Tinfoil hat time in the boonies

I had to back away from a group on Facebook recently. I'd joined it because the focus of the group is supposedly the great stuff one encounters while living up here on the tundra, but discovered there can be way too much weirdness in the comments threads on some posts. I've written before about how bizarre it can be to encounter paranoia and conspiracy theories in people or places where neither should be an issue. There must be something in the American psyche (or maybe humans in general) that causes people to go looking for problems or risks where none exist.

Anyway, the latest weirdness, the one that made me decide I really needed to distance myself from that particular group of tinfoil hat wearers, was when a commenter trotted out an image of a federal vehicle and went into a long spiel about "Why is Homeland Security stopping at a Burger King in L'Anse?!" Well, maybe they were eating lunch? Without working at it real hard, I can think of multiple reasons why the Department of Homeland Security would have vehicles in the U.P. and personnel making routine trips between various points: there are several commercial airports that no doubt have personnel from DHS duty-stationed there. They're federal employees so you know those people have to occasionally attend meetings (meetings are what the government does best), either with each other or local law enforcement, and would use agency vehicles to do so. Every so often the local news will mention cooperative programs various agencies are involved with so it doesn't strike me as particularly strange that someone from DHS would be stopped at a L'Anse Burger King.

That's assuming it was a DHS vehicle at all, of course.As a former federal employee, I can say with confidence that most people can't keep agencies straight. They see vehicles belonging to Fish & Wildlife and think it's the state DNR. They see a National Park Service vehicle and think it's the Forest Service. And they consistently call agencies by the wrong names. (That same comments thread contained a misattribution regarding a recent joint law enforcement sting operation that targeted illegal fishing on the Great Lakes. It was Fish & Wildlife and the FBI that set it up. The commenter said it was DHS, which is probably the last agency that would care about people fishing in closed areas.)

In any case, from there, the thread quickly degenerated into multiple variations on "It's all Obama's fault," "Obama is coming to take our guns," and "Remember Jade Helm!" That's when I decided it was time to step away. If people want to waste time worrying about crap that's never going to happen, that's their problem, not mine. (It's been almost 7 years, guys, if Obama really wanted your guns he'd have them by now.) I just wish they wouldn't waste bandwidth sharing their bizarre fantasies with the rest of the world. 

Although maybe I'm being a little harsh. I've worked for the federal government. I know how incompetent it can be.

I am regretting I didn't take a couple photos of the local National Guard guys training in Ishpeming not long ago. They were practicing urban warfare tactics in the parking lot when we drove by. After all, why worry about Jade Helm down in Texas when it's obvious the government is planning a takeover right here in Yooperland? Except instead of using abandoned Walmarts, up here they'll have to resort to putting the detention tunnels under old Kmarts and JC Penney stores. Or maybe they'll just repurpose some of the closed copper and iron mines. The Quincy can go from being a tourist attraction to a detention center without much work at all, and there must be some iron mines that wouldn't require much dewatering to make them usable. All they'd have to do is take the bat gates off.

Tinfoil hat time

Rick Santorum won the Republican primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. Not much of a surprise -- the tinfoil hat types and religious zealots outnumber rational people by quite a bit down there, at least among white voters (and black Republicans are pretty rare in the heart of Dixie). Santorum's success, like that of Newt Gingrich, shows just what short memories voters have. After all, Santorum lost his Senate seat by a record margin because the voters in his home state of Pennsylvania figured out he was a corrupt son-of-a-bitch who'd say or do anything to keep corporate money rolling into his pocket. His ethical lapses were in the news and have been re-reported since he began his presidential campaign, but too many voters would rather believe the lies he's telling now than remember the lies he got caught out in a mere six years ago.

I do have to say it's rather astounding to see how enthusiastic all those Southerners, those white fundamentalist Baptists and Pentecostals, are about Santorum, a man who's made it plain his religious beliefs trump everything else. Whatever happened to "omigod-Catholics-worship-idols!!" or "the whore of Babylon" beliefs? We live in strange times. . . .

On one level, I kind of hope Santorum ends up as the Republican nominee. He's such a blatant religious bigot and misogynist, someone who makes it real clear his idea of the perfect society would include creating a cabinet-level Department of the Inquisition, that he might actually motivate all the lukewarm voters who think there's no difference between the parties to come out and vote. However, given that no one has ever gone broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American populace, I think the safer bet would be Romney. He's an opportunistic flip-flopper who can shift from one contradictory position to another with blinding speed, but at least he's still marginally sane.

Thinking about politics

Saw this over at the Booman Tribune this morning:

I think it's a stretch to call what Republicans have come up with a "strategy." The people who are taking on these fights in the GOP aren't shrewdly and carefully assessing the percentages of liberals, moderates, and conservatives in America, and planning accordingly -- they're drinking their own Kool-Aid and concluding, at least on a subconscious level, that they don't have to worry about non-conservative voters because non-conservatives aren't really Americans. 

Ann Coulter says Democrats would never win if we took away women's right to vote. Rush Limbaugh says Obama is pursuing an electoral strategy of trying win the votes of "the takers," not "the makers." These are rhetorical flights of fancy, but I think a large percentage of Republicans actually believe them, and have started to think that voters who don't pull the (R) lever aren't actually voters at all, because they shouldn't be. 

This isn't exactly news, but it is a nice capsule description.

Yawn

They're caucusing in Iowa today, and I'm trying to figure out why any of the rest of us should care. It's never made much sense to me -- you have a state that is utterly unrepresentative of most of the country and a process that's guaranteed to bring out the fringe elements in both parties, and it's supposed to shape presidential politics? Iowa is the classic case of the media driving the message: the Iowa caucuses just happen to come first in the parade, so the media hovers all over the state trying to find meaning in what some person on the street from Harlan or Ottumwa says, treating each vacuous pronouncement as though it's newsworthy.

Usually, of course, what you hear when those persons on the street speak their minds is an astounding combination of blind ignorance and personal projection. The folks from Iowa always strike me as being astoundingly gullible: the candidates say they're conservative god-fearing upstanding citizens and, regardless of the candidates' track records, the fine folk in Iowa suck it all right up. I was listening to NPR yesterday, and it became real clear real fast that the people being interviewed had an image of Newt Gingrich based solely on the lies he's been telling about himself -- don't these people ever bother to look beyond the latest press releases from candidates? Apparently not. . .  The Iowa caucuses give a whole new meaning to "born again." Pro-choice politicians morph into pro-life, serial adulterers become family values candidates, and characters whose political careers appeared to be dead on arrival are suddenly contenders. Who could have predicted even a few weeks ago that a loser like Rick Santorum would now be considered likely to be in the final 3?

The Lunacy Continues

I speak, of course, of Birthers, the pathetic losers who are dumber than stumps and totally unable to get their heads around the fact there's a black man in the Oval Office -- and he's not there to pour the coffee. President Obama released his long form birth certificate this morning, and, judging by some of the way-beyond-delusional comments in the AJC, Washington Post, and elsewhere, the tinfoil hat crowd has simply decided to double down on the crazy.

Personally, I love the way all the wackaloons keep babbling on and on about a "certificate of birth" not being the same thing as a "birth certificate." Obviously, they haven't looked at their own papers in a long, long time. Either that, or they're so illiterate they don't know what a prepositional phrase is. Or maybe both.

Actually, some of them have looked at their own papers recently. Sort of. One of my favorite comments today was from a wackaloon who ranted about the fact the certificate as shown didn't have the baby's footprints or a nifty gold seal like his own did. The poor sap is actually so clueless that he thinks the souvenir certificate hospitals sell the parents to frame or put in baby books -- the ones that usually state clearly, albeit in small print at the bottom of the form, that it's not a legal document and an actual, legal birth certificate has to be obtained from a government office -- are what the real ones look like.

The stupid, it burns.

I could hear the tinfoil rustling

First topic of the day on C-SPAN this morning? Donald Trump and his supposed interest in being a Republican candidate for President in 2012. I swear, every time I think the right-wing loonies have hit the ultimate in living in a fantasyland, they manage to top themselves. Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together seriously believe that The Donald is doing anything other than promoting himself?

They showed an excerpt from his most recent speech given to the delusional Obama-haters. The Donald managed to touch each and every one of the red meat issues in under 60 seconds: he's anti-abortion and pro guns and a birther. The gullible fools in the audience ate it up. He was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear, so of course they think it's the closest thing to the Second Coming they've seen in a long time.

And then the calls to C-SPAN began, proving once again that there are a lot of people out there who will support anyone who's willing to validate their own delusions.

I do recognize that all politicians play the same game: they make promises to the electorate that they either know can't be kept or will not be kept, but they run their mouths anyway. But usually they're a little more subtle about it -- there's nothing subtle about The Donald. He's going to tell the Republican base exactly what they want to hear, no matter how insane it is, and they're going to be foolish enough to believe every word of it.

We do have to thank Trump for one minor blessing, though. He's managed to suck so much oxygen away from the other possible candidates that Caribou Barbie seems to be fading into the muskeg. One can only hope that a year from year Bible Spice's star has dimmed to the point of being referred to as "Sarah Who?"

Once again, someone's said it better than I can

Great post over at Whiskey Fire:

Yes, wingnut rhetoric is dangerous and irresponsible and loony.

But worrying about whether or not wingnut rhetoric is responsible for the Tucson nutjob, well, that's like worrying about shutting the barn door after the horse has been shot and fucked and sold for glue.

Go read the rest.

Resolutions

I need to limit my C-SPAN viewing time.  Screaming at the television while I'm still on the first cup of coffee is not a good thing, especially when it's a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, of all things, that inspires the screams. 

And what set me off?  Linda Feldman (the reporter in question) referring to Hawai'i being made a laughingstock because it can't satisfy the birthers' demands to see the original "long form" birth certificate of President Obama.  Hawai'i is a laughingstock for not being able to satisfy demands made by delusional lunatics?! 

The stupid, it burns.

Getting too old for this crap

Moving.  Politics.  Work.  You name it, I'm ready to walk away from it all.  It's been one of those weeks where I find myself thinking Ted Kaczynski had the right idea -- a crude, tarpaper shack in the woods with no television, no internet, no boxes to schlep, no co-workers, and only legacy technology like a manual typewriter is looking good at the moment (I'm not enough of a Luddite to go back to goose quills and ink made from lampblack).

The big move into the renovated townhouse finally happened, dragged out over the past week, and is still sort of going on.  The old apartment was empty by Sunday afternoon -- and it was moderately amazing just how much crap we had managed to stuff into that small space; maybe a starring role in an episode of "Hoarders" is in my future after all -- but of course we're still living with piles of boxes in inconvenient places.  Maybe if I didn't have a zillion books and a multiple-lifetimes supply of quilting supplies the whole process would be easier.  Or maybe if I wasn't a reader, I'd have turned into one of those crazy ladies who collects Precious Moments figurines and we would have been buried alive in bubble wrap by now. 

The good news about the move, sort of, was that we were relatively television- and internet-free for a few days.  No political ads.  It was wonderful.  Before I left on vacation, the only politician I was feeling the least bit mellow about was Johnny Isaakson.  I think the man is completely wrong politically, but the Senate race here in Georgia is so lop-sided that he apparently felt comfortable running nicely bland, polite ads.  They basically said "Hi. I'm Johnny Isaakson, and I share your Georgia values. Vote for me." Not anymore.  Despite the fact his opponent is thoroughly outgunned (I think I've seen ONE yard sign for the poor sap, whoever he might be, and no television ads at all), Isaakson apparently got marching orders from the Repugnican establishment -- and his ads are now attacking Obama, progressives, you name it.  Why bother? 

Of course, that is one of the characteristics of the reich wing -- they play dirty when they don't have to.  They fuck people over for the fun of it.  I've never been able to figure that one out, other than it does seem to be a sick psychological trait of bullies and cowards to kick people when they're down.  Conservative social policy seems to consist of figuring out ways to make other people's lives even more miserable than they might be now, to punish the victim for having the nerve to have been born poor or disabled or in the wrong country. 

The S.O. and I were talking the other day.  He was wondering out loud why another characteristic trait of the political right wing, especially the far right wackaloons, is to be running scared all the time, absolutely terrified and practically wetting their pants over stuff that's never going to happen --  Obama's going to take your guns away, Congress is going to start taxing all bank transactions, the government is going to forbid crosses in military cemeteries, and various other pieces of weirdness that get debunked regularly on Snopes.com.  He said it's almost like they want all sorts of horrible things to happen to the country so they'll be proved right.  I don't think that's it -- I think Michael Moore actually nailed it a few years ago in the movie "Bowling for Columbine."  If you fuck over enough people long enough, you're going to develop a fair amount of paranoia that one of these days they'll decide to fuck you back. 

A first

I had to turn off C-SPAN.  Smarmy sleazeball hypocrite Ralph Reed was the featured guest.  All it took was about 3 minutes of his bloviating about morals and people of faith always doing the right thing and I was flipping to HGTV.  If I'd listened much longer, I might have lost my breakfast.

One of Reed's riffs was about the way government should just stay out of helping people, that everything was fine and dandy back when churches and private charities handled making sure the widowed and orpaned and handicapped didn't starve in the streets. 

Right.

Although he didn't go as far as Gingrich did back in the 90s (I have a vague recollection of the Newster advocating taking poor kids away from their parents and sticking them in orphanages), I kept thinking that any second Reed was going to wax nostalgic for the good old days of poor farms, county workhouses, and orphan trains. 

Reed did get me to thinking about the whole notion of the "deserving poor."  One reason the government gets involved in creating social safety nets, like disability payments or food stamps, is government can be impersonal.  The bureaucrat who makes you fill out the forms doesn't get to say Yes or No based on whether you're fat or thin, white or Asian, wearing denim and covered with tatoos or dressed in Dockers with a nice neat haircut -- it all comes down to what information goes on the form and your ability to provide the various pieces of required documentation (e.g., a completed "Proof of child in the home" form signed by a neighbor). 

The same isn't true of private charity.  Churches and individuals pick and choose the beneficiaries of their largesse based on subjective criteria -- we feel sorry for the poor sap in a wheelchair so we hand him a $5, we feel contempt for the apparently physically abled person standing with a "homeless please help" sign because we think that surely he or she could get a job.  We'll help a family that falls on hard times if they're members of our congregation; we'll ignore them if they're not.  One person in a community is diagnosed with a devastating disease and collection cans to pay his medical bills pop up at every gas station in town; another person suffers an equally disastrous circumstance, and the collective response is to ignore it.  What makes the difference in the response has nothing to do with the person's actual life story, how they happened to end up on a street corner panhandling, and everything to do with our visceral reaction when we first see them.

There was a reason government got involved in social services to begin with.  The private sector wasn't working.  Unfortunately, Reed and his ilk will never admit that.  

Stunning display of cluenessness

I was watching The Ed Show on MSNBC last night, and got to witness one of the all-time most clueless displays of white ignorance and racism I've seen in a long time.  The panel discussion was about Dr. Laura's use of the infamous N word in talking with a caller.  The caller had a legitimate problem, and Dr. Laura responded the way she always does -- blame the victim -- and accused the caller of being too sensitive. 

Dr. Laura also did the usual psuedo-naive white person's lament of "I don't get it.  Why is it wrong for me to say nigger, but black people use it all the time?"  The simple answer, one that doesn't even get into the long and troubled history of race relations in this country, is "For the same reason that the Irish can call each other drunks and Poles can tell Polish jokes without being called bigots, but people outside their ethnicity cannot, you dumb bitch."  But that isn't what floored me about the discussion on The Ed Show. 

No, that honor goes to Heidi Harris, Las Vegas conservative radio talk show host.  In debating whether or not Dr. Laura did something wrong, Harris told Joe Madison (a black progressive with an XM satellite radio show) Dr. Laura doesn't dislike black people.  Madison thought the same thing that I did -- that Harris was going to pull out that tired line about "some of her best friends. . ."  We were wrong.  Harris dropped so far into cluelessness that even my jaw dropped.  Her defense of Dr. Laura?  The woman can't be a bigot -- she has a black employee (a bodyguard). 

Holy fuck.  That's in the same class as "I really like Hispanic people. Our gardener Jose is a gem."  No wonder the right wing comes across as a bunch of tinfoil hat types.  They really are dumb as rocks.

Maybe your paranoia is seeing a problem where none exists?

I heard a moderately amusing on the news today.  Seems a local watchdog group, Jobs for Georgians, is concerned about undocumented workers being hired to work on a major government construction project, the new Cobb County Courthouse.  So they pushed for background checks of the approximately 700 workers on the project.  The sheriff's department says they've investigated over half the workers, and so far this is what they've found:

Two guys with outstanding warrants:  Lambert Williams, 31, for failure to pay child support, and Ray Lee Roberts, 29, for violating probation.

So much for the vast hordes of mojados stealing jobs from honest Americans.

Campaign promises

Sunday morning tinfoil

There was a lot I meant to say, but hearing the fellow call in to warn us all about the microchips that Obama is going to implant in us all got me laughing so hard that I can't come up with anything serious.  Maybe later.

The Party of No lives up to its reputation

Right about the same time President Obama named Elena Kagan as his choice for the Supreme Court, I changed my quote of the day to a snippet of satire from The Borowitz Report.  Borowitz suggested that the Republicans had their speeches all ready to go a week before anyone was nominated, and were simply going to regurgitate their usual unthinking objectives to anything and everything President Obama says or does.  He was, of course, dead on.  

Last night I caught several different Republicans on various news shows -- and, sure enough, once again they're in lockstep reciting talking points that would be laughable if anyone paid attention.  Unfortunately, with a few rare exceptions, instead of looking those Republicans in the eye and saying, in essence, are you fucking nuts?, the main stream media are (as usual) functioning as an echo chamber -- and within a day or two, long before confirmation hearings can begin, the perceived wisdom will be that Ms. Kagan is hopelessly inexperienced, and that, despite the fact she clerked for Thurgood Marshall, taught law at the University of Chicago, and served as dean of the Harvard law school, does not know enough about the law to work as a magistrate in night court, let alone be a Supreme Court justice.

Tin foil hats on parade

The topic on C-SPAN at the moment is the future of the Republican Party.  Need I say more?  Probably not, but I will anyway. 

Then again, can anything I say top conservative Richard Viguerie describing Newt Gingrich as "principled'?  The only principle Gingrich has ever adhered to is his own self-advancement.  The idea that anyone would describe Gingrich as a viable 2012 presidential candidate serves as proof that the GOP is back to scraping the bottom of the barrel when they bandy names around. 

Then again, Vigurie just compared to Jim DeMint with Barry Goldwater.  If Vigurie thinks DeMint is the future of the Republican Party, the GOP is going to be able to save a lot of money on national convention costs -- give it a few more years and they'll be meeting in a back room at Denny's. 

This is one of those mornings when I didn't need to wait for the tin foil hat types to call in -- the featured guest was already wearing one.

Sunday morning

C-SPAN. Coffee, toast, the endless entertainment provided by the delusional right-wing faithful. Life is good. I am a creature of habit, I like having a set routine -- stalkers would give up on me through boredom; I'd be too easy -- and this morning definitely followed the usual script to lull me into a cozy feeling that life is proceeding as usual: Obama's a socialist, Social Security is teetering on the brink of insolvency, we're all doomed as long as the Democrats insist on dragging civilization down into the abyss.

Not surprisingly, the looniest calls, the one where describing the caller as a "few fries shy of a happy meal" doesn't really cover it because it's real clear the poor sap never even made it to the drive-through window, were all from the South. Is it the kudzu? Does it emit fumes that kill brain cells?

Two different things have reinforced the image of the South as the bastion of the mentally challenged: one is the "birther" movement, the other is health care. Both just floor me. They're both so far over the "how fucking dumb are you?!" line that they're well beyond "the stupid, it burns" point.

The birther movement, which anyone with even a modicum of intelligence can see is a proxy for racism -- Barack Obama could have been born under the US Capitol rotunda with both houses of congress witnessing the event and there'd be closet Klan types howling that he's a foreigner (and this is the part they won't say out loud) because he's black. Because, of course, as far as they're concerned the only people who actually qualify for elective office are white males and an occasional token white woman.

That said, the amusing part of watching the birthers in action is seeing just how unbelievably ignorant they are about how birth certificates are actually issued, and what counts as one. They actually get into debates over supposed differences between a "certificate of birth" and a "birth certificate." It goes beyond moronic. You know, when I applied for a driver's license here in Georgia they insisted on seeing my "birth certificate" so they'd know I was a U.S. citizen. You know what it says across the top? "Certificate of birth." (It's also kind of funny seeing just how many there are who don't seem to believe Hawaii is a state, so even if President Obama was born in Honolulu it doesn't count, but that's a different issue.)

And then there's health care. . . this is a part of the country that has some of the lousiest health outcomes in the nation. Quality of care sucks big time, lots and lots of people have no health insurance whatsoever, and they're worried about socialized medicine? Get a grip, people. Socialized medicine would have to be an improvement over none at all.

Of course, one of the funnier things to emerge from the South in the past week was reading about one of the fine citizens of South Carolina who got up at a town hall meeting and ranted about not wanting the government to mess with his Medicare by replacing it with a government program. When the Congress critter whose district it was tried telling him that Medicare is a government program, his constituent started arguing with him.

It's got to be the kudzu.

What I'm thinking

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Words fail me

Doctor Slain at Church

Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, where Sunday morning services were being held, Stolz said. The gunman then pointed a gun at two men who tried to stop him before driving away in a 1993 blue Ford Taurus, authorities said.

Brilliant at Breakfast has a good post up about the American Taliban with links to other sites.