THE TALKING SANDWICH

POLICY RIPS ASIDE, THE SUSPICIOUS PR STRATEGY that put this Robert Gibbs buffoon in the White House Press Secretary slot simply to play the inept front man designed as an administrative contrast and counterweight to the messianic fluency of the eternal candidate named Barack Hussein Obama (except when his teleprompter chokes), seems apparent to all but the most dedicated of partisan players.

And I suspect the pick of Joe Biden as VP was for the same reason. Make the highly brokered showmanship of Barry the Obama look good via the manipulation of exaggerated comparison.

Wasn't Joe Biden sold to the voting public as a strong foreign policy wonk? But what's he been kept doing? The President himself has laughingly informed the public that he's anointed Joltin' Joe as watchdog for the domestic stimulus money, while BHO himself calls the foreign policy shots from the shadows, afraid to confront, or even face those foreign counterparts he is stiffing or the military leadership he commands yet ignores.

Remember how half the country railed against the supposed grammatical ineptitude of George Bush?

Opinions still rage. By playing his media games at the G-20 summit, Obama has managed to insult what's left of our allies, insuring the world is an even more dangerous place.

His dramatic disclosure of Iran's "secret" nuclear facility that he has known about since last November, the same one that some of our allies have known about for several years, has made him the laughing stock of the world. Perchance, to all those free of blinders, one can't help but notice that this president has confirmed to the world that he just might be the Clown-In-The-White-House, a title dubbed to him by certain number of fallen Democrats who saw him up close during the primaries.

Because Mr. Obama deliberately embarrassed them at the G-20 meeting, China, France, Great Britain, and Russia will now move to extract a high price for cooperating with the US on the Iran issue, and it should come as little surprise should the nations actually work to embarrass the president and the United States.

Under George Bush some of our allies didn't like the US, but they respected our status and our resolve. Under apologetic and weak Obama, they no longer respect the US, and seek ways to exploit our weaknesses with even more diligence than in ordinary times. They see, according to sources close to French President Nicolas Sarkozy that Obama is nothing more than what he appears to be—an egotistical, bumbling showman in an empty suit, despite all his dedicated followers on the US Left and in the media who try to paint this man, tied to his teleprompter except when giggling late nights with David Letterman, as the greatest statesman and intellectual America has ever seen, and I mean ev-aaaaah!

Too much skin in the game to admit they were duped, or perhaps they just love cashing those George Soros-funded checks they get in the mail? Who knows? But we remain, indeed, a nation divided. A quick spin around the media turf and channel wars is enough to tell us everything we wanted to know but were afraid to ask about where our country is now headed and even why we somehow intuit that the gear-grinding propaganda machines on both sides are only now just warming up.

LET'S ROLL OUT A MISSILE NWO-STYLE

Washington Times opinion writer Wesley Pruden takes on the Obama cult in an article, titled," Reality bites Obama's 'West Wing.'" A good article no doubt about matinee idols and their sycophants, and in particular, one matinee idol and his merry band of worshippers who made up the majority electorate last November. But it's Pruden's third paragraph which struck me.

"Nasty surprises abound across the real world. Iran completes a third round of testing of Shahab-3 and Sajjil medium-range missiles capable of hitting not only Israel, Eastern Europe and several Middle Eastern countries but, if all that were not sobering enough, several U.S military bases as well. Venezuela boasts that it's working with Russia and Iran in finding sources of uranium, the key ingredient of nuclear weapons technology. China says it will display new "upgraded missiles" in celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of Red China. India announces that it can now make nuclear weapons up to a strength of 200 kilotons, four times over the line that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty pledges signing nations not to cross."

Now what I read is this. We are in a shrinking global existence, monetarily and militarily, at least according to or even thanks to the several recent as well as the current occupiers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. While we continue under this present administration to exhibit cultural weakness and across the board apologetics, what we truly should be doing is marginalizing the weak Left, and joining in with our new peers, and blast off a few rockets and unveil a few more death machines in big parades and national celebrations. Then perhaps, once again, we Americans might again feel like we fit into the world as we know it, and how do we know it?

We watch our neighbors. We mimic our enemies who seem to have no shame in calling for our deaths. They know who they are, even if our leadership looks the other way or forgives them seven times seventy and more in what seems to be an impossible struggle to win hearts and minds. We show them our strength as they show us their strength. As the dollar continues to fail, and the bankers conspire, and we give away billions of these dollars to our enemies in a vain attempt to buy friendship even as these foreign governments funnel our US tax monies right back into the coffers of those who seek to kill us, perhaps we should stop this wasted appeasement long enough to ask what comes next when all this bribery and corruption fails to bear fruit. Look at Pakistan. Look at Egypt. Look at Turkey. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at the immigrants from those countries into the United States and Europe.

We cannot win there. We can only return these haters to their countries of origin, or isolate them in their own countries before they get here, bound by the ummah struggling for a caliphate. That one way. It worked with Isabella in 1492. Tried for treason under penalty of death, or hard expulsion can work again.

Or we can get right with ourselves and expose those of the order of Mohammed to the very best firepower we've got. I prefer the former, but if that fails to stop this drip drip dripping flood of madness we call the New World Order, I suppose the latter will do.

When in Rome...

Unless each American prefers to live in slavery and fear, we cannot long deny nor surely long escape this crisis. Therefore, as responsible and free citizens standing upon this soil beneath this flag with concerted and quiet enjoyment of the United States Constitution and its favor, we must prepare ourselves. I say, let the games begin!

IDEOLOGY AND STRATEGIES OF GLOBAL JIHAD

Dear Gabriel,

Our friend and esteemed colleague Dr. Walid Phares comments below on the unprecedented acceleration of jihadist terror plots we have seen in the past few weeks, the latest in Springfield, Illinois.

Dr. Phares will be presenting a session entitled "The Ideology and Strategies of Global Jihad" at the American Congress for Truth national conference webcast on November 7th.

This conference, entitled "Radical Islam's Threat to America," is available FREE of charge to all elected officials, their staffs, and members of ACT! for America and American Congress for Truth. Log on to Act For America to find out more information and how you can participate.

And please pass the word about the conference to every elected official you know.

As we noted last week, we believe there is a correlation between the Obama administration's accelerated "outreach" effort to the Muslim world and the increase in terrorist plots. Within the world of jihadist Islam such efforts are viewed as weakness. They reinforce the supremacist political ideology shared by jihadists and, in doing so, embolden them.

What's more, these efforts send a message to the so-called "moderate" Muslims that the "strong horse" (to quote Osama bin Laden) they should get behind is, indeed, the jihadists.

Warning: The Jihadists are mushrooming inside America

Dr. Phares writes...

It is unprecedented in American counter terrorism annals: in one day the nation was dealing with three separate Jihadist plots to blow up civilian and other targets inside the Homeland. Although the cases were addressed at different time periods by the FBI and other agencies, nevertheless, the thickening web of Terror attempts breached the crossing line of US national security. This week, authorities revealed three conspiracies by American Jihadists: Michael C. Finton, a 29-year-old man who wished to follow the steps of American-born Taliban John Walker Lindh, was arrested after trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb inside a van outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Ill.

Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian national was arrested after placing what he believed was a bomb at a downtown Dallas skyscraper. But perhaps the most troubling case is of Afghan-born Najibullah Zazi who set up shop in suburban Denver, scouting the Web and visiting beauty supply stores in a hunt for chemicals needed to build bombs for Al Qaeda. Sources called the alleged plot one of the most significant terror threats to the U.S. since 9-11. Add to the list the North Carolina Jihad cell, led by Saifullah Boyd, which was planning on attacking civilian and military targets across the country.

The immediate question raised by an increasingly worried public is about the connection between all these terror cases: are they all connected? While law enforcement and certainly judicial authorities proceed in a bottom up reasoning, that is to build the case for a global connection between all what is happening with the help of legal evidence, analysts in the field of counter terrorism and conflict are already realizing the meaning of what is happening inside America.

In my book Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America (2005-2006), I clearly projected that Jihadists, individuals and cells will be mushrooming and expanding inside the United States within few years from then and that they will precisely do what they are trying to do now. I have also projected how large they will become, with time. It was a simple deduction: if the Government doesn't counter this ideological growth, Jihadists will keep coming. And in fact they kept coming, spreading crossing the barriers of ethnicities, races, nationalities and geographical frontiers.

The Jihadists committed to harm the US, and based inside our borders, are now by the hundreds. When I suggested this fact on CNN in 2006, and reiterated it on Oprah's show so that the public realizes what is to come, I raised a few eyes brows. Now unfortunately, we are meeting the cells of Jihadism in our cities and little towns, and sadly the expectation is that we will see more, and we may unfortunately not be able to stop them all from reaching their goals.

The North Carolina cell, the New York subway plot, the Dallas attempt, the Illinois case, added to the previous cases of the shooting of a soldier in Arkansas, the precedent New York cells, Georgia's young Jihadists, all the way back to the infamous Virginia paintball network, if anything gives us the genome of what is morphing inside the country—a vast body of dispersed cells with at least one binding force—the Jihadi ideology. The question thus is to find out who is propagating the doctrines of Jihadism: who is funding it; who is protecting the indoctrination operation which leads naturally to the rise of homegrown or foreign linked, lone wolves or packs of Jihadists, Terrorists. That is the real question: where is the factory?

What should the US Government do? Well, it must first of all come to the front of the threat and lead the nation against it. This is not a matter of only local police or law enforcement efforts. President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders from both parties must give this spreading plague a top priority—for if one of these groups is successful, our national economy will crumble again, or at least will be wounded even more severely, let alone the human consequences of terror.

Americans are watching with great concerns, these terror plots being revealed. They expect their elected officials to address these fears before the worse happens.

PREPARING THE TURKEY SHOOT

IT'S QUITE EASY TO SEE who's causing liberals and Marxists the most pain. They sputter and spend an enormous amount of time and resources in an effort to demonize those who cause them so much agony. We can easily observe that Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh cause liberals to suffer severe, chronic heartburn and draw full migraine headaches they can't wait to share with their neighbors.

Paragons of American liberty Micheal Savage and Mark Levin also pierce the frothing leftist "message" balloons, but who's counting mighty eagles now that the chirping chickens are indeed coming home to roost...

Rodeo clown or not, Glenn Beck at his most outrageous is no louder than those two hilarious party-sniffers Chris "Leg-tingling" Matthews and the salacious King of Rage, Keith Olberman. The reason Beck has captured the right wing zeitgeist so thoroughly is that he is providing a valuable service by connecting the long string of dots no one else wants to connect.

Unlike the increasingly feckless Bill O'Reilly, Beck is showing incredible stones by being one of the very few individuals willing to snatch back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz that characterizes this administration.

Which brings us to that old leftist canard—Global warming, Man-Made or Political Rubbish? The "real" facts show that more and more climatologists are stepping from the shadows of the Al Gore-scare to contradict the rush to blame man on global warming, or even to admit that dangerous unnatural warming is even occurring across the planet.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen mocked man-made global warming fears in a July 2, 2009 radio interview on WRKO's Howie Carr program. Lindzen noted that man-made climate fears were "divorced from nature" and he said the scientific foundation for climate fears is "falling apart."

"How did we get a population that can be told something that contradicts their senses and go crazy over it?" Lindzen asked on the program. Lindzen recently co-signed an open letter to Congress with a team of scientists warning: "You Are Being Deceived About Global Warming. Earth has been cooling for ten years.'

When asked about climate fears, Lindzen dismissed the notion that "ordinary" Americans are buying into former Vice President Al Gore's climate views.

"We are too smart for that. You look at the polls, ordinary people see through this, but educated people are very vulnerable," Lindzen quipped. Lindzen also noted that people are being told that if they change a lightbulb, they are "saving the Earth", they are "virtuous, they are smart."

"Now you are told if you that if you don't understand global warming is going on, you are dumb, but if you agree to it, you are smart," Lindzen explained.

That sounds familiar.

NO EXTRA HARRUMPH

Well, of course he is. Barack Obama. Chicago politics. Democratic community organizer organizing the Democratic community as far as the eye can see, and then some. But of course, in a critical era with so much already on the national plate, combined with the president's "a speech a day keeps the radical right-wing revolutionaries at bay" mentality, in my own humble opinion, signals that this action is not only dangerously overreaching as the tea party movement continues to grow in opposition to any government intrenchment not constitutionally stipulated, but is laughably frivolous. I think the record shows rather clearly that the Bush example mentioned above, brought the Republicans no extra harrumph at the polls, but indeed may have proved detrimental to those candidates.

WASHINGTON — The White House’s intervention in the race for New York governor is the latest evidence of how President Obama and his top advisers are taking an increasingly direct role in contests across the country, but their assertiveness has bruised some Democrats who suggest it could undercut Mr. Obama’s appeal with voters tired of partisan politics.

Read it all.

THE MOST INCORRECTLY USED WORD

YES, VIRGINIA. Racism exists in America—and it exists in all races, socio-economic groups, heritages, populations, tribes, and imaginations. It cuts across every line man dares draw in the sand. And let's face facts. Racism is not the exclusive domain of white males living in the south, driving a pick-up truck while kissing his shotgun. That is a stone cold fact.

The definition of racism is a simple concept: Racism is the belief that one’s own race produces a particular superiority over any or all other races. It is the opposite of the concept of equality—and is anathema to MLK’s exhortation to judge one another by the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin. Racism is rejected by most reasonable and educated people of good spirit. Don't misunderstand me, good spirit is the key factor of innocense and empathy, although education and reason are often great partners.

“Racist” is the most over-used and most incorrectly used word in the English language of our age. Even so, however, there is a growing number of educated people who practice an agenda of racism based on a politics of ever receding grievances and envy. Just look at the United Nations. Or Saudi Arabia and its satellites. Or Malmo, Sweden. Or the Democratic Party in America.

And that's not even mentioning the sad and dangerous notions of religious bigotry that engulf the world today.

SLAMMIN' MIDDLE-AGED OUTRAGE

AS THE SEPTEMBER 12 Tea Party march of two million and this blog wanes temporarily, here's a quick spot on why things are different now. As Shannon Love noted on the Chicago Boyzblog and and now echoed by Mark Tapscott in the Washington Examiner the times may be changing again:

"Getting hundreds of thousands of kids, the professionally unemployed, and government workers to show up isn't that hard [especially if someone buys the bus tickets]. Getting two million middle-class, middle-aged people with jobs, careers, children and businesses is way, way more impressive.

"We can safely assume that for every individual who made it to the protest that there are dozens of people whose grown-up obligations prevented them from attending.

"That thought should keep Obama and Pelosi up at night."

Indeed. To have Federal laws written by outsider lawyer groups like the Apollo Group, and driven through congressional hoops without having even been read by those who dare to vote on such game-changing legislation being shoved down the American populace is just wrong, anti-American, and no way to run a republic founded upon the principles of liberty and constitutional law. It's that simple, folks. America, please. This nation is slipping away. Both parties have long raped and pillaged the US Constitution as if she deserved it in flaunting her exquisite and growing beauty and liberty for all peoples to admire and aspire to. Where has our once lauded American magnanimity gone? Can we not agree that this serial abuse of our constitution must be stopped?

Read it all.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Socialists can provide shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things that are guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave." - Ronald Reagan

As the young and the belligerently idealistic continue to push toward anything that smacks of overthrowing capitalism and ushering in the imagined golden era of socialism, despite all its past and present failures, preferably under the banner of its anointed one, the rules of the game only grow fuzzier while the strategies turn nastier. If only I had been more politically awake during the Reagan years.

CONSIDERATIONS ON SUCH HEIGHT

And then there were none. Well, there is still the dazed and confused Taliban-loving Patti Smith. But after Ginsberg and Burroughs left the beat in the late 90s, andCorso ducked behind the curtain in 2001, Jim Carroll was damn near the final nail in the famous and infamous Beat Generation tool shed annex to fade to rust.

Carroll contributed an untitled poem to the pages of Rolling Stone at the height of his rock and roll stardom:

It’s sad this vision required such height.
I’d have preferred to be down with the others, in the stadium.
They know the terror of birds.
I am left, instead, with the deep drone…
The urgency to deliver light, as if it
were some news from the far galaxies.

[From Issue 321 — July 10, 1980]

Jim Carroll was 60.

Actor and dancer Patrick Swayze also died this week of pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA

It's not often I find pushy liberal first person reveries I accidentally discover to be such riveting and therapeutically charming journalism. In spangled tone and delivery the "unbamboozeable" Joe Bageant, celebrated author of Deer Hunting With Jesus (Dispatches From America's Class War) and the following essay, dubbed Poor, White, and Pissed honors the raunchy profession of confessional reporting. Liberals, take note. The fix is in. You have just been given room to make improvements in your game, if you can just pay attention long enough to read the signs. Your knuckleball has become a soft shoulder lob ripe for the bleachers. America might just be changing yet.

Having recently affiliated professionally with a company in Winchester, VA, after a quarter century of surviving the juiced up jostle of the national buzz called Washington, here is one local's description of his hometown, which is located some ninety miles due west of the nation's capital. Just beyond the rippling Blue Ridge Mountains nestled among the apple trees of the Shenandoah Valley, it is a beautiful ride from utter chaos and global intrigue to the fresh green freedom of God's country.

The essay, written some three years plus before candidate Barack Obama put his own teleprompted spin on the unsightly static cling of the poor, white, and pissed crowd is an eloquent rejection of the liberal standard, and needs no more introduction from me:

IF YOU ARE READING THIS it is very likely that you are a liberal, maybe even an outright screaming burn down the goddam country commie—in which case I say, "Come sit by me comrade!" (Especially if you are a blonde.) Like most lefties you probably live in an urban area, or someplace with reasonable cultural diversity. More than likely you are educated and can read this without moving your lips. Maybe you even live in the freethinking People's Republic of Berkeley, or bustle along under the fabled lights of Manhattan where you can see independent films and buy such things as leeks and soy milk at your grocery store.

I, however, live in a town where it is easier to find chitterlings, ponhaus and souse in the grocery store than a leek—and where Smokey and the Bandit still plays to packed movie houses year after year. My hometown's claim to fame is the 1983 "Rhinehart Tire Fire" in which some five million discarded tires burned for nine months, gaining Winchester, Virginia national news coverage and EPA superfund cleanup status. The smoke plume was visible in satellite earth photos, the cleanup took 18 years and the fire stands as my hometown's biggest event of the Twentieth Century. As for intellectual life, this is a town where damned few residents ever heard of, say, Susan Sontag. Even though our local newspaper editor did manage a post mortem editorial on Sontag, which basically said: Goodbye you piece of New York Jewish commie shit!, most people reading the paper at their breakfast tables around town were asking themselves, "Who the hell is Susan Sontag?" They would ask the same thing about Daniel Barenboim or Hunter S. Thompson because those figures have never been on Oprah. Our general ambience was well summed up by a visiting Atlanta lawyer who looked around town and observed: "Dumb lordee I reckon!" This from a guy who's seen a lot of dumb crackers. Laugh if you want, but this is the red state American heartland everybody is talking about these days.

Is it possible for a higher class of person to live in American places like Winchester, Virginia? Not really. Only the local old family business elite and well-paid plant managers transferred here find such a place livable—the former for their social status and the latter in the safe knowledge they will be transferred out someday.

Most of the rest of us stuck in Winchester are what used to be called the traditional working class. These days, when we are called anything at all, it is White Trash. Poor working whites, people with only a high school diploma, if that. Nationally we at least number a quarter of white U.S. workers, thirty five million in all by the government's own shaved-down numbers. Nobody knows for sure in a nation that calls millions of $7-an-hour janitors and marginal people working "contract labor", with no insurance or benefits, "independent businesspersons" and "entrepreneurs." Small independent business people are, we are told, "the backbone of America's economy." If that is true, then it's a sorry assed thing because we are talking here about citizens who bring down maybe 25-30K a year before taxes. With both spouses working. I told my freelance janitor friend Gator that he was the backbone of the American economy; he said he felt more like its asshole.

In any case, my people are not the people in the cubicle next to you at work (though they might well be cleaning it at nights when you are sleeping.) Mine are not people complaining about paying off their college loans or who got the best parking spot at their office campus complex. They are people with different problems entirely. Mostly related to truck payments. Or people like my old tree service boss Danny, who cut off a finger working with a chain saw, wrapped it in a McDonald's foil wrapper and ran to the hospital to get it sewn back on.

Or any of the thousands of people in this town who smash apples into apple sauce or boil them into vinegar at National Fruit Products, performing soul grinding shift work year after year with no opportunity to ever be promoted, or obtaining health care at all. Just the seasonal layoff when all the apples are smashed and the millions of gallons of vinegar bottled. Working class people going nowhere in a town that smells like vinegar.

Most of the rest of us stuck in Winchester are what used to be called the traditional working class. These days, when we are called anything at all, it is White Trash. Poor working whites, people with only a high school diploma, if that. Nationally we at least number a quarter of white U.S. workers, thirty five million in all by the government's own shaved-down numbers.

Don't laugh, you're next!

Middle class liberals, or affluent conservatives for that matter, are hard put to understand poor white working class culture. With our guns, God and coarse noisy aesthetic, (let's face it, NASCAR and Shania Twain?) we look like a lower species, a beery subset of some sort. The truth is that poor white working culture is not a subset of any other American class. It does not operate below the middle and upper classes, but parallel to them. Just as there are few ways out of it, there are few ways in. Its inhabitants are born here. The educated left cannot easily get inside.

When it comes to access, liberal social academics are camels passing through the needle's eye, though I've never met one who would admit it, or even knew that observing is not necessarily understanding. Consequently we find many books/studies focusing on ethnic minorities, but few credible ones about our defiant native homegrown poor. To my mind, it is impossible to be tenured and have street cred, but then I am just a prejudiced redneck prick from Winchester, Virginia, otherwise referred to as "Dickville".

Yet this place from which and about which I write could be any of thousands of communities across the U.S. It is a parallel world created by an American system where caste and self-identity are determined by what one consumes, or cannot afford to consume, education and of course, the class into which one is born. Like most things American, it was about money from the get-go. The difference is that some of us have known this truth from birth and on brutal terms. For instance, few middle class Americans today ever sold newspapers on the street corner at age twelve to pay for school clothes or carried coal to a dirty living room stove all winter. I did both. They never sat down to a dinner of fried baloney and coffee after cold hours on the street corner.

If this sounds like some Depression era sob story, let me say that it was in 1959-62. And right now I can find a hundred people in my neighborhood who did the same, or some kids still doing it (often Latino these days). My point being that there are and always have been a helluva lot of us know-nothing laboring sons out here, whether more fortunate Americans acknowledge our struggles or not. But they should. You see, it's like this: When the heartless American system is done reducing us to slobbering beer soaked zombies in the American labor gulag, your sweet ass is next.

Everybody loves the Dalai Lama, but nobody loves po' me!

Ain't no wonder libs got no street cred. Ain't no wonder a dope-addicted clown like Limbaugh can call libs elitists and make it stick. From where we stand, knee-deep in doctor bills and hoping the local Styrofoam peanut factory doesn't cut the second shift, you ARE elite. Educated middle class liberals (and education is the main distinction between my marginal white people and, say, you) do not visit our kind of neighborhoods, even in their own towns. They drink at nicer bars, go to nicer churches and for the most part, live, as we said earlier, clustered in separate areas of the nation, mainly urban.

Consequently, liberals are much more familiar with the social causes of immigrants, or even the plight of Tibet, than the bumper crop of homegrown native working folks who make up towns like Winchester. Liberal America loves the Dalai Lama but is revolted by life here in the land of the pot gut and the plumber's butt. Can't say as I blame them entirely, but then, that is why God created beer. To make ordinary life more attractive, or at least stomachable.

Whatever the case, helping the working poor does not mean writing another scholarly paper about them funded by grant money. That is simply taking care of one's middle class university educated self. Yet the cause of dick-in-the-dirt poor working white America is spoken for exclusively by educated middle class people who grew up on the green suburban lawns of America. However learned and good intentioned, they are not equipped to grasp the full implications of the new American labor gulag -- or the old one for that matter. They cannot understand a career limited to yanking guts out through a chicken's ass for the rest of one's life down at the local poultry plant (assuming it does not move offshore). Being born working class carries moral and spiritual implications understood only through experiencing them. It comes back to street cred.

Read it all.

And from this Georgia boy with a similar background, I say let them eat boiled okra and fried green tomatoes! It'll do the nation good...