Republicans are certainly doing a bang-up job recruiting the black vote in red states like Mississippi ahead of 2016, you know. Get them to talk about a common subject like education funding, and they’ll find a way to relate to the average black voter.
State Rep. Gene Alday, R-Walls, doesn’t believe any more funding is needed. “I don’t see any schools hurting,” he said.
But then he went on to say that Mississippi “has a lot of bad school districts. The people are electing superintendents that don’t know anything about education.”
The former mayor of Walls (population 1,248) went on to say, “I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks.’ They don’t work.”
He had to go to the emergency room for pain, he said. “I liked to died. I laid in there for hours because they (blacks) were in there being treated for gunshots.”
Feel the outreach, baby! Man, I just want to go vote for these guys right now.
Why, I can’t imagine why the party of Lincoln has an image problem among black voters.
japa21
I’ll just sit back and wait for the fireworks to start.
Belafon
Saw a news story yesterday about a town in Vermont where 30 people got busted for food stamp fraud. Hard to imagine, I know, but all of them were white. (OK, sarcasm related to it being hard to imagine.)
trollhattan
What’s that line–“I find your offer acceptable.”
Flabbergasting to me that the 1950s are alive and well and venerated in swathes of the nation. Such a mouth on that boy.
Baud
Looks like someone wants Steve Scalise’s job.
BGinCHI
This guy is going to have Boehner’s job if he keeps up this level of political chess.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
We do keep saying that they want to go back to the 50s. Not sure if they realize exactly (OK pretty sure they really don’t) what that means but it is what they want.
Mustang Bobby
@Ruckus: Some people are nostalgic for a polio epidemic and “duck and cover.” Oh, and the Edsel.
Bobby B.
Once more, fuckthesouth.com
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I’m pretty sure they are not eager to go back to 1950s tax rates.
Shakezula
He and this judge should take their outreach act on the road.
Citizen Alan
Sigh. The dumb SOB is from Walls, MS (pop. 2000). It’s in Desoto County, which makes is a white flight area from Memphis. Heavily GOP. I imagine he’ll run unopposed in the next election.
The Ancient Randonneur
Was the local supermarket out of T-bone steaks?
Amir Khalid
Even though I’ve followed some if the history, I’m astounded at how thoroughly the Party of Lincoln has abandoned his principles and taken up those of the Confederacy.
Ruckus
@Mustang Bobby:
Some people are fucking idiots.
Had this conversation with someone yesterday. How the measles vaccine had killed 30 some people in one year, yet measles hadn’t killed any. Asked him how many people he knew that had had measles as a child and what effects they had suffered. Like me with encephalitis. The reason people aren’t dying here with these diseases are because of the vaccines for them that most take. When most stop you will see people die from them. But he’s a libertarian gun advocate, so anything that he doesn’t approve of (which is a lot of stuff that makes a society work, and worth living in, but which doesn’t affect him directly) he doesn’t want to have anything to do with.
BGinCHI
We need to get Conservatism into the next DSM.
It’s definitely a mental illness.
geg6
@Belafon:
It’s been on Facebook today. I put it on my timeline and commented “Notice anything about this?” I expect the wingnuts to be going nuts in comments in 3, 2, 1…
Joey Maloney
@Citizen Alan: I was just coming to say – it’s not some ass-end-of-nowhere shithole. It’s a solidly exurban white-flight shithole. And the blacks that formerly made up most of the population are saying “there goes the neighborhood” and heading on down Highway 61.
Halley's Barber
“I had a lot of people ask me to run, thinking that possibly I could make a small change,” said Alday, a Republican. “I’m very familiar with small businesses and I’m very familiar with small towns and small towns have needs that other towns don’t.”
Alday has been the mayor of the Town of Walls for six years and was the town’s police chief for the four years before that.
Alday’s biggest concern is overspending on the state level and spending money in places where it isn’t needed. He said being the mayor of a town with a small budget has prepared him to keep spending to a minimum.
The Ancient Randonneur
@Roger Moore:
Wrong century.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
There were votes there for the taking.
Sherparick
@trollhattan: Agree, except it is the 1850s that they are nostalgic for. The Party of Jeff Davis is more like it.
greennotGreen
@Ruckus: Re: gun advocate: The other day I saw a car that in the place where many people have stick figures of their families had cartoons of several guns.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
They want what they want, not what really was. The biggest thing a lot of conservatives seem to want is a return to a time when the world as they know it was white bread merica. POC knew their places, the back of the bus, out back of the dinner, servants/slaves, anywhere really that they didn’t have to be bothered by the cooties that they just know POC have.
Violet
Uh huh. Going to the ER for “pain.” Sure….
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Ruckus:
And when you say “the 50s,” you really mean the 1850s. Otherwise, you still have Brown v Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott clogging up their beautiful landscapes.
Also, something like 100,000 people die of the measles every year. It’s just that they’re not in the US, where the disease is virtually eliminated except for morons who take their sick kids to Disneyland.
Violet
@greennotGreen: Were the stick figures’ guns pointing at the other stick figures? Only seems right.
Sherparick
@Amir Khalid: Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Although not the only books on the subject, Perlstein’s books (“Before the Storm,” “Nixonland,” and “The Invisible Bridge”) explain the movement of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party of FDR to the Republican Party of Reagan.
Tommy
Just read that story over lunch. Asked about the comments, and I couldn’t even make this up, he kept digging:
“It was late at night and he called me,” Alday said of his earlier interview with Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell. “He asked me a question back to when I was in law enforcement … I have a way of talking and saying, ‘take this off the record.'” […]
But Alday said the reporter failed to write about the numerous times Alday has helped people of all races in his community, whether that meant giving them rides to the doctor or providing credit on merchandise at the store run by his family.
I have said this a hundred, maybe a thousands times. Just when I think the Republican party can’t surprise me anymore, they prove they in fact can and often do multiple times a day.
Ruckus
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Not really, they just don’t have any idea of actual history of the 1950s, just a distorted one. Like a person with 20/400 vision trying to drive at night without correction, but wearing a welding helmet.
Mike in NC
Only a class act like Newt Gingrich could have come up with “Food Stamp President”.
Gin & Tonic
@Violet: ER nurses and pharmacists can smell that behavior from a mile away.
Zandar
@Citizen Alan: Hence the “I Can’t Believe We’re Losing To These People” tag.
If anything, Alday wins in 2016 by a larger margin.
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: 1950s society with 1980s taxes. Equals 1820s infrastructure and 1870s grandfather clauses by my math. Yep, pretty sure that’s what they want.
Shakezula
@Ruckus: Measles kills someone (usually young children) every 16 hours, based on the latest stats from WHO.
But I think in the U.S. people brush off how very sick it makes kids because they think “Oh, I’ll just take him to the hospital.” Like staying in the hospital is fun for kids.
Heh. That stood out to me as well. Guess his regular doctor cut him off.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Yeah, I asked him about countries that don’t have measles vaccine programs, or decent ones anyway, and how many people died from the fucking measles. I’m just old enough to have had most all the diseases that people no longer have to suffer from because of vaccines, and know people who did have the others. Anti-vaxers are fucking idiots, there is just no other way around that.
Redshift
@Ruckus: The common basis for conservatism the world over is a desire to return to an idealized imagined past that never was. Even if the conservative movement here has gone completely off the rails compared to people who call themselves conservatives in other industrialized countries, they still have that in common.
Kropadope
@trollhattan:
This isn’t exactly so. The same folks who venerate the more-complete-than-now dominance of the white race that prevailed in the 50s don’t celebrate the socialism of the 50s. It’s likely not the socialism itself that bothers them, but the fact that they can no longer exclude darker segments of the population from benefitting from it. So now no one gets it.
Violet
@Gin & Tonic: Yep. And the fact that he said “went to the ER for pain” is a tell. Most people have a defined reason to go. If it’s pain, they can tell you, “I injured my foot” or something like that. “Pain” is a tell.
RSA
@Ruckus:
Holy crap, that’s some poor reasoning. The CDC shows fewer than 200 cases of measles in the U.S. in 2013, with a spike to triple that in 2014. So we’re talking about 30 deaths (if that’s true) of around 3 million vaccines given to one-year-olds versus no deaths (again, I don’t know) out of 200.
Belafon
@Roger Moore: Someone was talking about how they wanted to go back to the 50s when America was doing everything, and I asked them if they wanted to go back to a 90% upper marginal tax rate. I didn’t hear anything else.
Ruckus
@Redshift:
Exactly.
It must be easier to only look backwards if one’s head is stuck up their ass..
Kropadope
@Redshift:
There’s nothing conservative about these clowns. They’re social reactionaries and radical economic liberals. Compare this to the Democrats, who are social liberals and economic conservatives.
In short, don’t accept Rush Limbaugh’s redefinition of words.
Ruckus
@RSA:
Best health care in the world!
We’ll spend untold dollars fixing you when you catch something that we could have stopped with a $20 vaccine. That you may have life long effects from that disease that we could have stopped with that $20 is also irrelevant.
Starfish
This was a really great speech by Judge Reeves in Mississippi about the racially motivated killing of James Craig Anderson in 2011.
Kropadope
@Violet: I read a lot of medical charts at my work and I can tell you that simple “pain” is a very, VERY common reason to go to the emergency room. Pain means that something is wrong. If you don’t know why you have this pain or if it may correlate to a known medical condition, you certainly want to go have it checked out. Especially once you’ve reached a certain age.
TooManyJens
@Violet: I want to push back on this a little, because I have friends who live with chronic pain, and one in particular frequently has to go to the ER for injections for a migraine. (If asked, she’d probably say she went for a migraine and not just for “pain,” but the latter’s hardly inconceivable.) People with chronic pain have a lot of trouble getting the help they need because of the perception that everyone’s just after drugs. Maybe this guy is and maybe he’s not, but I’m worried about the splashback effect of the speculation.
Ruckus
@RSA:
No real understanding of cause and effect. Unless it directly affects them. It’s why libertarians say the are not part of society. I always just ask them how they got here. Then I ask them the last time they shopped in a supermarket. Or if they live in a lean to that they build in the wild and only hunt and fish for food not using any tools that they didn’t build themselves from metal that they mined. By that time I usually get blank stares.
JustRuss
@Bobby B.:
If only. I was just visiting in-laws in Washington state, and the subject of MLK Day came up. Let’s just say racist fuckery isn’t limited to the sub-Mason-Dixon. Too bad, because they’re lovely folks otherwise. Aside from the homophobia, although they’re making progress there.
SiubhanDuinne
@Belafon:
I’ve seen it on Facebook today, assuming it is the story from northern NY state (probably very close to the Vermont border) — mug shots of one white face after another. Kind of messes up the narrative, doesn’t it?
ETA: Or what geg6 said at #16
shelley
Yeah, it’s called ‘triage’ ya moron.
bemused
A TN Rep wants inserted into state constitution that our liberties come not from government but from God. Nothing about our responsibilities from God.
Ruckus
@TooManyJens:
As a chronic pain and migraine sufferer I get where you are coming from. But I will say that my friend with sickle cell has to go to a specific hospital when having an episode as no one else will believe it without records. Maybe not everyone going to an ER/doc for pain is faking but many are.
boatboy_srq
@shelley: He’s worth more than they are, so his pain is more important than their imminent demise from 2nd Amendment remedies and SYG (after all, if they were shot, then they deserved it). The layers are multiple and odiferous.
Violet
@Kropadope: Of course it’s important to have pain checked out.
I’ll only say that people I know who work or have worked in ERs say the med-seeking is pretty common. And undefined “pain” is usually the story they’re given. People with real issues are more specific about what their pain is related to. Chest pain, leg pain, hurts to breathe. Whatever.
@TooManyJens: Absolutely, the people most hurt by the drug seekers are the people with real issues. But, as you said, people with actual medical problems usually say what the problem is. Migraine. RA flare. Back pain. It’s less common to say you went to the ER for “pain” without a qualifier as to what kind of pain. So it stood out to me.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kropadope:
I think that’s only a little bit true. They see liberal policies – like a social safety net – as having elevated blacks. The more blacks are elevated, the more angrily they push back at anything they perceive as liberal. They don’t know how environmental protection is at fault, but liberals want it and liberals caused a black man to be president, so fuck environmental protection. The same with gun laws, regulating big businesses, increasing taxation on the rich, bringing back POWs…
Kropadope
@Violet: Yeah. Still though, a lot of people present to the ED with pain, not further specified. It may be because we screen out patients with drug problems before seeing them, but the majority of such complaints that I see are not drug seekers. (I’m the one who does a lot of that screening, though. Unless the hospital pre-screens for us, I’m pretty sure my sample is fairly representative.
Kropadope
@Frankensteinbeck:
If those people don’t want to breathe dirty air or have their business destroyed by industrial pollution, they should get a job and move to the suburbs. The other suburbs.
Zandar
@Frankensteinbeck: This.
There is a massive segment of the American voting population that will vote against something that they perceive will end up benefiting “those people”.
The only reason Social Security still exists is because the average lifespan of a black male is 71. And you can just raise the retirement age to that number.
kc
@Violet:
Um, I’ve done it. It happens.
kc
@Violet:
Oh. To be clear, when I went to the ER it was for excruciating lower back pain (once) and neck pain (one other time). Both time the result of muscle strain and spasms, not things that would show up on an x-ray. It would have been dreadful if the ER staff/docs had thought I was just faking it, but fortunately that was not an issue.
kc
Anyway, Rep. Gene Alday is an ignorant jerk.
chopper
to be fair, it must hurt a great deal to have your head so far up your ass.
Kropadope
@kc: Pain is also sometimes all over or difficult to describe. Some patients also have cognitive defects (like being a Republican politician for example) which prevent them from describing the pain clearly.
He also may have just said pain to the interviewer because there’s no real reason to go that deeply into his medical history when it’s only passingly related to the subject at hand.
Violet
@kc: And experienced ER nurse or doctor will be able to tell your pain was real. Usually, anyway.
@Kropadope: Yeah, the interview may have been truncated or condensed for space in the article. It just seems odd to me. Either say you went to the ER or be more specific. It’s the non-specific “pain” that seems suspect. Combined with his racist whining that he wasn’t being seen while all the gunshot victims were, it’s even more striking. I guess he’s never heard of triage. Or, more likely, he thinks any black people should be put in line behind him.
Kropadope
@Violet: I’m just amazed he knew the black people who were there were there for GSWs. HIPAA compliance at that hospital must be atrocious.
kc
@Kropadope:
Yes, I didn’t mean to lose sight of the real issue, which is Alday’s dumb-ass statements about “the blacks” and welfare.
Violet
@Kropadope: Maybe he’s just the chatty type and he went over to every person in the ER and asked them why they were there.
Villago Delenda Est
We’re going to need a couple of Manhattan Project/Apollo Program like operations for rapid tumbrel construction and sour apple tree planting to dispose of filth like this Alday asshole.
Villago Delenda Est
@JustRuss: You’re right, and these vile types are south of the Columbia here in deep blue Oregon as well.
gelfling545
I’d expect a fair number of his supporters to end up in the ER for gun shots as well because FREEDOM.
Apparently he is now saying that he is not racist because he was speaking off the record or some such. Jaysus.
grandpa john
@Violet: MY last visit to the ER , I was certainly relieved at how fast I went to the head of the line when I told them I was there for chest pain that was extending to my left arm and my back. Yes it was what was indicated. later that night I got a balloon up an artery and another stint.
MattF
Reality, I guess, is that we’re seeing the net effect of non-racists moving out of Mississippi and racists moving in. Why would anyone want to live there?
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Kropadope:
I’m guessing that he thinks triage should be based on the color of one’s skin, or at least one’s ability to pay, rather than based on whose medical condition is the most life-threatening.
I once had to sit in the ER for a couple of hours after I complained of chest pain, but they did an EEG immediately on arrival and figured out it wasn’t my heart, so I got bumped back down on the triage scale.
(It was pleurisy/pleuritis, which hurts like hell because your lungs are scraping the inside of your chest wall, but is not immediately life-threatening.)
cckids
@shelley:
Also, if (as he tried to clarify) this happened while he was either mayor or police chief, WTF? Of where, Baghdad? How many shootings are going on day in & day out? I live here in Sin City & have spent WAY too much time in ER’s, and even we don’t have that many shootings.
Geeno
Social Security didn’t cover blacks initially (to get the Southern Dems to support it), but once in place, it was expanded. Conservatives (the “grass roots”) want to go back to when the safety net only protected whites, and that was okay – nobody thought that was a “bad” thing. Conservatives (the Leadership) want to go back to when there was no safety net, and proles would just die if they outlived their usefulness. If you ran an enlightened place of business, you’d let former employees beg out front.
Citizen Alan
@Kropadope: One of my favorite bits of historical trivia is the fact that in 1936, FDR took Mississippi with 98% of the vote. Because Mississippians are fine with Socialism so long as they didn’t have to share the benefits with black folks.
Citizen Alan
@MattF: Desoto County is across the state line from Memphis, TN, which has a black run city government. This makes it a prime white flight area that can never be targeted for annexation.
Jeffro
@Sherparick: hey whoa, whoa there, let’s go with the full “party of Jefferson Davis”, por favor
Another Holocene Human
@Violet: Exactly. And he’s whining and crying about the fact that his non emergency kept him waiting 3 hours (not really long at all compared to urban wait times in public hospitals) and spins these fantasies about why he was triaged. Pro-tip: hospital staff do not tell you about other patients’ admission status and conditions. Even if staff did disclose they had some level 1 trauma gunshot wound shit going on, how would you know age/sex/race? Oh that’s right, you wouldn’t.
Narcissistic. Personality. Disorder. With a pill “problem” too? Possibly.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: He’s a narcissist who is shitty at putting out that false front. Unlike extremely successful cons like Bill Cosby and Steve Jobs. (To be fair, Jobs experimented with some seriously mind-altering substances that changed him … somewhat. Tripping balls may be the only … partial … treatment for NPD that has any efficacy whatsoever. Besides wanting to change, and they rarely do.)
Another Holocene Human
@Kropadope: Yeah. But he got triaged and is crying about it. Apparently it wasn’t a serious condition after all.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: Aside from the fact that his stories about who got in ahead of him are almost certainly completely made up.
Another Holocene Human
@kc: Neither of those are life-threatening conditions. His crying about waiting a whole three hours in the ER waiting room is just a little too cute to me.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: Based on population/census, I don’t think too many people are moving in.
The ones who are left behind have kids so population could stay same even with adults moving away annually.
sm*t cl*de
Do they not have a decent dominatrix in his hick town?
Kropadope
@sm*t cl*de: I’m glad to see you had such a refreshing take on this.