This is the video that East Asheville residents showed to City Council last night. It was a productive and positive meeting. I’m confident that all of Asheville is going to move more quickly towards a comprehensive multimodal transportation network. More soon!

From the Shuler – Miller comment thread comes this quote from Tom Sullivan.

Republicans play the long game. Like terriers with a knotted rope, they won’t let go. They can be the relentless, and that is how they defeat liberals over and over. They know that if they just hold out long enough, liberals will give up and go home. They may win nothing more than a knotted rope, but that is enough to keep them going. One setback for us and we are ready to throw in the towel.

Me, I’m just getting warmed up.

The Male Privilege Checklist

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

The Invisibility of Upper Class Privilege (.pdf)

Heterosexual Privilege Checklist

Russell Edson

The Bridge
In his travels he comes to a bridge made entirely of bones.
Before crossing he writes a letter to his mother: Dear mother,
guess what? the ape accidentally bit off one of his hands while
eating a banana. Just now I am at the foot of a bone bridge. I
shall be crossing it shortly. I don’t know if I shall find hills and
valleys made of flesh on the other side, or simply constant
night, villages of sleep. The ape is scolding me for not teaching
him better. I am letting him wear my pith helmet for
consolation. The bridge looks like one of those skeletal
reconstructions of a huge dinosaur one sees in a museum. The
ape is looking at the stump of his wrist and scolding me again.
I offer him another banana and he gets very furious, as though
I’d insulted him. Tomorrow we cross the bridge. I’ll write to
you from the other side if I can; if not, look for a sign . . .

The financial reform bill looks like it will come up for a vote in the Senate this week.

Senator Kay Hagan needs to hear from you. Give her a little coaching.

You know what to do.

202-224-6342
919-957-4630

Asheville shocked the nation last year with our brewing industry’s excellence and our online community’s enthusiasm for it. It’s time to defend the title against all comers.

You can vote by clicking here.

He left the world of the living two years ago, but Floyd Red Crow Westerman doesn’t let that stop him from having something to say about the Gulf oil spill.

Awhile back, I was calling Iraq: Whose War Is It Anyway? Where Everything’s Made Up and the Facts Don’t Matter. Well, the war is finally winding down, but facts still don’t matter. And to a lot of the same people. The married ones just got an $800 tax credit.

From USA Today:

Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman‘s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

[...]

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

So okay, it must be the spending. Digby nails the spending part:

You would think this news would come as a big relief to the tea partiers who seem to think they are enduring the suffering of Jesus under the tax burden. But it won’t. The anti-tax sentiment among middle and working class people actually means “stop giving my money to people I don’t like” (and among the Peterson level deficit fetishists, it’s “taxes are for the little people.”)

People have no problem spending zillions of deficit dollars on a trumped-up war so long as our kids are killing people we don’t like. It’s spending their money supporting people they don’t like that really gets people riled. That’s the only fact that really matters. That’s pretty sad.