Indian Marriage Love

Baked Goods Love

A House bill sponsored by Brevard Republican representative Trudi Walend would exempt baked goods from the state sales tax.

The bill defines baked goods as bread, rolls, buns, biscuits, bagels, croissants, pastries, donuts, danish, cakes, tortes, pies, tarts, muffins, bars, cookies, and tortillas.

As lovers of all things baked, Conservative Love would like to offer our endorsement for the bill.

"Oldest Democratic Rat in the Barn" Love

I thought I was fairly literate on the absurdities of NC politics over the last hundred years, but I just discovered this:

From 1936 to 1989, North Carolina had the SAME Secretary of State: Thaddeus Armie Eure.


Above: Sec. of State Thad Eure hangs out with his good friend Jim Graham, who served as Commissioner of Agriculture for 36 years (1964-2000).

That's right for 54 years this man served in the same elected office, and North Carolinians re-elected him 13 times. That's longer than Fidel Castro's 50 year hold on Cuba, and that's longer than Robert Byrd (48 years and counting) or Strom Thurmond (49 years) Senate tenures.

Above: Thad Eure in the 60's before he became known as "the rat."

Makes you long for the good old days, hunh?!

Here's more on him via Wikipedia:

Thaddeus Armie (Thad) Eure (1899-1993) was a North Carolina political figure who holds the record for longest tenure as North Carolina Secretary of State (1936-1989).Prior to his service as secretary of state, Eure served as mayor of Winton, NC, and as a state legislator. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan recognized Eure as having held public office longer than any official in the nation at that time, with more than 64 years of continuous service. In his later years, he was known as the "oldest rat in the Democratic barn." Ironically, in his first run for the office of Secretary of State, he asked voters to "give a young man a chance."

Infant Death Love

Surprise surprise.

After 25 years of de-funding basic public goods, infant mortality is on the rise, especially in the South where the impacts of federal and state support network defunding has been greatest. In Mississippi where 54,000 people lost Medicaid coverage, there were 65 more infant deaths in 2005 than in 2004.

Infant death, it turns out, is inversely proportional to the skyrocketing stock market and burgeoning GDP:

From 2004 to 2005, the Dow Industrial grew from 9,750 to 11,250, a 15.4% increase.

From 2004 to 2005, infant deaths in Mississippi went from 9.7 (per thousand) to 11.4, a 17.5 % jump.

PICTORIAL GRAPHIC:

This Exxon board member made 50 million more dollars last year in stock options.


As a result, this baby died.


Every dead baby ticks the stock market up, and every tick up creates more dead babies. Its a fully cannibalistic positive feedback loop, whose end, CLEARLY and LITERALLY, produces the consumption (and infant death) of itself.

Umbrella Love

Ethiopia



Fayetteville, NC

Vonnegut Love

We'll miss you:

Requiem

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Painting Dog Love

This dog is SO UNINHIBITED:




Above titled: Bluebirds




Above titled: Vesuvius




Above titled: Shadow People


This by the way reminds me of a HILARIOUS narcoleptic dog video Robin turned me on to years back:


Barring affirmative action bake sales and scurvy, painting/narcoleptic dogs are about as conservative inspiring as you can get.

Chomsky Love

From today's New York Times on "what is sexual desire":

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

Bill O'Reilly Goes Crazy Love

Conservative Love is Running High Today:

Multicultural Con

Yet further evidence that Republicans are increasingly being included as one of many distinct and important minority cultures co-existing under the grand arc of normative liberal multiculturalism.

"They have the right to celebrate their sexuality as we do ours," Miller said, adding that last Wednesday she went out to show her support for the CRs during Straight Pride day.

Love goes out to all courageous, heterosexual-affirming patriots who tirelessly endeavor to create spaces for straight people to celebrate their sexuality.

Apology Con

Sen. Tony Rand (D-Cumberland) proposed a resolution today expressing "profound regret" for slavery and legalized racial segregation.

After all, late's better than never!

If you have any ideas about what we'll belatedly (and emptily) be apologizing for fifty years from now email me.

Inequality Love

This just in:

Income inequality is increasing.

That's right. Income distribution is now as unequal as it was in 1928, right before the stock market fell. The top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes last year of more than $348,000 — now receive their largest share of national income since 1928.

But the beautiful thing about it is, despite this inequality, and despite the decline in incomes for the bottom 90%, no disaster is in sight. No upheaval is fomenting. No protest can be heard. All is peaceful (for the rich). Inequality keeps on trucking.

In 1928 when our country was as unequal as it is today, there were booming socialist and anarchist movements and even larger labor movements sweeping the country. All of them were itching to redistribute wealth, create public goods all could benefit from, and build a more equal society. And with populist leaders like Huey Long beginning to take up their call, the establishment was terrified.

To think, the New Deal was the CONSERVATIVE COMPROMISE legislation that was passed to preserve societal stability.

But today, things are different.

Not only are we NOT in a moment of economic questioning (few are seriously exploring ways to re-structure the economy or decrease inequality) NOT in a moment of populist outrage, and NOT in a moment of renewed vigor for public goods, but the remaining New Deal era amenities we still do have continue to be under threat of destruction.

Where's the outrage?

It's not because people are doing well themselves. Their incomes are actually decreasing as well, and goods like health-care are becoming more expensive at multiple times the rate of wage increases. And it's not because people don't know that incomes are becoming more unequal. If anything, with all the media exposure to the rich, and the unrealistic expectations of middle class life, people probably think things are MORE UNEQUAL than they actually are.

And that's the beauty. The dissatisfaction, declining wages, and growing inequality just doesn't translate.

Call it divine intervention, or the tenacity of the American spirit, or the inherited hope average Americans still hold that if they work hard enough they just might find gold in San Fran or start a lucrative farm in the 1910's Texas Panhandle.

Americans today just don't seem to get ruffled by inequality. Instead of condemning our billionaires who own entire economic sectors and continue to make money while average Americans go more and more into debt, we're able to look past that, love them as Jesus Christ would, and excuse their wealth accumulation. Or forget excuse, we think their money is awesome! I mean their money makes these PEOPLE awesome. Their money-filled lives rock.

Today we personalize the Billionaire. We normalize them. We victimize them. We love them.

The rich, after all, have for too long gotten the shaft, with labels like oppressor, exploiter, robber barron, king pin. We here at Conservative Love like to see their humanity. So we make them one of us. Creatively. Compassionately. Each empathy fully individualized.

That's why Conservative Love is here to speak individualized compassion into every one (billionaire that is).


Ted Turner: $10 billion, but he's so committed to the U.N. and women's reproductive rights. I wish a liberal rich man like that would come and marry me...!


George Soros: $20 billion, but he's our only hope for defeating Bush! Plus I might get a job at his Open Society Institute someday...!


Warren Buffet: $52 billion, but he's giving most of that money away... to a foundation that doesn't even bear his name (now that's humility!). In fact, he's so humble he even supports higher estate taxes on himself (talk about conspicuous non-consumption... I have so much money to burn that I long for it to be taxed)


Bill Gates: $56 billion, but he does such good things with his money... do you really think the U.S. government is better equipped to fight AIDS than his super innovative foundation is? Isn't it great that Bush's tax cut means more money to help Africans/rural High Schoolers!


John Grisham: His books got me through my divorce. And I wouldn't have started law school (then dropped out) if it wasn't for his Southern legal thrillers.


Oprah Winfrey: $2.8 billion... If anyone deserves it, Oprah does. After all, she's a poor black girl from Mississippi...you go girl...! We hope you get billions more.


Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, prince of Saudi Arabia: $27 billion. Okay, maybe we do have populist rage against this Arab-looking man's wealth.


Rupert Murdoch: $10 billion, He can't be that bad if he supports Hillary Clinton! And you know I'm a fiend for media moguls.


Julian Robertson: $1 billion. He gave my friends college scholarships AND he loves New Zealand. And that bus is stopping global warming.


Tim Gill: $8 billion... C'mon, he's gay! He might be rich but he still can't walk down the street holding his boyfriend's hand.


50 Cent: He had a tough life on the street. Rags to riches stories like his are what America is all about. We should celebrate, not condemn.


Dr. Phil McGraw: No one's more of a family values guy than Dr. Phil. He personally saved my marriage, by chastely refusing my sexual advances.


Olson Twins: Many tens of millions... You think you believe in social justice? Where were you when they were being worked half to death as child actors. They're sexy AND adorable. Sounds like money deserving logic to me.



Rick Warren: He's told me personally that he's doing it all for the Lord. In fact, he's so non-committed to money, that he's vowed to leave it all behind in the afterlife. And besides, think about how many souls he's saved!



Dave Chappelle: If anybody deserves money he does. He's funny as shit! Anybody that can make me laugh just from the memory of laughing at him, deserves the plata.


Angelina Jolie: She's fucking hot AND she's raising important awareness/sexiness about Africa with her money. I mean, had you ever heard of Namibia before she gave birth there?


Tom Monaghan: $Billions, He's a triple threat: pizza maker, church goer, champion of the unborn. That's justification enough.


Elton John: $200 million?, but my god that boy can sing. Plus, he's ALSO got the aforementioned gay card.


Lakshmi Mittal: $20 bill, but he's Indian. His people are suffering and he's got a large extended family who all want some of the goods. Give the guy a break.


J.K. Rowling: First of all, she used to be on welfare. And second of all, she brought us muggles and quidditch. If you're gonna be a hater, you better watch your back.


Conclusion?


Marie Antoinette: A victim of her own circumstances; Got a little carried away with excess. (We all make mistakes!) But she owed it to the French economy to conspicuously consume and waste abundantly. I mean, what would YOU/Sophia Coppola have done in her shoes...(For real you know she had some bad ass shoes)?

As much as Conservative Love normally loves raving mobs who take things into their own hands, we do feel bad for Marie Antoinette. Guillotine and all.

If only she had lived in 21st century America, she could have had a different fate. A real different fate. Not only would she not have been given the death penalty by the burgeoning masses, but she'd be in charge of a brand/TV show/product/movement that'd make her one of the most popular and beloved celebrities our country has seen. We'd all want her in our living rooms, and you know she'd be the first to popularize and glamorize a "cake to Africa" campaign, or some other equivalent.

It's these kinds of masses--the consuming, rich-loving, pacified kind-- for whom we've got nothing but love. They're a horde, we can get behind.

Insurance Company Denial Love

Few institutions get away with embodying the CON with as much impunity as the insurance industry.

First they scare Americans away from universal health care by telling them that it will be exhorbitantly inefficient. Then they spend 1/3 of their operating costs on denying claims, negotiating prices with doctors, and building complex Leviathans of document production and distribution that can confuse even health care legal scholars, causing America's NON-government system to be the most expensive and INEFFICIENT per capita system in the world.

They charge that a government-run system will be like having "Big Brother" be in control of a person's most personal health care decisions. Then the insurance companies themselves pervasively creep into the daily micro-management of doctors' decisions and peoples' health care needs, refusing to pay for many preventative procedures.

There's only one word that can adequately describe such hypocrisies: Brilliance.

And this brilliance is further unveiled today in the New York Times. The article examines long-term care insurers who consistently deny dying people's claims, sometimes as often as one in four times.

Here's a quote from Mary Beth Senkewicz, a former senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, that gets to the heart of the claim denying art.

“The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims,” she said. “They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die.”

Above: This woman has early-stage dementia, hypertension, and diabetes. She has been paying for long-term care insurance for the past twenty years, but her insurance company has denied all her claims, arguing that she should "get off her lazy ass and go out and support herself like a responsible American."

Above: The insurance companies are buying time with claim denial letters in hopes that this woman dies before her case is resolved. As they explained to her in a notarized letter, "By long-term care, we meant LONG-TERM CARE... you know the lawn maintenance kind that keeps your final resting place trim, green, and mowed."

Clearly, the hope-they-die business strategy has proved to be a huge success on Wall Street. It's a market innovation that would only be possible if a select few were making billions off of health care provision/denials and it certainly embodies the American dream by uncovering untapped profit potentials.

And that is something even the most viciously dogmatic moderate can have Conservative Love about.

Saul Alinsky Flirtation Con

Hillary Clinton, as it turns out, was genuinely interested in the confrontational Alinsky community organizing paradigm back in the later 1960's. She even considered taking a job with the Industrial Areas Foundation, one of Alinsky's Chicago-based groups, upon graduation from Wellesley.

Yet even then, Hillary-as-apartment-building-organizer-tirelessly-demanding-better-sidewalks or spearheader-of-civil-disobedience-events-to-demand-better-trash-pickups-in-poor neighborhoods, is hard to imagine.

Needless to say she didn't take the job, preferring to move into the more lucrative fields of law, business, and poltiics. But she did write her Wellesley college thesis about Alinsky, and she appears to have respect for many of Alinsky's philosophies and tactics. Here's an excerpt from Clinton's senior thesis taken from the Washington post:

Much of Alinsky's agenda, she wrote after interviewing him three times, "does not sound 'radical.' " Even his tactics, she concluded, were often "non-radical, even 'anti-radical.' His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them."

Among examples of Alinsky's methods, Clinton cited the 1961 decision to send 2,000 black Woodlawn community residents downtown en masse to register to vote. She mentioned activists picketing the suburban homes of slumlords and a mission to dump garbage outside the sanitation commission.

"In many cases," Clinton wrote, "the abrasive tactics paid off with the cancellation of double shifts in the schools, the increased hiring of Negroes by city businesses, growing responsiveness from the machine politicians, even some property repair."

Clinton believed that new federal poverty programs in the 1960s were a step backward because their architects neglected to listen to individual citizens -- the crux of the Alinsky model. The policies, she said, invited the poor "into the mainstream not through their participatory planning, but through their acquiescent participation."

Absolutely incredible, though it should be noted that this flirtation was brief, preferring to move into the more middle class and affluent worlds of second wave feminism.


Hillary, then and now, what does this tell us?

1. Clinton's past affinity for ground up, participatory community organizing means that she might have latent empathy for the working poor?

2. Her flirtation is seen as a thorough enough embarassment that she will do everything in her power to continue to cover it up and overcompensate against it?

3. Or should our lesson be that no matter how compassionate we try to be, no matter how much we think we really believe in democracy, justice, and the interconnectedness of humanity, and no matter how much we believe in social change, eventually all of us will be CONS.

Or even better, CONS pretending to be liberals.

Collard Festival Love

Today the NC House passed legislation making the Collard Festival in Ayden, NC the "Official Collard Festival of North Carolina." (H406, S387) Above: Samantha Holvey digests a fresh batch of homegrown greens. Many have said that she has brought new meaning to the word "collards."

This year it will be held September 3-9 in downtown Ayden, NC, located between Kinston and Greenville in Pitt County.

Ayden is also the home of the best barbeque joint in NC, but don't expect the General Assembly to speak this reality into Truth/Statute anytime soon. Combine hundreds of barbeque joints dispersed throughout 100 counties with the big moneyed localized barbeque lobby buy off of 90% of state legislators and you get a ton of competing claims. Talk about a grueling, diatribe-filled committee meeting!

But as far as the town of Ayden is concerned, they're happy with just being the state's official collard capital. In fact they plan to use it as a tool for economic development, hoping that festival goers will decide to settle down or open a business after stuffing their faces for a week with collards. Maybe the state can create a special incentive that would give anyone who settled down in Ayden free collards for life! That would make the high-tech companies start calling.

(In case you were wondering North Carolina already has three official state festivals -- the Hertford County Watermelon Festival, the Fair Bluff Watermelon Festival and Folkmoot U.S.-A in Waynesville as the official international festival. Hertford County's festival is the state's official northeastern watermelon festival while the Fair Bluff event is the state's official southeastern watermelon festival).

Thankfully, with this much love (and food) and festivals going around, we have plenty to keep us busy.

Daylight Savings Love

Daylight savings begins again Saturday, and like it has with almost every agency, bureaucracy, process, and precedent, the Bush Administration has left its stamp:

Daylight Saving Time rules have CHANGED beginning in the year 2007. Starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time (DST) begins each year at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on the second Sunday in March in most of the United States and its territories. Clocks must be moved ahead one hour when DST goes into effect. DST is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the state of Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe DST).

Standard Time begins each year at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on the first Sunday of November. Move your clocks back one hour at the resumption of Standard Time. In 2007, DST begins at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on March 11, 2007. In 2007, DST ends at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on November 4, 2007. The current Daylight Saving Time rules represent a change from the past.

On August 8, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included the changes in Daylight Saving Time described above, effective in 2007. Prior to 2007, DST began at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on the first Sunday in April, and ended at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on the last Sunday in October.

The new rules for DST beginning in 2007 mean an extra four or five weeks of DST each year. There will now be a total of 238 days of DST, compared to a total of 210 days of DST in 2006 under the previous rules, and the U. S. will remain on DST for about 65% of the year.

Such right-wing pervasion and such wonkishness increases our love.

GK Butterfield Love

There are few things that make me happier than G.K. Butterfield, the African-American Congressperson from NC's 1st Congressional District (he's on the right).






Wait.... there is one thing.


How about G.K. in a white lab coat behind President Bush in a white lab coat investigating ethanol-based energy solutions?

Yeah, that definitely makes me happier.

Thanks for increasing our happiness (and love) G.K.!!

NC Pride Love

Nothing says North Carolina love like a North Carolina, zip code embroidered tatoo.

Shout outs go to 214 N. Graham St., to Collin Lee, zip codes, and naturally, all other North Carolina-love filled body writing(s)!

Great work Collin... may you always return to these hallowed, and beautifully progressive-conservative, state lines!

Walmart Spreading Love

This video will fill you with a chilling, awe-inspiring love for Wal-Mart:

Superficially Tokenized Anecdote Con

In case anyone was wondering the name of the Congolese NBA star President Bush mentioned in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, here it is:

Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo
Above: Bush's human profiles were filled with diversities, especially of the height variety: NBA star Mutombo is 7'2" (center) and cellulosic ethanol geneticist Dr. Nancy Ho (2nd from left) is 4'10"

For more information on Mutombo check out Salon and his NBA profile.

Above: Mutombo even soars above other Africans! No wonder he's in the NBA!

Thank you President Bush for bringing the American people meaningful portraits of lives of struggle and success. If they continue to be this sensational and moving, we might forget to care about rapidly escalating inequalities, a patently failed foreign policy, and the destruction of our commons.

Copter Con

Helicopter service now takes Manhattanites to NYC-area airports for 169 US. Since helicopter use on average about 80-100 gallons of fuel an hour, New Yorkers now have the opportunity to multiply their airport travel economic footprint ten-fold. Another example of how the entrepeneurial spirit can create new consumer needs/goods that propel us into a more beautiful, consumption-laden, efficient future.

Sex-Selling Global Warming Love

Global Warming just got HOT!

Diesel's launched a new campaign called "Global Warming Ready."

Thanks for getting us ready Diesel. And for showing that 1. the bourgeouise, sexy life can be had in any post-apocalyptic context, 2. ironic critiques of government ineptitude/ public malaise on impending world crises can also (apparently) help sell jeans, and 3. anything can be eroticized !

Maybe next you can eroticize malnutrition. Oh wait...

"Replacing C with K" Kon Love

Evidence from my recent journey through North Carolina and Georgia:

Atlanta, GA

All over the South

Richfield, NC

Atlanta, GA

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the K replacing phenomenon:

Replacing the letter "c" with "k" in the first letter of a word came into use by the Ku Klux Klan during its early years in the mid to late 1800s. The concept is continued today within the ranks of the Klan. They call themselves "konservative KKK" or "klonservatives".

It was common among 1960s and early 1970s United States leftists to write Amerika rather than "America" in referring to the United States. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and is still used in political statements today [6],[7] It is likely that this was originally an allusion to the German spelling of America, and intended to be suggestive of Nazism, a hypothesis that the Oxford English Dictionary supports. It may additionally have been an allusion to the title of Franz Kafka's 1927 novel Amerika.

In the 1987 TV miniseries Amerika, it denoted a Soviet-conquered United States of America.

In broader usage, the replacement of the letter "C" with "K" denotes general political skepticism about the topic at hand and is intended to discredit or debase the term in which the replacement occurs. [8] Detractors sometimes spell former president Bill Clinton's name as "Klinton" or "Klintoon".

Non-Human Con

"A Google spokeswoman said the company has an extensive privacy policy to ensure no humans at Google read user e-mail."

Church Sign Con

Seen or heard in Henderson and Wake counties:

"Exposing the myth of the da Vinci Code"
-South Henderson Pentecostal Church

Spirit FM: "Tomorrow on Wake Up with God: 'Wacky animal stories!'"

"Need a new Life? God Accepts Trade-ins"
-Kittrell Church of God

Fishing-Catching-Dipping-Chocolate Sprinkles Love

ARYE DWORKEN On Adam Baker's band, Annuals:

Baker is describing his songwriting methods, and I have no fucking idea what he is talking about: "Fishing, catching something really small, dipping it into candle wax repeatedly, and then decorating it. Dipping it into candle wax again and then dipping it into chocolate sprinkles, not rainbow sprinkles—rainbow sprinkles are played out—and then you have a song."

Completely and totally and fully, entirely beautiful Adam. We at Conservative Love applaud you.

(Unfortunately, after taking your advice on how to write a song we inflicted third degree burns on ourselves that not only prevented us from arriving at the chocolate sprinkles step, but also in the end, didn't produce a song).

デミグラビーフ (Sausage Stuffed Crust) Love

Yet another example of the "exoticism of the subtlety different familiar"-CON.

And as always, lubidinous con-on-con love goes out to Robin for spreading the word about such mouth watering, ideologically titillating, post-industrial orientalizing delights!

Mustached Love

Exodus International Love

Excerpts from their website:

"As a talented rock musician who played alongside some of the most famous bands of the 60's and 70's, Kent was the last person you'd expect to struggle with same-sex attractions, let alone become one of the early trailblazers of the Exodus movement."

"The occurrence of a homosexual attraction or feeling did not mean, "I am a homosexual." I could experience temptation, but resist it and walk in freedom! I also began to have a relationship with God as my "Abba," a word of intimacy similar to "Daddy" in the original biblical language. He was the only source of meeting my needs."

"If life is static and non-changing, then all you get is black and white. It’s only when people allow themselves to grow and mature as people and human beings that they see the world through colored eyes. The people of Pleasantville change when they do something freely and of their own will. Only then do the roads open up and the life beyond the town exists."

War is Homo Love

This picture increases our conservative love: