Must Read

I haven't finished this post, yet. But it should be shared far and wide as well.

As Michael Lind has compelling argued, the Tea Party movement is the latest echo of the Southern Confederacy. In all, they are neo-Secessionists whose language of “States Rights’,” “nullification” and “Second Amendment remedies” hearkens back to that of the old Confederacy. Because the Tea Party are in fact neo-Confederates, the federal government is viewed with deep hostility, and they are heirs to a political tradition that views the preservation of Jim Crow segregation in the name of “States’ Rights” as more important than civil rights for black Americans.

Tea Party representatives such as Rand Paul have echoed this suspicion of the civil rights laws which brought down Jim Crow; the Tea Party faithful have made repeated efforts to (quite literally) white wash the U.S. history curricula of the Arizona and Texas school systems; and in their creative reimagining of the U.S. Constitution, the Tea Party GOP has conveniently removed all of the “bad parts” (i.e. references to slavery) as a function of a feigned and convenient “colorblindness” that actively avoids the full complexity of the country’s past and present.

In keeping with their oversimplification and flattening of history, even the Tea Party’s Revolutionary War era costumes and histrionic railings against a “tyrannical government” speak to an embrace of Lost Cause ideology. Not coincidentally, the Confederacy also embraced the same symbolism, and imagined themselves as the true heirs to the founding fathers, the real champions of the U.S. Constitution.

I gotta find a way to get this to Dennis G over at Balloon-Juice.......

Your voice still matters

There are a lot of petitions out there that, really, let's face it...nothing ever happens. There's uproar and shock, but nothing changes if the dems create the petition.
But there's actually one that I think deserves to be signed.
This link, will take you to Change.org. This petition is the brainchild of one of my favorite bloggers...you will find his site, The Political Animal at the side over there ---->
Anyway, he posted the other day about taking all the letters from repubs, asking for funding and approving them with their letters to him . :) Go read it here.
Now, that's just brilliant.
So sign this petition and share it everywhere. And be on the lookout for a march in DC and across the country in October. I will just happen to be in DC in October......I hope my path will cross with it. :)