Free Republic

Dear Old Friend, It was wholly a pleasure to hear your theory about where the South ends, probably because any theory about the South will get a conversation going around dinner tables, at barber shops, in graduate seminars on Southern history, and just about anywhere else in these talkative latitudes. Your theory is that the South ends where the last monument to the Confederate soldier can be seen. This would mean that Bentonville, up in the far northwest corner of Arkansas, and known far and wide as the capital of Wal-Mart, qualifies as Southern. This might comes as a surprise,...

The Veterans Day parade that will be held in Homestead later this year will be missing one controversial symbol: The Confederate battle flag. That's because organizers decided to ban the flag from the parade after much back-and-forth debate. For some, the flag is a symbol of Southern pride. But others say it's a symbol of the country's racist past. Initially, the organizers – the Homestead/ Florida City Chamber of Commerce's Military Affairs Committee – had agreed to allow the flag. But they reversed that decision on Wednesday after Jeffrey Wander, the committee chairman, said he sent out emails asking for...

The Wrong Rights by: Mytheos Holt, August 18, 2009 This July, the Heritage Foundation hosted a talk by Abigail Thernstrom, the author of the newly released book Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, to discuss the findings of the book and explore its implications for current Constitutional/political discourse. Thernstrom began her talk with the warning that she “[had] not written a book that can be reduced to soundbytes.” Moreover, Thernstrom said, “I thought I’d focus on a few interconnected points that challenge conservative thinking in the hopes of getting a discussion going.” For many conservative...

It’s a thought to madden a Manichaean, but the usual outcome of any struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ isn’t victory for one or the other, but stalemate. Good and evil both survive to fight another day. Thus, the astonished delight over Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential elections last November hadn’t even begun to subside before the resultant rage of racist America was making itself heard. In a column written three weeks after November 2, this columnist (‘Keeping him safe’) remarked on that fury. Yet, in the euphoria of the moment, I was inclined to dismiss it as “the...

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy. In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in...

John H. McWhorterThus Spake Zora Zora Neale Hurston’s writing challenged black people as well as white. Summer 2009 One of the last photos of Zora Neale Hurston, taken in the late fifties, is heartrending. Once renowned as a handsome figure who could dominate any room, she sits outside a Florida bungalow, a bloated old woman living in poverty, chatting with locals. As sanguine as she looks, we can’t help wishing that she had been in New York, plugging her latest novel on The Jack Paar Show. But all her books were out of print, and she was supporting herself...

Does the Confederate Flag offend you? http://www.sodahead.com/question/537677/does-the-confederate-flag-offend-you/ I came across this question asked at SodaHead.com that has produced a lively discussion with over 2500 comments. I thought I would post it here at Free Republic and see if it gets a similiar response.

WASHINGTON, July 15, 2009 – North Korea’s recent provocations underscore the importance of the strong U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance, the top U.S. commander in South Korea said yesterday. “I can assure you that the alliance is fully prepared to respond to any situation as we continue to closely monitor activities in the region,” Army Gen. Walter “Skip” Sharp, commander of United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command and U.S. Forces in Korea, told reporters via videoconference from New York. “In the face of these recent provocations, the alliance stands strong and ready, and in fact is getting stronger every day,” he...

People from Mississippi are fat. With an adult obesity rate of 33%, Mississippi gobbled its way to the "chubbiest state" crown for the fifth year in a row, according to a new joint report by Trust For America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Alabama, West Virginia, and Tennessee aren't far behind, with obesity rates over 30%. In fact, eight out of the 10 fattest states are in the South. The region famous for its biscuits, barbecue and pecan pies has been struggling with its weight for years — but then again, so has the rest of the country....

A suspected al-Qaida member has been taken into custody by Brazilian authorities in a case shrouded in secrecy, police said Tuesday.

Postmodern Prof Whistles Dixie by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 18, 2009 From the people who like to paint critics of higher education as anti-intellectual comes a new tome that shows how cerebral the pursuits of the academic publishing world are. The University of Virginia Press has just released Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968, by Michael P. Bibler. Bibler is an assistant professor of English at Mary Washington. His self-proclaimed areas of expertise are: Gay and Lesbian Studies; Postmodernism; and The Southern Plantation, in that order. “He has had articles published in Mississippi...

Video on site"And it's gone!"

South Park dares to say who REALLY should get credit for all the economic stimulus and budget spending. (Hint, it's not Obama). http://www.butasforme.com/2009/03/26/kids-will-pay/

What follows is a slightly edited version of an email I sent to a a couple of close friends back in January 2008 about Mike Huckabee as an example of the GOP's rise in the New South. I didn't have a blog back then and I found it again while cleaning out my email today. I think this post still rings just as true today as Southern Governors like Bobby Jindal and Mark Sanford rise to prominence as leaders of the GOP. The GOP's complete reconstruction of the New South By IkeonicRemember Bush 41 smearing Bill Clinton as "the failed...

ATLANTA — In a cultural war that has pitted Old South against new, defenders of the Confederate legacy have opened a fresh front in their campaign to polish an image tarnished, they said, by people who do not respect Southern values. With the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States in 2011, efforts are under way in statehouses, small towns and counties across the South to push for proclamations or legislation promoting Confederate history.

HANNIBAL, Mo. (AP) - A Hannibal police officer was finishing up mundane paperwork on a quiet Saturday morning when Manuel Cazares walked into the station, blood splattered on his hands and shoes. Cazares put his hands out, crossed them, and told the officer to arrest him. "I killed two people," he allegedly said. Details surrounding the allegations are far too common: an abusive relationship, a jilted lover, a sudden attack. But some in this Mississippi River community of 17,000 best known as Mark Twain's hometown aren't just outraged by the violence. They also question why Cazares was in Hannibal at...

Now comes Time Magazine with a piece saying that Calvinism is back as a dominating force in American culture. What does this mean for our future, politically and culturally. . .

Remember how during the run up to the election, all the left pundits and talking heads and their compatriots in the Old Media said that no white person would vote for Barack Obama? Well, despite the singular fact that Barack Obama convincingly won the popular vote in a country that sees a majority of its voters are white, the Old Media is still insisting that all southerners are slavery-loving, neo-confederates that are no different than they were in 1860. For the Washington Post, Robert S. McElvaine is here to tell us in "The Red, the Blue and the Gray" that...

"When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled to China this month, she said human rights concerns could not interfere with talks about the economic crisis." Doesn't that sound eerily similar to the South's . . .

A few months ago, another Civil War blogger mocked my contention that the South remains the last great bastion of Judeo-Christian conservatism in the United States, even though poll after poll shows that to be the truth - the South is still the "Bible Belt." Now comes this story . . .