Category Archives: Politics: Tinfoil

Conspiracy Theory Claims President Teleported to Mars.

(“Obama Derangement Syndrome” explained.)

It wasn’t even close. AP has the votes. The amendment was not a serious attempt to do anything more than rally the troops, since it was medical nonsense to suggest that every fertilized (not even implanted!) embryo should have ‘personhood’ status. Even so, 42% of the voters (at last count) voted for it in this low-turnout off-year contest.

But if we’re going to put personhood on the ballot, how about putting corporate personhood on the ballot? That could be a fun debate.

I’m back from brief travels. Not much seems to have changed while I was gone. E.g. Bachmann says only ‘radical environmentalists’ wouldn’t drill the Everglades.

It’s the sort of theatrics that wows people and gets headlines, but has no substance as there isn’t much oil there anyway.

… geologists believe there’s not much oil under the Everglades anyway. Collier County’s Sunniland Field, the only significant oil field nearby, doesn’t produce large quantities of oil, and a former employee tells 10News the oil is difficult to refine.

…

10News sat down with USF Geologist Dr. Albert Hine, and he told us, “There is no known evidence that there is a significant hydrocarbon deposit beneath the Everglades.”

I am waiting for a democratic candidate to suggest confiscating guns from institutionalized mental patients. That seems about the same kind of thing. But of course they don’t do that. Which is why everyone is linking to Mike Lofgren’s Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

It seems to me that Obama’s party is like the Rockerfeller Republicans of the 70s and 80s. Bachmann-Perry Overdrive ¹ look like the John Birchers with a human face. I’m not sure what Romney is, maybe it depends on the phases of the moon.

1. No disrespect intended to these guys.[↩]

• Bachmann sees Irene as divine message on spending
• Bachmann remains “open” to lowering minimum wage. (Actually, she’s against the basic concept.)
• Michele Bachmann says she would consider oil drilling in the Everglades

Someone should be asking all Republican candidates for President if they agree, and if they don’t agree they should be asked whether someone who believes divine political instructions are delivered via the weather is a good choice for public office.

In other Islam-related news, today I met my first Irishman who thinks Obama is secretly Muslim. I’d thought that sort of thing was confined to the US. But in this man’s defense, he was a paranoid schizophrenic I met with the psychiatric crisis team. What’s your excuse, Americans?

via Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz (eh?)