My Love/Hate Relationship With Louisiana

I moved to Louisiana in the fall of 2010. I arrived here on a Greyhound bus in October, with just a few coins in my pocket, and no job prospects. At that point, I was at probably the lowest point in my life, and thankfully, I had family that would make sure I didn't starve, and that I had a place to sleep.

Within a month, I had a job waiting tables at a local restaurant. It took me another 5 months to save up the money to buy a used car, and it was nearly a year before I could find a job in my field. It was an unexpected journey from having nothing, to having a steady paycheck, a woman who loved me, and the peace of mind I had been seeking for years.

Louisiana is not where I ever saw myself ending up. A couple of years prior, I had visited with an ex-girlfriend to attend my sister's wedding, and I remarked that while I liked parts of Louisiana and its culture, it was a place that I could never see myself living in.

Yet, just a couple of years later, that's where I found myself. In time, I began to adjust and find my own niche in a culture that has a distrust of outsiders and a preference for their own ways, even those ways are decades behind the rest of the country.


What I love about Louisiana, at least the southern part of the state, is how friendly people can be. They want to know who you are, who you are related to, and many will buy you a beer during that conversation. You might even be invited to a crawfish boil where you don't know anyone else, and at the end of the night, you've made a bunch of new friends - if you don't talk about political or religious issues that might offend some folks.

For the most part, most Cajuns I've met have embraced me to some degree. After 5 1/2 years, I know people of all political and religious persuasions who I can spend time with, and we get together over our love of food, sports and beer. This isn't the place I saw myself ending up in, but I've learned to make it work.

The political ignorance and individuals fighting against their own self-interests does drive me crazy - as does the racial hatred which lingers just below the surface not only in Louisiana, but across the Southern states in which I have spent all of my life.
One of these days, I may move back to Florida, or even the state where I was born, Virginia. Louisiana has so much promise if only it would turn its government around and elect officials who have the best interests of every citizen in mind, rather than the corporate interests who have run Louisiana into fiscal crisis.

I would like to see Louisiana rise out of the bigotry and ignorance of the Bible Belt and join the rest of the United States in the 21st century sometime in the near future. But if they cannot do that, I will have to regrettably move on, Cajun recipe books in tow.

Yes, Virginia, There Are Liberal Bullies

Over the past few years, a number of people, especially my friend John Henry, have been singled out for harassment by a group of people who call themselves liberal page admins or liberal trolls. Other people like the owner of Americans Against The Tea Party were the targets of extortion attempts which tried to get them to turn over the access to their Facebook page.

These attacks are nothing new, and have existed from the beginning of our page, but they have ramped up their efforts to include attempting to breach the website instead of simply being a nuisance and insulting myself and friends of mine.

As one example, here is a recent screenshot of yet another Facebook page created solely to annoy John Henry, and nothing else.

Why would they do that? Because these individuals are obsessed with harassing us and anyone who stands in their way.

My friend Erin Nanasi has also been bullied by anonymous Facebook pages with names like "Pot Meet Kettle" (now offline) who have mocked her and her family - all in an attempt to force her and her blog off Facebook, even after she stopped writing for my former website, Forward Progressives.

Since that time when I first called out these "liberal" websites and others like them for being as unethical and slimy as the conservatives they blog about, I have had my personal Facebook suspended multiple times after waves of false reports, as has John Henry and other people in our circle of friends.

Why do people who call themselves liberals do such things and why would they perpetuate falsehoods, distort the truth, or be just as ugly as the right-wing Tea Party conservatives they claim to be better than? It's simple, it's all about profit, and not furthering the liberal cause.

In the liberal blogosphere, it is a cutthroat game of tentative alliances between page owners who work together to maximize page traffic to their websites - or take payments from site owners to post their links. These are people who promote themselves as champions of the liberal cause against the right-wing, but care more about the money they can make from web traffic to their articles instead of publishing factual information that would further the left's agenda - the same thing Gawker has done with scandal stories for the past 12 years.

Utilizing these sketchy SEO tactics isn't a unique thing, other liberal bloggers like Lou Colagiovanni, Omar Rivero of Occupy Democrats and Samuel Warde (they all know each other) have all resorted to proxy alliances with a group of individuals that will harass and falsely report people who will not work with them, especially anyone who is critical of their brand of hyperbolic and false "liberal news."

Around the same time we were hit with the cyberattacks on the website I formerly wrote for, we were also the subject of an article by a blogger we believe to be the leader of the group that was originally hired by the folks at Addicting Info to target my Facebook page for harassment. Thomas Clay, Jr of American News X wrote a blog which falsely accused Forward Progressives of being a Tea Party plant, and relied on falsely reported Zoominfo data to make their claim.

In fact, they even boasted about it on one of a number of pages that have been blocked from interacting with mine and Forward Progressives.

Seriously, who sits around all day and makes up Bitstrips mocking people in hopes they can drive that person to the point of quitting political blogging? As I've said before, these aren't conservatives to the best of my knowledge, these are individuals who portray themselves as valiant liberal writers leading the charge against the Tea Party and the GOP. Except they aren't. They're really little more than political grifters hoping to make some easy cash off gullible liberals who will believe anything they see on social media.

In fact, one of the writers for American News X is one Steve Ahearn, the owner of a Facebook page called Stop Telling Lies About Liberals And We'll Stop Telling The Truth About You, and a former admin of my old Whiskey and the Morning After Blog page. He was finally removed from my page after he and others mentioned continually harassed an acquaintance of mine, David Haberman, over starting a GoFundMe account to be able to afford dental surgery. This is all while Steve Ahearn constantly begged for money over a period of years, claiming that his children were hungry, his car was out of gas, or that their power was about to be shut off. This is why he continually makes pages just troll mine, because former drug addicts who believe in conspiracy nonsense are so reputable, right?

Mr. Ahearn, along with his friends who include Kevin Plamondon, Thomas Clay, Jr and Sean Conners of American News X have apparently been working together to harass anyone who will not work with them. They claim I am "jealous" of their "success" but these are people who gauge their accomplishments on the size of their pages, and the size of the ad revenue checks they receive each month.

It's a sad story for liberal politics when people are so driven by profit and notoriety that they resort to the attacks that I and other have dealt with for the last 3+ years. The problem is it isn't going to stop anytime soon, as you can see by the obsessed comments from Sean Conners below, which I am screen-capping in chase he decides to delete them.

Bullies try to use back channels and they try to isolate people so that they can win. I have been the recipient of these attacks ever since I first started calling out Being Liberal and their friends back in 2012.

In case they want to continue their campaign of bullying and extortion attempts, I have many more screenshots of their antics that I will be more than happy to post as updates to this story.

I am never, ever going away. After 3+ years, I'd think you would have learned. UPDATE 10/11/2016: My email account is being spammed for porn and other subscriptions by a Louisville, KY IP address. I have reached out to the IP provider.

@TWC_Help @TWC the owner of IP address 74.141.223.101 is harrassing me and spamming me with porn subscriptions. Please address this. pic.twitter.com/CDymYKSgo6

— (((Manny Schewitz))) (@MannySchewitz) October 11, 2016

12/21/2016: I am now being slammed with trolls and writers from some of the same sites once again. One of them is Tiffany Willis of Liberal America who claims she never heard of Ed Brayton from Patheos who called out her site, yet here she is in the comments of that article.

Update: http://traffic.libsyn.com/podcastfakenews/Episode20420-206_3_172C209.2420AM.m4a

The NRA Is On The Side Of Terrorists, Not Responsible Gun Owners

Once again, there has been another mass shooting here in the United States. According to Vox.com, more Americans have been killed in the last fifty years by gun violence than all the wars in our history. This should press lawmakers to do something to keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists and criminals, but the NRA has blocked nearly every gun law across America.

Just today, the Republican-controlled United States Senate voted to block expanding background checks, which comes almost 24 hours after the massacre in San Bernardino which left 14 people dead and even more wounded.



Two police officers were also injured in the shootout with the two suspects who died in a furious battle with police. According to law enforcement, both suspects were armed with assault rifles, handguns, and had thousands of rounds of ammunition.

As bad as this attack was, it could have been even worse. Despite the fact that this is the worst attack on American soil since Sandy Hook, the NRA and their GOP puppets continue to advocate further loosening gun laws across the country.

The NRA does not represent gun owners like myself and the millions of other people who use responsibly use firearms for recreation or personal protection. The NRA does represent the gun lobby and the hucklefuck dumbassery of the most paranoid, delusional conservative base which laps up their constant propaganda about how President Obama and liberals want to take all of their guns.

As long as they continue to block sensible gun legislation which could reduce the number of incidents like San Bernardino, it's safe to say that the NRA is on the side of terrorists, not responsible gun owners.

The end of the Third Great Empire

"The Republic will not end when ordinary people find they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury, but when corporations find that government influence can be bought, sold and manipulated like derivatives on Wall Street".

~Whiskey and The Morning After Blog

America's national case of PTSD

With the pudgy jester of doom once again preaching the impending Apocalypse over the uprising in Egypt, I continue to wonder, what the fuck are we all so afraid of? For a nation that is so enamored with guns, war, ultimate fighting and other assorted acts of violence, we certainly seem to be awful worried about a couple sparring crowds that are using rocks and sticks as their main weapons. Why are we afraid? Because we're told to be afraid, because that is what sells ratings.

We seem to be suffering from a national case of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) ever since 9-11-2001. According to the Mayo Clinic, if you could diagnose an entire nation, we'd fit many of the symptoms as noted here.

Flashbacks or reliving the traumatic event:
I don't think you can go a day without some pundit bringing up 9-11 and how "it changed everything".

Hopelessness about the future:
Just turn on Fox News...the world is going to end soon, buy gold.

Hearing or seeing things that aren't there:
Again, Fox News...

Being easily startled or frightened:
I'd say again, Fox News but I'm beating a dead horse with that one at this point.

These are just a few examples and you can read all of the symptoms on my link but it does raise an interesting concept of us as a nation still coping with a traumatic event almost 10 years in the past now. It was as if after that event, we became an irrational and angry country, willing to accept any excuse for war and any violations of our national ethics so long as we thought it would keep us safe.

I'd also say that there are those who have made a very handsome living by exploiting the event for their own gain by convincing us daily that there is some type of plot ready to once again make us relive the tragedy of that September morning any day now. Are there people out there that want to do that? Absolutely, but that doesn't need to turn us into a nation of bed-wetters. Come on people, we bankrupted communist Russia, nuked Japan twice, put people on the moon and own more guns per capita than any other countries but we allowed some idiot who caused no damage (other than to his testicles) to make us have to get full body scans every time we want to get on a plane?

I say it's time we man up, stop allowing people to manipulate us into fighting each other and instead demand our civil liberties back. It's what Chuck Norris would do.