Link: http://www.zimbio.com/Mayor+Becky+Miller/articles/3/Mayor+Becky+Miller+Compulsive+Liar

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.

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/the-policyspeak-disaster_b_264043.html

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...

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/deadlineusa/2009/aug/07/cat-download-child-pornography

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.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/wish-you-werent-here-greece-tells-tourists-1769200.html

...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?

This recent incident, where Officer Crowley arrested a Harvard professor for disorderly conduct, only to have the local prosecutors pretty quickly drop the charges, is fascinating on a number of levels.
Having read (directly or indirectly) the accounts of both men, it seems clear to me that they both were not at their best during the encounter, and I suspect that they would both admit that in private.
The main challenge is that, having gone public with their narratives, they are now locked into their positions publicly. In addition, President Obama, having stated his opinion that the arrest of Professor Gates for disorderly conduct was "stupid", now has a public position to defend.
Since the original incident, and the decision by President Obama to comment on it, we have seen some rather predictable events unfold.
Firstly the police have closed ranks behind Officer Crowley, acting all hurt and demanding an apology from the President. The sight of a collection of pompous, huffing, barrel-chested authoritarians whining about the President making an obviously correct statement (whichever way you parse it, the decision to arrest Professor Gates was not a smart one) is not an attractive one, especially to the African-American community, for whom the Gates incident is yet another reminder of the many instances of racial profiling and general disrespect thrown their way over the years by law enforcement. I did not see a single African-American law enforcement official in the gathering, which further throws the position of law enforcement into sharp relief.
Secondly, and interestingly, President Obama seems to be using the incident as a "teaching moment" to try and get both sides to move beyond their hurt and indignation and see things differently. His decision to even get involved at all, and his investment of a lot of time behind the scenes in talking to both Officer Crowley and Professor Gates, tells me that he wants to use the incident as a means of moving discussions about race relations and the roles of the communities into a new zone. Whether he will succeed is an open question. Both law enforcement and the African-American communities tend to take refuge in predictable and inflexible positions when incidents like this occur.
Lastly, the incident has triggered a massive discussion about what happened/should have happened/did not happen, and also a wider discussion about the roles and responsibilities of both law enforcement and the public. The best discussion I have found so far is this one, triggered by a considered posting from a policing expert who has worked with law enforcement for many years.
The fact that such widespread discussion is occurring is further proof that, over 40 years after the passing of civil rights legislation, race is still a divisive issue in modern America. I see a lot of racism in the country still, wrapped up in coded language and distracting nonsense such as the "birther" controversy, which I see as nothing more than an attempt to de-legitimize a sitting President, and not a very good attempt at that. America needs to grow up rapidly in this and other areas if it wants to remain a top world power in the years to come.
UPDATE - From the Croked Timber discussion comes this excellent, nuanced response from a military veteran who has seen just about all sides of the issue in the past.
UPDATE 2 - One of the issues not highlighted in this whole incident is how the decision by Officer Crowley to arrest Prof. Gates for "tumultuous conduct" was in itself an abuse of the law. From the Reason blog we have this post by Radley Balko which explains why arresting Gates for "tumultuous conduct" was an abuse of the law; laws governing disorderly conduct were originally created to give the police methods of heading off riots and disturbances, not for the arrest of angry single citizens perceived as engaging in "contempt of cop".
The abuse of laws in this way is nothing new under the sun. In the 1960's and 1970's, the police in the UK engaged in racial profiling using an obscure law (the 1824 Vagrancy Act) which gave them (as they saw it) the ability to stop anybody on the street with little or no suspicion or probable cause. In practice, a lot of people became wearily used to being stopped, frisked and questioned under the dr facto pretext of "walking on the street while black". It took the Brixton Riots, the Scarman Report, and a whole heap of public anger before the police stopped abusing the act (the section of the act that was being abused became known as the "sus" law). There were other potential abuse mechanisms that the police also used, such as a law which made it an offense to be "equipped for theft". Apart from the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, it is difficult to find a more badly-written piece of law; under this law my bunch of car keys could be claimed to be "equipment for theft" in the eyes of a paranoid law enforcement official...

...so why is it that a Christian group paying for pro-religion billboards feels it necessary to just make shit up?
The blog Computing Intelligence has a suitable riposte:

"There is nothing so simultaneously dull and mentally detrimental as spending your Sunday morning in a church." - George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America.
Haven't heard that quotation before? That's because I just made it up. Chances are, George Washington never said that, but a lack of documented evidence for the attribution of a quotation is apparently no problem for some people. It would seem that a pair of theocratically minded citizens of the United States decided it was perfectly reasonable to make up a sentence that corresponded to their beliefs, and then slap that statement on a billboard and attribute it to George Washington.

However, if this is the way that some Christians want to behave in furtherance of their ideas and beliefs, I look forward to either calling BS on this, or getting into the business (like Computing Intelligence) of Making Stuff Up. Given the razor-sharp wits available at websites like Pharyngula, I am sure that we can out-BS them.
Bottom line though: these billboard charlatans are deceitful sacks of shit, hypocritical lying loons.
UPDATE - No sooner have I written this than another example pops up, this time from Oklahoma...you cannot make this stuff up.

1. Texas Secession and all that crap
Not to be outdone by Gov. Rick Perry's inane hints about secession, the Texas State Legislature is now getting in on the act, proposing to use up limited legislative time on a motion re-affirming the existence of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
Texas Rep. John Culbertson has also gotten in on the act, pointing out that Texas has the right to subdivide itself into up to 5 states. In his world, this somehow means that Texas can SHAZAM! morph into 5 states overnight, each with 2 Republican senators. Leaving aside any practical considerations of whether all the Senators would be Republican, Culbertson is either stupid or talking total BS, or both. The clause in the agreement by which Texas joined the Union which refers to Texas splitting also states that this must be done within the rules laid down in the U.S. Constitution i.e. the other states have to agree. Somehow I do not see other states agreeing to this sort of a split without some form of matching split (California, which has more electors than Texas, will probably want the same sort of split). Culbertson's bloviating nonsense is yet more evidence that the GOP in Texas are currently a whiny-ass bunch of losers.

2. That Darned Taxpayer Hotel in Dallas
Harlan Crow has spent in excess of $4 million on the campaign against the hotel and convention center backed by the Dallas City Council and the Mayor. I am getting tired of this group's adverts - they are slick and narrated by people with resonant well-modulated voices, but they are nothing more than innuendo-ridden polemical slams, mostly consisting of ad hominem attacks on Mayor Tom Leppert. Whenever I see a campaign like this relying almost exclusively on the ad hominem fallacy, my BS/sleaze meter gets pegged to the end-stop. Where's the argument?
There is also a rich vein of hypocrisy lurking in the adverts - Crow himself refuses to talk publicly about the campaign, claiming he wants it to be about issues, but as the Dallas Morning News has pointed out, one of the most recent adverts is nothing more than an ad hominem slam against Mayor Tom Leppert.
Crow's campaign is the most egregious example of special pleading (his family business just happens to own the Anatole hotels) that I have seen since the Dallas Cowboys spent millions to con the city of Arlington into ponying up for a second major-league sports stadium in 10 years. That campaign was similarly one-sided in terms of the amount of money being spent by the pro and anti stadium factions.
The Dallas Obsever has a fairly comprehensive article outlining the main facts and issues in this unfolding saga.
UPDATE - The ballot initiative to prevent Dallas City Council from supporting the hotel was narrowly voted down by the city voters.

3. The Big Bank Bailout
Here is a pretty cogent explanation for why the recent bank bailout was not a very good idea...

I was examining our Yahoo inbox the other day when I found another chain email sent by a friend. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have limited patience for chain emails, since they are usually reflexively forwarded by people who (in some cases) have not even bothered to read and understand the contents of the email.
This email deals with US healthcare reform, a vexed subject if ever there was one. It is a link to the website http://freeourhealthcarenow.com.
I went to the website. It purports to be a "group of concerned citizens". That twigged my BS meter straight away. A phrase like that, to me, has about as much credibility as somebody saying "you can trust me" when telling you a story.
To cut a long story short, after doing some fairly elementary research, I was able to write this reply to the sender:

I decided to do some research...the website freeourhealthcarenow.com is owned by the National Center for Policy Analysis. This organization is not "a group of concerned citizens". It is a pressure-group funded by a number of conservative organizations who have a track record of funding lobbying efforts, not just against government involvement in healthcare, but also against the idea that global warming actually exists, and in favour of reduced environmental regulation (this group has been funded by such environmentally responsible organizations as Exxon/Mobil in the past). See wikipedia.org for some information.
I would be leery of signing this petition, partly for this reason, but for a whole raft of related reasons:

1. We already have government involvement in health care in the form of Medicaid and MediCare, and I have yet to hear or read any compelling rationale for why those forms of healthare delivery do not deliver effective results. I hear lots of sniping against them by small-government lobbyists, but I do not see them being cut back or dismantled, which suggests that they are probably filling a need and have electoral support.
2. Most of the current debate around healthcare in the USA is not grounded in reality. This country spends around 13% of GDP on healthcare based on 2003-2005 WHO figures, and has worse healthcare metrics than many other westernized countries that spend a lot less on healthcare as a percentage of their GDP. Something is not working well in the system. Mouthing platitudes "we have the best healthcare in the world" while ignoring metrics looks to me to be rather like head-in-sand.
3. Empty slogans and phrases like "socialized medicine" fail to impress me or fill me with dread - that is what is in place in Canada, the UK, France and many other European countries, according to what I keep reading from the harbingers of doom. I have bad news. Those countries have not become sink-holes of government-run healthcare hell. I have lived in the UK, and visited European countries, I have friends in those countries. The system operates differently, but acute medical needs are taken care of. There is also the ability of anybody in those countries to pay for their own private treatment if they choose to do so. When I lived in the UK, I had private medical insurance paid for by my employer, but I never used it, because the National Healh System took care of my needs at the time.
4. There is a deep reflexive anti-government animus in the USA that has the effect of choking off any sensible debate about healthcare systems and options. The words "government" and "socialism" are bandied about like bogeymen in much the same way that "communist" was used as the ultimate demonizing phrase in the 1950's. Whenever I find myself reading slogans, I wonder where the argument is.
The petition request implies that government involvement reduces choice, but there is no argument to back up this assertion. The request relies on the reader making the reflexive connection "govenment = bad". My threshold for a compelling argument is a hell of a lot higher that that. If government really is bad, then somebody ought to have little trouble assembling an argument instead of a collection of linked assertions and slogans.
As you can probably tell, I would not sign a petition like this. It is a lobbying device being marketed by a free-market pressure group masquerading as "concerned citizens". That is BS deceptive marketing from the outset. The petition makes no case, it deals in empty sloganeering. That being the case, I regard it as a meangingless distraction. We should be having a deep and wide-ranging debate about healthcare, (now I am going to sound pompous and possibly condescending) and everybody needs to take some time out to become informed about what the current state of healthcare in the USA is, and also what really goes on elsewhere in the world (note - radio and tv talking heads with anecdotal stories do not provide any useful information about Canada, for example).
Oops, I just noticed that my soapbox hit the roof...Better get down off it now.

Usually when I send these types of replies, I never get a response, which is a shame, since I would like to understand the reaction. However, I am getting very weary of hearing and reading misinformation, cherry-picked outlier examples, and other forms of BS being deployed to support an ideological perspective that Government Healthcare Involvement Is Bad. Most of the posturing in this area is intellectually risible, it would not have survived 15 minutes in my high school debating society, and it should not be allowed to survive scrutiny today.
As a follow-up, I found this diary on DailyKos today that explains some of the key concepts that do not exist in the Canadian healthcare system...