North Texas Nonconformist

Courtesy of the Guardian newspaper, some revelations about unscrupulous shit-like behaviour from Richard Nixon, who spent a lot of time and energy trying to dig dirt on Senator Edward Kennedy in case he ran against him in the 1972 Presidential election. Gosh, wasn't Tricky Dickie a class act?
A Republican candidate for elective office in Idaho is caught laughing along with a moonbat meeting attendee who thinks it would be cool to issue Obama hunting tags. When called on it, he claims he was "being sarcastic". Sure you were being sarcastic. I have a bridge near New York to sell you, and you're an un-American little dipshit too.
A Republican representative is surprised when his false claims about medical treatment denial are shouted down at a town hall meeting...priceless.
Simon Dee, who was Britain' first TV chat show host, and for a period of three years was just about the biggest celebrity in the UK, before he abruptly fell to earth, died at the age of 74. His was a textbook example of zero-to-hero-to-zero, and what happens when you start to believe all of your own propaganda...however, his style and brash "ladies man" persona lives on in the Austin Powers movies.

For some time now, I have tended to drink relatively little in the way of non-diet sodas. This is partly because I have been (successfully) working to lose weight - down from 242 pounds in the early Summer to to 222 now. I am working to get down to less than 210 pounds by October.
One non-diet soda that I have not yet given up, however, is Coke, as long as it is Mexican Coke. Several years ago I found large bottles of Mexican Coke in Central Market in Dallas, and made the discovery that a lot of other people have made - that this variant of Coke actually tastes like Coke as I remember it when growing up. The reason appears to be because it is sweetened with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, which has almost totally displaced sugar as a drink sweetener in the USA because of cost.
This article explains how Coca-Cola is not happy that Coke is being imported from Mexico in this way, although the imports are not illegal since there is no counterfeiting of merchandise occurring.
Coca-Cola's attempts to stop these imports might be due to its contractual arrangements with bottlers in various territories and legal jurisdictions, but they are counter-productive. Afficionados of this variant of Coke are prepared to pay a hefty premium for it. I currently pay around $20 a case of 24 bottles for it at Costco. That is around $0.83 a bottle - a lot more than I would pay for a similar-capacity can of US Coke.
A naive person like me wonders why Coca-Cola does not simply sell it on import and collect most of the revenue for its US operation, instead of having to tolerate "gray market" imports and then whine about them. There is clearly a significant demand for this variant of Coke in the USA. But no matter, in the meantime I will continue to enjoy a cold bottle of "The Real Thing" on the patio in the evenings. Viva Mexico!

The article explains it very neatly:

Gordon Klingenschmitt is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who claims he sacrificed his 16-year career in the military and a million dollar pension because he was targeted for praying publicly in Jesus’ name while serving as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy.
...but those claims are flat-out lies.

The article sketches out the whole story, which shows that Klingenschmitt was fired from the Navy for disobeying the valid order of a superior officer. His whole public persona since then has been built around the concept that he is a religious martyr. In the process he has created an entirely false persona and is attempting to BS his way through the rest of his life pretending that he is the victim of religious persecution.
I am shocked, but not surprised that once again, lacking any legitimate justification for his actions, a Christian is wallowing in lies, BS and martyrdom. Having seen it in the Evolution vs. Creation debate all over the USA, it appears to be more widespread than I suspected.

Eric Boehlert in Media Matters has gotten around to neatly summarizing what I concluded many moons ago - the mass media and commentators in this country are a bunch of myopic, biased fools. As he reminds us:

As early as June 2003, The New York Times was fretting over whether Howard Dean's "angry message" would be his downfall. "All the Rage," read a Newsweek headline on a Dean profile.
And in two features in the summer of 2003, The Washington Post described Dean as "abrasive," "flinty," "cranky," "arrogant," "disrespectful," "fiery," "red-faced," a "hothead," "testy," "short-fused," "angry," "worked up," and "fired up." And trust me, none of those adjectives was used in a complimentary way. In fact, the Post took pains to distinguish Dean's anger from that of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom the paper termed "brilliantly cranky."

But oh my, how times have changed! Suddenly this summer, as right-wing mini-mobs turn health care forums into free-for-alls, as unhinged political rage flows in the streets, and as the Nazi and Hitler rhetoric flies, anger is in. Suddenly anger is good. It's authentic. It's newsworthy. Reading and watching the mini-mob news coverage, the media message seems clear: Angry speaks to the masses.
Instead of being turned off by the displays of passion the way they had been when liberal protesters took to the streets prior to the Iraq war, media elites have been touting the mini-mob trend as a "phenomenon" (USA Today) staffed by a "citizen army" (Bloomberg News).

As Boehlert then snarkily observes:

Bottom line: Liberal protesters don't tell us anything about the mood of America. But angry right-wingers do, according to the press.

There is plenty more in the article, but I will leave you to read it.
The bottom line is that what we are seeing in the town halls is not "democracy in action", nor is it any form of sensible manifestation of the democratic process. When people show up at a town hall and boo stories meant to illustrate the need for healthcare reform, that is not civil discourse. That is people behaving like mean-spirited moronic little shits. Neither is showing up outside a political meeting with an ostentatiously-displayed firearm.
To re-cycle an old saying, just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I have heard no plausible rationalization for standing around outside a meeting about healthcare with a prominently-displayed firearm. I think I know what the real reason for that display is, and it has a lot to do with a desire to intimidate.
The bottom line is that nobody in the media currently appears to have the cojones to call many of the town hall protesters out for what they are: mean-spirited, bullying, misinformed and wilfully ignorant, and anti-American in the widest sense of the word. These people have no interest in the democratic process, sensible, intelligent, informed debate, or any form of co-operation. They are only interested in being loud, obnoxious, threatening and unconstructive. Time to call this bunch of jerks for what they are. Of course they will whine and wave their hands and complain about "media bias", but guess what? All bullies whine and do that when they are told to knock it off. All that is needed is for the message to be repeated and reinforced enough times, then they will fold and slink off back to where they came from.
Time to call crappy behaviour for what it is, folks.
UPDATE - One of the less edifying features of the town hall rabble is that in many cases, the elected representatives whose meetings they are disrupting seem unable or unwilling to muster the cojones to face down and call out their insane and sinister prattlings. Wally Herger (R-Redding) can be seen in this video apparently failing to object in any way to the rantings of an attendee at his meeting, who seems to see no issue in describing himself as a "right-wing terrorist".
Herger clearly could not even remember to remind him of the famous saying that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. I tend to think that Herger is below fuckwit status in his reaction to this nonsense, he appears to be engaging in the worst kind of nodding-dog pandering.

The former Mayor of Carrollton, Becky Miller, managed to get a Texas Monthly Bum Steer Award this year. On her bio, she claimed a number of achievements (such as being a backup singer for Jackson Browne) that were found to be, er, fabrications.
One would think that with the rise of this pesky thing called the Internet, which allows for fact-checking a lot faster and more efficiently, that public office candidates would be a lot more wary of peddling BS in their resumes or bios. However, it seems that Becky Miller was one of those people who thinks that you can fool a lot of people all of the time.
Miller ended up losing her re-election race in May by 9 percentage points. The victory may not necessarily be a good thing in terms of city policy, since her winning opponent, Ron Branson, appears to have a severely reflexive and rather mean-spirited sounding anti-immigrant position. However, given that Miller led early voting by 9 points, it seems that revelations of her "creativity" in writing about her earlier life did contribute to her defeat.

George Lakoff, whose book "Moral Politics" comes the closest of any book I have read to explaining why so many people have been persuaded to vote for policies that are against their own best interests, has a powerful new article on Huffington Post explaining why the Obama administration is having so many problems in the healthcare reform debate. And problems there most certainly are, with a new NBC poll showing that many of the falsehoods and myths being promulgated in the debate are gaining credence with the public, despite easily obtainable evidence that they are not correct.
To those of us who believe that policy topics should be rational and properly debatable points, this is nuts. Not so, says Lakoff, whose backround in Cognitive Science provides him with a different viewpoint, He calls the rational approach Policy Speak, and argues that it is failing:

PolicySpeak is the principle behind the President's new Reality Check Website. To my knowledge, the Reality Check Website, has not had a reality check. That is, the administration has not hired a first-class cognitive psychologist to take subjects who have been convinced by right-wing myths and lies, have them read the Reality Check website, and see if the Reality Check website has changed their minds a couple of days or a week later. I have my doubts, but do the test.
To many liberals, PolicySpeak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest
But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind PolicySpeak is just false. Certainly reason should be used. It's just that you should use real reason, the way people really think. Certainly the truth should be told. It's just that it should be told so it makes sense to people, resonates with them, and inspires them to act. Certainly new media should be used. It's just that a system of communications should be constructed and used effectively.
I believe that what went wrong is (a) the choice of PolicySpeak and (b) the decision to depend on the campaign apparatus (blogs, Town Hall meetings, presidential appearances, grassroots support) instead of setting up an adequate communications system.

Lakoff swiftly identifies one major weakness:

As for language, the term "public option" is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that's what it really is.
The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It's got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, "I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I'm fight for it here." Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

He later re-inforces another important underlying reality:

...the positive policy should have been made in moral terms, with clear and vivid language. The term "public option" is a PolicySpeak loser. The public is the American public, it is all of us, it is America, and it should have been called the American Plan.

There is a lot more good stuff in this article, which is rather long for a HuffPost article, but needs to be read by anybody interested in why the debate has unfolded the way that it has, and why (despite the manifest idiocy, dishonesty and cynicism of the opponents of health care change) the administration is still not making headway in the public debate.

...is that your past is going to be investigated, and if you have been remiss in your business or professional dealings, you will have questions to answer.
Former KIRO-TV Susan Hutchison, now running for political office in King County in Washington, probably wishes she could close Pandora's Box, but alas, the lid is open and the contents have escaped:

...Hutchison was suspended from work at KIRO-TV after calling in sick over the Fourth of July in 2002 and then being spotted canoeing in Oregon.
She had asked for vacation for those days but was turned down, according to a first, incomplete set of documents unsealed by a court order today.

The story is incomplete, since more court records are to be published after local media successfully argued that they should be released. However, the picture being painted by the current documents is not a flattering one; that of a prickly, obnoxious woman deceiving her employer and then trying to file lawsuits when she was terminated.
Hutchison is claiming that she is prevented from discussing her lawsuit by the terms of its settlement; however, KIRO-TV claims that the terms of the settlement simply prevent her from discussing the actual settlement details, and do not prevent her from discussing other aspects of her time at KIRO-TV.
King County electors ought to be taking this into account when deciding which way to vote...

Wait for it...courtesy of the Guardian newspaper:

A Florida man says his cat downloaded child pornography.
Police are charging Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach, Florida with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after finding more than 1,000 images on his personal computer.
Griffin told police he had been downloading music, and that his cat jumped on the keyboard when he left the room. He said "strange things" appeared on the computer when he returned.

...I was jerked back to UK reality after spending some time reviewing the attempts by fascists to disrupt US politician town halls, by this reminder that in the UK we have a related version of bad behaviour in the form of drunken tourists. This article in the Independent lays out the usual litany of alcohol-fuelled idiocy in the Greek islands and Crete.

...Malia, a resort that has become notorious for the bad behaviour of tourists. Locals are increasingly angered and exasperated – not least at the sight of couples copulating in public. Internet chat rooms and UK party sites publicising "all night" orgies have fanned the unruly and drunken behaviour in the resort. Residents have repeatedly taken to the streets to demand that Britons "stay away" and this week a shop owner in Malia meted out his own brand of justice by holding hostage for an entire day a tourist who had driven into his shop on a quad bike.

This sort of anti-social nonsense gets visited on hapless towns all over Europe every Summer thanks to a culture based on binge drinking. Warning to the USA - this is what you are also getting into by trying to stop people drinking under the age of 21 (one of the most futile legally-backed attempts to modify adolescent behaviour ever seen).
The sad thing is that the story never changes. Every year a significant number of drunken Brits end up cooling their heels in jails, from which they eventually get bailed. They then either get deported, or charged with criminal offenses to which they end up pleading guilty, with their defenders blaming alcohol for the bad behaviour. (An excuse which may stop being used once enough courts laugh at it then increase the sentence as punishment for ducking accountability). Once back in the UK they whinge and whine about "brutal police", while conveniently overlooking their own appalling behavioural pathology. This is lapped up by the media of course.
I would like for these people to be locked up for a while in the country that they have offended, then laughed back into the UK. I despair of morons like this. They appear to have minimal brainpower even when sober, but when drunk they seem to go to pieces.

#1 Orly Taitz
The rather eccentric lawyer (but only in CA via a correspondence course) appeared on MSNBC today to answer the rather pertinent question of why she is submitting as evidence in a court filing a "copy" of a Kenya birth certficate for Barack Obama that is a total forgery.
Her response to questioning was to accuse MSNBC of being "Obama's Brownshirts".
I have no idea where Orly Taitz has been hiding out for most of her life, but she clearly is a clueless idiot when it comes to lawyering and making friends. If that birth certificate is part of her legal filing in her lawsuit, I hate to think what the court is going to write in its ruling.

#2 Greg McMackin
The football coach at the University of Hawaii, who used an anti-gay slur in a press conference, after attempting to dig himself out of the hole, finally had to admit that he was in one:

The Hawaii football coach who used the word "faggot" three times to describe rival team Notre Dame during a press conference, then asked the press not report on his use of the antigay slur, has been suspended for 30 days without pay in addition to other penalties.
Greg McMackin, who attempted to apologize multiple times during the same press conference -- he said he hoped the press wouldn't report on what he said because he didn't "want to… have every homosexual ticked off at [him]" -- will also receive a 7-percent pay cut.

Frankly, I am somewhat surprised that McMackin still has a job, after exposing what is clearly an anti-gay animus about half a mile wide. Hey Greg, what does it feel like to be exposed as a bigoted wanker?