Why do I have to watch fake news shows to see actual reporting?

Being stuck in a motel for a few days does have some advantages. Among other things, we've been able to watch television when it's actually happening instead of dealing with the hassles of streaming stuff many days later. Last night we watched "Full Frontal" with Samantha Bee. It was. .  . enlightening.

One of the segments focused on Russia and Internet trolling. Russia is apparently the motherlode of Internet weirdness. Being an Internet troll is a civil service job there. People get paid by the state to go hang out on the Internet and push various memes and fake news and get comment threads going that in some way further Russia's interests.

At this point in time, those interests include disrupting the U.S. political process. It's pretty clear Wikileaks has been aided and abetted by the Russian government in releasing material detrimental to the Clinton campaign. Vladimir Putin would prefer that Donald Trump win the election next week, although he'll probably settle for enough crap being stirred up that a Clinton administration ends up being distracted by a gazillion bullshit investigations and faux controversies. Because let's face it -- Putin has no fear of Trump. Trump is so thin-skinned it's unreal, which would make him remarkably easy to manipulate. He freaks out when Saturday Night Live makes fun of him; I shudder to think of how he'd react if a foreign leader told him to shut up. Clinton, on the other hand, is a bitch with balls of steel. I disagree with a number of her positions on foreign policy -- she's much, much too hawkish (not a surprise considering she's taken advice from that toad in human form, Henry Kissinger) -- but for sure she's not likely to flinch in a crisis.

In any case, Samantha Bee's staff had done serious research on the subject of Russian meddling on the Internet. They even managed to track down a couple people who work as trolls. One fellow cheerfully admitted he's got something like 28 online identities, all supposedly American, that he uses while spreading various bits of propaganda and rumors. The woman Samantha Bee talked with poses as, among other identities, a housewife from Nebraska. From what the young man said and given his proficiency with English, I'm guessing the biggest hurdle he's had to jump in creating fake identities and getting involved in comment threads is dumbing down his vocabulary and ability to spell to match up with the typical American's lack of knowledge of standard English.

The big question I have (along with a lot of other people) is why are the fake news shows doing a better job of covering current events than the supposedly real ones? Time magazine ran a piece recently on some of the late night show hosts (Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert) and noted that the satirical shows like "Full Frontal" and "The Daily Show" are doing the in-depth investigative reporting we once assumed the straight news programs did. Instead, news networks like CNN, ABC, et al just serve as stenographers, breathlessly parroting whatever the latest rumors are and doing no fact-checking whatsoever -- it's apparently so much easier to speculate and toss out melodramatic headlines than it is to do a little background research. "Full Frontal" looking at who's actually putting what out on the Internet is a perfect example.

You know, I would hope that everyone who spends any time at all wandering around the Intertubes knows about sock puppets, the fake identities created to make it look like a site is generating more traffic than it actually is or to help gin up a controversy. A comment thread will look like there's a dozen or more people arguing back and forth when the reality it's maybe one real person and a whole lot of sock puppets. And sometimes it's 100% puppets. This is one of the many reasons why the best advice anyone can follow when it comes to the Intertubes is Never read the comments! It's just too easy to let yourself get sucked into a 100% faux argument. Then the next thing you know you're telling all your friends global warming is a conspiracy to make Al Gore rich and that Hillary Clinton personally ordered a hit on Antonin Scalia. Gullible people, Russian trolls. Definitely not a good combination.

The S.O. suggested that one reason the mainstream media, the straight news shows, do such a poor job of doing investigative reporting is they're owned by corporations that have a vested interest in keeping the sheeple ignorant. Well, so are the satirical news programs like "Full Frontal" and "John Oliver Last Week Tonight." Does tossing in some dark humor make the shows less threatening? Or do the corporate overlords just assume it doesn't matter because the target demographic for those shows (people in their 20s) are notoriously uninvolved in politics. Or they were. Bernie Sanders may have changed that.

A feeble grasp on reality

One of the key themes of this political season has been Donald Trump's repeated assertions that he's going to make America great again, he's going to bring back the manufacturing jobs that vanished overseas, he's going to make it harder for countries like China to export cheap consumer goods to the United States. Polls of his supporters show that something liek 65% of them agree that protective tariffs are a good idea -- we do indeed need to stop the flow of cheap consumer goods ASAP.

Leaving aside some of the other questions most sane people have about Trump's campaign, I've got just one query this morning: just where do all those America First people plan to shop once the shelves in Walmart go bare? The last time I saw a statistic, something like 98% of the merchandise in Walmart came from another country. Ditto Family Dollar, Dollar General, and all the other cheap places to shop.

Actually, I have a second query. Just how loud are these same America First people going to howl when U.S. labor costs are factored into what are now incredibly cheap goods? One reason many businesses moved manufacturing overseas was to keep costs low. What happens when the price of their widgets climbs? Will people still buy them? Will they be self-reflexive enough to realize that they shouldn't be complaining because they got exactly what they asked for?

I doubt it.

I cheerfully predict that if and when Walmart ever ceases to be perceived as bargain central, consumers will howl like wounded banshees and be unbelievably angry that they're now stuck paying for the policies they pushed for. After all, if they truly believed that it's wrong to buy stuff made in China they wouldn't be shopping at Walmart now.

Trees died for this? Ultimate Sacrifice

See end note.

I finally made it to the end of Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for A Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of J.F.K. I'm not sure why I bothered pushing on through the incoherence, tautologies, and general weirdness for almost 800 pages, but I did. I think I kept hoping that the authors would actually tell me something interesting.

For example, the authors say the Central Intelligence Agency (a misnamed agency if there ever was one) indulged in multiple "let's kill Fidel Castro" schemes. The plans ranged from sending in hit squads armed with machine guns to sneaking in various poisons lurking in mundane items: cigars, lotions, pens. Reading that the CIA wanted to assassinate Fidel Castro through the use of a poison pen intrigued me. How exactly was that going to work? What type of strange James Bondian technological wonder had the agency dreamed up? The poison pen plan gets mentioned multiple times, but the authors never do provide more than vague references. I had to Google it. Turns out the pen was rigged with a hypodermic that would supposedly inject poison. mentalfloss.com managed to describe it in one brief sentence; why Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann couldn't do something similar is a mystery.

The pen, incidentally, is one of at least ten methods the CIA has admitted to either trying or planning to try in their attempts to assassinate Castro. If they've admitted to ten, there were probably a whole lot more, all of which quite obviously failed given that Fidel is now 90 years old and still tottering out of the Aging Dictators Nursing Home to make occasional public appearances. We can see just how effectively the Agency managed to spend our taxpayer dollars. I ask again: why does the CIA still exist? (And, yes, I am willing to make the completely amoral argument that if they're going to be evil they should at least be good at it.)

Back to the book. Ultimate Sacrifice is one of the many books that have been written that attempt to explain why President Kennedy was shot. It's a long, rambling, badly focused, repetitive, and rather murky explication of the Mob Hit Theory. The version of the Mob Hit Theory I was most familiar with prior to reading this book is that mobster Sam Giancana had JFK assassinated because JFK was banging Sam's girlfriend, Judith Campbell. This is a theory that always struck me as ridiculous. If Judith Campbell had been anything other than a casual girlfriend to a mobster, she'd have been the one who got whacked for screwing around and not Kennedy for taking advantage of her availability. If anything, if the mob knew about Campbell's intimate encounters with Kennedy, the logical thing to do would be to use it as a blackmail tool. Still, quite a few people apparently believe it.

This book is a variation on the Mob Hit Theory. The authors claim that Kennedy was shot by the mob, but it wasn't because of his love life. Nope. The motive was Bobby Kennedy's emphasis on fighting organized crime. As a Senator, John Kennedy had been aggressive in holding hearings to expose gangster activity, and after he was elected and appointed his brother Attorney General the crime fighting continued. Various mafioso began to feel threatened. Eventually the "godfathers" who controlled Chicago, Miami, and New Orleans got together and decided that much as they'd like to get rid of Bobby Kennedy, the more logical approach was to off JFK. With JFK dead, Bobby wouldn't last long as Attorney General because he and Lyndon Johnson hated each other.

As conspiracy theories, go it's not a bad one. What makes it slide over the line into the tinfoil hat territory pretty quickly is the combination of the authors' tendency to kitchen sink (every little factoid about any of the people involved, no matter how tangential, gets treated with equal seriousness), to rely heavily on hearsay that definitely falls into "a friend of a friend" urban legend category, and to speculate over and over that there are still a gazillion classified documents lurking in the filing cabinets at the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere. You know, there are way too many paragraphs that contain outright speculations, in essence saying "We haven't seen the actual documents, but we're sure they're there." Right. I've known people who believed in the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot who I thought were sliding pretty deeply into wishful thinking and fantasy, but in retrospect they were hardcore realists compared with Waldron and Hartmann.

How does their explanation actually play out? Well, it involves the CIA hiring mafioso to work with Cuban exiles on a plan to overthrow the Castro government. Supposedly, one particular action, a combination coup and invasion, was planned for December 1, 1963. Because the Kennedys wanted to get rid of Castro, Bobby Kennedy was deeply enmeshed in the coup/invasion planning. Why are the mafioso involved? Because they weaseled their way in on purpose so they could set up the Cubans to take the blame. They're going to use the planned coup to help cover up their plans to whack JFK. The reasoning is supposedly that if Bobby Kennedy thinks the Cubans did it, he won't push for a thorough investigation because that would reveal that JFK and Bobby had been plotting to overthrow Castro. It all struck me as unnecessarily complicated as well as illogical. If Kennedy hadn't been whacked, the coup planning would have gone forward as planned, Castro would have been gone, and the gangsters could have gotten their Cuban casinos back. If they had their Cuban casinos, brothels, and drug running safe havens back, they wouldn't have to worry as much about the Justice Department going after them for racketeering in the U.S.

It is true that a number of gangsters were openly gleeful when JFK got shot. So was Jimmy Hoffa, who was so far in bed with organized crime he came close to qualifying as a mobster himself. Does that mean they would have bothered to have come up with a plot with as many moving parts as the plots Waldron and Hartmann propose? I'm doubtful. 

In any case, the authors argue that the mob planned to pin the assassination on Cuba, hoping for an American invasion that would have the same end result as the aborted coup attempt. They manage to fill hundreds of pages of remarkably repetitive text with descriptions of various losers being set up to be patsies with Cuban connections. Lee Harvey Oswald was just one of several who would be manipulated into a position to take the fall. Unfortunately for the mob (and fortunately for the rest of us), LBJ worried a lot more about what the Russians might do than he did about impulsively avenging Kennedy's death.

In the end, the only surprising thing about this book was just how empty of actual content it was. The authors seem to think that the readers are already so thoroughly familiar with the various players involved that they can omit details like just exactly when did Oswald go to the Soviet Union? How long was he there? When he did move back to the U.S.? When did he start working at the Texas Book Depository? How much did he pay for the gun? How did he get the job? Turns out that if I want to know the answers to those questions, once again Google will be my friend.

As for my own thoughts, I can understand why so many people are reluctant to believe that Oswald acted alone. By today's standards, the postmortem examination and forensic investigation following the assassination were a disaster. Potential evidence wasn't secured, the Secret Service actually washed the blood out of the limo before investigators had a chance to do thorough documentation, and numerous other mistakes were made. It definitely did not help that J. Edgar Hoover pushed hard for the single shooter explanation -- he was in full CYA mode because he didn't want it coming out that the FBI had received multiple reports of potential attempts on JFK's life and had basically ignored them all. There was enough bureaucratic ineptitude and silo-ing of information that to anyone who assumes that law enforcement (especially federal law enforcement) knows what it's doing it does look suspiciously like deliberate attempts at obfuscation took place.

I'm skeptical. To me, Oswald strikes me as fitting the profile of semi-delusional misfit so well that I find it totally believable he was the only one involved. We've seen a fair number of these poor saps in the past few decades: John Hinckley thinking he was going to impress Jody Foster by shooting Reagan, Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon, various celebrity stalkers, some of the guys who go on mass shooting rampages. Maybe Oswald really did think he was striking a blow for some ideology, maybe he had deluded himself into believing he was secret agent on a mission, who knows? And, to be blunt, at this late date (almost 53 years after the fact) who cares?

I do know that having read one "who shot JFK?" conspiracy theory book, I am unlikely to ever read another. If this one was typical of the genre I won't be missing much.

Note: Back in 1996 I was living in Blacksburg, VA, and dependent on public transportation to get to and from the Virginia Tech campus. Got on the bus one morning and a seemingly normal-looking (no visible tinfoil) dude was talking to the driver about the X-Files episode he'd watched the night before. It was a long enough ride into town that it slowly dawned on me that the dude thought the X-Files were real. He really did think the television show was a documentary series. No doubt this year he's waiting impatiently to cast his ballot for Trump.

Another bizarre conspiracy theory

Did you know the federal government is actively conspiring to force all of us rural folk off the farm and into cities? I didn't either, but apparently the goal is to have us all shoved into urban hellholes by 2040 leaving the countryside empty except for park rangers and endangered species. You know, every so often I hear about about a conspiracy theory that has me shaking my head and muttering, "The stupid, it burns," but this one? Words fail me. Just how delusional do you have to be to make the mental leap from some grazing leases getting cancelled or modified in Utah or Nevada to believing that the feds want us all to abandon the countryside and move to a city?

Is it something in the water out West? Or maybe it's the result of the parents or grandparents of these delusional loons living too close to the Nevada nuclear test sites? Too many generations of fundamentalist Mormon inbreeding?  A lack of tinfoil? It's a mystery, but according to a discussion I heard yesterday this particular bizarre conspiracy theory is one of the things motivating the yeehawdists occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Vanilla ISIS (aka Y'all Qaeda aka Welfare Cowboys) members exist in a strange, alternate reality where rather than admitting that it's impossible to make a living ranching in a desert they believe their problems are the result of an active plot to make them give up their rural idylls, their pastoral paradises. They look out the window at an arid landscape and see a "ranch" where it's possible to raise cattle and make a living at it. Saner people look at that same patch of bone dry sand and creosote bush and wonder how anyone with more than one brain cell could believe cow critters could survive, let alone put on enough weight to be marketable, when the land has a carrying capacity of more than 40 acres per animal unit. Back when I was working on a special history project in Nebraska, I had ranchers in the Sand Hills explain that the absolute upper limit for raising cattle on range land was something like 15 acres per animal unit. If browse is sparser than that, the bovines have to do way too much walking.

The yeehawdists talk a lot about "freedom" and the right of everyone to try to make a living, but they've never been "free" in the sense of self-sufficiency. Their so-called ranches could not survive without welfare in the form of subsidized grazing. The various fees that ranchers and others get charged to use federal land don't come anywhere close to the actual cost of the resources. The rest of the country has been subsidizing the welfare cowboys for generations, letting them suck off the government teat and allowing them to rail against the slackers in the city who collect Food Stamps when they're benefiting from a much more generous welfare plan. After all, if you're a city dweller who uses welfare, there's a cutoff, a 5-year maximum for how long you can rely on what used to be called AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and is now TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). If you're a Western rancher, until recently grazing leases were forever. No wonder the welfare cowboys turned delusional and started thinking they actually owned that acreage.  

They're also delusional, naturally, about just how important their ranching is to the rest of us. The sad reality for anyone who has a nostalgic mental image of western ranches is that more beef comes from east of the Mississippi than west of it. Or maybe it's east of the Missouri. But for sure it's not Western states like Montana or Arizona. It's not even Nebraska, even though Nebraska loves its image as Cattle Country. There are farmers here in the Upper Peninsula who probably have more head of fat, happy cattle on a couple hundred acres than the Bundys and their ilk can raise on many thousands.

Which brings me to another point. Don't the delusional loons ever talk to anyone outside their own little conspiratorial bubbles? On a per capita basis, yes, it's true, there are a lot fewer people living on farms and ranches now than there were 100 years ago. There are multiple social forces at work -- industrialization, economies of scale, demographics -- that have led to a natural migration from the country to the city. There really is a lot of vacant farmland in this country, places where immigrants settled decades ago, farmed for a few years (or a few generations) and then left. No one forced them to. Unlike the welfare cowboys, they actually owned the land; they just figured out they didn't want to live on it anymore.

The community where I live used to be solid farms, mostly dairy, but following World War II more and more people figured out there were easier ways to make a living. Enough people have given up farming, in fact, that the USDA actively goes looking elsewhere in the country for people who'd like to farm up here. Land is still reasonably priced and some vacant farms still have usable buildings (not all the barns and silos have collapsed). We have a fair number of Mennonites in the county now thanks to the efforts of an Extension agent -- he went down to lower Michigan and Ohio selling the idea of the U.P. to Mennonite farming families down there that were running out of land (you can only support so many adult children on the same patch of dirt). That's kind of the opposite of pushing people into urban areas. Oddly enough, the government has figured out that all those people living in cities actually need to eat -- and if you want to eat, someone somewhere had better be farming.

Well, that explains it

I'd been wondering about just what was going on in the heads of the yeehawdists in Oregon since that kerfuffle began. I've been observing with some bemusement the Nevada chapter of y'allQaeda (or should we call them yokel haram?) fearlessly occupying a wildlife refuge office building located in the middle of nowhere. Takes a lot of balls to take over a building that's usually visited only by senior citizens looking to do some bird watching. And, to top that, they've been sending out pleas on social media for their fanboys to send them Cheetos and winter jackets via the U.S. mail. The crazy doesn't run much deeper than the insanity of a group of "we don't recognize the power of the federal government" morons relying on that same government to deliver supplies to them. The stupid, it burns.

But this morning it all became a lot clearer. The news reader on NPR's "Morning Edition" came right out and described the Bundys as being part of the "sovereign citizen" movement. Sovereign citizens are, to say the least, delusional. They have some remarkably strange beliefs. They don't recognize the right of the state to register motor vehicles -- they'll make their own license plates, which is one of the ways law enforcement is trained to recognize them -- and they have this screwy notion that if you write documents using red ink you can nullify legal paperwork (divorce decrees, child support orders, foreclosure orders, you name it). I'm not sure where this particular strain of group insanity started, but the Internet has surely helped spread it in the past few years.

Had something happen to you in court or through some action of the government that you don't like? You know, are you annoyed that the registration fee for your SUV has crept up? Property taxes getting too high? You're notified your grazing lease isn't going to be renewed on a patch of desert because cattle damage the habitat for an endangered spcies?  Well, if you spend anytime at all online researching the thing that's annoying you you're sure to stumble across some other disgruntled types hanging out on Reddit or in other social media. Pretty soon you're reading nonsense that says, hey, the government is actually violating the U.S. Constitution. The government has no right to tell you to register your car or levy taxes on your land or require you to comply with any law you don't personally like. It feeds right into your wishful thinking, and the next thing you know you're stocking up on red crayons and making your own license plates. . . not to mention hoarding ammo and convincing yourself that when you do decide to shoot one of the oppressors in a uniform you're going to be hailed as a hero by your fellow lunatics. All it takes is a handful of other people telling you that you're not nuts, you're their hero, and the next thing you know you're sitting in at wildlife refuge in the middle of nowhere begging online followers to send you Funyuns. You're talking big about staying indefinitely and shooting anyone who tries to remove you -- the possibility of ending up dead yourself never enters your mind. You're a sovereign citizen, ergo, you're invulnerable.

Personally, I'm still in favor of that tyrannical government the Bundys fear coming down on them like the world's largest shit hammer and squashing them like bugs -- if incineration was good enough for the black MOVE followers in Philadephia, I see no reason not to treat vanilla ISIS the same way -- but then I take a very dim view of nutjobs with guns threatening to kill people who are simply doing their jobs. As it is I fear our spineless federal officials are going to let the Bundys slide on this one, too. A sane response on the part of the government would be to seal the complex off, let no one in, and promptly arrest anyone who comes out. Given enough time, it could end with no one getting hurt. More likely, the occupiers will continue to be allowed to have contact with the outside world and this mess will drag on indefinitely.

If the government does treat the Bundys gently because they're afraid of another Waco or a Ruby Ridge incident, then the government is even crazier than the Bundys. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that if they slide on this one, too, the next time it won't be a chunk of desert in Nevada or a chunk of desert in Oregon that gets occupied, it'll be a Fish & Wildlife or Bureau of Land Management or National Park Service office building in the middle of town -- and for sure people will get hurt then.

No, we're not all thinking that

Talk about coincidences. Yesterday Gin and Tacos had a post up about people hearing someone spout something particularly vile or bigoted and responding by praising that person for being brave enough to "say what we're all thinking." The post said, in essence, no, we're not. When someone spouts some disgusting nonsense about all Mexicans being rapists or every Muslim being a terrorist, there may be a few ignorant yahoos who can't think beyond stereotypes, but please don't assume that just because something bizarre is going through your mind everyone else is on the same wavelength.

Then last night we were watching the local news -- With Luck You See TV* has been live-streaming its news programs for awhile now -- and they had done a story on The Donald on an earlier broadcast. The 7 pm news always includes viewer comments. Not surprisingly, there was the ever so predictable "I like Trump because he's got the courage to say what the rest of us are thinking." Oh really? On what planet would anyone with two brain cells to rub together agree with the suggestion that John McCain is a loser because he spent 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war? I don't particularly like McCain much anymore (he sold whatever soul he may have had during the last few election cycles), but the idea of mocking him for getting captured by the North Vietnamese? I'm not sure you can sink much lower than that. But some deluded viewer was actually foolish enough to publicly state, right down to providing her real name, that she agreed with Trump on a lot of the garbage he's been spouting. Thank you, naive viewer, for being nice enough to self-identify so it'll be easier for the rest of us to avoid you.

Why do people do this? Where do they get the idea that we all operate with some sort of hive mind where everyone is thinking the same way they are? Look around, people. Name a topic, any topic, from politics to professional sports to preferences in fast food restaurants and you're not going to have any trouble finding someone whose opinion is the opposite of yours, so where does this "we're all thinking" nonsense come from? Is it deliberate self-deception or just thoroughly ingrained ignorance? It's a mystery.

*WLUC-TV6, "your Upper Michigan news source"

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.

Listening to C-SPAN

I used to have a serious C-SPAN addiction. I'd listen to "Washington Journal" at work, and I'd listen on the weekends, at least until the stupid started running too deep or they trotted out a guest "expert" who was enough of a professional liar that I couldn't stomach listening any longer. I haven't listened for several years, though. I kind of lost interest after we moved back to the tundra and I retired. Streaming it helped keep me awake at work; that motivation vanished once I stopped copy editing articles about tapeworms in sushi.

Now we're in Missouri spending a few days at the Younger Daughter's place before heading over to Montauk State Park for our month of campground hosting. And, to invoke the usual cliche, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The topic du jour is the debate over funding the Department of Homeland Security. As usual, the Republicans are having hissy fits over nonsense. The more right-wing, rabid Obama haters in the Congress are busy trying to stir up their base (and, going by the phone calls coming in from the tinfoil hat types, succeeding) by ranting about Obama and "amnesty." WTF? Obama's supposed tyrannical executive order isn't amnesty. Doesn't anyone know how to read anymore? An amnesty would be a general pardon, you're off the hook for whatever you might have done now and forever. It's what the Reagan administration did back in the 1980s, a sweeping Get Out of Jail Free card for every undocumented immigrant who met certain criteria.

What Obama tried to do is create a breathing space, a brief moratorium, a 3-year stay of execution. He instructed federal prosecutors to exercise discretion and to focus on certain classes of undocumented aliens more than others. He didn't say ignore those people forever; he said to go after the worst elements among illegal immigrants first. You know, prioritize deporting drug dealers before jerking law-abiding high school students out of classes. This is what Immigration and Customs Enforcement should have been doing all along -- trying to track down and deport the persons who present the most risk to our society -- but, hey, it's a whole lot easier to find people whose only crimes are status offenses. One of the reasons the Obama administration has set a record for number of deportations is that ICE has been aggressive in going after what might be termed the low hanging fruit, the people who are relatively easy to find, e.g., students. Someone who's dealing drugs or on the run for shooting someone is going to be a whole lot harder to find than some kid who's going to school everyday while worrying about whether or not he or she can get into college.

In any case, despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Obama-haters, prosecutorial discretion is not amnesty. At best (and worst) it's simply an invitation to young people who are currently caught in a legal limbo to step out of the shadows, do some of ICE's work for the agency, and identify themselves. To date, none of them have because the program has yet to be implemented.

Which is another thing that kills me when it comes to being amused by stupidity in action. Going by the language various callers are using, you'd think a gazillion undocumented aliens have already been tapped with a magic wand labeled Amnesty. Pshaw. The program was supposed to start this month. It's currently on hold. Not one person has actually been affected by it yet. And, considering the potential downsides of signing up for the program, I tend to believe the number of applicants for it (if and when the program is ever implemented) will be remarkably low. After all, back in the 1980s when actual amnesty was on the line, there were still large numbers of undocumented aliens who chose to remain undocumented. The gains from applying for legal status back then were a lot higher -- permanent resident alien status -- then they are now, i.e., a lifetime versus "temporarily."

I've mentioned before that if I were one of those "illegals," I'd stay in the shadows. Right now ICE knows potentially millions of these people exist but it doesn't know specifically who or where they are. Step forward, apply for the program, and you've just saved ICE a whole lot of work in tracking you down when the temporary moratorium on deporting that particular class of undocumented immigrant ends.

But can any of the more extreme right-wingers figure that out? Nope. If it was President Obama's idea, then it automatically must be bad, a grab for power, another example of the evil socialist dictator's imperial ambitions. The stupid, it burns.

Amusing stuff seen on Facebook

Nope. Not cute memes with pithy sayings superimposed over images of cats in awkward positions. What's amusing me this morning is the latest (at least to me) offering in right-wing paranoia. The wingnuts really do waste an awful lot of energy yelling at clouds.

Today's specific example? A video of a freight train hauling "unmarked" military equipment "west." And this is proof of what exactly? In the right wing mind, it's probably more evidence of FEMA death camps being built in Nebraska cornfields or the Nevada desert. To a saner person, of course, it's just a freight train, a much cheaper method of shipping equipment than by truck, and thus evidence that someone in the Department of Defense actually does think about saving some money occasionally (and if they ever figure out who that person is, he or she will probably get fired).

In any case, once again I turned to the magic that is Google. It took me about a nanosecond to learn that the viral video was shot in California and that it was a perfectly mundane, run of the mill freight operation. The military ships equipment by rail all the time. New equipment gets shipped that way by the manufacturer; equipment currently being used will be shuffled from one Army post to another by rail; the National Guard will ship its equipment from armories to training locations via rail. No nefarious plots, no grand conspiracies, just business as usual. When I mentioned the freight train to the S.O., he got it immediately -- it's the logical way to haul a tank anywhere. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle is 12 feet wide and weighs quite a few tons. Hauling one by truck would require a specialized trailer (one with more axles than normal as well as a wider than usual trailer bed), possibly a specialized truck to pull that trailer, and two escort vehicles with the usual warning lights and signs regarding over-sized loads. Now multiply that by a more than a couple tanks and you can see why the military would prefer to travel by rail. No conspiracies; just common sense.

The really sad part is that the video my conservative friend shared this morning is over two years old. More proof, I guess, that even the lamest of conspiracy theories will never die.

It must be remarkably exhausting to exist over on the right wing end of the political spectrum. It's got to be tiring as hell to live your life in constant fear of stuff that's never going to happen or freaking out over really old news. If they'd spend even one-tenth as much time fretting about real issues -- crumbling infrastructure, for example -- the country would be a better place.

Reading comprehension

The S.O. and I had a rather amusing experience on Facebook recently. We both have a tendency to clump -- to share en masse various memes, links to articles, cartoons, whatever. Like everyone else who clumps, we don't put huge amounts of thought into it. It's more like "That's a good Maddow quote. I'll share it," or "Those otters are cute." It's the type of stuff everyone passes on and almost no one pays any real attention to.

Anyway, as part of a clumping exercise the other morning, the S.O. shared a meme about every single Republican Senator voting against equal pay for women. The meme apparently referred to the Paycheck Fairness Act, a Senate bill which the Republicans have blocked debate on three times (at last count) since its original introduction. I repeat, the S.O. shared a meme, one of those e-cards with the vintage art work and a grand total of 19 words on it. Unless a meme contains an egregious error, like calling Donald Rumsfeld a draft dodger when the man is a U.S. Navy veteran, no one ever comments on them. Why bother? Was there an egregious error in the meme the S.O. shared? Well, you could quibble that voting as a bloc to prevent debate isn't exactly the same as voting against equal pay, which is the kind of hair-splitting I'd be inclined to do (I tend to obsess about precision in language). That type of quibble would also signal that you had been paying attention to the issue and had at least a minimal grasp of the facts.

That is not, however, what the troll who did decide to comment on that rather vacuous meme chose to do. Instead he started off with a thinly disguised insult -- "My father taught me the meaning of work" -- as a segue into how leftists expect people to get paid the same regardless of merit or willingness to do any work at all. This is a theme he's brought up in other threads (there's overlap between our groups of Facebook friends) and it is annoying as hell. It doesn't take a semiotics expert to interpret that particular sign. I know the meaning of work = you're a lazy bum. This was followed by a typical Obama is a hypocrite because the women in the White House earn less than the men do. The S.O. made the mistake of responding to the ad hominem attack, and I'll admit it bothered me, too, so I jumped into the discussion.

I opted to go after the hypocrisy statement as well as a rather glaring ignorance of basic American law the troll had displayed -- he said Obama could just write a law to increase wages for White House staffers. I did a careful explanation of the problems inherent in interpreting aggregate data, described how the civil service system works, acknowledged that women unfortunately are still over-represented in lower pay grades, and noted that when direct comparisons are made (every GS-7 with every other GS-7) civil service workers are paid the same regardless of gender. Being a sarcastic bitch, I also tossed out a snide comment about his High School apparently not offering Civics back in the '50s because Congress passes laws, the President signs them.

He came back with an outraged response about how dare I insult his beloved alma mater?! That's when I had to explain what sarcasm is. I wasn't insulting his school; I was insulting him. I should have known. The poor man is an engineer as well as an avowed Libertarian, two categories of human renowned for their poor sense of humor and inability to pick up on subtleties in language.

The S.O. had done another response, too, and the troll had also responded to that one. Each of his responses included an explanation of how he really hadn't meant what he'd said in his previous response, he'd actually meant something else. After about the third response, I got bored. Granted, we were forcing him to discard more and more generalities and memorized talking points and to actually get into the messy weeds of reality, but even when the troll you're arguing with is a troll you actually know in real life (as this guy is) after awhile it gets old. I told him feeding time was over and I was off to do more productive things with my time.

If I had any doubt whatsoever that at the core of every Libertarian male lies a misogynistic asshat, he removed all doubts. You could practically see the spittle on the keyboard from him ranting at the S.O. that "your wife can't read." Way to go, sexist jerk, instant dehumanization by turning me from a person to a possession.

I used to have a remarkable knack for getting people to show their true colors. It's nice to see that even in cyberspace, I've still got the touch.

Hand me the tinfoil

I need to make a hat for a friend.

She's always been a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I think she's slipped over the edge. She has fallen victim to one of the more venerable chestnuts among conspiracy theories, the absolutely classic belief that the current occupant of the White House is about to declare martial law and turn the United States into a Pinochet-style dictatorship, one that will no doubt come complete with NFL stadiums being filled with dissenters who have been targeted to "disappear." This particular delusion goes way back. It's so old that not only does it predate the Internet, it predates telephones and telegraphs. In fact, it goes back so far we were listing Presidents using single digits, as in One.

Yep, it goes back to George Washington. As soon as he announced he would accept a second term, there were political opponents and conspiracy-mongers telling anyone who would listen that the venerable George Washington, father of our country, was planning to have himself declared King. Today we have this image of Washington as being universally loved and respected; back in the 1790s it was a different story, especially after Washington authorized the use of the military to stamp out the Whiskey Rebellion. The theory faded a bit when John Adams became president -- it kind of killed the "Washington wants to be King!" rumors when he stepped down gracefully -- but it would re-emerge periodically, usually when the current President was someone who aroused particularly strong opposition from some segment of society. In the 19th century, Andrew Jackson was suspected of having dictatorial designs upon the country, ditto Abraham Lincoln. In the 20th, conservatives feared that Franklin D. Roosevelt would never relinquish his grasp on the White House (and they were right; it took death to get him out of the Oval Office), although World War II was enough of a distraction that most people welcomed a strong presidency rather than fearing it.

More recently, when the Watergate scandal broke in the 1970s, many people sincerely believed that Tricky Dicky would never go quietly. Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Elder escaped conspiracy theorizing, but Clinton and Bush the Younger were both star players in the minds of the tinfoil hat crowd. Clinton was going to seize power and declare Hillary was the next President (which sort of indicates who was perceived as being the scarier half of that particular power couple); Bush was going to declare martial law and void the 2008 election to prevent himself and members of his administration from being prosecuted for war crimes. (An alternate popular theory was that Bush was preparing to flee to a ranch in Paraguay to avoid prosecution for treason when it came out that he and Cheney were responsible for 9/11.) The fact both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the subject of conspiracy theories is a rare example where you can say in all honesty that "both sides do it." It doesn't matter who's actually in office; both ends of the political spectrum have people sporting tinfoil hats.

In short, if a President can manage to be elected to a second term and is sufficiently disliked by enough people, he's going to be the star player in a conspiracy theory. The motives may vary along with the "evidence" being trotted out to support the theory, but the supposed ultimate goal is always a dictatorship. If you ask people what the evidence actually is, it falls into the classic urban legend pattern. That used to be "a friend of a friend knows all about this;" now it's "I read it on the Internet so it must be true." Either that, or it's perched upon such a slender reed that one marvels that anyone would pin their hopes on it. One general gets fired for being a drunken sot who caroused with hookers, and through the miracle of exaggeration and wishful thinking suddenly the President is eliminating all the senior military staff who disagree with him.  

The stupid, it burns.

Getting close to having turd breath

Given the penchant of the right wing to indulge in blacktracking, i.e., if President Obama is for something, they're automatically against it, it's not surprising that memes like this one are floating around the Intertubes. Another slightly ruder one is that if President Obama told people not to eat dog shit, all the Republicans would have turd breath in short order. Pshaw, you say, these memes are pure hyperbole. Not even hard core Tea Baggers are stupid enough to engage in insane behavior just because they can't stand President Obama.

Well, if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Over at the Daily Kos, FisherofRolando had a piece on the best Red State Comment of the Day. There was a gem about Sarah Palin's intelligence, but the best one came perilously close to advocating eating yellow snow:

Kentucky can go to hell in a handbasket. The people there are flocking to the ACA. We should bring to this fight the discipline of the union workers who hold firm on their strikes and suffer on principle. There can be no worse patriotic move right now than to sign up for Obamacare just to save a few hundred bucks a month. It will end up costing America much more than that. 

Yep. You read that right. If you decide you want to purchase health insurance through the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act, you're being unpatriotic. How dare you decide your health matters! Stay away from health insurance because it's more important to demonstrate how much you hate Obama than it is to take care of your own health. And, here, while you're avoiding signing up for health insurance, enjoy your entree of canine feces (fresh off the sidewalk) followed by a refreshing yellow snow sorbet.

So how's that bunker fantasy working out?

As that standoff in Alabama was unfolding, I found myself wondering just how long that particular delusional nutcase was going to manage to avoid getting shot by the cops. Answer: five days, and only because he had a kindergarten student in the bunker with him.

You know, I can understand and empathize a bit with the survivalists who hoard weapons, ammo, and canned goods because they fear a breakdown of society. The idea of having a safe place to hunker down quietly and wait for the looters to all shoot each other makes a certain kind of sense. I personally doubt we're likely to experience a Mad Max/zombie apocalypse dystopia anytime in my lifetime, but preparing for one isn't totally nuts. If nothing else, if there's a major infrastructure failure, e.g., no electricity for several weeks, you're not going to be totally flummoxed.

On the other hand . . . the rationale I've been hearing over and over from various gun nuts is that individuals have to be prepared to stand up to a tyrannical government. Well, good luck with that one. From what I've seen, the people who shout the loudest about the need to stand up to tyranny are the ones who'd have zero luck doing it, especially when their idea of tyranny too often consists of being asked to pay property taxes or abide by local zoning laws. They'll invoke the American Revolution and compare themselves to the Founding Fathers while totally ignoring the fact the American Revolution was the result of a lot of people cooperating with each other. The typical bunker-building gun nut doesn't seem to be able to get along with anyone, probably because the same paranoia that inspires bunker building renders the gun nut incapable of doing effective networking. If you don't trust anyone, usually all it takes is for your little group of "patriots" to exceed the passenger capacity of a Kia Rio and the group starts splintering.

In any case, given the long history of various individuals and groups that have engaged in stand-offs of various types with the government, whether it was local law enforcement, state police, the FBI, or ATF, can anyone recall any incident where the end result was anything other than the bunker-building gun nut being hauled away in a body bag or handcuffs?

And you thought birthers were nuts

A friend mentioned the television series "Doomsday Preppers" and I could not resist checking out the web site. Once again, I found myself being amused by the paranoid fantasies of a group of gullible loons. What is it about us Americans that makes us so prone to irrationality? Where does our enormous faith in the wonders of technology come from? And why do some folks keep falling for con men  marketing "survival gear" that's overpriced and of dubious value?

Example: the web site includes a quiz that scores you on how likely you are to survive a doomsday scenario. "How much water do you have stored?" strikes me as a reasonable question. Everyone, regardless of whether or not they're anticipating the end of the world, should have some emergency supplies in the home, especially some safe drinking water. After all, if you live in an urban area and for some reason water stops coming out of the tap, you could be screwed pretty quickly. But shouldn't you also be prepared for having to purify water? I'd be encouraging preppers to invest in a few gallons of bleach, some water purification tablets, or a backpacking water pump/filter just in case the bottles of clean water run out. After all, if an actual apocalypse happens, Coke is going to stop bottling Dasani.

In any case, it was a question on which we scored low. We've got less than 5 gallons stashed. We don't worry much about water when we've got our own well and still own a functioning hand pump. That part of the quiz also asked about food stores, like stashes of meat and flour, but totally overlooked beans. How can anyone take a survivalist show seriously that doesn't include dried beans in its lists of must-haves? Dried beans are the ultimate survival food. Properly stored, they'll stay edible for decades, unlike flour (which can go rancid and/or easily become infested with weevils) or canned goods. I've cleaned out old people's pantries where there were some older canned goods (both home and commercial) hiding in the back -- those bulging cans and lids were definitely scary.

On to another question: do you own a 4-wheel drive vehicle? Apparently if you've got a nifty SUV with 4-wheel drive, your survival chances go up. Right. Like owning a Jeep is going to help a lot when the zombie apocalypse happens, I-75 out of Atlanta is bumper to bumper stalled traffic, and all the surface streets are a snarled mess. If you live in an urban area, you need to think about surviving in that urban area because there's no way to guarantee you're going to be able to get out. Again, of course, not a problem for us. Urban preppers may fantasize about their bug out cabins out in the boonies somewhere; we already live there.

And then there was the weapons question. . . apparently, the more guns and ammo you have hoarded, the better. Bizarre. Just looking at it logically and assuming long term social chaos, complete with looters and worse, what you really need to be doing is mastering relatively silent weapons (bows, bolos, slingshots, atlatls) because the first time you fire a gun, you've both spooked the game and drawn attention to yourself. No doubt there's something very machismo in the fantasy of bravely holding off a horde of would be looters, but in a real survival situation, the lower your profile, the better. You don't want to find yourself defending your own personal Alamo; you want to be invisible.

Besides, arrows are reusable. Bullets aren't. Sooner or later the ammo will run out -- and unless reloaders have also mastered the art of making gunpowder, their complex technological crutch is going to turn into just so much scrap metal. Instead of hanging out at the firing range playing with Bushmasters, the semi-savvy survivalist is going to be at home practicing making slings and deadfalls and channeling his or her inner Robin Hood. Of course, it's a lot more fun to go the range, talk tough with your fellow preppers, and fire off a zillion rounds at human-shaped targets than it is to think seriously about the need to someday hunt very quietly for squirrels and rabbits.

We definitely flunked the weapons question.

I think Hank Williams jr is pretty much of an ass, but I do like this song -- I wonder how many of those would-be preppers even know what a trot line is?

 

Bring on the tinfoil hats

As one might have predicted, the right-wing's reaction to President Obama's re-election has brought the crazies out in full force. You know, after every election you know there are going to be sore losers, folks who are absolutely convinced that the only reason their guy (or gal) lost is the other side stuffed the ballot box. They'll rant about voter fraud and other shenanigans, but, other than a lot of grumbling that most of us recognize as being a way to vent after a disappointing result, they're generally reasonably sane in their responses.

And then there's the stunning cognitive dissonance displayed by the tinfoil hat types on the far right. We've spent the past 4 years hearing about how President Obama was an extreme left-wing radical socialist who was going to force us all to live in some sort of European-style socialist hell hole. So now that the President has won re-election, how are those tinfoil hat types reacting? The Southern Poverty Law Center reported on various reactions around the country and quoted this gem: “If you can immigrate to Europe you start making plans. … " You got it. The radical right spent 4 years ranting about the evils of Europe with its high taxes and heavy-handed socialist agenda, but now that their dreams here have been crushed, where should they go? Europe. 

Of course, part of the reason for retreating to Europe is the angry white base of the Republican Party is not at all happy about the shifting demographics in the U.S. They see their bubble of white privilege steadily shrinking and it scares the bejesus out of them. They can't handle it -- they keep talking about the country going to hell in the proverbial handbasket because whites will be a minority in a few decades. Apparently they think it's going to turn into Haiti overnight if old rich white guys stop running it. More cognitive dissonance (or perhaps denial). I've been hearing for years that there's no such thing as "white privilege," but now that it seems to be poised to vanish, lots and lots of white people are freaking out. Maybe it's beginning to sink in with a few of the bigots that actions have consequences. When you treat some people like shit for decades, odds are they're not going to be particularly inclined to be nice to you when the balance of power shifts. 

Can't cure stupid

Lately the S.O. has been indulging in an exercise in frustration in trying to communicate with some right-wing relatives. He spends way too much time exchanging comments on Facebook while muttering about how fucking stupid some people are. This behavior tells me it's definitely time for us to hit the road back to Michigan -- he needs to be using that energy to finish filling the woodshed before the snow gets to be asshole deep instead of wasting it in cyberspace. He could type until his fingers bled and it wouldn't change anyone's mind. The relatives in question are the classic example of what I (elitist left-wing Commie that I am) tend to think of as the brainwashed proletariat -- they fret a lot about creeping socialism and President Obama being a Marxist without having a clue as to what socialism or Marxism actually are.* They just know that they've been told that socialism is evil so it's become a convenient label to slap on to anything and everything they've been told to oppose.

I don't know why the S.O. bothers. I figured out quite awhile ago that there are some people who like to talk but are incapable of listening, so it's pointless to try to engage in a dialogue. It's especially pointless when you're dealing with people who have trouble understanding some fairly basic concepts, like the difference between socialism and fascism, or who rant about the evils of big government while working for a corporation that depends 100% on government funding. When people are so oblivious or willfully ignorant that they don't get it that shrinking government would result in their own unemployment or eliminate their benefits arguing with them is a waste of time and energy. All you can do is walk away while being quietly grateful that the people in question are fairly distant relatives, not close ones, and that they don't live next door.

[*As an actual Marxist who has known genuine, ideologically committed Socialists and Communists, it always annoys the crap out of me to see the labels applied to corporatist politicians like Barack Obama who 50 years ago would have been Eisenhower Republicans.]

National Rifle Association weirdness

I should have remembered this quote yesterday and just walked right on by the NRA booth at the Vilas County fair. I didn't. I stopped. I became involved in a discussion -- if you can call talking to the human equivalent of a wall a discussion.

The conversation did actually manage to remain civil -- no raised voices, no yelling, no name calling -- although it was more than a tad bizarre. When I asked questions like "Aren't you concerned about the increasing number of incidents of mass shootings?" the response was "Those are all happening in states where they've suppressed gun owners' rights or places where you're not allowed to have guns. If bystanders had guns, they'd be able to defend themselves and others." My response: "You mean like in Arizona when Gabby Giffords got shot in a shopping center parking lot?" I reminded her that the only thing that stopped the shooter from targeting more people was someone in the crowd tackled Jared Loughner when he paused to change clips. He wasn't "taken out" by an armed bystander; he was physically tackled and (figuratively speaking) sat on until the police got there.

Her response to my mention of the Aurora, Colorado, massacre was to mention another incident in Aurora where an armed gunman shot a minister and someone in the congregation then shot the gunman -- except she had her facts totally wrong on that one. Her narrative was that the shooter walked into the church and shot the pastor; the reality is that the perpetrator crashed his car in the parking lot and freaked out when members of the congregation walked toward the car to help him (the guy had a long history of drug abuse, including PCP use, and had apparently exhibited freakish behavior in the past). One woman died. An off-duty police officer was also a member of the congregation, and it was that police officer (not an ordinary citizen who just happened to have brought a gun to church) who then shot the gunman. This story, incidentally, is making the rounds out there in bizarro land -- it's the "Aurora shooting the media won't tell us about" -- as if one off-duty cop happening to be at the scene of a random incident somehow cancels out the 13 people who died and dozens wounded in the theater shooting. Of course, that is a typical NRA tactic: you take one incident where someone having a gun possibly saves a few lives and totally ignore all the hundreds of incidents where, thanks to stupidity, carelessness, or craziness, people die.

She then trotted out the "Americans have always been well-armed; people used to walk around all the time with a six-shooter on their hip." I laughed a lot at that one. I asked her if she knew what caused the famous gun fight at the OK corral. She didn't. I said it was because the Clantons refused to check their weapons at the sheriff's office when they rode into Tombstone. The town, like most Western towns, had an ordinance saying you couldn't carry a gun within the city limits. She did some sputtering and said she'd certainly never heard that. I told her to Google it -- it's historic fact. Then she tried going back farther, to the founders and the right to bear arms. I said, sure, and do you know why the founders were concerned about having a "Well regulated militia?" No real answer, of course.

The most bizarre part of the conversation, though, was about President Obama. Half the table was covered with literature that portrays Barack Obama as the most rabidly anti-gun President of all time, a man who is just chomping at the bit to nullify the Second Amendment and turn us all into tools of the United Nations. As I was looking over the literature, I couldn't help it. I asked her just how nuts they were. That's when she gave me the literature that proves Obama is out to take away our guns. The flyer had ten points on it, most of which are paranoid fantasies (e.g., Obama's promoting an anti-gun treaty with the UN that's going to gut our gun ownership rights; this is a perpetual favorite lately with the tin foil hat crowd despite being debunked numerous times).

Point number 10, though, was a little gem that the NRA lady kept insisting to me was gospel: President Obama had told Sarah Brady they're quietly working on gun control, just planning to sneak stuff through without anyone noticing. She told me this several times, and it is indeed on the flyer. This is what the flyer says (and I quote exactly, right down to the punctuation): Obama admits he's coming for our guns, telling Sarah Brady, "We are working on [gun control], but under the radar."

You know what brackets mean in a quote? The speaker said something else, but the editor is substituting a word or a phrase that will make the meaning clearer -- or, in this case, give it the spin the NRA wants. And why did they feel the need to do that? Because, according to Sarah Brady, the one thing she and Mr. Obama did NOT talk about when they met back in March 2011was gun control. PolitiFact has given this particular claim by the NRA a resounding Pants on Fire, but I didn't have to do any research to know the claim was bogus: those brackets tell the whole story. Checking on it made it clear it's even more bogus than my initial reaction indicated: it's not a direct quote at all; it's paraphrasing from a Washington Post article in which the reporter surmised that Mr. Obama and Sarah Brady must have talked about gun control because Mrs. Brady is a strong gun control advocate. In fact, Mr. Obama made a courtesy visit to the Bradys on the 30th anniversary of President Reagan getting shot; the conversation they had was brief and superficial. PolitiFact has researched a number of other claims made by the NRA; it's not much of a surprise that the Pants on Fire and Mostly False findings outnumber any deemed True.

I'm old enough that I can remember when the NRA was a relatively sane organization. They focused on hunting, conservation, and gun safety. Now they obsess about the UN taking away our freedoms, promote  paranoia and xenophobia, and peddle lies.

For what it's worth, I'm not anti-gun ownership, and I don't have a problem with the Second Amendment. I do have a problem with organizations that have apparently decided the way to boost their membership and ensure a healthy income is through the use of scare tactics, groundless conspiracy theories, and hate-mongering. The NRA is working hard at turning the United States into a nation of paranoid cowards who huddle in their houses, fearing for their lives every time they hear a strange noise and convinced that the only solution to any problem is to shoot it.  

Thinking about politics

Once again, Matt Taibbi nailed it when it comes to describing Mittens:

Romney can’t even be mean with any honesty. Even when he’s pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences. But Mitt Romney has to think his way to the lowest common denominator, which is somehow so much worse.

Most presidents have something under the hood – wit, warmth, approachability, something. Even the most liberal football fan could enjoy watching an NFL game with George Bush. And even a Klansman probably would have found some of LBJ’s jokes funny. The biggest office in the world requires someone who buzzes with enough personality to fill the job, and most of them have it.

But Romney doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/romneys-free-stuff-speech-is-a-new-low-20120713#ixzz20sVw7rqn

I haven't had much to say on the subject of politics lately. I look at what's happening in general and find myself being quietly amazed a day would come when I'd start missing Richard Nixon. To paraphrase Robert Reich, calling Romney an empty suit is an insult to empty suits everywhere. Something like a third of the voters in this country describe themselves as independents not affiliated with either party, and it's easy to see why. The Republicans have allowed themselves to be hijacked by the crazies, the tinfoil hat crowd that used to hang around on the fringes being laughed at, and, with a few rare exceptions, the Democrats have evolved into Eisenhower Republicans.

One thing that astounds me about that lunatic fringe, the teabaggers and closet racists, is the way they cling to their delusions and conspiracy theories. They keep rehashing the same weird obsessions -- the birth certificate, President Obama's Hyde Park house, his college grades -- as though if they say some of this stuff enough times it'll start to sound sane. I don't get it. The whole birth certificate fantasy is so convoluted and bizarre it's just laughable, and why would anyone care what type of grades any politician received in a freshman English composition course?

Ditto the bizarre speculations about the Obamas' purchase of their house in Hyde Park. The big question the teabaggers and conspiracy nuts keep tossing out is "How could they afford it?!" The implication is that there were backdoor deals and special favors. Pshaw. The house cost $1.65 million  when the Obamas bought it in June 2005. They did conventional financing just like any other home buyer. At the time of purchase, the Obamas had a healthy combined 6-figure income and his book was a best seller. If there were shenanigans going on, the mortgage would be a lot closer to paid off than it is right now. Based on the information provided on the President's 2011 income tax return, at this point in time he probably still owes close to $800,000 on the house. 

As a fan of "House Hunters" on HGTV, I feel confident in saying that there are a lot of buyers out there who could purchase just as much house with much, much shakier credit than the Obamas had in 2005. Back in 2005, with the housing bubble expanding at full force and banks issuing mortgages on McMansions to Waffle House fry cooks, anyone could buy a lot of house without much effort with absolutely no need for any political favors, shady dealings, or influence peddling. Episode after episode of "House Hunters" back then featured buyers who'd be described in what can only be termed lower middle class income terms ("Ellen is a secretary while Joe is a graduate student working toward a Ph.D. in philosophy"), buyers whose joint income in a sane world might have made them eligible for a Habitat for Humanity house. Then the narrator would intone, "They've been pre-approved for $600,000." WTF? These people can't be taking home much over $3,000 monthly between the two of them and they're buying a house that with a conventional fixed rate 30-year mortgage would have payments close to $4,000 a month? Of course, we know now that they weren't doing conventional mortgages -- they were being suckered into doing interest only and indulging in a fantasy that low payments would last forever -- but that's the subject for a different post.

Bottom line, though, is that if manicurists and fry cooks were being sold over-priced McMansions, why should there be any mystery over how a successful upper middle class couple could manage to buy a house in Hyde Park, especially when their household included two white collar wage earners with 6-figure annual incomes?  

How ignorant is the American public?

Every so often I think I've seen the ultimate in stupidity being mouthed (or, more accurately, typed) by the tinfoil hat types on the Internet. Then I'll make the mistake of looking at the comments following a news article or opinion piece at a site like CNN, the Washington Post, or MSN. Today's gems came from the comments opining about an article about the Supreme Court's ruling regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), television broadcasts, and indecency. Basically, the court ruled that the FCC had treated broadcasters unfairly by not warning them in advance that fleeing nudity or spontaneous profanity during a live broadcast might be subject to hefty fines. There were a fair number of reasonably sane comments along the usual lines, e.g., if people think a program is obscene they can always change the channel. Then the comment string deteriorated in a really strange direction. . . .

Bottom line, as expressed by the mouth breathers: Why was the FCC involved? After all, it's NOT a government agency.

Did these people sleep through civics classes? What type of cognitive impairment does it take to not understand that when an agency has a name like "Federal Communications Commission" the odds are it is indeed part of the federal government?

Then again, this is no doubt the same crowd that wants the government to keep its hands off their Social Security and worries about socialized medicine interfering with their Medicare. The stupid, it burns.