There are ways to treat ailments such as poor eyesight, aching joints or hearing loss. But finding a cure for either or any type of ailment is not a reality at this point in time. Although there is no cure for hearing loss, there are ways to treat it, and only the person suffering from [...]
All too often, the elderly are stereotyped and stigmatized as being chronically "hard of hearing." This may be the case, but it also very well may not. Elderly hearing loss is most often the result of the body’s normal degeneration in our older years; the older we get, the more we start to lose function [...]
People who have not experienced sudden hearing loss are generally unable to imagine the impact this terrifying condition can have on a person’s life. Many who are stricken with sudden and unexpected hearing loss are young and free of the pre-existing medical conditions that are often associated as causes of sudden hearing loss. Fortunately, the [...]
While most reduction of hearing can be caused by something as simple as a large ball of ear wax that can be removed with a Q-tip, a lot of times this is not the case. At least 20 million people throughout the United States suffer from hearing loss, and a large portion of it is [...]
Teenagers are not the only ones that like loud music or that attends concerts, but they seem to be in the majority where this issue is concerned. However, loud music is not the only cause for concern when hearing is addressed. Noise induced hearing loss can be caused by many different types of noises, and [...]
“Today’s Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies,” the Washington Post’s Colby King charged in his weekly Saturday column, maintaining “they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the ‘real Americans,’ while all who don’t think or look like them are not” and so, “without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan.”
King, the Post’s deputy editorial page editor from 2000 to 2007 who in 2003 won the Pulitzer Prize for “distinguished commentary,” began the column, “In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history,” by equating the Tea Party activists with the racist segregationists of the 1950s:
The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956….Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. “They moved closer and closer,” recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. “Somebody started yelling, ‘Lynch her! Lynch her!’”
Subtle.
King proceeded to recall: “Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.”
Interestingly, while King made sure to identify Duke as a Republican, he failed to identify George Wallace as a Democrat (long before and after his “independent” presidential runs), nor how the violent anti-desegregation efforts he cited in Alabama and Arkansas were led by Democrats.
From February: “Washington Post’s King Disparages Palin as ‘Simple-Minded’ and ‘Mediocre‘”
An excerpt from “In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history,” Kings’s column in the Saturday, March 27 Washington Post:
The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school’s first black student, bravely tried to walk to class.
Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957.
"They moved closer and closer," recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. "Somebody started yelling, ‘Lynch her! Lynch her!’ I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd — someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me."
Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.
People like that old woman in Little Rock, the Alabama mob that hounded Autherine Lucy, the embracers of Duke’s demagoguery in Louisiana, never go away.
They were spotted last weekend on Capitol Hill under the Tea Party banner protesting the health-care-reform bill….
Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the "real Americans," while all who don’t think or look like them are not.
And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace…
And they are faithful to the old Wallace playbook.
McWhorter wrote how Wallace, in a 1963 speech to the political arm of Alabama’s Ku Klux Klan, "referred to the recent bombings in Birmingham against prominent black citizens, citing the lack of fatalities as proof that the ‘nigras’ were throwing the dynamite themselves in order to attract publicity and money."
Fast-forward to today. Note the pro-Tea Party conservative commentary debunking last weekend’s racist and homophobic slurs as a work of fiction and exaggeration strictly for political reasons….
The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.
If the media outlets are going to report on tea party events, they’re not likely to get any benefit of the doubt much of the time.
Case in point – at the Tea Party Express event on March 27 in Searchlight, Nev., which former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spoke, CNN’s Fredericka Whitfield wasn’t quite prepared to give the rally credit it was due as far as participation. She estimated that hundreds, but if not, "at least dozens of people" were in attendance. (h/t fstaff with assist from Mark Finkelstein)
"Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin there in Searchlight, Nev., was the backyard of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but today it’s the backdrop of this Tea Party Express – making a stop here," Whitfield said. "Hundreds of people, at least dozens of people – we haven’t gotten a count of how many people turned out there. We heard Sarah Palin talk about everything about the campaign, to unseat Sen. Reid to what she calls ObamaCare, on the heels of that health care vote and even talking about her definition of her love of America."
Politico’s Kenneth Vogel had a little higher number, saying "an estimated 20,000 tea partiers gathered for a rally in a windswept desert lot," in his March 27 report on the event.
But Whitfield still had her own interpretation of Palin’s message at the rally.
"Also trying to kind of explain or structure the language she has used about reloading America," Whitfield said. "Many people talked about some of the language that’s been used by Republicans, including her as inciting violence as a result of the health care vote. She says she is not inciting violence. Instead, she says she is inspiring people to stand up for their God-given rights in her language. Sarah Palin there as she takes the steps there and heads onto that crowd. Folks, she said she is off to Massachusetts next."
This week, Del Walters, a veteran local Washington, DC and Baltimore television reporter and anchor, who in January of 2009 served as executive producer of “Virginia’s Inaugural Black Tie and Blue Dominion Ball” starring actress Jenna Elfman and the Commodores (NB item), joined the on-air anchor team for Washington, DC’s Bonneville International-owned all-news radio station affiliated with CBS News. The ball’s home page shouted: “A Celebration of a Dream Fulfilled!”
“Wasn’t that local TV veteran Del Walters anchoring on all-news WTOP yesterday evening?” Dave Hughes asked Friday on his DCRTV.com site. “Sources say that the former Channel 7/WJLA and Channel 2/WMAR anchor starts a ‘regular presence’ on WTOP this week. A top TOPer says that Walters will be doing ‘fill-in’ work.”
In a 2007 novel, The Race, Walters imagined a black U.S. President “hated by every extremist group that can still hold a gun license” whose life is threatened by the KKK and Vatican-connected conspirators afraid he will demand reparations payments. From Amazon.com’s summary of the book:
….He is hated by every extremist group that can still hold a gun license. The Klan put a bounty on his head, and militias see him as a threat to the second amendment, but it is an invisible overseas enemy that has proven to be deadliest of all. A shadowy group known as ‘The Consortium,’ with ties to the Vatican, and a history that dates back to the Lincoln Assassination, has vowed to either control Baron James…or kill him. The group has one point four trillion reasons to want James dead. That’s the price tag attached to a slavery reparations lawsuit creeping through the courts. ‘The Consortium’ fears because Baron James is black he would shepherd the lawsuit through the judicial system and ruin their centuries old hold on power. Power that can directly be traced to the trafficking of human beings we know as slavery….
In the same week Democrats forced unwanted healthcare reform down America’s throat, internal documents surfaced across the Pond showing plans for massive budget cuts at Great Britain’s National Health Service.
"The sick would be urged to stay at home and email doctors rather than visit surgeries, while procedures such as hip replacements could be scrapped," the Daily Telegraph reported Friday.
"Documents show that health chiefs are considering plans to begin sacking workers, cutting treatments and shutting wards across the country."
The Telegraph said such cuts would lead to (h/t Weasel Zippers):
There was more:
Last year all English health authorities were ordered by Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, to reconsider their plans after the recession forced the Government to freeze health spending from April next year.
This left a ”black hole’’ of up to £20 billion in health budgets up to 2014, prompting the drawing up of new proposals by the 10 strategic health authorities (SHAs).
They had until Friday to submit their plans to Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary. He is under pressure from the Treasury to show how money will be saved to help bring down Britain’s record £167 billion deficit. [...]
Documents produced by several of the SHAs show how the cuts are, in fact, expected to fall on hospital services. [...]
A document marked “restricted” and circulated among SHA board members suggests 10,000 of the region’s 100,000 NHS workers may lose their jobs. “The new financial environment demands that the trend in workforce growth must be reversed,” it said, adding bosses must reduce employee numbers by 10 per cent “or further”.
The document said staffing in the acute sector, covering hospitals, “can be expected to decline faster and further” than elsewhere.
Shocking stuff. Yet, according to LexisNexis, not one major American media outlet reported the Telegraph’s findings.
Apparently our press doesn’t feel this is at all relevant as the President and his Party begin trying to sell the benefits of healthcare reform to a citizenry that isn’t happy with the bill they just passed.
After all, if Americans knew that healthcare services might be cut in Great Britain due to that country’s budget crisis, maybe they would be even more against the bill Obama just signed given our exploding debt and financial woes.
With this in mind, it will be very interesting to see how this gets reported by the Obama-loving press in the days and weeks to come.
Stay tuned.
We’re down to the Elite Eight. How are your brackets doing? Have you been enjoying this tournament? Who survives the weekend and makes it to the Final Four?
