Fargo (the film) - Breaking Bad

A question: would there have been a Breaking Bad without the Coen Bros. Fargo?

Is the total sad sack, Jerry Lundgarde, who remains a loser

the father of the total sad sack Walter White, who become a king of crime in a sad sack turn-around?

Yah, one is set on blizzard-swept northern prairie and the other in the southwest desert, both equally filled with bleak desperation for many.

Personally, I gave up on Breaking Bad early on, disliking it very much. However, I kept watching the film, Fargo, and now the television series, because there is nothing I know as deeply in my dna as this:

or this:

The Fargo Forum's History of the KKK in North Dakota

This is news, at least to me.  I'd no idea, until today's Fargo Forum put up a history of Ku Klux Klan. Evidently the Forum went into their archives about  KKK activity in the Red River Family because of this:

Three mischievous fans of the Roughriders’ hockey team flouted a taboo when they recently wore hooded Ku Klux Klan robes to taunt the opposing squad. But the Red River High School hockey spectators might not have known just how prevalent the Ku Klux Klan once was in the Red River Valley – nor that Grand Forks, home of Red River High, was a hotbed for the group, which railed against Catholics, blacks, Jews, Asians and foreigners.

Some Fargo residents are outraged that there are members of the Fargo community  who were outraged by the fans demonstrating support for their sports team by donning KKK robes and masks.  It's all in good fun, right? dressing up in the robes of those who lynched and in many others ways shoved a reign of terror upon unnumbered communities throughout the U.S. in the teens and twenties and into the thirties, and did it as much so in North Dakota as in Tennessee?  So what's the problem? Get grip!  Lighten up!  Laugh a little!  This ain't no thang.

It is history, and we know all too well how easily history repeats itself.

Excellent work, Fargo Forum. Thank you for showing, not telling us, so to speak, that none of us anywhere can be too vigilant when it comes to representing bigotry and the evil it performs in even the slightest of a positive light.

A Ku Klux Klan robe, modeled here on a mannequin, is part of North Dakota State University’s Emily Reynolds Costume Collection. The historic robe is not used in classes and is not on display to the general public. The garment was found in the 1950s by a man who worked as a Fargo trash collector. An NDSU employee discovered the robe and hood at an auction sale and bought it for $18, according to a 1990 NDSU Spectrum story.

Evidently grandpa died and the kids, cleaning out the closets, chose to throw out his old KKK robes instead of donating them along with rest of his clothes to the Salvation Army.

There are links to more photos and related stories that provide a profile of a Red River Valley KKK member of those days.  It isn't what you think, and it's shocking, because one of them at least, is an immigrant himself, from Croatia.

Disaster State -- North Dakota

The flooding in North Dakota has made it a state of disaster, even more so, it looks like, than the terrible blizzard and flood year of 1997.

I've been getting e-mail and phone reports. Relatives and friends are needing to evacuate, all up and down the Red River Valley. Many fear they will lose their homes. Even my step-mom is anxious, and her home is far from the river, relatively speaking.

It's no better further west. Bismark had to shut down state capital business due to flood threat.

Blizzard and flooding simultaneously -- only in the midwest. I'm waiting for the additional flourish of tornadoes plus thunderstorms to make the mix of catastrophic weather complete.

Listening to the Locals: North Dakota

Adam Blomeke, a blogger at the site, North Decoder, writes about Our State's political state on Daily Kos today.

Read it here.

He says, "It's exciting for North Dakota to finally be a player in the electoral college." Though I haven't lived in ND since leaving it at age 18, I feel the same way.

Ed Schultz and his liberal radio show (he bills it as "Where America Comes to Talk"), which he started on a Fargo radio station, has had a lot to do with this, it may well be. In other words, Air America has had an effect, despite its very low numbers, i.e. funding and access -- and even though it's gotten too limousine liberal for me, owned by the big real estate Greene family here in NYC now. It didn't start that way. It's shifted way right, er, centerist, since they took it over. It's all about Ariana Huffington, Robert J. Kennedy, Jr., Mark Greene and other wealthy Dem elite celebrities.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the rank-and-file Air America crew has worked tirelessly and enthusiastically since its inception during the darkest days of the regime that seemed to be permenently installed as the single oligarchical ruling class, as the neoCONs blithely, publicly, declared was the Goal.

Starting with the splendid, highly educated, highly articulate Laura Flanders, who travels constantly around the nation, connecting activist communities to each other from Utah to Louisiana (and which it seems to me Ed Schultz has imitated with his "Town Halls", though he charges admission to them, like everything else in his heavily merchandized bully pulpit). She gave us hope. She showed us we were not as alone, as solitary, as isolated as we felt. And if we would get off our duffs, and connect again with our communities, we can make a difference.

It seems to me, since Air America gave Schultz its prime slot, the noon to 3 gig, is that he's far better than Tom Hartman, who had the slot prior to Ed (Al Franken had it first). Hartman started as a CON, before seeing the light, and it shows. He wastes far too airtime by giving it away for days at a time going to cover rightwing gatherings and letting them talk. The right wing owns the primary media; they don't need the air time -- and besides they loathe the Fairness Doctrine and got it repealed, allowing Limbaugh to thunder hate speech for decades now to all of the U.S.A that isn't pockets with more choice in radio listening like NYC.

Schultz, also, when times get really rough, as they did immediately post the mcpln bounce and coo, never loses faith. He keeps people going. And again, for anyone living where you have no choice in radio other than limbaugh and religous armageddon broadcast, Schultz and everything on Air America is a tonic beyond price. Even in NYC, with the largest public radio broadcasting station in the country, having an alternative to the corporate blandness and determination not to offend their big corporate sponsors and doners -- who are, well, corporations and definitely not leftist, much less Democrat -- Big Eddie and Air America can be a great antidote.

When they brought in Rachel Maddow, I quit listening to "All Things Considered." The bland lies ATC propagates, their slants of unexamined assumption and statement as facts things that are not, have just become too slimey to swallow without either gagging or yelling, and I don't want to expend energy doing either.

I just wish Ron Kuby were more of something or other, or less. I'm not sure. When I heard him the other day blithering on with a neoCON attorney about why the whole idea of a Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting in this day and age was risible, I had to restrain myself from going to the show's blog and writing a whole chronology of what has happened to the news media since the corporate media moguls got the Fairness Doctrine repealed. The consequences? Iraq, for one. The theft of one, if not two, national elections.

A proof? Today in the NY Times there's a story about the nervous nelly Dems who won't allow themselves to believe that perhaps the Dem candidate will become POTUS, despite the many favorable signs. The article blithely mentions in passing the reasons Dems are such nervous nellies this year, "one if not two elections stolen." This is the first time the NY Times has ever acknowledged that the 2000 election WAS stolen. If it wasn't for the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine they might have had to admit much, much ealier, because the news journalism on the old school public broadcasting networks would have said so, the alternate weekly papers (which no longer exist other than to provide adverstising to local communities for escort services, etc.) would have beat the drums about it, and so on and so forth. So this is why despite how obviously intelligent Kuby is, he puts forth way too often some really ignorant ideas. He spent far too much time as the only nonwhackorightwingnut with Curtis Sliwa. He still hasn't purged himself of all he's unconsciously absorbed from that long-time, lucrative gig. Time for him to get over it.

Air America also receives the accolade of providing the first Female, Lesbian, Leftist, Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. in Political Science, political pundit, Rachel Maddow to the wider world of prime time television political punditry.

Laura Flanders and Rachel Maddow. That's pretty darned good. But the Greenes have determined Laura not rich / successful / celebrity enough to have a show on here, in NYC, the Air America flagship station. That is bad. Very, very bad. And stupid too.

Sober North Dakotans Hope to Legalize Hemp

[ OSNABROCK, N.D. — David C. Monson seems an improbable soul to find at the leading edge of a national movement to legalize growing hemp, a plant that shares a species name, a genus type and, in many circles, a reputation, with marijuana.

As Mr. Monson rolls past his wheat, barley and shimmering yellow fields of canola, he listens to Rush Limbaugh in his tractor. When he is not farming, he is the high school principal in nearby Edinburg, population 252. When he is not teaching, he is a Republican representative in Bismarck, the state capital, where his party dominates both houses of the legislature and the governor is a Republican.

“Look at me — do I look shady?” Mr. Monson, 56, asked, as he stood in work boots and a ball cap in the rocky, black dirt that spans mile after mile of North Dakota’s nearly empty northern edge. “This is not any subversive thing like trying to legalize marijuana or whatever. This is just practical agriculture. We’re desperate for something that can make us some money.”
The rocks, the dirt, the cool, wet climate and a devastating crop fungus known as scab are part of what has landed North Dakota, of all states, at the forefront of a political battle more likely to have emerged somewhere “a little more rebellious,” as one farmer here put it, like California or Massachusetts.

Though federal authorities ban the growing of hemp, saying it contains tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive substance better known as THC in marijuana, six states this year considered legislation to allow farmers to grow industrial hemp, and Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, introduced a bill in Washington that would let states allow such crops. In state legislatures, the advocates of hemp note that it contains mere traces of THC, and that hemp (grown in other countries) is already found here in clothes, lotions, snack bars, car door panels, insulation and more.

But no place has challenged the government as fiercely as North Dakota. Its legislature has passed a bill allowing farmers to grow industrial hemp and created an official licensing process to fingerprint such farmers and a global positioning system to track their fields. This year, Mr. Monson and another North Dakota farmer, with the support of the state’s agriculture commissioner, applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration for permission to plant fields of hemp immediately.

“North Dakota is really pushing the envelope on this one,” said Doug Farquhar, the program director for agriculture and rural development at the National Conference of State Legislatures. Legislatures in Maine, Montana, West Virginia and other states have passed bills allowing farmers to grow industrial hemp, said Alexis Baden-Mayer, the director of government relations for Vote Hemp, a group that presses for legalization, but those laws have not been carried out given federal drug law. ]

There is much more to this article -- hit the link above.