves, a statement he doubled down on later by comparing himself to Rosa Parks before saying that if Black people didn't like his opinions, it's because "Martin Luther King hasn't gotten his job done yet."

Skreeeeeeech went the needle off the record. Every right-wing media personality and politician who had rushed to publicly embrace Cliven Bundy immediately fled his presence as if he was covered in Goliath tarantulas. I think there still may be a Hannity-shaped hole in the studio wall at Fox News.

His ardent gun-toting supporters at the ranch stood their ground...until a few days ago, when there was a sudden falling-out between Bundy's own ranch security - commanded by a man actually named Booda Bear - and a contingent of Oath Keepers who had come to the ranch because Jesus, or something. Their leader, one Stewart Rhodes, informed Booda Bear (God, I could type his name all day) that he had "intel" from a "source of intelligence of high value" that Eric Holder and the Justice Department were going to deploy a "hot drone strike" against the Bundy Ranch within the next 24 hours. Because of this, the fearless leader was forced to re-deploy his stalwart troops off the ranch and into hotels with room service back in town.

This did not sit well with Booda Bear, who told Radio Free Redoubt's John Jacob Schmidt, "This is a battle front in some sense of the word and to remove them is kind of, ah, that's some yellow curd, ya know, spineless backbone piece of shit maneuvering right there. He had pretty much said, 'Well, I need to pull my guys back so they can allocate resources to the exterior of the area,' meaning go into the next town and get hotel rooms, get showers, gamble, eat steak dinners, while we're out here on the battle front...and just so everybody knows, as Booda, head of security for the Bundy family, I can swear on the white skin that covers my ass there will not be an Oath Keeper - there WILL NOT BE AN OATH KEEPER allowed to set foot on the internal ranch property."

And so not with a bang, but with a Derp, solidarity at the Bundy ranch "battle front" fell to dust that swirled and eddied around the white skin of Booda Bear's ass.
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...and note you well: here in America, you can point a high-powered rifle at federal officers and get off scot-free with your gun still in your hand. Sit down at a peaceful Occupy protest on the campus of UC Davis in California, however, and you get a gushing face full of Mace for your trouble...while the cop who sprayed you gets $38,000 in compensation for "anxiety and depression."

Far more insidious is the fact that, until he pulled his little "What, Me Racist?" number for all the world to see, Mr. Bundy's most dedicated supporters were a couple of billionaire brothers named Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers, if truth be told, could not give less of a damn about Cliven Bundy and his band of merry men, but until Bundy blew out like an old, racist tire, they were intensely interested in using him as the avatar for a fight they've been waging for twenty years: placing control of publicly-owned federal lands back into the hands of the states, so the states can lease or sell those lands to companies like Koch Industries for cattle grazing, mining, drilling, fracking, and lumbering.

Right now, those lands are protected from such activities, but the Koch Brothers were hoping to ride Cliven Bundy's cause to a massive land grab. The fact that Cliven Bundy upended the intentions of the Koch Brothers by being a racist idiot on television does not change their intentions one whit. They want to drill, to mine, to frack, and to profit off those lands that belong to us, for now.

So, as matters currently stand, Cliven Bundy can certainly be quantified as a human clown car. Do not, however, lose sight of the real story here: Mr. Bundy was also a Trojan Horse filled with Koch Industries drilling equipment until he blew it. Bundy may be gone from the news soon, but the Koch Brothers still want that land, because the world is not enough for guys like that, which is why, to no small degree, the rest of us can't have nice things like clean air and water that doesn't catch on fire coming out of the tap.

The moral of the story is that, to the Kochs and their ilk, it's always about the Benjamins and these wannabe militia goons are useful idiots to their ends.

The NRA has declared war on America

Ana Marie Cox at The Guardian. links at site.

Wayne LaPierre and Co are not out merely to defend the Second Amendment or Newtown or gun laws anymore. They want you to pay the price for freedom and they want their money now

...NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.

LaPierre's bleak vision is exaggerated dystopianism in service of sedition, a wide-ranging survey of targets that put justice against the intrusions of the IRS on a continuum with (as an advertisement he ran during his speech put it) workplace "bullies and liars".
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You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be both winning and losing, alone but united, the minority but the majority. It is almost (almost!) as if Wayne LaPierre intended to mislead his audience with this whiplash oratory, intended to dizzy them into acceptance of his underlying message, which is almost disappointingly mundane: give us money. Give the NRA money. Give us money so we can create the legal environment that allows gun manufacturers to make more money so that they can give us more money.

Conspicuously absent from LaPierre’s list of grievances was any serious consideration of the economic system that might have a role destabilizing the society for which he pantomimes such concern. [...]
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The problem with the NRA lies with the people who lead it.

No shit. I joined the NRA when I was in the service, in the days when you had to be sponsored ny an NRA member to join. My company commander sponsored me. I like firearms and the shooting sports and I enjoyed their magazine and that was about it.

I dropped my membership like a hot rock when the NRA went right-wing in the late '70s. It wasn't all that political before that.

It's WAY worse than that now. Now it's part of the "domestic enemies" that I swore to defend the Constitution from in my Oath of Enlistment which I never un-took.

BTW, there was a shooting near a town in Georgia today where folks are required by law to keep a gun. Where were all the "good guys with guns" anyway? Another right-wing lie perhaps? Or are they just afraid to actually go in harm's way and maybe get their AR-15 giant penises blown off?

Headline of the Day

This just in. Choices have consequences and words are choices. This is just a bitch slap to a billionaire but I'm down wid it.

NBA Bans Donald Sterling For Life

Fixer has chimed in on this and says he's impressed with NBA commissioner Adam Silver. So am I. Neither of us are basketball fans but we're interested in speaking truth to power.

Oh. the irony

Ironic Times

VATICAN: TWO POPES CANONIZED
In historic “Buy One, Get One Free” ceremony.

Bill Introduced in Congress Would Create National Park on the Moon
Already, the wait for a decent campsite is 6 months.

Claiming an Error, Feds Rescind Approval of Powdered Alcohol Product “Palcohol”
Seemed like a great idea, until they sobered up.

Those who'd rather mainline booze directly into their bloodstream are also in luck. Palcohol can be snorted!

What could possibly go wrong ... ?

Los Angeles Clippers Owner Caught Telling Girlfriend to Not Bring Blacks to Games
Clippers, with only J.J.Redick and Hedo Türkoglu available, lose to Golden State, 319-12.

Recent Book Proposes U.S., Canada Merge
We get oil, maple syrup, hockey players, they get Bible belt, high fructose corn syrup, baseball players.

War with Canada on the horizon...