I can't believe I have to do this, but I do...
Turns out your problem with the Battle Flag has crap all to do with implications of slavery, but rather that's simply a convenient excuse to use while striving for the moral high ground against the people you really hate. Those evil southern people.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that you're yet another hand-wringing idealist without the first damn clue what he's talking about.
It has everything to do with the god-fearing, muddled-in-"tradition", this land is OUR land view of the stereotypical (and, unfortunately, also just typical) southerner. I have been through the South many times, and aside from the very occasional bout of southern hospitality one may be so fortunate to experience, it's a rather insufferable place to be. But, you're right, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Speaking of people who have no idea what they're talking about...
By the way, before you blame those eeeevil gas-guzzlers for "your gas prices", you may want to do a little research into this weird thing called "supply and demand", and an overview of how futures markets work wouldn't hurt either. Here's a tip: If the majority of people drove useless hippy boxes around, bleating about how they're saving the planet, we would use much less fuel. As a result, in a relatively short amount of time, you'd be paying somewhere around $40/gallon for it.
The current largest contributors to gas prices being what they are are refining capacity and government taxation. It has nothing to do with people keeping demand up by driving pointlessly oversized vehicle. If you actually knew anything about supply and demand, you'd know that. A truck that gets 12-17 mpg will create a higher demand than a car which gets 25-35. When the supply can be influenced very little without building additional refineries -- which oil companies are slow to do given the somewhat uncertain nature of their ability to recover such costs when they can simply raise prices and make more money -- the demand is what drives the price. You're $40/gallon claim is laughable (actually the only part of your entire post that's even remotely entertaining), and speaks volumes about your ability to grasp the difference between "facts" and "propaganda". I would actually be happy paying what we currently pay for gas -- hell, I'd be happy to pay twice what we currently pay -- if only the money was going to fund research and development on alternative energy so that we could ween ourselves off of the need for crude oil in all its forms. But as long as "those evil southern people" insist that their traditional way of life is necessary and their states take on that horrid red hue any time a political map gets produced, we can remain quite certain that the money will instead be going to pay for lobbyists and things remaining pretty much what they always were. This, in turn, bring about my mental image, as you so adeptly point out...
I've no doubt that particular fact is at odds with your mental image of the eeeevil oil company executive, twirling his moustaches while pulling ever-higher fuel prices out of his butt.
Except I know that the prices are not pulled out of their butt. They're created by the allowances of the capitalist system in which we live. A system which I'm fully in support of as long as our government is doing what it needs to ensure that the system does not get out of hand.
Thanks for so cleverly reading my mind, though.
And yes, to everyone sitting there thinking, "Oh shit, not again. Doesn't this asshole ever shut up?" I get it. I understand that the previous post took us entirely too far off topic. When the tangential nature of the discussion made it questionably relevant to the topic of the show earlier, I was willing to bow out. I am merely, at this point, defending the assumptions being made about me. I apologize, but I'm not going to allow some random, misguided, educated-only-enough-to-know-big-words-but-not-enough-to-know-how-to-use-them troll come along and put words in my mouth to paint me as some bleeding-heart liberal who is out to make the world a haven for sunshine and flowers.
I never cease to be amused by the tendency of the truly idiotic to show their true colors, as it were, when given enough rope to do so.
I always cease to be amused by the idiotic. Unfortunately, I also never cease to be amazed by their sheer numbers. True colors, indeed.