Dear Liberals: Please stop telling me that Tennessee Teabaggers want to excise slavery from history books. This story is well over a year old. I don’t know why people are still having hissy fits about something that didn’t happen last year and won’t happen this year but I have a few ideas.
The story resurfaced back in January when some idiot blogger saw an old Memphis Commercial Appeal piece from 2011 about the Tennessee Tea Party giving our Goofball Governor a “list of demands.” Among them: telling lies about slavery in our state history books. I’m guessing this blogger forgot the calendar had switched from 2011 to 2012 and did a post on it, but it then ricocheted around the liberal blogosphere. Now it’s a zombie story that just won’t die.
Look, ThinkProgress covered the story on January 13, 2011 and then again on January 23 2012. But it’s the same exact story. It’s not like the Governor can magically decree a school curriculum. The Teanuts were ignored in 2011 and they won’t be given the time of day now, especially since they’ve disbanded.
Dear Republicans: Get a new schtick. President Obama is a far-left socialist? You say that every election about every Democrat. John Kerry was “to the left of Ted.” Al Gore’s endorsement by the Human Rights Campaign and NARAL made him a far-left “extremist.” Bill Clinton was a “stealth Communist.” Please. Recycling is for beer cans and newspapers, not political campaigns.
Dear Media: Enough with the saber-rattling over Iran. Every presidential election Iran is suddenly this close to building a nuclear bomb and, OMG, everybody panic! I’m starting to think you’re full of shit. Remember John McCain singing “Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran” during the 2008 campaign? If that doesn’t tell you this is all bad political theater, I don’t know what will. How about Halliburton doing business in Iran?
Dear Religious People: Just zip it already. I’m sick to death of you people. Nothing is less appealing than a bunch of people screaming about what God hates: fags, birth control, liberals, the other sports team, etc. etc. No one wants to be in your stupid little club. There is a reason you lost the culture wars 30 years ago, and going back to fight those same battles you already lost just reinforces the viewpoint that the church is out of touch and irrelevant.
Dear Corporate America: Please stop asking me to take your stupid “customer satisfaction survey” every time I have a dealing with you. My time is precious and you’re already eating up enough of it as it is, what with your barrage of advertising, stealth marketing and cyberstalking. If I buy goods or services from you, I want that to be the end of it; if I have a problem with the transaction, trust me: I’ll let you know.
Speaking of stalkers, Dear Great Courses Company: Please DIAF. I bought one lecture from you three years ago and I now get a catalog a week and direct mail pieces saying you “want me back.” Jesus Christ on a saltine, if I wanted another lecture I’d fucking buy it already. This isn’t sales, it’s harassment. I might have bought another lecture from you but based on your past behavior I’m afraid to encourage you. Next thing I know you’ll show up in my driveway demanding to move in. Take the fucking hint already.
Dear Hollywood: Please make movies for grown-ups. If you want to know why 2011 box office revenue was down it’s because the movies sucked. Not everything needs to be in 3-D or feature a superhero. Find some original stories. Rediscover the concept of “imagination.”
Dear Bloggers: If you aren’t checking your own damn blogroll at least once a month, you’re doing it wrong. I’m sick of following dead links all the time, especially from “establishment bloggers” who really should know better. If you can’t even be bothered to keep your own main page clean of dead links and long-shuttered blogs, then I’m going to guess you can’t be bothered to check a bunch of other facts, too.
That is all.
Love,
Southern Beale.
Hurray! Coming from south Florida, with the retired population, the Bible Belt influence (kinda Bermuda Triangle) the preponderance of rightwingnuts in the 1% category being in the ‘ruling party’ in Tallahassee either selling, giving away or doling out contracts to buddies in smoke filled back rooms, I not only feel your pain, I’ve got plenty of my own. ‘Bout time I followed your example and had a damned good rant.
I do what I can, but periodically people take down their blogs, disinfect the premises and then blow up what’s left. (Naming no names.) I am mindful of the famous Fafblog! hiatus; but by and large if a year has gone by with no update, I start giving the site the stinkeye.
Links in posts are a different problem; I have 1000+ posts and I know that several of the videos are toast, but checking every link for existence is time I’d rather spend researching rock groups
My compromise there is to .ink and quote (I hope) a relevant chunk with attribution. No, I don’t always succeed.
Links in posts are impossible to keep current. I get that; my rant is directed at blogrolls. I always try to visit the people on my own blog roll at least once a week. I feel like putting them on my blogroll is an endorsement of sorts, in that it’s telling my own readers “these are blogs I read and respect.” So if I’m not reading them often enough to know that they’ve moved or shuttered or haven’t posted since August 2010 … ? What does that say about me?
I feel like you’ve got to support your fellow bloggers, and one of the ways to do that is by actually reading the blogs you’re telling people you read. And if your blogroll is too lengthy to do that well, maybe some editing is in order?
Heh. I just took Carnival of the Elitist Bastards off; nobody’s posted there in 2 years.
I do keep 2 non-current blogs as reference archives, though.
I just took Carnival of the Elitist Bastards off; nobody’s posted there in 2 years.
LOL. With a name like that, I’m sorry to hear they haven’t posted in a couple years, sounds like they were up my alley….
my impression is that some of the big-name bloggers stopped updating their blogroll after the whole “blogroll amnesty” controversy in 2007. atrios announced that he was deleting his blogroll entirely and then would add back the blogs that he actually reads as they occurred to him, and that set off a shitstorm of hurt feelings and charges that big bloggers were only linking to other big bloggers. so now their blogrolls are mostly frozen circa 2007 or 2008, for fear of igniting another shitstorm
at least that’s my theory. it does seem like the bigger the blogger, the less chance of a current blogroll.
(as for the fafblog problem, i delete any blog once the last post is a year old. i’m thinking of shortening it to 6 months)
Thank you, thank you, especially for “Dear Corporate America”.
BTW I clicked on the cyberstalking link to read more and got Forbes delivered in a 60 pt font size. Do you think they know something about my age group and are pumping up the size for eyesight?!
“Dear Religious People: Just zip it already. I’m sick to death of you people. Nothing is less appealing than a bunch of people screaming about what God hates: fags, birth control, liberals, the other sports team, etc. etc. ”
Oh, yeah, you know what GOD rillly, Rilly, RILLLY HATZ! ? Faracies, that’s what! Them people that do the ashes and sackcloth, rendin’ the garments, nashin’ the teeth sortastuff in public–well, cept they wear Hugo Boss and Prada and wouldn’t even DREAM of fuckin’ up their wardrobe shit.
Hey, I was over to Mikeb302000′s jernt and seen where there was another “minor altercation” over to West TN (http://news.yahoo.com/tenn-nightclub-shooting-leaves-1-dead-19-injured-010738680.html). I’m sure it was outside agitators come to stir up trouble for good, honest, lawabidin’ Tennesseeans.
well, the comment thread is certainly a bastion of tolerance.
/not
Dude that stuff happens here on a DAILY BASIS.
Sort of an “Unfinished Business” memo:
Maureen Dowd has been reading your blog:
“…Delegate Dave Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse with his own Old Dominion version of “Lysistrata”…”
And in the interest of fairness, from the same piece, at least one GOP’er gets it:
“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/dowd-ghastly-outdated-party.html?ref=maureendowd
“Sex is popular.”
Also necessary. Just ask the Shakers. If you can find any.
Saber rattling over Iran = $6/gallon gas. I’m just saying.