Rev. Robert W. Lee IV, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, denounces Majorie Traitor Green for “national divorce” comment. “MTG is acting no better than the Confederates who fought against the Union during the Civil War,” he said, denouncing racism and white supremacy: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Imagine, if you will, what it would feel like to be a rain soaked soldier (like the ones depicted in “All Quiet on the Western Front”) huddled a muddy trench fighting a stalemated civil war for 40 years.

Some days just north of the nation’s capital that’s what I feel like, and to be honest with you, I’m sick and tired of it. It’s time to end the fighting and finally go home.

But I can’t, we can’t, because there are still fake idealogical warriors hell bent on keeping the war going, and they are still singing “Dixie” 158 years after the end of the American Civil War.

If I were a song writer, I would like to write an anti-Dixie song. Yet I don’t have to, because Union troops already did. Look it up.

Away down South in the land of traitors
Rattlesnakes and alligators…
… Where cotton’s king and men are chattels,
Union boys will win the battles…
Each Dixie boy must understand
that he must mind his Uncle Sam…”

Levon Helm also wrote one that became a hit for The Band.

Unlike my father before me, who I will never understand
Unlike the others below me, who took a rebel stand
Depraved and powered to enslave
I think it’s time we laid hate in its grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
That monument won’t stand, no matter how much concrete

The fair and balanced mainstream news media can’t resist covering this fight, day after day after the live long day. I’m done.

Can we please just tell it like it is and be done with this constant doublespeak flooding the public airwaves, driving us back down into Dixie like ocean stressed whales beaching themselves on the rocks and giving up?

Politico coverage on the fight over the debt ceiling

Let’s be clear. The so-called Freedom Caucus of House Republicans — who are still denying that President Joe Biden won the presidential election of 2020, who refused to vote to certify the electoral college votes on Jan. 6 after the insurrection was put down — is a terrible misnomer.

Let’s call it what it is. The Dixie Caucus. Still trying to refight the Civil War.

Let me be brutally honest and tell you what is about to happen. Nobody else is doing it, not even The New York Times or Washington Post and certainly not the talking heads on cable TeeVee.

Child molester Matt Gaetz of the Florida Panhandle, a.k.a. the Redneck Riviera, along with his cohorts Marjorie Traitor Green of Northwest Georgia, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and the other MAGA Republicans are so determined to prevent Democrat Joe Biden from succeeding to save the United States economy and the global environment that for political purposes, they will mount a challenge to raising the debt ceiling to the point of shutting down the government just in time for the next hottest summer on record.

They want to “conquer the peace for Dixie,” as the song declares.

We say “fuck that.” You can quote me on that.

This will crash the nation’s economy and lede to a recession if not a depression. In spite of all the numbers showing this overheated economy doing pretty well in terms of generating jobs, so well that inflation is over six percent, there is a key economic indicator commentators appear to be ignoring.

If you look back at all the recessions of the past hundred years, they were all preceded by a precipitous drop in advertising spending and revenue. If you look back at the Bush Great Recession, which was not declared until 2008 even though it started in 2007 and lasted through 2009, advertising in newspapers had already dropped significantly.

My friends in Alabama may remember that in 2004, the Newhouse newspaper chain was so confident of 20 years of growth in advertising that they built brand new buildings in Birmingham and Mobile. By 2007, both of those buildings were shuttered because the company could not even afford to pay the debt service to the banks which financed the construction.

It was recently announced that they would no longer even bother to print the newspapers in Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville. There was not even enough advertising revenue coming in to print The Birmingham News in my home town since circulation had dropped to 30,000.

Of course there were other factors at work back in 2004-2007, including the drop in reading in print and the rise in reading on the web, and the blogging revolution. I was there. I saw that trend coming and helped to lede it.

The Locust Fork News-Journal

See what’s happening now with social media companies that took over the advertising sales business starting in 2009. Google fired 12,000 employees in January. Facebook’s parent company Meta got rid of 11,000 hacker/programmers next, 13 percent of its work force.

Already the banks are beginning to quake, significantly the Silicon Valley Bank with billions in assets that was known for loans to tech startups.

“One of the most prominent lenders in the world of technology start-ups, struggling under the weight of ill-fated decisions and panicked customers, collapsed on Friday, forcing the federal government to step in,” The New York Times reported this week.

“The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said on Friday that it would take over Silicon Valley Bank, a 40-year-old institution based in Santa Clara, Calif. The bank’s failure is the second-largest in U.S. history, and the largest since the financial crisis of 2008. The move put nearly $175 billion in customer deposits under the regulator’s control … the swift downfall of the nation’s 16th largest bank evoked memories of the global financial panic of a decade and a half ago …

“Silicon Valley Bank’s failure came two days after its emergency moves to handle withdrawal requests and a precipitous decline in the value of its investment holdings shocked Wall Street and depositors, sending its stock careening (downward). The bank, which had $209 billion in assets at the end of 2022, had been working with financial advisers until Friday morning to find a buyer, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said.”

This does not bode well.

So what is the House of Representatives, in control of the federal government purse strings, doing to help shore up the economy?

Attacking necessary government spending on Medicare and Social Security while claiming they are not going after Medicare and Social Security, which they know will get reported in their favor on the Faux News network, Fox.

It’s been underwhelming to see the lies at Fox come out in the Fox-Dominion lawsuit, since we’ve known they lie for the past 20 years and reported on it thousands of times before. Forgive me for not getting all excited about these revelations and sharing all the cable TeeVee news links on Facebook and Twitter.

I can’t help but “look away.”

Look Away From Dixieland

Look away, look away
Look away from Dixieland
I do not miss the land of cotton
I do not miss that flag of division and hate

Tear down those Confederate monuments
Tear them all down one by one
Let us celebrate instead the Underground Railroad
And toast the courage of Harriet Tubman
And remember the bus seat of Rosa Parks

Look away, look away
Look away from Dixieland
I do not miss the land of cotton
I do not miss that flag of division and hate

Lock up those traitors of Jan. 6
Who attacked our Capitol with violence and hate
Lock up their leaders too
Especially those who incited their insurrection
And let Donald Trump burn in hell to boot

Look away, look away
Look away from Dixieland
I do not miss the land of cotton
I do not miss that flag of division and hate
— Glynn Wilson, Sunday, March 12, 2023

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