Dimwits, Part 2 (Okay, we won't call them Southern, but you'll know.)

Our first story is from Louisville, Kentucky. Turns out the fountains in Waterfront Park were skanky, from people allowing poopie diaper babies to wade there, and homeless people taking baths in the fountain, etc.

Officials tried posting signs warning of bacteria, to no avail. So some wiseacre official ordered this sign posted by the fountain:



Thank God for the internet. The online edition of the Louisville Courier-Journal reminds all of us that "The water in the fountain pools is, like all water, made of two-thirds hydrogen atoms and one-third oxygen atoms."

Oh there I go thanking God with one hand and promoting science with the other. Again...

However, now that the signs telling people about "the hydrogen part" are posted, "bacteria [has] dropped to safe levels as people avoided the fountains."

So I was telling Mr. Blue Gal about this series and he reminded me that there are people throughout the deep South who would take issue that Kentuckians are actual Southerners because their state did not join the Confederacy. Talk about holding a grudge for a lost cause. Next thing you know we'll restart the Francisco Franco death watch. (Feels like it, donnit?)

But I digress. So since stories of dimwits from a certain region always come in three's, let's make sure this last one actually comes from a real Confederate state: Alabama! (and major props to "Don's Political Parlor and Home of Lawn Mower Repair", a go-to blog on Alabama politics.)

Terri Willingham Thomas (R- you're kidding!) is running in Cullman County, Alabama for a seat on the Court of Civil Appeals. Like any white person who has more than three generations of the family living in Alabama, it appears a leaf or two on her family tree actually has a white pointy sheet head-covering. Okay, let's not sugarcoat it: Looks like maybe Terri's own parents were in the Klan. Not saying, just suggesting. Now, lemme tell you, if somebody "suggested" that my parents were or had ever been members of the Ku Klux Klan? Oh, ma hunnies, I would have a response. Terri did, too:

"...if her parents were in the Klan, she wasn't made aware of it."

In other words, Meemaw and Daddy did not talk about the cross-burnings at the actual dinner table. Okay, give her a pass. I mean, it's not like she ever actually solicited votes from a white supremacist group herself. Oh, wait...



"Thomas declined to repudiate [the CCC's] beliefs because she said she doesn't know what they believe in." But she conducts a friendly visit and asks for votes. Bless her heart.

Now I'm not saying that the Council of Conservative Citizens is a white-supremacist group. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls them that. Um, actually, that's good enough for me. But Terri Willingham Thomas likes to think for herself, darn it! She says "she won't rely solely on [SPLC's] analysis of the group."

I almost hate to post this, but this is the Southern Poverty Law Center's "analysis" of the group:

The organization routinely denigrated blacks as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called homosexuals "perverted sodomites," and accused immigrants of turning America into a "slimy brown mass of glop."

Oh yeah, the Anti-Defamation League and the Coalition of Latino Organizations don't like them, either. Now why would a candidate for JUDGE have a hard time investigating a public group? She could Google it. And deciding whether statements like that are right or wrong? Isn't that what Judges are supposed to do?

Doc says it best:

She is a judge who cannot find enough information about a public group to evaluate its positions?

But more important, she is unwilling to act on the understanding that people are not as interested in what the CCC believes as in what she believes. She doesn't have to know what the CCC believes to disclaim racist beliefs.

Unless it might make Mommy and Daddy upset.

UPDATE: Yeah, the CCC is the white supremacist group in that photo with George Allen, too.