Skip to main content

Don't Fence Me In

By


I'm reminded of the line, "Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, don't fence me in," as Greg Abbott tries to carry the stick of Cliven Bundy over a faux battle for 140 acres of land along the Oklahoma-Texas border.

Apparently, Wendy is gaining some ground in the Texas governor's race, although she is still 12 points behind.  I guess this is too close for "Wheels."  Why else would Abbott make hay over what could best be described as silt and cottonwood trees along the Red River?  Of course, the conservative hell hounds at Breitbart Texas have blown the "land grab" up to 90,000 acres along a 116 mile stretch of the river, evoking the cattle call of Bundy.

The dispute goes back to 1986 but the bad guys are "Obama's BLM," because naturally everything that is bad in this world can be directly linked to our current POTUS.  Abbott is hoping that he can rally Texans around the Gonzales flag of 1835.  I guess he needed something to counteract the success of Obamacare, as Southern Republicans now find themselves on the defensive in their assault on the Affordable Care Act.

However, as Peter Weber notes in his article in The Week, this isn't a smart move.  The Lone Star State hasn't exactly been kind to private land owners over the years.  Abbott was involved in the eviction of a fundamentalist branch of the Church of Latter Day Saints still practicing polygamy in West Texas.  The state claimed the 1700-acre ranch after the leader was convicted of pedophile charges.  Abbott has also used eminent domain to help secure land for oil companies, and taken landowners to court who refused to yield to these greater Texas interests.


Instead of sounding like a tough guy, Abbott sounds more like a whining coyote looking to deflect attention away from a notorious track record that Wendy Davis has been airing out on the campaign trail.  With 6 months left to stump, there is plenty of time to turn 12 per cent of the vote around, especially since many are still undecided with Abbott barely edging over 50 per cent of the polling.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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