NEVER MIND WHERE THINGS HERE IN THE MINNWISSIPPI ARE CLOUDY TO THE POINT OF OVERCAST, WITH THE ODD PEEP OF SUNSHINE OR TWO, as I present this exugenesis of my own comments, but still, The Exaggerator needs to speak its mind.

After all, "don't read the headlines; read The Exaggerator: Smartness, with just a hint of pretension."

Or, as they'd say in Bloemfontein, "nie lees van hoofopskrifte; lees Die Oordryfte--smartness, met 'n wenk van pretension."

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THOSE WHO PUSH THAT PATHETIC-SOUNDING SINGSONG MEME OF "CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION! CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION!!" CERTAINLY GOT THEIR COMEUPPANCE with the Texas Supreme Court's ruling that child-welfare agencies must timely return to the so-called "Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" the 420-plus children removed from their Yearning for Zion compound nearly two month back, citing the incredibility of the rationale of "imminent harm" used by the State to justify removal thereof.

And will no doubt be dancing in the streets of Branson this weekend.

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MEANWHILE, THE "CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION!" CROWD, WHAT WITH THEIR ASSOCIATIONS TO THE RELIGIOPOLITICAL RIGHT, need to recognise where one of their own leaders--as in Tony Perkins of the so-called "Family Research Council"--has let slip his associations with the so-called "Phineas Priesthood," a loose-knit band of Archie Bunker/Alf Garnett types who would love to invoke the Biblical account of Phineas (see Numbers 25) as a defence to hate-crimes charges involving the old ultraviolence against real or suspected "homosexuals," "race-defilers" (interracial couples, Loving v. Virginia notwithstanding) and others deemed "undesirable" because of colour, race, beliefs or sexual orientation.

Several as have been convicted of hate crimes, in fact, have been using the "Phineas Priest" device of late as an ex post facto defence, particularly for the sake of appeals to avoid enhanced terms of penal servitude ... or, for that matter, as a criminal defence in forthcoming trials.

Next thing you know, the Elmer Gantry Institute for Advanced Religiopolitical Theology will want to be recommending the "Phineas Priest" defence vis-a-vis hate crimes which heretofore would have been excused as one with "protecting racial and familial honour, purity and integrity." As for the courts, don't expect them to buy into it; on the contrary, expect them to disallow the "Phineas Priest" defence to hate crimes.

(As reminder, Mein Innkeeper Friend is of the view that what many homophobes--especially such invoking the G-d, Country and Family defence and banner--see as homosexuality may actually be confused with transvestism, transsexualism and/or hermaphroditism. Has anybody considered this prospect?)

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A NEW PILL FOR "CHRISTIAN PATRIOT" HOMOPHOBES, GENERAL XENOPHOBIC FEELINGS AMONG THE ELEMENT NOTWITHSTANDING: A Turkish district court in Istanbul, Not Constantinople has ordered the country's only gay/lesbian rights group, Lambda Istanbul, dissolved on the grounds that its activities contravene Turkish laws on "violating morality" and "protection of the family."

Never mind where homosexuality is not specifically proscribed under Turkish law, nonetheless Human Rights Watch has gone on record with a recent report revealing blatant and wholesale dicrimmination against the epicene across Turkey.

Never mind, too, that Turkey's Constitution calls for its being a republic along Secular-Progressive models, nonetheless the militant Muslim element could easily be some of the worst ringleaders in said homophobic feelings.

Now how will the Religiopolitical Right respond to this news?

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THANKS TO HIGH JET FUEL PRICES AND A SOURING SOCIOECONOMIC SITUATION AS IS PARTLY THE BLAME OF HIS FRAUDULENCY'S GREAT WITHIN, British business-class international airline Silverjet has announced where it's suspended operations.

This notwithstanding the just-launched US-EU Open Skies Agreement.

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AND SPEAKING OF FUEL PRICES, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has announced where it had quietly been conducting enquiries into the clear and present likelihood of speculative price manipulation on the futures markets for crude oil, natural gas, propane and refined petroleum products since the start of the year.

As in speculative to the point where crude oil prices on the spot markets reached a record $135/bbl. just about a fortnight ago, translating into a 1,350% increase in the cost of a barrel of oil over the last decade.

The CFTC may want to consider among Likely Suspects the likes of His Fraudulency's Great Within, especially so the "inside of the inside," secretly and yet discreetly engaging in Hunt Brothers-stylee behaviours tending towards outright domination of crude-oil and refined products futures since well before the Unfortunate Events of 9/11, and hoping for a substantial cashin once His Fraudulency leaves office.

Unaware all the while of the likelihood for where the Great Within could be facing significant and measurable margin calls which they may be unable to meet, in turn translating into wholesale collapse of the markets in question, within measurable distance.

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AND YOU CAN PROBABLY START BLAMING THE NATIVISTS AND WORKFARE'S ZEALOTS AND TRUE BELIEVERS for the summer guest-worker scheme (as in having foreigners from Eastern Europe in particular on J2 visas employed in summer positions) being diluted to the point where Wisconsin Dells especially won't be seeing too many among the Russo-Slavic element working summers there.

In effect, forcing the shoobie trade to turn to workfare programmes to find what it could get for summer help among "chronic and habitually-dependent" welfare "basket cases" as but the first step towards weaning what Neoconservatives want to see as the first generation since the "failed and failing" Great Society to simply say No to State welfare and Yes to Industry, Self-Reliance, Personal Responsibility, Thrift based on Cash Economy and a Wholesome and Simple Home Life.

Likely to be further reinforced by expecting such summer help from among these "welfare basket cases" to consider private-sector retirement savings schemes instead of the "failed and failing" State system of Social Security; said private funds all the likely investing in dubious microcaps, "junk bonds" and Real Estate Investment Trusts unlikely to turn a profit by deliberate design tending to manipulation--all the while really little more than thinly-veiled "High-Yield Investment Programmes" (HYIP's) as are based offshore "for tax reasons," or so the line hath it.

And the connexions of K Street's biggest fans for denationalised State Social Security in all of this subplot downplayed, and deliberately.   

ON SEVERAL RECENT OCCASIONS, YOUR CORRESPONDENT HAS TAKEN TO USING COLUMNS BY MIAMI HERALD COLUMNIST LEONARD PITTS, JNR., to bring up some rather points which he has to offer when it comes to issues like race and its effect upon the public good.

This time, Mr. Pitts (himself of colour) has some worthwhile observations about the "how and why" of "poor white trash" being all the more vulnerable to the point of their exploitation being all the more pronounced as it is:

I keep thinking I should be mad at West Virginia.

Not because Barack Obama was recently beaten like a red-headed stepchild--to use my father's expression--in that state's primary. No, I'm thinking I should be upset about why he was beaten. According to exit polls, two out of every 10 voters said race was a major factor in how they cast their ballots.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show ran a clip of a white woman who explained her refusal to vote for Obama thusly: ''I guess because he is another race. I'm sort of scared of the other race 'cause we have so much conflict with 'em.'' She spoke in the vaguely shamefaced, what're-you-gonna-do? voice of someone who knows she should stick to her diet or stop smoking, but just can't help herself.

You'd think this would have me in a state of high dudgeon, fingers blazing the keyboard in righteous rebuke of attitudes so atavistic and wrong. But I can't. Oh, it's disappointing to see bigotry in Appalachia so vividly displayed. Yet I find it doesn't make me angry.

It just makes me sad.

I feel sorry for them. If that sounds patronizing, I apologize. That's not how it's meant.

It's just that, if the headline here is that Obama was rejected by whites on the basis of race, I submit that's not the whole truth. Pollsters say he was actually rejected on the basis of race by whites who lack college degrees and whose household income is less than $50,000 a year. In other words, he was rejected by the poor and the less educated.

Which is a desription that fits many in Appalachia--and also a vast swath of African America. So for me, the story here isn't simply the old, familiar tale of the nation's stark racial divide, but also another tale, just as old, less often remarked, of how the white poor and the black poor have long been kept at one another's throats as a means of keeping them from looking too closely or clearly at the ways both are maniuplated by the forces of money and power.

And here, let me tell you what I am not saying. I'm not saying all bigots are poor or all the poor are bigots. I'm not saying everyone in Appalachia is poor, or less educated, or atavistic about race.

But I am saying this: The white poor have been victims of a con job going back at least as far as the Civil War, when poor white men were used as cannon fodder for the right of rich white men--I repeat: rich white men--to keep slaves. They were told they fought for state's rights.

From then till now, the white poor have often been the front line of white supremacy. You think people with college degrees and six-figure salaries are out there marching around under pointy white hoods, burning crosses? Hardly.

My point is that race has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, nor any realistic expectation of having more.

But the one thing they did have--or so the con went--was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than. Someone to look down upon.

This, even though they did menial work under menial conditions, earned menial pay, sent their kids to menial schools, were subject to menial indignities, made do with menial health care and lived menial lives hemmed in by want, ignorance and hunger.

Exactly like those they had been taught they were better than. Exactly like those they had been taught to look down upon.

There are those in positions of political power who can and should be held to answer for the meanness and narrowness of poor people's lives. But they can't and won't so long as those who should be standing together to demand those answers are kept busy fighting one another over superficialities of color and culture.

Those are differences that too often obscure commonalities--of need, of hope and of cause. Over the years, many of us have figured that out.

In West Virginia, at least, two in 10 of us have not.

Is it any wonder, then, that working-class "poor white trash" are all the easier prey for the Producerist movement and its articles of faith, heavy as they are with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, nativism, racism and anti-Government sentiment targeting especially immigrants and welfare "basket cases"?

And haven't they heard about cooperativism as a tool towards their own empowerment out of the desperate quagmire they've been reduced to all this time, and the stereotypes that feed their so remaining?

SO MUCH FOR BOYCOTTING FRANCE IN THE NAME OF G-D, COUNTRY AND THE USE OF UR-RAHOWA TO MAINTAIN AN OUTDATED CONCEPT such as "the White Male Christian Power Structure," the unswerving defence of which Fox Prolefeed forever contends is necessary to that of "our antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity" as a nation--see for yourself what the French could be teaching us "morally superior" Americans, as in the new wheel-on-rail world speed record of 578 km/hr (358 mph) set by a TGV test bed just last summer:

(Come to think of it, perhaps it was time to start asking the Presidential candidates of the several qualified parties what their agenda would be towards transportation policy in general and Amtrak in particular.)

And speaking of Bill O'Reilly's "Boycott France" campaign, and the lies such are built on, consider this video:

No wonder I could just imagine The O'Reilly Factor being especially deserving of being "drowned out" by a lusty rendition of "La Marsellaise," the French National Hymn whose lyrics any French schoolchild can sing @ the drop of a hat....

MEMO TO ANYONE STILL HARD-WIRED IN THEIR ZEALOTRY AND TRUE BELIEF FOR THE TERRIBLE-TEMPERED MR. BANG OF INDECISION 2008, otherwise known as John McCain, the GOP's Presidential candidate-presumptive:

Once you see these videos (thanks to Brave New Films for the tip), will you likely reconsider your vote, or no?

As an aftertnought, consider these remarks from a related comment board from someone signing himself "Me Too:"

If anyone tells you that John McCain is a straight Talker- let them see this...
He can not follow and remember his own dialog. This is a concern- which side of the issue is he arguing now? The problem isn't that he sees nuanced angles in every debate and appears to not define his position, but that he literally contradicts himself- even when shown hard evidence of what he previously stated. The other problem is that he doesn't seem to know all the factors in the questions he answers. He should know the hard facts. That's his job as Senator.

FOX PROLEFEED APPEARS TO HAVE ADOPTED THE SAME TACTIC OF ITS BRITISH "RED TOP" COUSINS OF THE SUN AND NEWS OF THE WORLD in offerig big-big money to such willing to offer the biggest "whoppers" of "voter fraud" stories to further reinforce their desire to restrict electoral franchise solely to an "elect***entitled as of right" who can be easily manipulated into voting Straight Republican, and constantly.

Otherwise known as White Male Low Church Christian Freeholders.

RawStory.com broke the news last evening, with an update added subsequently:

Fox News has now set out to find the evidence of fraud that the Bush Department of Justice could not, whipping up their audience with the threat of non-citizens "getting a fake ID, a driver's license, or a social security card and voting in this year's election."

"If you think there's voter fraud where you live, or there are other election problems, we at Fox News want to know about it," Shawn told viewers. "You can email us. ... voterfraud@foxnews.com."

Shawn's proposed remedy is "legislation that would prevent illegals and other ineligible voters from going into the voting booth," although he acknowledged sadly that "even if states do act, it may be too late for the upcoming presidential election."

Update: In a comment on this RAW STORY article, Brad Friedman of BradBlog suggested, "You heard 'em, kids. Fox is looking for voter fraud! Feel free to email them this link documenting the no-uncertain-terms case of Ann Coulter having committed voter fraud in Palm Beach County, Florida! ... Let 'em know I sent you, in case they have any further questions. I'll be happy to speak to them, and help 'em root out those voter fraud criminals!"

At his blog, Friedman has charged that Coulter "knowingly lied about her address on her voter registration form in Palm Beach County, Florida; proceeded to break the law again by knowingly voting at the wrong precinct; then lied about it repeatedly; hired a former Bush attorney to protect her ass; and even called in her FBI ex-boyfriend to save her bacon when it looked like the Palm Beach County Sheriff might actually have the balls to bring charges."

Coulter appears frequently on Fox News Channel to expound upon campaign politics.

(For "other ineligible voters," Fox Prolefeed wants you and me thinking "chronic and habitual welfare cases," "known troublemakers," "inferior" National Minorities and "heathen noncomformists," especially so Jews and Muslims along with suchlike others "not in comunion with Low Church Christianity"--as in Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians [especially so Cumberland Presbyterians], Seventh-Day Adventists, Assemblies of G-d, Jehovah's Witnesses and others in the Fundamentalist or Primitive brand of theology whose theology emphasises fanatical hellfire-and-brimstone excesses to the point of risking serious psychoemotional harm in worshippers.)

In other words, those of you in serious financial difficulty, those with a history of mental disorders, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, gamblers, spendthrifts, "habitual criminals" and other weird and unwholesome types need not apply, as such are traditionally regarded as highly incredible sources of information by law enforcement agencies.

Especially so the kind motivated by selfish greed above all else, which may belie serious psychoemotional problems, come to think of it.