I find myself in the odd position of not only agreeing with, but actually cheering on Virginia Attorney General Ken “The Coochieman” Cuccinelli. The AG has taken time away from the pursuit of his rightwing, anti-science, anti-Obama religious agenda to do something statesmanly. He has thrown the full weight of his office behind Virginia Tech’s appeal of the Department of Education’s outrageous fine for the way the college handled the April 16, 2007, shootings by a deranged college student that left 33 people dead. (Memo to the AG and local TV stations: DOE is the acronym for the Department of ENERGY. For the Department of Education, it is DoED, or just simply ED or DE.) Here is a link to the story as reported by WSLS in Roanoke.

The Department of Education was created in 1979 during the Carter Administration as a payoff to the NEA (National Education Association) and the more radical AFT (American Federation of Teachers) for their support of his campaign. Dissolution of this meddlesome organization is one of the very few items  on the conservative agenda I support. Since its creation, the percentage of American high school graduates going on to college has dropped from number one among developed countries to 17th. The dropout rate in some inner city schools is approaching 50%.

So thanks Cooch for finally doing something I can support.

I still think you’re the Spawn of Satan.

For several years now, I’ve been researching the food of Appalachia. Traditional mountain cooking has never really been codified nor is it available in restaurants because it is a cuisine that relies heavily on wild game: deer, rabbit, wild turkey and other game birds as well fresh fish like trout, perch, and catfish from the rivers, streams, and lakes. Health Departments tend to take a dim view of ingredients that have not been raised according to Federal guidelines and officially inspected. I doubt hot biscuits and squirrel gravy has ever appeared on a commercial menu. Fresh vegetables come from family gardens and are canned for the winter months. Foraging for nuts, berries, wild greens, and mushrooms also help fill the larder.

If I had to point to one meal that says mountain cooking more than any other, it would be pinto beans and cornbread. Nothing hits the spot on a frigid winter day like dried pintos slow cooked with onions and smoked pork to a delicious creaminess accompanied by a plate of hot cornbread and butter. Traditionalists would wash it down with fresh buttermilk or sweet tea. Real old-timers might even have sassafras tea or coffee made from wild chicory.

Unfortunately, this style of cooking is rapidly disappearing and will probably be gone in twenty years or so. With each passing generation, more people lack the knowledge and skills necessary to process and cook wild food and have turned to fast or processed food for their diet. Pinto beans come out of a can, and cornbread from a mix. You have to know someone who knows someone to obtain venison sausage. Unlike other areas in this country where regional foods are making a comeback and are being preserved, here in Appalachia, that’s not happening.

Sadly, once this style of cooking is gone, it will be gone for good.

I grew up in North Carolina in a family of “Yellow Dog Democrats.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it meant that we would vote for a yellow dog as long as he was the Democrat nominee. I remained a Democrat until the 1980 presidential election. When Jimmy Carter took office, he looked the nation in the eye and said, “I’ll never lie to you, and you can depend on it.” I realized he had just told his first lie and his presidency was only minutes old.

When he ran for re-election, I didn’t vote Republican, I voted for the third party candidate, John Anderson. After Reagan had been in office for a year, I drank the kool aid and  made the big switch. I was working as the Director of Congressional Affairs for a wealthy political action committee. It was a very heady time for me. I rubbed elbows with the shakers and movers and was privy to the inner workings of the highest levels of our political system. I controlled nearly a million dollars (1982 dollars) that I could dole out to candidates and causes as I saw fit. I had a false sense of self importance that had few limits. My ego was such that I felt completely comfortable when I called Secretary of the Interior James Watt an asshole to his face. At a dinner party, Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan and I nearly came to blows because he didn’t like a comment I made. Over drinks in a private club in DC, I told Attorney General Ed Meese to fuck off when he tried to talk me into giving him my Rolex watch. Then Vice President George H.W. Bush was sitting at the table and laughed uproariously.

By 1985, I was thoroughly disgusted with the corruption I had both witnessed and been a part of. I washed money through my political action committee for both Democrats and Republicans in order to circumvent the campaign finance laws. I was asked for and paid what essentially were bribes by members who fortunately no longer serve in Congress.

By and large, with few exceptions, Congress does not give a good goddamn about the people who elect them. Politics is not about the people and the issues. It is about the acquisition and maintenance of power and, ultimately, money. No politician ever left Washington poorer than when he arrived. A case in point: Bill Clinton grew up without a pot to piss in, has never had a private sector job, and is a multimillionaire.

After I got out of politics and trained as a chef, I operated a highly successful catering business in DC. Many of my clients were former political allies, so I still had an inside track. And I continued to vote Republican. I voted for George W. not once, but twice. Technically, I’m still a registered Republican. However, a person can’t stay stupid his entire life. The Republican Party has sold this country to the highest bidder. It should come clean and rename itself RepubliCorp, because that is what it has become. One only has to look at some of the major legislation passed in the last thirty years to realize that we live in a political climate that is pro big business and anti-consumer. The economic mess we currently find ourselves in is a direct result of the policies of eight years of a corrupt Bush/Cheney administration. Our country had a surplus when they took office and a $9,000,000,000,000.00 deficit when they left.

And it very definitely was a corrupt administration. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the trillion dollar war in Iraq was the Halliburton Corporation, Dick Cheney’s former company. Information is now surfacing that Halliburton may also be largely responsible for the Gulf Oil Spill, the single greatest manmade disaster in history. I voted for these son-of-a-bitches, and I admit my culpability. I knew they were corrupt bastards when I voted for them, but at the time it was in my self interest to see that they were elected. I didn’t want to give up my powerful contacts. I will carry the regret that I feel for the rest of my days. We are now coming to the end of the most expensive and nasty mid-term election in history, and we have some very serious decisions to make.

The Fighting 9th

The decision of which candidate for Congress to choose in the 9th District race should be a no-brainer. But because of the national hysteria created by outside interests and the upstart Tea Party, we are on the verge of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Forget Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Cap and Trade, and Obama Care. They have absolutely nothing to do with what’s at stake for us in the 9th District. What we have to decide is who is going to do the best job for us.

On the one hand we have 14 term Congressman Rick Boucher. In his 28 years in Congress, Boucher has brought hundreds of millions of federal dollars to the District, which have been used to repair the infrastructure, build wastewater treatment facilities, provide clean drinking water for thousands of homes, assist dozens of police and fire departments, and make SW Virginia one of the most wired rural areas in the country. Boucher has had a major role in creating tens of thousands of jobs that offer options beyond just the coal industry. They include telecommunications, technology, and the medical field. These are good-paying jobs with high growth potential. Veterans are seeing an expansion of medical care through the establishment of regional facilities. In 2006, the esteemed Library Journal chose him as politician of the year. Congress.org ranks Boucher as the 10th most powerful member of the House. The Almanac of American Politics, which gives liberal/conservative rankings to House members based on their votes, ranks Boucher squarely in the middle. In the national press, Boucher is usually referred to as a conservative democrat. The ultra-conservative National Rifle Association gives Boucher an A+ rating.

On the other hand we have Morgan Griffith. DOH…

I don’t care that Morgan Griffith doesn’t live in the District, even though the one foot outside the line he claims is a huge distance because his entire career in politics has been focused on Salem and Roanoke. The needs and concerns of Salem and Roanoke are vastly different from the needs and concerns of SW Virginia. Though Griffith claims otherwise, there is no guarantee that redistricting will bring him into the District. The lines could just as easily be redrawn to bring Lynchburg into the 9th. I don’t care about that.

Neither is my decision made by the fact that losing Boucher would cost us valuable seniority on House Committees that are extremely important to SW Virginia. Griffith as a freshman Congressman would be assigned to insignificant committees with no seniority and no power. I don’t care about that either.

Neither do I care that Griffith doesn’t seem to have much of a legislative program to offer. All we hear is his rap, “If ya wanna change Congress, ya gotta change Congressmen.” Maybe he should change his name to Biggie MG, Original Gangsta.

What I do care about is that in a recent interview on WJLS, Griffith stated that the politician he most identifies with is Ken Cuccinelli, which makes him BATSHIT CRAZY in my book. Virginia does not need to launch a new political embarrassment onto the national stage.

People, don’t be stupid. On Tuesday, vote to re-elect one of the best in the nation. Vote for Rick.

Sometimes though, profanity is the only way to get a point across. Calling someone a mentally dull child of an unmarried couple carries a lot less punch than simply saying he’s a stupid bastard. Nevertheless, I resolve to be a little more creative in my choice of words. After all, someone once said that profanity is the attempt of a lazy and feeble mind to express itself forcefully, and I don’t think I’m feeble minded yet.

I grew up in a neighborhood with eleven or twelve boys my age. We did what all little boys did. We held spitting contests, played baseball, had BB gun fights, tried to catch a glimpse of Jerry Byrd’s teenage sister as she stepped out of the shower, and taught each other to cuss. Starting with your basic hell and damn, our salty vocabularies grew exponentially. We liked to call each other nasty names. I remember penis head was real big one summer.

We also learned that profanity brought attention from our parents and other adults. I’ll never forget the time we were all sitting at the dinner table, and my little sister Debi asked for more peas. Now Debi is the youngest of four siblings and the only girl. She was four or five at the time and usually had a hard time making herself heard. After politely asking several times for someone to please pass the peas and being repeatedly ignored, she said as loud as her little voice would allow, “Would you please pass me the goddam peas!” The next day, my parents had a long talk with our snuff-dipping housekeeper, Granny Williams, the widow of a sailor and the source of a lot of our vocabulary words.

After three years in Army, swearing became second nature to me. It’s one of those character weaknesses that I deplore about myself. But since the Little Prince and Heir Apparent has become more cognizant, I try to be a little more careful about it. No one likes to be chastised by a 7 year old.

So to all my concerned friends and family, I heard you. Is this better?

uneducated, right-wing, gay-bashing southern view of a north bound equine

mentally challenged vagina

Our Neo-Nazi Attorney General is still at it. Even though an Albemarle County judge ruled last August that the far rightwing asshole failed to make his case, and there was NO reason to suspect former UVA Professor Michael Mann of committing fraud, Ken “The Coochieman” Cuccinelli is trying once again to force The University of Virginia to turn over documents relating to Dr. Mann’s research into global warning.

When is this stupid shit going to stop?

Cuccinelli, along with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and all the other far right kooks have an agenda that, among other things, denies that global warming is a problem.

Hellooooooooooo….the Polar Ice Caps are melting you stupid fucker. The ocean waters are rising. If this idiot Cuccinelli has his way, one day Wythe County will have beach front property.

Dr. Mann left UVA eleven years ago. His research is widely accepted throughout the scientific community. Cuccinelli continues to pursue this issue (claiming fraudulent use of taxpayer dollars) in an attempt to discredit Mann’s findings. The AG’s office has already spent more of our money, yours and mine, than the amount of the original research grant.

Cuccinelli has long accepted campaign funds from Massey Energy, the main perpetrator of the mountaintop removal (MTR) style of coal mining in Virginia. We in Appalachia have little or no say so in the destruction of our environment, or the health and welfare of our citizens. Under the guise of preserving jobs (we’re only talking about 14,000 jobs at most over the next decade,) people like Cuccinelli will not be satisfied until our beautiful mountains consist of nothing more than a picture in some future history book. This motherfucker has to be stopped.

Make no bones about it. Cuccinelli views the Attorney General’s Office as a stepping stone. He sees himself one day as governor, senator, or, god forbid, president.

Where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we really need him?

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My Left Tit

Here’s a little Rodney Carrington to get you in the mood.

Post Edit Note: Apparently I violated someone’s term of service. YouTube’s I guess. You can try searching “Show Them to Me” at YouTube.com. It has been made unavailable to me.

Sorry folks, Ron