Stickybuffalo.com

ok, i’ll admit it. i often rush to the defense of rural areas, especially the midwest, when they’re portrayed in the coastal media as white-bread, red-state backwaters devoid of cultural life and populated more or less exclusively by nativist mouthbreathers and bible-beating hicks. it’s one of my most cherished hobby horses.

but you’re on your own, nebraska.

CHICAGO — Residents of a small city in eastern Nebraska voted Monday to banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes, defying an earlier decision by the city’s leaders and setting off what is all but certain to be a costly and closely watched legal challenge.

In Fremont , a meat-packing town of about 25,000 people, unofficial results from The Associated Press late Monday showed that 57 percent of voters approved a referendum barring landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and obliging city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the new law, including some business and church leaders, had argued that the City of Fremont simply could not afford the new law, which is all but certain to be challenged in court. In a flurry of television commercials and presentations by opponents in the final days before Monday’s vote, opponents said paying to defend such a local law would require a significant cut in Fremont city services or a stiff tax increase — or some combination of the two.

these dumb cornhusking fuckers — a solid 57% of them, anyway — are perfectly happy to mortgage what little public infrastructure they have in one of the more virulently tax-phobic regions in the country, and apparently even prepared to pay more taxes (!), just to make a point. which is, in a nutshell, “we don’t like brown people.”

incidentally, even here in the midwest we’re not immune to the the east-west hierarchy that implicitly informs the condescension news organizations like the NYT bring to reporting on the flyover, on the rare occasions when they deign to do so (notice, btw, the chicago dateline — fully 500 miles and two states away from the story was as far afield as they could stand to go). as far as most of my wisconsin inlaws and sub-chicagoan students are concerned, the mississippi river might as well be the outer edge of a pre-columbian nautical map, a nether realm infested with sea-monsters and dribbling water off the edge of the world into eternal cosmic nothing. as much as that attitude grates here on the iowa side of the big muddy, if we’re being honest we feel pretty much the same way about nebraska, kansas and south dakota — why would anyone ever want to go there, except to buy fireworks? hell, here in latte-sipping, volvo-driving iowa city we could do without just about everything west of I-35. it’s the kind of territory that would be rife with auto malls and megachurches, except that it doesn’t have the kind of population to sustain even those things. truck stops and tumbleweeds, mostly.

so, full disclosure: is my own contempt for nebraska and the politics that hold sway there tinged with regional prejudice? probably. am i still a little sore about the whole Big 12 thing? perhaps. have i spent enough time in places like fremont, nebraska to have a pretty decently informed idea about what a vote like this says about the community’s attitudes and values? yep. and these are some hateful, dumbass crackers right here. fire away, east coast liberal media — for once i won’t complain.

Bear with me on this one. It’s a long post, but trust me, you’ll be glad you waded through it.

You guys know about Pamela Gellar, right? She’s one of the more colorful and unstable right-wing bloggers. At her blog Atlas Shrugs (no, I refuse to link to it), Ms. Gellar can be found spinning bizarre conspiracy theories, sputtering furiously about various slights against conservatives (some real, but mostly imagined), crusading for the obliteration of Islam (and all who profess its faith), and generally reveling in her own lack of tact. In the pantheon of crazy wingnut luminaries, she’s usually lumped in with Ann Coulter (because they both have ladyparts, they both perform what right-wing extremists apparently perceive to be sexiness, and that’s pretty much it. Well, that and their shared affinity for tastelessness), but she’s really more at home with crackpots like Pastor Grant Swank, Confederate Yankee, and Michael Savage. Y’know, monstrously stupid people with a penchant for fantasy. Gellar adds a heapin’ helpin’ of Michelle Malkin-style spite and sheer, spittle-flying hatred, just for good measure.

Pam’s rise to prominence can probably be attributed mostly to her aforementioned ladyparts (there’s nothing a right-blog dweller likes more than a woman they can imagine both discussing politics and having sex with), but also to the wonderful way she spins clusters of right-wing fantasy into intricate, yet wildly implausible conspiracy theories that, though they bear almost no resemblance to anything found in the realm of the possible, satisfy as many wingnut yearnings as possible. These baroque, almost inspired webs of Grimm Brothers-esque fiction usually follow the same trajectory: Gellar posts an extremely long, poorly sourced, increasingly preposterous story on her blog, claiming definitive proof of the awfulness of some liberal or group of liberals. Her commenting readership immediately posts adulatory paeans to her genius (no doubt typing one-handed), and shortly, her creation ripples throughout the right-wing blogosphere (which seems preternaturally predisposed to turning the spread of every story into a particularly erratic game of telephone). Inevitably, one left-wing blog or another (usually the incomparable Sadly, No!) starts mocking her story, leading her and her acolytes to ratchet up their certainty. A thorough debunking usually follows, though Gellar and her circle only rarely admit their errors, preferring instead to pretend the whole thing never happened (or, increasingly, drop the subject immediately, only to resurrect it later as common knowledge beyond the necessity of argument). A few days or weeks pass, and the cycle begins anew.

All of this is just background to explain why I’m so excited about her latest theory, which blows all the others out of the water. In the span of almost 12,500 words (all in a single post, mind you), she lays out her Grand Wingnut Theory of Barack Obama, which includes most of the conspiracy theories already surrounding the candidate, and accounts for many controversial (and not so controversial) figures lately linked (often only by rumor) to Obama, before introducing a whole new group of right-wing boogeymen supposedly now connected to Obama and his sinister plot to turn America into an Islamic Socialist Republic. You wanna know what the core of this grand theory is?

(more…)

contrary to polls that show georgia remaining solid red this year, fivethirtyeight.com has analysis of registration and early voting figures that actually suggest a potential obama lead on the strength of black votes.

Think these numbers sound unreasonable? Early voting is underway in Georgia, and according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, black voters do not represent 30 percent of Georgia’s early voter turnout. Instead, they represent almost 40 percent. Although early voting figures can be idiosyncratic, Barack Obama certainly seems to be having little trouble getting his vote out. Indeed, Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now.

d’you buy that?