Tag: Tea Party idiots

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters To The Editor

Forrest Park:

Never Forget

In your recap of the most significant Memphis news stories of the year 2013, please don’t forget this: In an action that sparked the outrage of thousands of area citizens, the Memphis City Council attempted to illegally rename three of the city’s historic parks: Forrest Park, Confederate Park, and Jefferson Davis Park. This action prompted hundreds of letters and emails to the city, public meetings and rallies, and dozens of media interviews and stories in response to the city’s attempt to erase Memphis history. It has also drawn attention both nationally and internationally and has cost the city some of the convention business of historic groups and Civil War tourists.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Citizens to Save Our Parks are in an ongoing lawsuit with the city and city council to nullify the city’s illegal renaming actions.

And don’t forget a second related incident: the theft of the approved Forrest Park stone marker by the city of Memphis.

Lee Millar

Memphis

Absence Makes the Heart …

“Double Issue,” eh? I know you good folks in Flyer-land deserve a vacation now and then, and I’m glad y’all had a nice break for the holidays. But you should know I spent two days looking for my weekly Flyer fix last week, before I figured out there wasn’t a new issue coming out for another week. That’s just cruel. I could hardly eat my Huey Burger.

Don Crowdis

Memphis

Laughing

Well, I’ve had my laugh for the day. I just heard another clueless Tea Partier blaming Obama for the Bush recession. How quickly these folks rewrite history! George W. Bush gave away the greatest surplus our country ever had (accrued under Bill Clinton) to his rich buddies, spent trillions on a war based on lies, ran up the highest deficit our country ever had, then slithered away to much-deserved oblivion and left the whole mess to Obama, who has reduced the deficit every year he has been in office.

To blame Obama for the jobs lost due to the Bush fiascoes is about as sensible as blaming Bill Clinton for the 1929 depression.

Jim Brasfield

Memphis

Brave

Why is having a sports team named Braves, Indians, or Redskins considered offensive and demeaning? Do we need to be reminded about what our forefathers did to these people? If I were a Native American, I would not want the names changed. I would want them kept as a reminder of the debt we owe them and the pride and honor they have as the only true American people. The rest of us came along later and took what we wanted, because we could. Don’t change the team names. That will just make it easier to forget Native Americans.

Randy Liscomb


Memphis 

Meat-Free for 2014?

When making your New Year’s resolutions, consider adopting a healthy, eco-friendly, compassionate meat-free diet.

According to Harris Interactive, 47 percent of American consumers are reducing their consumption of animal products. The USDA projects this year’s per capita chicken and beef consumption to drop by 8 percent and 17 percent, respectively, from their 2006 peaks. Similar dramatic drops are projected for pigs and turkeys. Milk consumption has fallen by a whopping 40 percent since 1970.

A number of celebrities, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Jay Z, and Beyoncé are becoming vegans. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams are funding plant-based replacements for meat and eggs.

Fast-food chains like Subway and Chipotle are responding to the growing demand by rolling out vegan options. The Baltimore, Los Angeles, and San Diego school districts have adopted Meatless Mondays.

How about dropping animals from the menu for your New Year’s resolution? Entering “Meatout Mondays” in a search engine brings tons of useful recipes and transition tips.

Morris Furman


Memphis

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Since the official publication date of this issue of the Flyer is October 31st — Halloween — I guess I should write about something spooky, like the idolatry of Ted Cruz going on down in Texas right now. Those Texans are welcoming him home from Washington, D.C., as some kind of hero, with big parties and rallies and parades. But I have arthritis in my right hand, and I don’t want to spend energy giving him any ink whatsoever, because I think he is the most dangerous man in the United States, and those who idolize him are just as spooky, if not worse. I think the best thing to do is ignore them, like a scab you really want to pick but know it’s only going to make it worse. So, nothing more about Ted and all those lemmings.

Even spookier is that — in some ways because of Ted — Sarah Palin is reemerging as a spokesperson for the Tea Party again. (I thought she and her family built a fort in Arizona or somewhere and were waiting for the end times with their guns and canned potted meat.) She recently wrote on her Facebook page: “We’re going to shake things up in 2014. Rest well tonight, for soon we must focus on important House and Senate races. Let’s start with Kentucky — which happens to be awfully close to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi — from sea to shining sea we will not give up. We’ve only just begun to fight.”

Is she kidding? “Rest well tonight”? She sounds like the mother in The Bad Seed, just after she gave her evil daughter a lethal dose of sleeping pills. If you’ve never seen that movie, rent it for Halloween. It is well worth it. Not as scary as Ted and Sarah but much more interesting, and it won’t make you vomit.

And why again with the geographical references? Why must she always talk about places that are close to each other? Alaska-Russia? Kentucky-Mississippi? She needs new handlers. And if she goes out on Halloween, she should just go as herself and hit a few gay bars (she and Ted can go Cruzin’), vegetarian restaurants, and Mensa meetings. She would scare the crap out of everyone. And she better stay away from Mississippi. I love Mississippi, and I won’t have her darkening the door of that state, especially Clarksdale, one of the greatest cities on earth, especially now that former Mississippi gubernatorial candidate and Morgan Freeman Ground Zero Blues Club partner Bill Luckett is Clarksdale’s mayor. On second thought, let her go down there and try to show her ass and see what happens to her. I would love to see Mayor Luckett’s reaction to her visit.

And even spookier than her new role of endorsing Tea Party candidates to defeat regular Republicans is the fact that part of her 2013 coming-out road trip is to promote her new Christmas-themed book, Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, which comes out next month. Can you dare to imagine how sickening that’s going to be? I am shuddering as I write.

She recently said about the book, “This will be a fun, festive, thought-provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas.” While I do agree with her that Christmas has been over-commercialized, do any of you see anything remotely resembling “fun” and “festive” about that statement? I think in the book she recounts stories about her family Christmases past while growing up wherever she was bred. Shiver.

If there are two things in this world that give me tormenting rectal itch, they are Sarah Palin and Christmas. Don’t care for either one.

I don’t really like Halloween either, save for occasionally wrapping ice cubes in aluminum foil and dropping them in the little over-sugared kids’ baskets. And don’t get me started on adults who find it necessary to dress up for the night. Have you ever noticed that the adults who dress up for Halloween are all knee-crawling drunk halfway through the night? Can’t they just go out and get hammered in their normal clothes? It’s embarrassing. And please don’t bring any children to my door tonight looking for a handout of food that is terrible for you. I also can’t stand candy of any kind. Basically, I am old and mean and deserve to be able to be so if I choose. I’ve lived through way too many holiday horrors to have to subject myself to more if I don’t have to. That said, I do love Thanksgiving, so I’m not all that bad.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Hoop City?

Those were two interesting stories about the University of Memphis Tiger basketball team and the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team (“Hoop City 2013: 20 Questions,” October 24th issue). Nice questions and some good answers. Now, I have one question: What qualifications does Memphis have to be called “Hoop City”? New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philly, and others pop up in my mind before Memphis does.

I love the teams here, but as a scorer/statistician (not a fan) I question that Memphis is Hoop City. I think it’s media hype and nothing more. Media hype in sports is frequent in Memphis from the print media to the sports talk-show people to television folks. I won’t go into details about why, but I hope that I am wrong when the Tigers and the Grizzlies bring home titles at the end of the season.

Jay Guinozzo


Memphis

Politics — as usual?

Regarding Liz Rincon’s article “A Wake-Up Call” in the October 17th Flyer and the buffoon Joe Brown’s diatribe at the Shelby County Democratic Party roast of Willie Herenton: Somehow, Brown and Rincon deserve each other.

First, and in all fairness, Brown did not say (as relayed by Rincon) that Obama had “failed to create a single job.” What Brown did say (according to the Flyer‘s own Jackson Baker) was that in six years, Obama had failed to produce a single jobs bill, which is true. The thin-skinned Rincon somehow imagined this to be an insult to the president, something clearly verboten among the true believers.

Nor did Brown say that girls should “keep their knees together.” What he did ask was why “black preachers are not telling girls to keep their knees together,” which was intended as a criticism of black clergy, not women.

Nor was Brown particularly critical of homosexuality, as Rincon perceived him to be. What Brown said was “we need to keep Big Brother out of the bedroom” and that he wished gays would remain “in the closet.” This was clearly Brown’s own personal belief, and, believe it or not, he has a constitutional right to express it —even if doing so conflicts with Rincon’s somewhat dogmatic and self-righteous views on the subject. Rincon should also note that black churches as a whole do not support gay marriage.

Most notably, Rincon completely failed to mention that Brown’s frank comments clearly “resonated” with a number of Democrats in the crowd.

The real issue here and the thing that really appears to have riled up Ms. Rincon is that someone in the morally challenged Democratic Party (albeit a dolt like Brown) had the audacity to question her somewhat tenuous, sactimonious, and ideologically rigid personal positions.

Finally, she puts the finishing touches on her own diatribe by issuing an ultimatum to Brown and other dangerous types who would stray from the tent of pseudo-inclusion and intolerant tolerance: Shut up, get back in line, and don’t question anything or “we’ll say goodbye” and exclude you from the great party of inclusion.

Erwin Williamson


Memphis

So, the party of “fiscal responsibility,” in thrall to a virulent absurdist fringe, has taken us to the brink of economic disaster, which, in the short run, cost us $24 billion, loss of credibility throughout the world, and induced international wonderment at how the greatest democracy on earth could be brought so low by such a small cabal of scheming anarchists! A simple answer would be that if you elect “fools” to high public office you should expect to suffer from the “errands” they undertake.

America, having endured this needless pain, will recover, though the long-term effects are yet to unfold. But those who bellow about “taking their country back” should realize that’s not going to happen. It ceased to exist at Appomattox in 1865.

Jay Sheffield

Memphis

Just how “fiscally responsible” is this: The Tea Party lunatics cost our country $24,000,000,000 in a temper tantrum trying to take health care away from 30,000,000 Americans. That $24,000,000,000 would have bought health care for every uninsured American for a decade. Instead, it was flushed down the toilet. It benefited no one. No foreign country helped. No wars paid for. No roads or bridges built. Just total waste never to be recovered.

I hope every voter in America will make “Twenty-four BILLION Wasted” a battle cry come November 2014. I also think legal action should be started immediately to sue the Republican Party for this money. It was ours, and they blew it on a terrorist attack against our country.

Jim Brasfield

Memphis