No One Could Have Seen This Coming

No One Could Have Seen This Coming

So here's an angle that I haven't seen posted anywhere (you read it here first). One of Trump's favorite talking points these days as he seeks to deflect blame for is ill-preparedness in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic (when he's not blaming President Obama or the WHO) is that no one could have seen the coronavirus pandemic coming. The Washington Post, among others, has examined this claim and found it to be lacking.

We know, for instance, that in 2018 Trump and his team dismantled the Global Pandemic Office of the National Security Council. We also know that in early 2017, before Trump was sworn into office, Obama administration officials briefed a group of restive, incoming Trump cabinet members on how to respond to a global pandemic.

But one thing few people have noted is that in addition to all that the year 2017, the very year that Trump took office, was notable because that flu season was the worst, in terms of the number of fatalities, that the US had experience in over 4 decades. At the time the Associated Press reported:

Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. It was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly....
Fatal complications from the flu can include pneumonia, stroke and heart attack.
CDC officials called the 80,000 figure preliminary, and it may be slightly revised. But they said it is not expected to go down.
It eclipses the estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-1977. Estimates for many earlier seasons were not readily available.
Last winter was not the worst flu season on record, however. The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, historians estimate.

So not only was the Trump administration handed a bureaucracy, tools and playbooks to deal with a global pandemic like the one we are now experiencing (which they either dismantled or ignored) but Trump's first year in office saw the worst flu season in 40 years. A particularly virulent flu strain triggered over 80,000 deaths in the US. Yet even that wasn't enough to shake Team trump out of their deep slumber and cause them to consider that maybe we ought to be a little better prepared for when the "big one" comes.

Another Trump Administration Failure

Another Trump Administration Failure

One of the biggest lies that Trump keeps repeating is that he "inherited a broken system" for dealing with pandemics. Yet every day we find out about another Obama administration pandemic mitigation initiative that the Trump administration either dismantled or failed to implement. Today the Washington Post reports that following the H1N1 swine-flu virus, the Obama Administration put in place an initiative to speed the production of N95 protective gear. A completed proposal was presented to the Trump administration in 2018, and then was promptly shelved:

In September 2018, the Trump administration received detailed plans for a new machine designed to churn out millions of protective respirator masks at high speed during a pandemic.
The plans, submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by medical manufacturer O&M Halyard, were the culmination of a venture unveiled almost three years earlier by the Obama administration.
But HHS did not proceed with making the machine.
The project was one of two N95 mask ventures — totaling $9.8 million — that the federal government embarked on over the past five years to better prepare for pandemics.
The other involves the development of reusable masks to replace the single-use variety currently so scarce that medical professionals are using theirs over and over. Expert panels have advised the government for at least 14 years that reusable masks were vital.
That effort, like the quick mask machine, has not led to a single new mask for the government’s response.

Yet he takes no responsibility.

The Impeachment lie

The Impeachment Lie:

The Washington Post reports:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that Trump’s impeachment distracted the administration’s attention from the emerging crisis, seeming to lay blame on the congressional Democrats who led the effort. 

In fact, Trump was so distracted by impeachment he was only able to hold the following political rallies during that time period:

Jan 9 - Toledo Ohio
Jan 14 - Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Jan 28 - Wildwood, NJ
Jan 30 - Des Moines, Iowa
Feb 10 - Manchester, New Hampshire
Feb 19 - Phoenix, AZ
Feb 20 - Colorado Springs, Co
Feb 21 - Las Vegas, Nevada
Feb 28 - Charleston, SC

Yeah... that's a man who's so distracted by impeachment he doesn't have time to focus on a deadly disease that's right at the nation's doorstep. I mean, the list of events reads like a Rolling Stones concert schedule... you know... if the Rolling Stones were some crappy, no talent, White Power Death Metal band.

Dumber even than Donald Trump?

Perhaps, if you are Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. The Washington Post reports:

After resisting a statewide stay-at-home order for days, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) succumbed to the pressure and issued one on Wednesday. Part of the reason, he said, was that he had just learned some new information.
Kemp said he was “finding out that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs.”
“Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad, but we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours,” he said. He added that the state’s top doctor told him that “this is a game-changer.”

So, yeah. Kemp just learned something that the news, the CDC and the WHO have been warning us for months.

Time to start blogging again...

These are the worst of times,
and we're being led
by the worst of men.

Case in point:

• 
  

“ Wait.  No, I don’t want [the states] to compete because all they’re going to do is drive up the price.  I don’t want them to compete.  They should be calling us.  And we can work it so they get the ventilators and they get shipped directly.

If they’re competing, if they’re calling — even if there’s only two of them calling, they’re going to just drive up the price.  Because as nice as some of the people that do ventilators, they do want to make money.  Okay?”

-Donald Trump on March 31, 2020

“First of all, governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work, and they are doing a lot of this work.  The federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping.  You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.  The governors are supposed to be — as with testing, the governors are supposed — are supposed to be doing it.”

-Donald Trump on March 18, 2020

On Taking Responsibility

Flipping through the digital pages of the online edition of the Washington Post the other day, I chanced upon a "Fact Checker" piece that examined accusations of complicity of the Michigan Governor's office in the poisoning of the water supply that feeds the city of Flint. It's not much of a surprise to see such a piece, after all the incident is much in the news these days and being that this is the political season the trading of accusations of malfeasance, corruption and incompetence, always a popular subject of conversation in political circles, is, if anything, amplified in both frequency and volume of late.

This piece looked in particular at the charge leveled by Hillary Clinton that the tainting of the water supply in the aforementioned Michigan town was a result of the governor "wanting to save a little money." Ultimately the charge was awarded a score "two Pinocchios" out of a possible four, meaning, I suppose, that the glass is either half full for the claim, or half empty, depending on what side of the political spectrum your allegiances happen to reside.

But aside from the accusations and counter-accusations, the damning and the mitigating evidence, the punches laded and the punches blocked, what struck me as most curious about the piece was the juxtaposition of the following two statements. 

The first, early in the piece, is a nutshell summary of the Fact Checker's findings:

"There are signs pointing to decisions possibly being made in the governor’s office, but a direct link to the governor himself is hard to find."

The second, is taken from a statement read by Ari Adler, Governor Rick Snyder's communications director:

"Gov. Snyder has apologized, taken responsibility for what happened and has begun a top to bottom culture change in Michigan state government,”

Harry Truman, 33rd President of the United States, famously kept a sign on his desk at the Oval Office that read "The Buck Stops Here." It was meant to reassure voters and the public that in his administration there would be no shirking of responsibility, no "passing of the buck" as it were. The failures of the administration would be acknowledged as failures of the President himself. The phrase is as iconic to and colors popular perceptions of the Truman administration as the legend of the cherry tree informs popular views of George Washington and his upright moral fiber. It has also become a kind of litmus test of an administration's trustworthiness and willingness to claim responsibility for its failures. The following exchange delivered by George W. Bush press secretary Scott McClellan in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco is just one such example of the many we could produce:

Q ... First, just to get you on the record, where does the buck stop in this administration?
MR. McCLELLAN: The President.
Q All right. So he will be held accountable as the head of the government for the federal response that he's already acknowledged was inadequate and unacceptable?
MR. McCLELLAN: The President's most important responsibility is the safety and security of the American people. He talks about that often. That is his most important responsibility. ..."

George W. Bush paid an enormous political price for the Federal Government's bungling of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, perhaps no further proof is needed than the various attempts that Republicans have made over the years to label some incident or other "Obama's Katrina." But the truth is, that President Bush didn't pay that price because he accepted responsibility for Katrina, but rather because the aid effort his administration undertook was so woefully inadequate to the task and his initial response to the disaster so inadequate that any attempt to deflect responsibility would have been met with disdainful laughter by all but the most sycophantic of supporters.

Indeed, there's a good case to be made that the formal acceptance of responsibility is more often an attempt deflect actual responsibility than embrace it, as when, for instance, John Pointdexter echoed Harry Truman's famous phrase in an attempt to shield Ronald Reagan from responsibility for the Iran/Contra scandal.

July Forecast: Storm Clouds Over Cleveland

A pair of articles are worth considering side by side today. The first comes via Politico and deals with the likelyhood that the GOP nomination race will reach its climax in a brokered convention:

Republicans are waging a shadow primary for control of delegates in anticipation of what one senior party official called “the white whale of politics”: a contested national convention.

The endgame for the most sophisticated campaigns is an inconclusive first ballot leading to a free-for-all power struggle on the floor in Cleveland.
“This is going to be a convention like I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” said veteran operative Barry Bennett, who managed Ben Carson’s campaign until December and is now advising Trump. “It’s going to be contentious from Day One.

The rules of the GOP convention require a candidate to carry a majority of delegates coming in to the convention to win the thing outright. Failing that, it becomes a high-stakes game of horse trading as leading candidates attempt to convince delegates to switch to their side. And given that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz seem in this thing for the long-haul, and that at least one establishment candidate (Rubio? Kasich?) is bound to tag along, there's a very good chance this race comes down to the wire.

Which leads to the second article, this time via Vox, where Jeff Stein notes that twice in as many days, Donald Trump has threatened to mount an independent campaign for the presidency if he feels that the party has slighted him:

In September 2015, Trump signed a pledge not to launch an independent bid for president if he lost the GOP primary. There was a catch: He added an exception to the pledge that made it invalid if the Republicans mistreated him — "a loophole so enormous it could mean anything Trump wants," as New York magazine's Jonathan Chait pointed out. 

Trump affirmed his willingness to exploit that crater-size exception during a town hall in South Carolina on Monday, in which he criticized the GOP for allegedly packing the last Republican debate audience with Trump opponents. 

"The RNC better get its act together because, you know, I signed a pledge. The pledge isn’t being honored by the RNC," Trump said, according to ABC News. "I signed a pledge, but it’s a double-edged pledge. As far as I’m concerned, they’re in default on their pledge."

The pressing question now is this: if Donald Trump heads into the GOP convention holding a plurality of delegates, but loses to Cruz, Rubio or Kasich through bartering and back-room deals, what comes next? Does Trump swallow his pride, shake hands with the other men in the room, congratulate them on a race well run and then go home? Or does he stage a press conference, point an accusatory finger at the RNC and announce that he will make good on his pledge to run as an independent as a result of what he decrees as the Republican Party's failure to abide by its pledge to treat him fairly?

Stay tuned...

You May Have Already Won!!!

Looks like Ted Cruz is targeting the "keep the government's hands off my Medicare crowd" with his latest mailer which promises free money from the government. The Huffington Post reports:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is out with a deceptive new mailer that masquerades as official government business and promises people there's a "check enclosed" when it's actually asking for money instead. A New Jersey resident sent The Huffington Post the latest piece of mail he received from Cruz's campaign. The envelope appears to have come from Cruz's Senate office and has his name printed the same way it often is for Senate business. In small type the mailer clarifies that it is for "personal" matters and was not sent at taxpayers' expense. It also promises a check.

And here's an image of the mailer:

I wonder if he'll find a way to blame CNN for this one, too...

Being Ted Cruz Means You Never Have to Apologize for Lying.

The Washington Post quotes Ted Cruz from tonight's GOP primary debate:

“First of all we have seen how in 6 years of Obamacare that it’s been a disaster. It is the biggest job killer in this country. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, have been forced into part time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, have seen their premiums sky rocket.”

What do we make of Cruz's claim that millions of Americans have lost their jobs? This is what the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics tells us about job growth in the Obama era:

The truth, of course, is that under President Obama the nation has seen 69 straight months of private sector job growth, with over 1/4 million new jobs in November alone and a net increase of well over 13 1/2 million new jobs over that span.

What do we make of Cruz's claim that millions of Americans have lost their health insurance due to the Affordable Care Act? The truth is the current rate of 9.2% uninsured is the lowest it has ever been in this country:

Cruz's rather tenuous grasp of the facts when it comes to health care reform should perhaps not surprise us. After all, this is a man so clueless on health insurance issues he mistakenly claimed to have lost insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, only to have to walk the claim back when it was revealed that, despite his claims to the contrary, Cruz in fact had it all along.

In a reversal from claims made on the campaign trail, Ted Cruz's presidential campaign is now saying the senator and his family do have health insurance and never lost coverage. The late night Friday revelation came more than 24 hours after Cruz had told a New Hampshire audience that he and his family were without health insurance and were scrambling to obtain new coverage--and used the claim to slam Obamacare for the mess he was in. 

In statements to Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier blamed Cruz's false assertion that his family had lost their health insurance on a misunderstanding... 

I guess "misunderstanding" is one way of putting it, another might be to say that he was "caught in another lie."

The Problem With Being A Racist, Nativist Party...

I guess it was only a matter of time beforeTed Cruz, presidential candidate and most hated man in the U.S. senate, would fall victim to his own party's anti-immigrant fervor. Climbing in the polls and threatening the Trump campaign in Iowa, Cruz has become the target of accusations and insinuations that the conservative firebrand, born of a Cuban father and American mother on Canadian soil (Calgary), does not meet the Constitutional requirement that a president be a "natural born citizen."

From the left, it's deliciously ironic to see this sort of comeuppance for man who sought to reassure GOP voters of his anti-immigrant bonafides by paraphrasing George Wallace's "segregation forever speech" for The New York Times. And of course, there's more than just a little satisfaction to be gained by watching the party that spawned an industry of nutty conspiracy theorists dedicated to casting doubt on Barack Obama's eligibility now setting its sights on destroying one of its own.

While questions about Cruz's eligibility have popped up now and again for years, this latest round of doubt sowing started with Donald Trump, who in his typically disingenuos, trademarked passive-aggressive way insisted that he was only looking out for the good of the Republican Party:

"Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem. It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head. I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

Not long after Trump lobbed his non-accusation accusation right-wing harpy Ann Coulter chimed in in more direct fashion, explicitly proclaiming through her twitter account that Cruz was not at natural born citizen.

NYT: Cruz was born outside the U.S. to 1 American parent: "Under the Constitution this makes him a 'natural born citizen.'” Absolutely false

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 6, 2016

And now the floodgates seem to be opening with Rand Paul and John McCain questioning the Texas senator's eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. The McCain attack is particularly amusing, given that the Arizona senator was himself born abroad and ran for president nonetheless. The distinction, as McCain sees it, is that he was born in a U.S. Territory (a military base in the Panama Canal zone):

“Barry Goldwater ran for president; was born in Arizona when it was a territory. The Panama Canal was a territory of the United States of America. That’s different than being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. I don’t think its illegitimate to look into it.”

In 2008, when John McCain decided to seek the presidency, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama co-sponsored a Senate resolution affirming the Arizona senator's eligibility to run for president. Today, Texas senator Ted Cruz is seeing questions about his eligibility being raised within his own party. I guess that's what happens when you set out to promote your personal career by trashing everyone around you, then cynically shut down the government to establish your own "holier than thou" ideological purity, while forcing others in your party to do the thankless work of keeping the country from a disastrous default.

I think I'll just sit back an enjoy the show.

The Freedom of Other People

Early the morning of March 24, 1944 a German patrol pulled up to a home on the outskirts of in the Polish town of Markowa.  The Germans had been alerted by a local police constable to the fact that eight Jews, comprising members of two different families, had secretly been given shelter by Josef Ulma, a prominent citizen and the town librarian. The Germans surrounded the home, and after extracting the Jews shot all eight of them in the head on the spot. Not satisfied with this bloody deed, the Germans turned to the Ulma family themselves. For hiding Jews in defiance of German martial law, Joseph was shot.  The fact that Jospeh’s wife Wiktoria was his eight months pregnant, failed to soften the Soldier’s hearts and she was shot as well. Finally, the Nazis turned their attention to the UIma’s six children, now weeping loudly and profusely at the sight of their dead parents.  Methodically, mercilessly and in cold blood they were shot as well. The eldest of the Ulma children was eight years old. The youngest was but two.

Without further comment:

The House that the NRA Built.

In pondering the significance of the Umpqua Community college tragedy, one of a seemingly unbroken string of mass killings to shake the nation since the shocking Columbine massacre 16 years ago, the first and perhaps most distasteful truth we have to acknowledge is that this shooting will not change anything. I’m sorry to be so blunt. I’m sorry if this sounds defeatist. But any honest assessment of the politics and the culture of firearms in America must come to the simple and inescapable conclusion that thanks to our nation’s out-sized love of firearms, at this very moment somewhere in the Midwest a mother is preparing dinner for a daughter who won’t live to see her 21st birthday, somewhere down South a father and son are restoring an old car that will be completed by just one of them under a somber cloud of loss, somewhere in New England a young couple are planning for a future life together in a world that has a place set aside for only one of them, and this is a scene that is being replayed hundreds, if not thousands of times this very moment all across our country.

He's a blowhard, a liar and a racist, but a stopped clock, as they say...

I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2015

“I think it’s a great country, there are a lot of great families, and it’s not just four families or whatever. There are other people out there that are very qualified, and we’ve had enough Bushes.”

--Barbara Bush, in a 2013 Today Show interview, responding to the question of whether Jeb Bush should run for president in 2016. 

Of Guns and News Organizations...

Took a vacation day and a trip down to D.C. yesterday. As I toured the museums and monuments I passed by the Newseum, a private museum dedicated to cataloguing journalism's contribution to our nation's development and discourse. Outside, the Newseum has an exhibit that consists of front pages from newspaper around the country and some from around the world. Yesterday the great majority of U.S. newspapers included a front page story on the slayings of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, two CBS television journalists who were murdered by a disgruntled ex-coworker while performing a live on-air interview. The coverage raged the gamut from shock, to outrage, to sensationalist... with a special category reserved for the New York Post's unbelievably tasteless front page comic-strip style photomontage of Parker's last moments.

The Nebraska paper was a bit different, however. I don't at the moment recall whether they covered this crime on their front page (they likely did, along with most news outlets) but the headline story concerned a voter initiative to retain the death penalty in that state.

The juxtaposition of these two events, it seems to me, is telling. I have long been an opponent of the death penalty and one of the  principal reasons for my opposition is the firmly held belief that, far from acting as a deterrent to the sorts of violent crimes the nation witnessed on Wednesday, the existence of a Death penalty perversely legitimizes them. In enshrining the notion that Justice is served when the State puts a man to death for the commission of a heinous crime, the criminal justice system in some sense legitimizes the crimes of those who kill others in response to a perceived slight or wrong. For these individuals seem to see themselves as instruments of justice meeting out punishment on their own terms. Let us not forget that we live in a nation governed by deep suspicion of government monopolies and of government in general. Time and time again we are told that anything the government does would be more efficiently and more expertly executed by the private sector. This laissez faire ideology extends not only to functions traditionally performed by the private sector in a capitalist society (manufacture and delivery of consumer goods and services) but even to functions that are traditionally the province of government in most developed societies (witness the proliferation of private prisons, for instance, or the use, by the U.S. military of private security contracting firms such as Blackwater). In a very real sense, taking "justice" into one's own hands, up to and including execution,  is a logical extension of this sort of thinking.

Now, of course, it's impossible to state categorically that a justice system that enshrines the notion that the taking of a human life is never a justified response to crime would have prevented this or any other crime. There has never been a human society so perfect where murder is non-existent, and certainly, when the objective of a murder is the securing of material benefit (as would be the case in a robbery, for instance, or murder in the course of perpetuating insurance fraud) the State's views on life, death and justice are largely irrelevant to the criminal who commits the act. But I do believe that a society that promotion the notion that it is never right for the State or any individual to end the life of another (excepting, or course, un-avoidable, immediate self-defense or the protection of others in similar immediate danger) is a society claims for itself a certain moral authority and in so doing ennobles its citizenry by promoting this principle of inviolability. The net effect would likely be a long-term lessening of these sorts of despicable acts of unjustifiable vengeance (a description that could equally apply to the death penalty itself).

Remember when...

Got annoyed at those "remember when" Reagan idolatry pics, so I decided to do one of my own. Enjoy:

Back From the Dead?

Haven't posted in ages... can't say I'm going to make this a regular thing (maybe, maybe not). Nonetheless, I recently wrote a comment for the ZDNet website that I though worth sharing here (no it wasn't a post or commentary, just a comment in the comments section of an article, LOL).

In any case, my comment was in response to an article that was discussing layoffs in the tech sector (where I happen to work). Recently two large companies, Con Edison in California and the Disney corporation have dismissed large numbers of IT staff in favor of foreign born replacements brought in under the H1B Visa program, that supposedly is meant to allow companies to hire foreign workers for positions that are difficult to fill with native born workers (who may, for instance, lack the necessary tech skills).

But the actions of Disney and Con Edison make a mockery of this program. How possibly, one might ask, are companies filling difficult to fill positions when they're replacing American born workers who already fill those positions?

That this is even possible, is due many factors, but in no small part to the death of organized labor in this nation. Here is what I wrote:

This is just another example of the woefully uneven power dynamic between employers and their employees that has resulted from and been exacerbated by the slow death of organized labor in this country. A union shop would never have stood by for something like this, watching passively as a large contingent of their co-workers were replaced by cheaper, foreign labor while being forced to train their replacements (shades of digging your own grave). Had these folks been represented by a union, they could have walked off en masse, and paralyzed the company, forcing it to rethink its plans. Instead, these workers can only lament their fate, and train their replacements like dogs with their tails between their legs, begging for whatever scraps might fall off their master's table. They are cowed, and pliant in hopes of a good reference that might allow them to find another job, and a few months severance that might keep them from losing their homes.

The death of the labor movement has been accompanied by huge disparities in wealth and income between the most wealthy (the 1%, if you will) and the rest of us. It is no accident. And with this mounting wealth disparity, the moneyed classes have also gained untold influence in government. A conservative Supreme Court is busy codifying the notion that the wealthy are entitled to an outsized degree of influence in the political process, and acts that one would have been derided as bribery are now enshrined as "free speech" by Judges appointed by politicians who themselves were bought and paid for by billionaires who know a good investment when they see one. What I'm saying is this: don't look to Congress to "fix" the problem of H1B abuse. The whole point of the program is to make the country more "competitive" by driving down wages and producing a more docile work force. What happened at Con Edison and Walt Disney isn't a "bug"... it's a "feature" of the program. It's the whole point of the program. 

The whole notion that U.S. workers, who are chomping at the bit for decent paying jobs, and were reared in the nation with the best higher-education system in the world cannot be trained, and must instead make way for engineers trained in a third world country is simply ludicrous, and the fact that these employees were made to *train their replacements* puts the lie to even that foolishness. This is all about the bottom line, plain and simple. And until IT professionals realize that they are dispensable, disposable pawns, and get over their innate Libertarian ideological tendencies and start seriously contemplating solidarity and mass action, everyone's job is at risk.

An Election That's About Pure, Undistilled Loathing?

an-email I sent to Andrew Sullivan's blog:
A personal observation on Mitt Romney's likeability problem: I live in Maryland and have yet to see a single Mitt Romney bumper sticker. Oh, don't get me wrong, I see plenty of NObama stickers (often poorly executed designs that appear, on first glance, to be pro-Obama signs, and I suspect are frequently mistaken as such) but I have yet to find myself behind a single vehicle sporting a sticker affirming support for Mitt Romney's presidential run. To be fair, most (but not all) of the Obama stickers I see are from the 2008 campaign, but I have, at least, seen a handful of Obama 2012 signs. It's pretty clear to me that, while many Republicans loathe Obama, they have little regard for Romney (yes, Maryland is a Democratic leaning state, but isn't that where you'd expect to find the greatest support for a moderate Republican?) So then, it would seem that this is a contest that, perhaps more than any previous one, will answer the question: is it possible to defeat a candidate on pure loathing alone, with no positive alternative vision to counter-balance it?

Montana had Ted Kaczinsky, Wyoming has... well... Wyoming.

With Governor Rick Perry in Texas threatening secession on an almost daily basis, Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona announcing that a panel of volunteer investigators have determined that President Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is a fake, and Newt Gingrich in Georgia promising to build a manned lunar colony in the next eight years (never mind that NASA doesn't even have a vehicle capable of carrying an astronaut into orbit at this time) it takes a lot of effort for a state to stand out from the run-of-the-mill, right-wing, lunatic fringe, clown circus that is today's GOP. But the Montana Legislature may have figured out how to do just that. A new bill has passed the state legislature on a voice vote that would study the ways on which the state would cope with a hypothetical financial and economic collapse of the Federal government:

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier (emphasis mine).

As far as garden-variety right-wing paranoid krayzee goes, this is all standard stuff... until we reach the bit about Wyoming possibly needing to acquire an aircraft carrier, that is. Then it becomes inspired right-ring nuttiness. Because let's face it: it's not truly inspired right-wing nuttiness until it crosses over into the territory of "stuff that's impossible to parody because it is already its own parody."

And this bill is impossible to parody because --and I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of geography can be sketchy at times (is Uzbekistan to the east or west of Tajikistan?)-- I'm pretty sure I remember learning in 5th grade that Wyoming is a land-locked state:

And as you can see from the above image, I am more or less correct in my recollection.

So why exactly would a land-locked state like Wyoming be studying the feasibility of acquiring an aircraft carrier? I'm not entirely sure, but if I were a member of the legislatures of Idaho or Oregon I might seek to introduce a bill to look into putting together our own standing army just in case the Wyoming's gotten some nutty ideas into its head about westward expansion.

That said, there is reason to question the seriousness with which Wyoming is undertaking this most important investigation. The Wyoming Tribune notes:

The bill must pass two more House votes before it would head to the Senate for consideration. The original bill appropriated $32,000 for the task force, though the Joint Appropriations Committee slashed that number in half earlier this week.

So yeah, Wyoming's task force on surviving financial Armageddon and the complete collapse of Western Civilization is being funded to the tune of $16,000. That's just a few hundred dollars more than what it would cost to walk into a Hyundai dealership and drive a way in a brand new Elantra:

I guess that tells you something about just how pressing the concern is, right now.

Could it be that this bill is simply a way to further rile up the the paranoid, gold hoarding, survival shelter stocking, gun toting, end-of-times believing, loonies who make up the base of the Republican party these days and do so without spending the kind of money that might lead to questions about why the Wyoming legislature is wasting so much money investigating paranoid right-wing fantasies?

Maybe. Probably. OK, surely.

(Hat Tip: Wonkette)