This turned up on the FacePlace today:

[VIDEO] Obama Wants To Shut Down Judge Pirro After She Exposes Damaging Leaked Info About Him…

Here’s a brief (yet complete withal) summary: Jeanine Pirro thinks Muslims are scary and said so.

Really, that’s it.

But Dale, you will marvel, what was the damaging leaked info about Obama that “Judge” Jeanine Pirro exposed?  And what exactly does her furry look like?  (Okay, so you might want to go read the first sentence.)

Spoiler alert: there is no damaging leaked info about Obama.

Nothing.  Nada.  I read the article three times thinking I had missed something.  But no, it’s not there.  The headline has nothing to do with the article.

And the article is simply telling us that “Judge” Jeanine Pirro said some things.  On the teevee.

By doing so, of course, she’s become a “political enemy of the White House.”  We guess.  There’s no link to any kind of statement from the White House.  There’s not even an educated guess about an Enemies List, which I think is just lazy rightwing martyrdom-doing.

But given how vindictive the President is—oh, come on, you know how he yells on the teevee and calls people names and threatens them^[1]—we all would be astonished if Pirro’s days were not numbered.  You just know we’ll find her in a ditch any day now.

I like the way Pirro rants about House Resolution 569, or Condemning Violence, Bigotry, and Hateful Rhetoric Towards Muslims in the United States Act; the author of the article immediately confuses it with an actual bill before Congress.  I guess she didn’t get to that webpage when she was homeschooled.^[2]

Somehow neither Pirro nor the author of the article seems to realize that this “bill” “establishing Sharia law”^[3] had to have been passed by the Republican House.  Such is the power of Islamic terrorists, I suppose.

Pirro also makes the whoa-if-true statement that Islam is the only religion “protected” by this “bill.”  I wonder if she read it.^[4]  Yes, Islam is the only religion mentioned in the resolution, but perhaps that might be because the House of Representatives wanted to offer their “thoughts and prayers” to any member of that religion who finds themselves in danger because of rightwing demagogues like “Judge” Jeanine Pirro.

::sigh:: Another day, another rightwinger throwing stones at themselves because no one else is doing it.

I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t enjoying it so much.

—————

^[1] Oh wait.  That’s Donald Drumpf I’m thinking of.  My bad.

^[2] Sorry, homeschoolers, that was a cheap shot.  I apologize.  I was just highly amused that the first and most succinct explanation I found of the difference between a resolution and a bill was on a conservative homeschool site, i.e., this author had resources congenial to his/her worldview and failed to use them.

^[3] No, really, another nutjob website headlined the resolution exactly this way.  I will not link to it, if only because ALL THE TEXT ON THE PAGE IS CENTERED, KENNETH!

^[4] Spoiler alert: she didn’t.

From Facebook.  Again.

Is it just me, or isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, “Yeah, and we took steps to make sure that none of that crap happened again”?

And anyone who thinks that the “straighten up and fly right” approach will solve our 30,000+ gun deaths a year needs to teach middle school.  Just for one day.

Oh dear.

Franklin Graham, a Bible grifter not known for his nuance or understanding, took to Fox Business News yesterday to warn of an impending cliff  a fork in the road: voting for Democrats will doom us because they’re going to turn us into socialism, and “socialism is godless.”

He also claimed that we’ve never had a secular government before, even though “we’ve chosen it,” and besides that, “secularism is the same as communism.”

Mercy.

This is pure gobbledygook. I hardly know where to start—it all goes in circles and there’s no good place to start to unravel it.

Let’s start with that epithet, “godless.”  Graham uses it to be synonymous with “evil,” but that ain’t necessarily so.  Is it possible to have a government without a god?  Yes—in fact, it’s preferable.  Is it possible to be a good human being without a god?  Absolutely, and the converse is true as well: you can be a total godbotherer and a complete shit—just look at Franklin Graham.^[1]

We’ve never had a “secular government before”?  Sweet Cthulhu, that’s all we’ve ever had.  Why does he say stuff like this?  Why does he ignore the fact that the Constitution itself prohibits a religious test for office, and the First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a religion?  Is he deluded, or lying?

Secularism = communism?  What?  For those of us to whom words mean real things, this makes about as much sense as saying “groundhogs are the same as the chair.”  I mean, it’s a perfectly cromulent sentence if you’re teaching Chomskian structural grammar (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) but actual English?  No.  Secularism is not the same as communism.

Beside which, I’m pretty sure he’s using “communism” to mean “oppressive totalitarian dictatorship,” which to be sure is our planet’s only real experience with the theory,^[2] but that’s not really its meaning.

So Franklin Graham’s theory is something like this:

Democratic Party = socialism = godless = secularism = communism

He wants you to think it means

liberal political party = communism = evil = demonic anti-religious forces = oppressive totalitarian dictatorship

but for those of us who use English as a real language, it means

liberal political party = economic theory promoting social welfare = without religious entanglements = the idea that we run our government and our society at large without reference to Franklin Graham’s version of the Bible = economic theory advocating the abolition of private property

and of course one those things is not like the others, is it?  (Hint: it’s “communism.”)

All of this code-speak is meant to tickle the fearful brains of the faithful, and if we wanted to boil it down to a sentence in plain English, it would be

If you vote for the Democratic Party, you are voting for Satan.

In other words, Franklin Graham is campaigning for the party that thinks that promoting our social welfare is the same thing as Joseph Stalin’s oppressive totalitarian regime.  (You should hear them try to conflate the socialists with the Nazis.)

I offer no solution, because there is none.  Franklin Graham is talking in code to people whose brains are wired to fear the world.  We cannot show them the way out, because they don’t want to go.

—————

^[1] Or worse, Ted Cruz.

^[2] If we ignore the Christians.   Which apparently Franklin Graham does, with every breath he takes.

A couple of memes showed up in my Facebook feed.

::sigh::

First of all, SUBJUNCTIVE VOICE, PEOPLE!!  “If kids were allowed”—that’s correct.  But then it has to be “they might not end up in prison,” not “may.”

However, that’s not the problem.  The problem is the idiotic belief that Bibles are not allowed in schools, with its attendant idiotic belief that children are not allowed to pray in schools any more.

This is a lie.

Of course Bibles are allowed in schools.  In my media centers at East Coweta High school and Newnan Crossing Elementary I had Bibles on the shelf for students to check out.  At ECHS, in fact, my religion section (the 200s in Dewey Decimal (PBUH)) was phenomenal.  I had every major religious text, plus commentaries and histories for almost all of them.  Even at the Crossing I had the Book of Mormon and the Koran on the shelf.  (Until I got a security system installed at ECHS, the most stolen book was The Tao of Pooh—every year.)

Not only was it not illegal for me to have religious texts in the media center, it is not illegal for students to have their own Bibles at school, and it is perfectly OK for them to have them out and be reading them if if it’s OK for them to be reading anything at the time.

So why do we hear stories of “persecution” of kids reading Bibles at school?  Two reasons: stupidity and viciousness.

Sometimes a kid will be reading a Bible and some stupid adult in the room who somehow believes the lie about Bibles not being allowed will create a scene by trying to take the Bible away from him.  This adult is A Idiot and deserves all the thwapping he/she will soon receive at the hands of the Intertubes.

And sometimes a kid will viciously pull out a Bible to read when he’s supposed to be doing other work and then create a scene when he is reprimanded by a teacher trying to run a classroom.  This kid is A Idiot and should have to watch C-SPAN as punishment.  It’s no different than when I read Crime & Punishment in 10th grade English rather than pay attention to the freaking workbook sheet on FREAKING PARTS OF SPEECH, KENNETH! I was thumbing my nose at that inadequate teacher, and so is the vicious little Bible-reader.  The difference is that if I had been called on it, and sometimes I was, then I put the book away—and so should the VLBR.

Where does the belief in this lie come from?  Read about it here.  Christian chronic persecution complex: it’s a real thing.

And then there’s this:

Such clever.  Much snide.  So capitalism.  Bless her heart.

Years ago, in the fabulous periodical The Weekly World News, there was a columnist named Ed Anger, surely a nom de plume if there ever was one. He was an irascible Archie Bunker kind of guy, always ranting about some minor inconvenience to his white, male privilege.  It was, as far as I could tell, a Poe.^[1]

One week, Anger announced that he had a solution to whichever recession crisis was going on at the time, and it was surefire foolproof, and this was his plan and it belonged to him: Cancel all credit card debt!

How simple is that?  You see, if you canceled every American’s credit card debt, then we’d all suddenly have a whole lot more money at our disposal, which we would then spend (by charging, of course), which would then end the recession on account of how consumer spending would boom.^[2]

Okay, two things.

One, that’s pretty much the idea behind Keynesian economics, not that Ed Anger or his ilk would ever suggest that the government lift us out of a recession by deficit spending.

Two, Ed seems blissfully unaware of the circular nature of money.  Yes, that sum on my credit card bill is my debt and it would be great if I didn’t have to pay it and I would in fact be able to spend more if it were gone.

But… that same amount of money—plus the interest I pay for the privilege of borrowing it—belongs to other people. That interest goes to the credit card company, who uses it to pay their workers and their bills, plus some amount of profit for their stockholders which I’m pretty sure is ungodly, but let that pass.  If we suddenly yanked the billions of dollars of household credit card debt^[3] out of the economy, you don’t have to be a student of economics to imagine the disaster that would follow.

(For one thing, all the credit card companies would immediately go bankrupt, so there would be no way for us to charge anything anyway.  A thinker, Ed Anger was not.)

Ed makes the mistake of thinking that our money supply is a zero-sum game.  In his case, he imagines you can just wipe the books clean and start over, like hitting reset on your cassette tape player’s counter.^[4]

Maggie makes the same mistake in thinking of the money supply as a zero-sum game, pretending that she thinks that we will run out of “other people’s money,” when in fact all our money flows in a circle.  However, she’s a little more insidious in the game she’s playing.  She is playing a zero-sum game: she doesn’t want the money flowing in a circle, she wants it flowing in one direction—towards the rich.  They deserve it, you know.  They’re job creators, unlike those unworthy parasites who only, oh, I don’t know, work the jobs.  Socialism: bah! humbug!

It is this very kind of snide punching down to the less fortunate that makes me see red and dream dreams about The Revolution.  And it’s this lack of understanding of basic economic terms that drives me to hover over that Unfollow button more and more every day.

—————
^[1] Of course, that’s the point of a Poe: you can’t tell.

^[2] It seems he did it twice, in fact, here and here.  (You have to give the author credit for actually writing a new column for the second one.)

^[3] $712 billion as of Q3 2015

^[4] I’m old.  Shut up.  Okay fine, your trip mileage calculator in your fancy self-driving car, you hippity-hop punk. Get off my lawn.

I promise I will once again blog about my creative efforts and cocktails and the labyrinth soon, but there’s just so much crazy out there clamoring for our attention.

Today’s crazy is a quote from a Baptist preacher in Nashville:

“We have to do something quickly, because there’s a cliff ahead of us, a civilization, and it’s within sight,” said Lydon Allen, a pastor at the Woodmont Bible Church in Nashville.
(Read more at http://wonkette.com/598063/god-turns-his-back-on-gay-hatin-tennessee-lawmakers#XHSlVK4E41COLxer.99)

This pitiful bleat is in reference to the Tennessee legislature’s failure to pass a bill nullifying the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality.  (I know, right?)

It’s not actually coherent, but we’re going to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt because his meaning is plain: we have limited time to repent of our Somdomite^[1] ways before we… Well, the country will… Um…

Okay, his meaning isn’t clear either.

Here’s what I don’t get about these apocalyptic warnings: they don’t actually mean anything.  None of it rises above Revelation-of-John style “beasts with nine heads” or “scarlet woman” ravings.  Sure, it’s scary, but what precisely are they telling us is going to happen if we don’t straighten up (!) and fly right (!!)?

There’s a cliff ahead of us?  Right ahead of us?  What does that mean in practical terms?  If we were talking about investing in new infrastructure projects, we could argue back and forth with numbers and data and historical precedent and facts so we could arrive at a decision on whether or not we need to keep the bridges from falling down.  But a “cliff”?  How are we supposed to make rational decisions about that?

The answer is, of course, that we’re not, at least not for these poor people who keep making these prophecies.  It’s all lizard-brain fear, all of it, and that’s enough for them and their followers.

But just once, I’d like someone to ask Rev. Allen, “What do you mean?  What, exactly, is going to happen if we don’t go back to stomping on gay people?  Names, Travis, I need names.”

I want a list of specific events, with a timeline, and then check in—very, very publicly—on the timeline to see if any of the terrible things have come to pass.  None of them will have come to pass, of course, not that it will matter to the End Times crowd, but I want these people marginalized and ridiculed back into their caves where we don’t have to pretend they mean anything to our society.

Thank you for listening.

—————

^[1] [sic]^[2]

^[2] cf.

Some old friends are apparently avid supporters of Ben Carson’s candidacy for the presidency. They are devout, conservative Christians, perfectly nice people, but who clearly have a blind spot where this man is concerned. As far as I can tell, they want us to vote for him because he’s a virtuous man who can “bring this country back to God.”

I have some questions for them.

What does that mean, “bring this country back to God”? What kinds of policies do you expect him to enact in order to do that? How would those policies square with the pluralistic country we live in? Or would that become United States policy, to privilege Christianity over other faiths (or non-faith)?

Is the God you hope he will bring the country back to the God he worships as a Pentecostal? Or is there some other mutually agreed upon version you’re hoping for? Do you understand that there are different versions of even the Christian God in this country? Do you understand that there are versions of God that lie outside what you consider the “Judeo-Christian tradiiton”?^[1]

Do you think that if we elect a devout Christian to the office that the nation’s problems will resolve themselves? Do you think that a Congress would naturally fall in line with this person’s policies?  Or will God simply intervene in our affairs?

What do you think Ben Carson’s policies actually are? How much do you understand about his take on the issues.^[2] Is it possible that his understanding of some of these could be simplistic and based on erroneous information, or worse, magical thinking? Are the issues he lists enough to run a country, or are there other problems facing this nation which he does not address? How important are those problems?

Do you think that “bringing the country back to God” is the President’s job? Do you think that if we elect a devout man to the office that God’s protection will return to the United States? What do you mean by the phrase “God’s protection”? Is this different from sports figures thanking God for their victory?^[3]

What, exactly, is it that you hope that will change about our country through divine intervention? Have you considered that your vision of a virtuous life and a virtuous nation might not be universal, i.e., that others have different ideas about what is virtuous and godly? Have you considered that these changes might be unwelcome in other people’s lives? How will that work absent change in legislation and policy?

Have you been praying for this country to achieve the results you hope Ben Carson will effect if elected? Has your church? How long have you been doing so?^[4] If so, then why do you think those results haven’t already occurred? What do you think God has been telling you all this time in response to your prayers?

——————
^[1] Do you understand that when you say “Judeo-Christian,” everything you associate with that term indicates that you actually mean “Christian”?

^[2] Have you compared his issues page to other candidates? Trump’s? Sanders’? Clinton’s?  Does his list of issues seem more or less comprehensive to you than the others?

^[3] Have you read Mark Twain’s War Prayer?

^[4] Has it been since Jan 20, 2009? Why is that, do you think?

No one has ever accused the Tea Party of being intellectual giants. In fact, most of them would deny the accusation themselves.

But David Brat, the rabid weasel who ran against and defeated rabid weasel Eric Cantor because—incredibly—Cantor was not rabid-weaselly enough for Virginia voters, has set a new standard. After President Obama’s State of the Union address, Brat took to the airwaves to object:

“He’s using the Christian tradition and trying to bring about compassion by bonking Republicans over the head with the Bible,” Brat said. “It’s almost a comedy routine on what compassion and love is. He’s mocking his enemies in order to compel a larger federal state using the tradition of love.”

“Our side, the conservative side, needs to reeducate its people that we own the entire tradition,” Brat said. “If you lose the moral argument, you lose the policy argument every time, so we need to reclaim the moral argument, where we’re so strong.”

(full story here)

To which the world replied:

I mean… It’s just that…

I can’t even.

I have to vent.

On Facebook this morning, a now-unfriended person paste-posted an image of what looks like a newspaper article outlining the deeply nefarious “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky.  Even if I hadn’t read “Rules”—which I have—this artifact didn’t pass the too-outrageous-to-be-true test.

So I commented that it wasn’t true, linking to the Wikipedia article on “Rules” and the Snopes article debunking the artifact.  (I also uploaded the graphic to the left; this is now my standard response to these idiocies.)

Another commenter then commented on the original, “Good to know, may I repost?” AFTER I HAD ALREADY DEBUNKED IT—but this is not my first time observing a rightwing nutjob’s blindness to the facts right in front of him.

Here’s why I’m seething: the next time this exchange percolated through my newsfeed, the original poster HAD DELETED ALL MY LINKS, leaving only my comment that it wasn’t true. He then commented, “To all my liberal friends—gotcha!”

WTF, dude.  “Gotcha?”  You posted a lie, I discredited it as a lie, and you have concealed that.  You have not deleted the post, you have not acknowledged that you slipped up and allowed your rabid weasel-brain to get the better of you, you have deliberately spread a lie as the truth.  Son of a bitch.

This person—it almost goes without saying—a fine, upstanding Christian in this town.

As the article says, “The Useful Idiots have destroyed every nation in which they have seized power and control.  It is presently happening at an alarming rate in the U.S.”

So this was on a friend’s feed today on Facebook:

I have a thought experiment here.  Let’s say that you go out on the playground and there’s this one kid who has a stick and he’s whacking the other kids in the face.

1. Do you

a) bemoan the lack of discipline in his home
b) take the stick away from him

2. Do you

a) take everyone back to class and ask them to bow their heads
b) take the stick away from him

3. Do you

a) give the other kids sticks and tell them to whack him in the face too
b) take the stick away from him

Such a dilemma, isn’t it?

You have probably looked askance at the crew occupying a bird sanctuary in Oregon and wondered who the hell those guys are and what the hell they want. You are not alone.

Ammon Bundy, son of welfare cheat Cliven Bundy, sums it up for us:

“We’re going to be freeing these lands up, and getting ranchers back to ranching, getting the loggers back to logging, getting the miners back to mining where they could do it under the protection of the people and not be afraid of this tyranny that’s been set upon them.”

What are they yammering on about?

The basis of their argument is that the Constitution, in Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 2 states:

“The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.”

…which they have interpreted to mean that the United States government cannot therefore actually “own” any land belonging to a state and so all that public land they’ve been grazing/logging/mining on needs to be “freed” from the control of the United States. (Many of these people are part of the III% movement, i.e., it only took 3% of the population of the colonies—according to them—to free us from Britain. Such patriot, much liberty.)

Here’s why they’re full of shit.

You may dimly recall that after winning independence, the thirteen former colonies had their eye on the land to the northwest of their boundary (hence, the Northwest Territories), but there were some disagreements on how it was to be added to the United States, or whether it could be added, and all that stuff. Much of the property was already in dispute between the bigwig states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia,^[1] and so a radical idea was proposed: everybody give up all your claims and cede the land to the United States, aka the federal government.^[2]

This was the famous Northwest Ordinance , a brilliant piece of legislation passed in 1787 and a document that is, as far as I’m concerned, should be considered part of the Constitution itself. The deal was that Congress would set up rules about how that territory—and all future territories ::cough Manifest Destiny cough::—would be administered, packaged, sold off, and finally admitted as states to the United States.

In other words, all land not already part of a state was land belonging to the United States.

Let’s take a moment to ignore the fact that this property was already occupied when we got here. Even as we fast forward through the timeline, ignore the fact that the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cessions were of land that didn’t actually belong to the people from whom we bought/wrested it.

So, ignoring all that, as we added those vast swaths of territory^[3] to our purview, Congress kept doing its job of drawing boundaries and selling off the land as they could.^[4]

Oops—almost missed that there, didn’t you? The III% crowd certainly has.

All land belonged to the United States. It was sold off as they went. That which was not sold remained in the possession of the United States, even after the territory became a state. That’s part of the deal of becoming a state. Strange, but true. About 47% of western lands is still public lands.^[5]

So the III% shibboleth that the United States is constitutionally prohibited from owning land is bullshit in every way, both de jure and de facto. (See Update below.)

Most of the western territories remain public because no one wanted to buy it, back when we were selling it. (Or letting people homestead it.) In the last 100 years, of course, we’ve begun to take a more custodial view of those lands. (Thank you, Teddy Roosevelt [R-Really?]!)^[6]

Which brings us to grazing rights. For 150 years, public lands were absolutely public. You could homestead a ranch, which gave you a certain amount of property, and then you just let your cattle roam as far as they could go to survive. Total freedom—no tyranny here nosirree!

If you are familiar with my oeuvre, you know that the Tragedy of the Commons is a recurring motif. We have in our present circumstance a perfect example.

As pointed out in this tidy summary at The Wildlife News, by the 1930s the grazing lands were a disaster. Introduced by a Colorado congressman, a rancher (!), the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 was designed to “stop injury to the public lands by preventing over-grazing and soil deterioration; to provide for orderly use, improvement and development; to stabilize the livestock industry dependent upon the Public Range and for other purposes.”

The U.S. Grazing Service—and its successor, the Bureau of Land Management^[7]—instituted grazing fees to help control overgrazing of the public lands. It’s that simple. It’s not tyrannical overreach (thanks, Obama!), and no one has “taken away” any rancher’s lands. It’s a sometimes complicated contractual agreement into which ranchers/loggers/miners enter with the United States, but the bottom line is that it is simply that: a contract.

Further, the fees charged by the BLM—by the United States—are far below market rate. The United States will charge you $1.35 for per AUM (the amount of land needed to support a cow and her calf for a month); the market rate out west, i.e., what a private land owner will charge you, is $20.10/AUM.

So when the Bundys whine about tyrannical government, remember that they’re whining about a 93% discount in what they’re charged to use our land, and that discount is provided by you, the taxpayer.^[8] Cliven Bundy and his sons are welfare queens.

Or when they proudly proclaim they’re holed up in a remote bird sanctuary to free these lands up, to get ranchers back to ranching, loggers logging, and miners mining, remember that the whole reason the BLM exists is that unrestrained use of public land was a disaster—the idea that present-day corporations and welfare queens would be better at land use now than they were 100 years ago is risible.^[9]

The irony is that if they got their way and the United States divested itself of the land, the Bundys couldn’t afford to buy it. Speculators and corporations would snatch it up and would charge the boys full market rate. And how do you think it would work if Cliven Bundy chose not to honor his contract with those people?

So you will pardon me if I mock these mighty patriots holed up in a bird sanctuary, fighting against a tyrannical government that exists only in their imagination—an evil entity which, for the rest of us, is simply the United States. The U.S. Us.

Update: Further insight at RawStory. [back]

—————
^[1] Georgia once claimed all the land west of the colony, first all the way to the Pacific, and then more modestly to the Mississippi. Part of the deal of joining the United States was giving up those claims. (Virginia was not about to allow that cracker state to supersede it in empire building.)

^[2] The conservative nutjobs have done an effective job of making “federal government” into a bad word, a shibboleth that gives them tingles down their legs as they imagine it hiding in their closet or under their bed. I will therefore use “the United States” instead to remind these yahoos that what they’re talking about is our country.

^[3] Oh, all right. Huge tracts of land. There, are you happy?

^[4] For a hugely interesting and entertaining look at the process, see Mark Stein’s How the States Got Their Shapes

^[5] This Salon article is a great overview of the issue.

^[6] Let’s see you wrangle punctuation like that, bucko!

^[7] Yes, the same BLM that manages the Playa where Burning Man takes place.

^[8] FiveThirtyEightPolitics has a very good article about it.

^[9] The Salon article points out that even if the United States wanted to devolve the property onto the states, the cash-strapped—and need I add, deep Republican red—states would be loath to accept the gift. They couldn’t afford it.  Talk about a welfare state!