Skip to main content

The Big Gulp

By


In the latest uproar over banning assault weapons, Wayne La Pierre accuses Mayor Bloomberg of trying to buy the American people.  Just in case you are curious the NRA has an annual operating budget of over $200 million, paying La Pierre a cool million for his efforts to "defend" the second amendment.  That's nearly 20 times the amount Bloomberg has pledged to push for assault weapon bans around the country.

Recently, we saw the ever resilient "Mama Grizzly" teeing off on Bloomberg's attempt at a Big Gulp ban in New York, proudly slurping from one of these half-gallon cups at a CPAC rally.  The Mississippi legislature followed suit by not only banning such attempted bans, but barring local governments from requiring nutritional information be posted at restaurants.  This from perhaps the most obese state in the nation, with the highest count of Type 2 diabetes.


These and many other issues have put the Republican party outside the mainstream, leading Andrew Kohut to speculate that the Republicans could face a major backlash in the 2014 midterms.  The only thing that appears to save them from total annihilation are sizable voting blocks in the deep South and large pockets in the Mountain West and Midwest, but it isn't anywhere near enough support to carry them in a national presidential election, as they found out in 2012, or even hold onto key House seats, judging by Elizabeth Colbert Busch's surprising popularity in South Carolina.

The Republican Party's response to this major electoral shift is a $10 million ad campaign aimed at potential Hispanic voters and better polling data so that they can more properly assess the political landscape.  However, judging by the blurbs that came out of CPAC this month it doesn't sound like the GOP is doing any major soul searching, just looking for new ways to sell their "brand."

Lalo Alcaraz 2013
The irony of course is that the GOP has no problem legislating morality when it comes to putting forward federal amendments against abortion and gay marriage, introducing "intelligent design" into high school curricula,and banning contentious books in local libraries. But, don't take away my gun or big gulp or there will be hell to pay!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more