Southern GOP Officials Put People In Danger By Playing Politics

The virus is once again raging across the country. We could have had it under control by now, but too many Republican politicians (especially in the South) have chosen to play politics over mask mandates and vaccinations. They seem to consider public health officials and medical workers to be the enemies, rather than the virus.

The following is part of an op-ed by Margaret Renki in The New York Times: 

In case you’re wondering how things are going here in the Delta Rising region of the United States, I regret to report that things are going badly. Very, very badly.

Our intensive care units are full. Our children are getting sick in record numbers. Nevertheless, a small subset of unmasked, unvaccinated humanity has taken to yelling during school board meetings, and the most extreme protesters have issued threats against nurses and physicians who dared to speak publicly on behalf of such reasonable pandemic mitigation measures as masks and vaccines.

It’s so bad that the Tennessee Medical Association had to issue a statement in support of the exhausted heroes who for the past 18 months have been risking their own lives to care for strangers. “The enemy is the virus, not health care workers,” the statement read.

This is what some of us have become here in the American South: people who need to be reminded that our doctors are not our enemies.

Things have gotten this terrible for one reason: Our elected leaders keep making an already bad situation much worse. Consider Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee. When a handful of school districts here began to issue mask mandates to protect children too young to be vaccinated — as advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — he issued an executive order allowing disgruntled parents to opt out, effectively rendering all mask mandates unenforceable. . . .

Children, like adults, wear masks in part for their own protection and in part to protect others. Mask mandates protect children only when masking is universal. This is not a hard concept to understand.

We cannot blame ignorance for Mr. Lee’s executive order. It is nothing short of perfidy to place a higher priority on humoring the kind of people who threaten doctors and nurses than on protecting the health and safety of schoolchildren and their families. . . .

It’s worth pointing out that this is a partisan position, not a regional one. In the three Southern states headed up by Democratic governors — Kentucky, Louisiana and Virginia — school mask mandates are firmly in place. But as a Republican, Mr. Lee is not remotely alone. In fact, in banning school mask mandates he was essentially copying Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who issued a similar executive order more than two weeks before Mr. Lee. The ban issued by Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott, came a day before Mr. DeSantis’s.

Fortunately, many citizens in these states and others in the region are determined to keep themselves and their children safe, even if their leaders keep undermining those efforts at every turn. . . .

That message of civil disobedience seems to be resonating across the South.

Last week, the school board of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Florida’s largest school district, and school districts in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa and Palm Beach County, voted to approve mask mandates in open defiance of Mr. DeSantis’s ban. And they did so despite the threat of penalties leveled by the Florida state board of education against board members and superintendents in Broward and Alachua Counties, which had already established mask mandates.

In South Carolina, which passed a ban on mask mandates as part of its budget, a bipartisan group of state legislators has called for a special session to reconsider the ban. The city of Columbia has passed a mask mandate in elementary and middle schools, and fire marshals are in place to enforce it.

School districts across Texas — in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio — are equally defiant. Arkansas’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, now regrets the ban he signed into law in the spring, and he is defying his base in attempting to overturn or modify the ban.

Look at a map of the worst Covid hot spots around the country, and you will see that the region getting most pummeled by this virus is, not coincidentally, the same one that is governed primarily by Republicans. Those supermajorities are why there has always been plenty of perfidy to go around down here, but this time the Republicans in charge have gone too far. People have finally stopped waiting for their leaders to lead and are taking matters into their own hands.

Our lives and our children’s lives are on the line.

The "Solid" South Is Changing

For the past few decades, pundits have talked about the "Solid South". Political wisdom has said the South is solidly Republican, evangelical, and socially conservative. But the South is changing, and it's becoming more like the rest of the country.

This is verified by a recent NBC News / SurveyMonkey Poll. Between March 12th and March 25th, 15,238 people were surveyed in the nation as a whole, and 4,132 people were questioned in 11 Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). The margin of error for the nation is 1.1 points, and for the South is 2.4 points.

Note that the opinions of people across the South have become much closer to the views of other Americans -- both politically and socially.

8 Charts From A Poll Showing Southern Views On Race

I'm just going to post this without comment. It is a Winthrop University Poll done between October 22nd and November 5th of 830 residents of  11 Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). The margin of error for the poll is 3.4 points.

Yes - Honoring A Heritage Of Hate Makes You A Racist

The photo at left is of a statue honoring Confederate soldiers in the city I grew up in -- Vernon, Texas. I never understood why that statue was there -- of a soldier who fought against the United States and for the institution of slavery. But it is there, and probably will be for a long time to come (the county voted 77.1% Republican in the last election).

This is not an anomaly in Texas or the rest of the Confederate states. There are more than 1,500 statues similar to it dotted throughout these states.

Finally, there is a movement to remove the statues, and some cities (like New Orleans) have already done it. But that movement infuriates others. They claim these statues just honor their heritage, and should remain standing.

Heritage? Just what kind of heritage is it honoring? Every one of the Confederate soldiers, from the lowest private to the generals, fought against the United States of America and killed American soldiers trying to defend the Union. And they did that to make sure the rich planters in their state could continue the institution of slavery. They, and their officials, were convinced that White people were superior to Black people.

It is not uncommon to hear those who defend the statues (and the flying of a rebel flag) say they are not racists, but just want to honor their heritage. They don't seem to understand that racism is not determined by what is claimed, but by the actions of those making the claim. And if you defend and honor a heritage like this, then you are a racist (whether you want to admit it or not).

You may be a closet racist -- one who would not march with the KKK, the white supremacists, and the nazis, or openly display your feelings. But if you honor and defend the Confederacy, your actions in doing so do make you a racist. You simply cannot defend and honor those who fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy, and not be a racist.

The statues should be removed. Put them in a museum, so we can always remember this shameful chapter of our history and never repeat it -- but they don't belong in the public square. They are just reminders that we have not yet rid ourselves of the disease of racism. They are symbols of hate.

Southern "Super Tuesday" States Solidly Behind Clinton

Tomorrow, the Super Tuesday states will vote for their presidential choice. And just like in South Carolina, the Southern states voting tomorrow are solidly behind Hillary Clinton's candidacy for the Democratic nomination. She has a 26 point lead in Tennessee, a 20 point lead in Virginia, a 28-34 point lead in Georgia, and a 21-24 point lead in Texas. That's what the two latest polls of those states shows.

The NBC News / Wall Street Journal / Marist Poll:

Texas (Feb 18-23) 381 likely voters (5.0 point moe)

Georgia (Feb 18-23) 461 likely voters (4.6 point moe)

Tennessee (Feb 22-25) 405 likely voters (4.9 point moe)

The CBS News / YouGov Battleground Poll:

Texas (Feb 22-26) 750 likely voters

Georgia (Feb 22-26) 492 likely voters

Virginia (Feb 22-26) 471 likely voters

Is The South Dragging The United States Down ?

(This image of "The South" is from Wikipedia.)

I was born and raised, and still live in the "South" -- in Texas, a very red state where beliefs and voting habits mirror the other Southern Staes. But I think this is a valid question -- Is the South dragons America down, and keeping it from fulfilling the American Dream? I certainly think a case can be made for that, as the Republican-dominated South seems to be against any progress toward equality or other human rights. Here is how Michael Lind answers the question in an article for Politico:

Every year the Fourth of July is marked by ringing affirmations of American exceptionalism. We are a special nation, uniquely founded on high ideals like freedom and equality. In practice, however, much of what sets the United States apart from other countries today is actually Southern exceptionalism. The United States would be much less exceptional in general, and in particular more like other English-speaking democracies such as Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were it not for the effects on U.S. politics and culture of the American South.

I don’t mean this in a good way. A lot of the traits that make the United States exceptional these days are undesirable, like higher violence and less social mobility. Many of these differences can be attributed largely to the South.

All English-speaking democracies share certain characteristics in common. Compared to continental European and East Asian democracies, the Anglophone nations tend to be more market-oriented and less statist, with somewhat lower levels of social spending and weaker bureaucracies. We might even speak of “Anglosphere exceptionalism.”

But even by the standards of the English-speaking world, the U.S. appears as an extreme outlier, in areas ranging from religiosity to violence to anti-government attitudes. As we learned after the slaughter last month in Charleston, S.C., some deluded Southerners still pine for secession from the Union. Yet no doubt there are also more than a few liberal Northerners who would be happy to see them go.

Minus the South, the rest of the U.S. probably would be more like Canada or Australia or Britain or New Zealand—more secular, more socially liberal, more moderate in the tone of its politics and somewhat more generous in social policy. And it would not be as centralized as France or as social democratic as Sweden.

As a fifth-generation Texan, and a descendant of Southerners back to the 1600s, I don’t want to encourage lurid stereotypes of a monolithic South. The states of the former Confederacy include ethnic minorities like Louisiana Cajuns and Texas Germans, along with African Americans. And the dominant conservatives in the South have always been challenged from within the ranks of the white community by populists, liberals and radicals.

But the South really is different from the rest of the country. Here are some examples of how the South skews American statistics.

Today there is more inter-generational social mobility in Europe than in the United States, contrary to the American myth that the United States is still the world’s No. 1 land of opportunity. The Economic Mobility Project of Pew Charitable Trusts has shown that children are far less likely to rise above the socio-economic levels of their parents in the U.S. than are those in Britain, Canada and Australia, as well as Germany, France and the Nordic nations. The American South, with the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility in the U.S., clearly skews the national statistics, creating an embarrassing and depressing version of American exceptionalism.

Economic inequality? Apart from California and New York, where statistics reflect the wealth of Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, the South is the region with the greatest income inequality. Southern exceptionalism has helped to ensure that the American Dream is more likely to be realized in the Old World than in the New.

The mythology of American exceptionalism holds that ever since 1776 the United States has led the rest of the world in expanding individual liberty and the growth of the middle class. This makes for inspiring Fourth of July rhetoric, but it has never been true. In reality, the United States has frequently lagged behind Britain and her other offspring in these areas. Britain peacefully abolished slavery within its empire in the 1830s; thanks to Southern opposition, the U.S. did so only as the result of the catastrophic Civil War. And thanks to mid-century Southern members of Congress, welfare-state policies from home ownership to Social Security were designed to reinforce segregation or exclude the disproportionately-Southern black and white poor. Not until the 1960s, with the help of federal military intervention in Southern states, was the right of African-Americans to vote secured. And today white Southern Republicans are at the forefront of efforts to roll back the voting rights revolution by making voter registration more difficult.

Ben Carson Wins Southern Conservative Straw Poll

This last weekend about 1,500 Southern conservatives met in Oklahoma City for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. They heard from numerous GOP presidential hopefuls -- and about two-thirds of them voted for their favorite in the SRLC's Straw Poll.

Ben Carson was the winner in that straw poll, garnering over a quarter of the vote in a 16-person field. Carson got 25.4% of the vote, while Scott Walker finished second with 20.5% and Ted Cruz was third with 16.6%. Everyone else (including supposed front-runners like Bush, Rubio, and Huckabee) finished far behind the top three.

This does not mean Carson (or the other of the top three) will get the nomination. But it does show us that Southern Republicans are not happy with establishment candidates. They want an extremist, and the more extreme the better.

Some of you may be surprised that a black man would win a Southern straw poll. You should't be. Southern racists didn't hate all Blacks -- only the ones who wanted to be equal with Whites. They were perfectly happy with "Uncle Tom's" (Blacks who supported and worked for the status quo -- White superiority).

And Ben Carson is the king of the Uncle Tom's. Carson hates President Obama, and blames him for the racial problems in the U.S. -- and actually said Blacks were happy with their place in this country until President Obama stirred them up. He would be a disaster as president.

Should Democrats Just Write-Off The South ?

(This image is from the website mapssite.blogspot.com.)

It is no secret that the Democratic Party did very poorly in the South in the last election. In fact, it did so poorly that I have been seeing rumblings from some pundits that the Democrats should just forget the South, and put all their money and efforts into other parts of the country. I think that is a crazy idea, and would be a big mistake.

You can never expect to carry any region if you don't ask the people of that region for their votes. And the South is changing. All you have to do is look at the demographics of the South provided by the Census Bureau. The question is no longer whether the South can ever go Democratic, but how long is it going to take before that happens. It probably won't happen by 2016, but it won't be too far down the road (as the percentage of the White population dwindles, and the percentage of minorities continues to grow -- especially Hispanics and Blacks).

The pundits may not realize this, but the Republicans certainly do. That's why they have gerrymandered the hell out of the South, and why they are trying to suppress minority votes with Voter ID laws. They are trying to hang on as long as possible, because they know the demographics of the region are working against them. If anything, the Democrats should put more effort (and money) into cultivating Southern votes (to counter the GOP efforts and make that change happen a little bit sooner).

Chris Kromm at the website of The Institute for Southern Studies agrees that ignoring or abandoning the South is not a viable option. In fact, he considers the South to be a great opportunity for Democrats. His entire article is well worth reading, but below I present his four reasons to keep engaging the South (along with the four maps he provides to prove his point):

1. The South is too big to ignore.

2. The South isn't the Democrats' biggest problem.

3. The South is home to the Black Belt.

4. Demographics in the South are rapidly changing.

Southern Republicans Want More Say In Picking A Nominee

Southern Republicans have not always been too happy with the candidates chosen by their party. Mitt Romney is a prime example. Romney was too "moderate" for Southern tastes, but by the time a lot of Southern States held their primary he already had a significant lead over more extremist candidates. Now some Southern Republicans are trying to change that.

They want to give the South a bigger voice in choosing the party's nominee in 2016. They can't move their state's primary up to challenge the caucus in Iowa or the primary in New Hampshire, because they would be punished severely by the national party if they tried that -- so they've come up with a different plan. They want to Southern States to band together and hold an early primary, giving the South a lot more clout early in the nominating process.

The two most populous states in the South, Texas and Florida, have already put their 2016 primaries on March 1st (the earliest date allowed by the national party). Now five other Southern States (Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas) are trying to move their primaries to that same date. The combination of these seven states would have significant clout, and would give teabaggers more say in who the nominee should be.

This would give more of an advantage to extremist right-wingers early in the process (Cruz, Paul, Huckabee, Santorum, Carson, etc.), and would tend to work against more moderate right-wingers (Portman, Bush, Christie, Walker, etc.). And it would increase the liklihood that the Republican Party would nominate an extremist candidate -- a candidate that would scare the hell out of most Americans.

I hope they get it done, because it would just intensify the internal war going on in the Republican Party -- and could seriously damage what little hope they have of retaking the White House in 2016.

NOTE -- This would also mean the Democrats in those states would be voting on March 1st, but that wouldn't matter much. Southern Democrats are much more in tune with their national party (and Democrats in other states).

The "Red State" South Has Half Of All Uninsured Americans

This is a rather staggering statistic -- that nearly half of all Americans without health insurance live in one region of the country (the South). In September of 2013, before Obamacare was fully implemented, the South had 41.5% of uninsured Americans, but in June of 2014 that has risen to 48.9%.

While enough states in the three other regions of the country covered many of their poorer residents by expanding Medicaid, the solidly red states of the South did not -- and when you combine that with the fact that the South has a higher percentage of people living in poverty (or working for a very low wage), it means the South now has millions of people living without health insurance (or any chance of getting it anytime soon).

This should not surprise us. The Republican officials in the South, like the national GOP officials, run their GOP-controlled governments for the benefit of the rich and the corporations. They don't care about the poor (or even the middle class). They oppose the minimum wage (and refuse to raise it), believing employers should be able to pay as little as possible to workers (even if that is a poverty wage). They also believe health care is a product to be sold to those who can afford it, instead of a right of all citizens.

This prompts a question -- why do the people of the South (many of whom are poorly paid or in poverty, and have no health insurance) continue to elect Republicans to political office? Why do they keep voting against their own economic and health interests? There are two facets to the answer -- race and religion.

Regardless of what you may have been told (or just want to believe), there are still a lot of racists in the South. They abandoned the Democratic Party when President Johnson got the civil rights laws passed in the 1960s -- and the Republican Party welcomed them with open arms. And since that time the Republican Party in the South has championed policies that are anti-immigrant and anti-minority, giving those racist voters (who have morphed into the teabaggers) the illusion that a white-dominated America is still a possibility.

But the racists alone cannot control the Republican Party. They need the help of the religious fundamentalists, who control religion in the South. These fundamentalists are upset that their religious views are not elevated above those of other Americans. And the Republican Party has been effective in convincing them that they are the party of christianity, and fooled them into believing they can re-introduce teacher or administrator-led school prayers and force the teaching of creationism as science.

The teabaggers and the evangelicals together dream of replacing out democracy with a white fundamentalist christian theocracy -- and the Republican Party has convinced them that they can make that happen. The crazy part is that they could elect Republicans from now until doomsday, and that still would not happen. The First Amendment protects all religions (and those without religion) equally, and would prevent the establishment of any religion above all others. And the Fourteenth Amendment, along with the demographic population changes happening in the U.S., insures that the future of this country will be a multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracy -- and dominance by whites (even where it still exists) is going to be eliminated.

In other words, a majority in the South votes against its own economic and health interests for a pipe-dream -- an illusion kept alive by Republican propaganda. There is hope for the South though. Just like in other parts of this nation, each new generation in the South is less racist and less religious than the one that preceded it -- and someday the racism and religious bigotry that currently triumphs, will no longer make Southerners vote against their own best interests.

Uninsured

This map (from The Christian Science Monitor) shows the percentage of people without health insurance in each of the four parts of the country. Note that the part with the highest uninsured rate is the South -- the area mostly controlled by Republican governments (and refusing to expand Medicaid). Note also that the reddest state is Texas -- meaning it has the highest percentage of uninsured citizens (and is also controlled by a Republican-dominated government). Republicans don't seem to care if poor and working class citizens must go without health insurance. After all, their rich benefactors have health insurance, and that's all that matters to them.

Apology Needed

I was born and raised in a state that abandoned the Union for a treasonous attempt to form a different nation, and I wouldn't mind hearing an apology either. And I'm sick of hearing about the "war of northern aggression", or that the war was over "state's rights". The South left the Union because they wanted to justify and continue the institution of slavery. Any attempt to deny that is just a lie.

Choice - It's The South Vs. Rest Of The U.S.

I found this information from the Pew Research Center to be very interesting. They combined the results from their own recent survey with surveys from others, and verify that Americans still support a woman's right to control her own body (top chart). But the most interesting part was the regional divide on the issue.

They divided the country into eight geographical regions (bottom chart), and six of those regions clearly support a woman's right to choose. One region, the Midwest, is split right down the middle on the issue -- with 47% on each side. There is only one region that opposes choice significantly -- the South-Central region (Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas). These states have a 12 point margin opposing choice.

I guess this shouldn't surprise anyone. These are also the states with the largest number of people without a high school education, and the largest number of poor people. They do a bad job of taking care of their own, but still want to tell the rest of America what it should be doing. And of course, they are all controlled by Republicans.

It Has Always Been A Racist Word

Let me start this post by saying that I have been a fan of Paula Deen. I think she is one of the best cooks using the Southern style of cooking (which I love). So I was extremely disappointed to learn that she has used the word "nigger" in the past, and at that time at least, did not consider it to be wrong to do that. I do believe people can change, and I sincerely hope that Deen has changed -- because it is obvious to me that she needed to change.

But there is something else that this story has brought out -- and it's something that is bothering me a lot. That is the idea being put forth by some that using that word back before the civil rights laws were passed was not a racist act, but a common occurrence. And that even non-racists used the word. That is an outrageous falsehood.

I am about four months older than Paula Deen, and I was born and raised in Texas (where racism was just as prevalent as it was in the Deep South). So I think I can speak to what things were like when she was younger. Was the word commonly used by many? Yes, it was. But we all knew that those who used it were racists (people who believed whites were better than blacks, and deserved more rights). But it was not used by everyone, and it certainly was not used by non-racists.

I cannot speak to the time before my lifetime, but I can say that in the 1950s everyone in Texas (and the South) knew that the word "nigger" was a racist term -- and those who did not think racism was acceptable, did not use that word. I was one of the lucky ones, because I was not taught by my parents to hate anyone because of their race, color, or ethnicity -- and I never heard my parents use that word (and my brothers and I knew it was not acceptable for us to say it either).

Southerners are not any stupider than others. They knew that by using that word, a person was making a racist statement. The non-racists (there have always been some good people in Texas and the South) knew it, and the racists knew it. The word was heard a lot among whites because the racists were in control of Texas and Southern society at that time -- but everyone understood it was a racist word, and it was not acceptable to use that word among non-racists.

I sincerely hope that Paula Deen has changed, because if she used that word in the past (as she has admitted she did) then she was a racist. People can change, and I have known many who have (and are ashamed of their past) -- and I have known many who have not changed. Racism is alive and well, but thankfully, it is no longer accepted by the majority in Texas and the South as it once was -- and hopefully, that majority who don't accept it will continue to grow larger as time passes.

But make no mistake -- in my lifetime (and Paula's), the word "nigger" has always been universally recognized as a racist word (even in Texas and the South). And anyone who used it marked themselves as a racist (to both racists and non-racists).

Welcome To The Plantation

I found this extremely interesting article at Truthout. It was written by Sara Robinson for AlterNet. She theorizes that Northern elites and Southern elites have a different idea of what the word "liberty" means -- and the essence of the Civil War was over the difference in those views. She says we are still fighting that war, and the Southern elites are now winning. And they are turning this country into a giant plantation -- peopled by a few elite owners and a lot of economic slaves. I think she has a point, and I urge you to read the whole article. Just to what your appetite, I post some of it here:

It's been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most Americans don't know is that they're also quite different from each other, and that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast difference in the kind of country we are. . .


 In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).


Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.


In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.


When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.


Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history. . .

Freedom Riders Were True Heroes

Although we are still having to battle racism in this country and probably will have to for many years to come, there has been a lot of change in this country. It was only 50 years ago that many brave African-Americans and Whites (about 450 of them nearly equally divided) put their lives on the line to challenge the unconstitutional Jim Crow laws in the South.

The first buses left Washington (D.C.) on May 4, 1961 with 13 riders (7 African-American and 6 White). Others followed throughout the month of May. All of these brave Americans knew they were putting their lives on the line, but they were determined to show how the South was still flaunting the law by continuing to enforce segregation in interstate transportation (which had been outlawed by the Supreme Court several years earlier).

They were met by violence throughout the South. Buses were burned, and the riders were beaten with chains, bats and metal pipes, attacked by police dogs, and arrested -- but they kept coming. Today they are admired for the bravery they displayed and are considered heroes. Their actions spurred many others to join the civil rights movement and truly changed this country.

However, they were not necessarily viewed as heroes at the time. Even many civil rights supporters believed they were pushing to hard and trying to change things too fast. President Kennedy, remembered now for his support of civil rights, even called them "unpatriotic" for bringing bad publicity to the nation worldwide during a time of Cold War.

But these wonderful people would not listen. They knew wrong when they saw it and were determined to correct it -- and they did. They should serve as an example to us today. You do not have to wait until you are in the majority to fight evil. In fact, your bravery can help to create that majority.

So today I honor the memory of all the freedom riders. They were (and still are) true American heroes.

Whoopi Has Low Opinion Of Southerners

Whoopi Goldberg debuted as a new host on the view this week, and instantly put her foot in her mouth. It seems that she doesn't have a very high opinion of southerners. For some reason, she felt like she needed to defend Michael Vick, so she trashed an entire part of our country in her effort to do that.

It seems that Michael shouldn't be held responsible for fighting, torturing and killing dogs, because according to Whoopi, dog-fighting isn't all that unusual in the South "where he comes from". She said, "It's like cockfighting in Puerto Rico. There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country."

She was asked about the torturing and killing of the dogs, and replied that dogs are sport for many people. My God, what the hell is she thinking? I guess they're civilized up North, but us Southerners just can't help loving to torture and kill dogs!

Let me make this very clear to Whoopi. You can't excuse Vick's vicious crimes because he grew up in the South. It is just as much a crime to fight, torture and kill dogs in the South, as it is anywhere else in this country. Millions of people grow up and spend their entire lives in the South, without ever having the urge to commit vicious and heinous acts against animals.

Vick knew what he was doing was criminal and just plain wrong, and he did it anyway. He deserves whatever punishment he receives, and probably more.

As for Whoopi, I'm very disappointed. I used to be a fan, until I saw what a low opinion she had of us Southerners.