Jimmy Dean 1928 - 2010

Jimmy Dean, a country music legend for his smash hit about a workingman hero, "Big Bad John," and an entrepreneur known for his sausage brand, died on Sunday. He was 81.

His wife, Donna Meade Dean, said her husband died at their Henrico County, Va., home.

After we were married in 1986, my wife and I lived in Plainview for a bit over two years. I was the advertising director for the Plainview Daily Herald and she was an assistant to the coordinator for special projects for Central Plains MH/MR.

Born in 1928, Dean was raised in poverty in Plainview, Texas, and dropped out of high school after the ninth grade. He went on to a successful entertainment career in the 1950s and '60s that included the nationally televised "The Jimmy Dean Show."

In 1969, Dean went into the sausage business, starting the Jimmy Dean Meat Co. in his hometown. He sold the company to Sara Lee Corp. in 1984.

I never met Dean but did meet many people in Plainview who knew him and his family well, and he was a big favorite of the country and western music fans in my household growing up. The facility that Dean and his family first opened to make sausage became a popcorn factory while I was there, churning out a variety of flavored popcorn in decorative tins.

In the late '60s, Dean entered the hog business — something he knew well. His family had butchered hogs, with the young Dean whacking them over the head with the blunt end of an ax. The Dean brothers — Jimmy and Don — ground the meat and their mother seasoned it.

The Jimmy Dean Meat Co. opened with a plant in Plainview. After six months, the company was profitable. His fortune was estimated at $75 million in the early '90s.

Don't forget that his biggest hit became something of a parody two years ago, thanks to John Cornyn.

More recently, a scrap with Sara Lee led to national headlines.

The Chicago-based company let him go as spokesman in 2003, inciting Dean's wrath. He issued a statement titled "Somebody doesn't like Sara Lee," claiming he was dumped because he got old.

"The company told me that they were trying to attract the younger housewife, and they didn't think I was the one to do that," Dean told The Associated Press in January 2004. "I think it's the dumbest thing. But you know, what do I know?"

Sara Lee has said that it chose not to renew Dean's contract because the "brand was going in a new direction" that demanded a shift in marketing.

Courtesy Erik Vidor, here's audio of a caller complaining to the Jimmy Dean Meat Company about the size of their sausage package (some profanity).



Update: Entertainment Weekly notes that Dean was the pioneer of country music television; before Hee Haw, and before even Johnny Cash, there was The Jimmy Dean Show. That link has some great videos, including one of Rowlf the Dog (the first Muppet to make it big on the country scene).

Repubs boot Adams, go with Munisteri | Libs pick Glass | Greens go with ...

A little news made by the GOP, the Libertarians, and the Greens yesterday. First, from the freaky deaky confab in Dallas ...

Texas Republicans on Saturday ousted their firebrand leader, conservative activist Cathie Adams, in favor of Houston businessman Steve Munisteri.

Delegates chose Munisteri to be the new state party chairman during their convention in Dallas.

Munisteri focused his campaign on the party’s $500,000 debt. The retired lawyer says Republicans should be in better financial shape since they control both houses of the Legislature and all statewide offices.

The internal struggle spilled onto the floor of the Dallas Convention Center, prompting a sometimes chaotic roll call vote of the delegates. Once officials announced Munisteri had won, Adams backers then proposed that she be selected as the party’s vice-chairwoman. Delegates picked Houston-area Republican activist Melinda Fredricks instead.

Adams is known as a take-no-prisoners conservative. The former leader of the Texas Eagle Forum had often criticized senior members of her own party, bucked business leaders by opposing their cherished lawsuit reform efforts, called global warming a “hoax” and used the specter of Adolf Hitler to warn of perceived Obama administration excesses.

Adams had not been in the job very long. She was chosen to lead the party in a special election in October after Tina Benkiser stepped down. Munisteri won a two-year term, which will expire when the Republicans meet at their next state convention in 2012.

Adams, head of the Texas wing of Phyliss Schafly's Eagle Forum and heavily involved early on Perry's re-election campaign, was the incumbent insider with allegations of "too much debt" against her. So she got teabagged -- even though her opponent had to work hard to appear as crazy as Adams. He obviously succeeded.

The Libs met in Austin and made their pick for governor:

Kathie Glass, a Houston attorney, has won the Libertarian Party nomination for Governor of Texas. She will face incumbent Governor Rick Perry and former Houston mayor Bill White in November.

"This is our time. We will leave this convention as a united party," said Glass. "Texans want smaller government and more freedom. This is the message that we bring."

"Regrettably, our current governor seems intent on running our state "Washington D.C." style instead of Texas style. Runaway taxes, exploding spending, escalating debt, ever-growing government, and confiscation of property so he can give it to foreign interests -- where will it end?" asked Glass.

"Kathie was nominated by our convention because of her strength, knowledge of the issues, and her sense of what's right for Texas," said Executive Director Robert Butler. "She knows the Libertarian answer for today's issues and she can explain it well for every audience."

Oh yeah, Kinky Friedman was the keynoter at their convention. Wasn't it just a few months ago he was telling us he'd always been a Democrat?

"I really think the Democrats and the Republicans have become the same guy, admiring themselves in the mirror," Friedman said. "Rick Perry and Bill White — it's like the lesser of two boll weevils. This is the classic choice between paper or plastic. I think the day has come for the Libertarians."

And the Greens, also convening yesterday in Austin, selected ...

... well, I'm still waiting to hear who they selected between Deb Shafto and Bart Boyce. There's video here of both candidates (the second of two on that page). I have made some inquiries and searches but there seems to be no word officially that I can find. I'll update here when I know.

Update: kat swift late last night reports that Deb Shafto was selected by Green delegates as their gubernatorial candidate. Here's a bio page from her bid for Houston city council last year and another video from that campaign as well.

Update II: More on Glass and Shafto, via jobsanger, from the Fort Worth Star-Tel.

The Texas GOP: fighting scared, and loving it

Dave Mann thinks they're on a crusade:

You can always tell a politician's desperate to win reelection when he or she describes an election as good vs. evil, us vs. them, the fight of our lifetime. Or, as Gov. Rick Perry put it last night, "a struggle for the heart and soul of our nation."

Perry unleashed that beauty in a speech to the Texas Eagle Forum, as The Dallas Morning News reports.

It amazes me how candidates must over-hype elections these days to ensure their loyalists turn out. Sure, elections are important, but it's a damn midterm, people. Let's not go mistaking it for Antietam.

By my count, I've lived through the "most important election of all time" at least three times in this decade alone: the 2000 election was supposed to be the great struggle for the soul of America. So was 2006. Then, 2008 was billed as the most important election of our lifetime... or the next two years, whichever comes first, I guess.

Meanwhile, the governor was in rare form last night, casting this fall's election in stark religious terms:

"We will raise our voices in defense of our values and in defiance of the hollow precepts and shameful self-interests that guide our opponents on the left....

"Who do you worship? Do you believe in the primacy of unrestrained federal government? Or do you worship the God of the universe, placing our trust in him?"

I'm surprised they came out from under their bed long enough to have a convention. Of course, maybe the stench of the soiled mattresses from all that bed-wetting just forced them out.

Wayne Slater thinks they're under siege:

For a party in power, there seem to be a lot of martyrs in the Texas GOP.

Rush Limbaugh says Democrats are the party of victims. But it was the Republicans at their state convention in Dallas this weekend who clearly saw themselves as the oppressed and mistreated.

“The fox is in the henhouse,” said congressional candidate Stephen Broden of DeSoto of the myriad enemies bearing down on conservatives. “And they have one thing in mind — fried chicken salad.”

For all the Republicans’ success in Texas, the barbarians are apparently at the gate: liberals, atheists, socialists, Hollywood, the media, a White House at work on wrecking the country and ruining their lives.

Everywhere you looked at the Dallas Convention Center, people were wearing their victimhood.

Republicans in Texas as the persecuted minority. Victims. Martyrs. That is just classic, isn't it?

At the Voice of the Martyrs booth was a map of Christians persecuted for their religion. The John Birch Society was selling a book, Inside the Terror Triangle, in which Washington, Moscow and the Middle East have collaborated against hapless American families.

Even Gov. Rick Perry, in a speech to delegates, complained of unfair treatment.

“This administration,” he said of the Obama White House, “has a target on the back of Texas. I don’t think he likes us.”

The tea-party movement is mobilized around fear of government and resentment of elites that it believes looks down on conservatives. Aggrievedness is built into the blueprint.

“Conservatism is an oppressed minority today,” Limbaugh said on his radio show last year. “If ever a civil-rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party.”

You couldn't make this shit up if you were taking Oxycontin and hydrocodone in doses strong enough to kill a horse. Unless you're Limbaugh, of course.

At Saturday morning’s prayer rally in advance of convention business, Pam Faraone, who heads a support group for border sheriffs, called on something higher.

Faraone prayed for divine intervention to seal the US-Mexican border to stem the tide of illegal immigration: “Because of iniquity, the United States-Mexican border is shrouded in spiritual darkness.”

Still, pending God’s help on the border, there are some things the victims on this side can do, she said — noting in her prayer the sheriff of Hudspeth County, who is urging Texans on the border to arm themselves.

In the midst of the booths selling buttons and T-shirts just off the convention floor, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson struck just the right mood of a people besieged. He draped his campaign space with green camouflage, as if it were something out of Apocalypse Now.

Patterson’s full-page ad in the convention brochure shows him against a pockmarked wall, grim-faced, as if at war.

I think maybe Slater juxtaposed that description of Patterson: his face is pock-marked and the wall is grim. Oh well, he will always have his arsenal to console him after he leaves office at the end of the year.

"Clinging to their guns and Bibles" is a perfect description of the Republican Party of Texas.  They believe that the 2010 statewide elections -- like every other election year -- are a holy war for the future of Texas and Murrica.

And I'm not certain anyone should disavow them of the notion, since when they lose in November it benefits them the most to drop their security blankets and reassess their lives.

Sunday Funnies

RPT Convention crazy is spewing like BP's oil disaster

Thank God the Texas Tribune is there to document the atrocities.

Here's Joe Holley at the Chron with the quotes.

"We embrace fiscal disciplineship." -- Rick Perry

"My husband really does like coyotes." -- Anita Perry

"The world will be right when the Pope is a Texan." -- Rick Perry, speculating on the future prospects of Archbishop Jose Gomez, who recently left San Antonio to head the Los Angeles diocese

The rest read like any of the Chron's comment sections: 'ObamaMessiahsocialistkeepthechange' is your executive summary.

They're brewing some awfully bitter tea in the back of the hall, too.

The San Antonio Tea Party's booth is tucked in the back of the Dallas Convention Center's exhibit hall.

To find it, you must wind your way through a maze of commerce and ideology — power scooter rentals, John Birch Society videos, T-shirts backing hard-rock guitarist Ted Nugent for president in 2012, magnetic therapeutic jewelry and campaign buttons proclaiming “Hot Chicks Vote Republican.”

Don't you wish you were there?

If you were, you could have seen Kay Bailey holding Rick Perry's hand while pinching her nose shut with the other. Or the governor's $18-million-dollar elephant in the room. Or his double-wide.

Parked outside Eddie Deen's Ranch on South Lamar Street was a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom green-and-white mobile home that the Texas AFL-CIO is generously offering Governor Rick Perry for $1 a month.

It's the same home they offered to Perry in Austin last month, minus the furniture, issues of Food and Wine magazine, a supply of hair spray, and a 50-year-old stuffed German shepherd "that has sentimental value to me," said the group's president Becky Moeller. Those were tossed out to make the home easier to transport here and later to drive to Corpus Christi for the Texas Democratic Party convention at the end of June.

But the pure, unadulterated insanity belonged to one of the lesser lights down the GOP ballot, Todd Staples -- who has chosen to libel Hank Gilbert in a manner so vile it defies description.

Really, it's so unhinged it is incoherent. Rabies doesn't hold a candle to this kind of crazy. This isn't just garden-variety Obama Derangement Syndrome, but some South Carolina strain of shit-that-doesn't-fall-too-far-from-the-bat so divorced from reality that all you can do is point and laugh at it before the men in white coats carry it away in a straitjacket.

Congratulations, Todd. It takes a lot of work to top Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, and even Jerry Patterson. You win the the 2010 RPT Convention's Chock Fulla Nuts Award. And there's a whole 'nother day ahead.