Almost two weeks ago, I received a many-times-forwarded message with the subject “Congressional Reform Act of 2011” (see Debunking 'Congressional Reform Act of 2011' on this site). On the surface, it appeared to be a typical piece of Tea Party/neocon invective that was unexceptional in any way; it started off with the obvious lie that it had originated with Warren Buffet, and then went on to call for a number of “common sense” responses to problems that don’t really exist, etc., and looked like something that had been making the rounds on Facebook a few days earlier. When I looked to see if I could tell where this message had originated, however, I was struck by a genuine surprise: It had, by all accounts, been sent out by the Chair of the Democratic Party of Comal County, Texas!
“While I personally do not fully agree with all of these suggestions, they are a good place to start,” this good lady writes at the beginning of her message. In that the contents of the message were ultimately written by the kind of people who make Democrats feel nervous about living in Texas, I would imagine that she would not agree with them. Why things she does not agree with would be “a good place to start,” however, I have no idea.
The idea that the leader of an organization representing besieged Democrats in a frighteningly Red state would be sending out rightwing literature was too much for me to accept and so I immediately sent her an email message to let her know I had received it. I expected she would probably let me know that she had been a victim of identity theft, but figured there was also a slight chance she would embarrassedly admit to accidentally disseminating something she had not bothered to verify (or even read very carefully to ensure it was in keeping with her party’s ethos).
When I had not received a reply after three days, I followed up with her again, once again emphasizing my affiliation with this site and my intention to publish an article about the hoax to which she had, one way or another, been party. That was a week ago and, as of this writing, she has still not had either the sense or the courtesy to reply to me or the readers of this site.
Seemingly coincidentally, right after I sent my first message to the Chair of my local Democratic organization I received a friendly and somewhat solicitous message from a gentleman who shared her last name. A little investigation revealed that this individual is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat, that he is also a member of the Democratic Party of Comal County, and that he is, in fact, the husband of the woman who had sent out the message being discussed here. We traded a few messages but, when I asked him about the email message that had originated with his wife, it went quiet at his end and our correspondence ceased.
And so, in the absence of any kind of a response, I am left to conclude that the most recent rightwing hoax to cross my desk originated with … a local office of the Democratic Party. This is certainly not an auspicious way for an organization of this sort to start off any year -- all the less so one in which we are about to experience what might be one of the most crucial national election cycles of our lifetimes and in which the Democrats will need to be on their game.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Debunking 'Congressional Reform Act of 2011'
Like just about everyone else in America with email, I regularly receive political messages that are, to a lesser or greater extent, hoaxes. Sometimes I respond to these messages personally by debunking the hoax for the person who sent it to me and possibly the other recipients; sometimes I respond publicly, generally with an essay on the Religion, Politics, and Sex website; and, often, I just let it go because I have got too many other more pressing things on my plate.
What usually surprises me is how quickly and easily I am able to get to the bottom of the lies behind such messages, often with the help of websites like Snopes.com. In such cases, I am generally left mystified by the number of people who simply forwarded them with apparently no attempt to verify the truth of what they were sending out to their friends and relatives and calling for action on. I am, of course, giving my correspondents the benefit of the doubt by assuming that again and again they allow themselves to be tools for whatever individuals or entities are deliberately attempting to spread false information; some of them, presumably, are not just unwitting dupes but, for reasons of their own, are knowingly party to trying to deceive the people they are emailing.
Recently, I received a many-times-forwarded message of this sort titled “Congressional Reform Act of 2011” that at first appeared to be a typical piece of Tea Party/neocon invective with one notable exception: It had originated with the Democratic Party of Comal County, Texas! (See A (Belated) Response to a (Strange) Hoax on this site.)
Following is the text of this odd message. As is usually the case, it is either obviously or verifiably false in almost every way and very poorly written, begging the question of why anyone would forward it to other people. My comments/debunks follow various points in brackets. Snopes.com does a pretty good job of addressing most of this at the post titled 28th Amendment.
Winds of Change ... Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around. [Warren Buffet is not retarded and therefore knows that most of what appears in this message is pure falsehood. Some comments he made in a recent interview were used as the basis for claiming he ultimately authored this message, but in fact he has never made such a call to action.]
1. No Tenure/No Pension. A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office. [The falsehoods implied by this item, as well as #2 and #3, are easily clarified by anyone at About.com U.S. Government Info.]
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose. [See About.com U.S. Government Info.]
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do. [See About.com U.S. Government Info.]
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people. [Yes, by God! Why should members of Congress be allowed to break the very laws they presume to impose on the rest of us. … Indeed. This really is a foolish item, in that elected officials are already accountable for following the laws of the land. If they violate them, they either get punished or they get away with it, but there are no legal provisions giving them a pass.]
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women. Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work. [As far as I can tell, this item does not mean anything, and more than anything seems intended to mock the intelligence of anyone who would forward a message containing it.]
If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. [Really? Not sure if this is true or not; messages like this that spread generally do so at the same rate as any other contagion, so maybe it is actually accurate.]
What usually surprises me is how quickly and easily I am able to get to the bottom of the lies behind such messages, often with the help of websites like Snopes.com. In such cases, I am generally left mystified by the number of people who simply forwarded them with apparently no attempt to verify the truth of what they were sending out to their friends and relatives and calling for action on. I am, of course, giving my correspondents the benefit of the doubt by assuming that again and again they allow themselves to be tools for whatever individuals or entities are deliberately attempting to spread false information; some of them, presumably, are not just unwitting dupes but, for reasons of their own, are knowingly party to trying to deceive the people they are emailing.
Recently, I received a many-times-forwarded message of this sort titled “Congressional Reform Act of 2011” that at first appeared to be a typical piece of Tea Party/neocon invective with one notable exception: It had originated with the Democratic Party of Comal County, Texas! (See A (Belated) Response to a (Strange) Hoax on this site.)
Following is the text of this odd message. As is usually the case, it is either obviously or verifiably false in almost every way and very poorly written, begging the question of why anyone would forward it to other people. My comments/debunks follow various points in brackets. Snopes.com does a pretty good job of addressing most of this at the post titled 28th Amendment.
Winds of Change ... Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around. [Warren Buffet is not retarded and therefore knows that most of what appears in this message is pure falsehood. Some comments he made in a recent interview were used as the basis for claiming he ultimately authored this message, but in fact he has never made such a call to action.]
1. No Tenure/No Pension. A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office. [The falsehoods implied by this item, as well as #2 and #3, are easily clarified by anyone at About.com U.S. Government Info.]
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose. [See About.com U.S. Government Info.]
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do. [See About.com U.S. Government Info.]
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people. [Yes, by God! Why should members of Congress be allowed to break the very laws they presume to impose on the rest of us. … Indeed. This really is a foolish item, in that elected officials are already accountable for following the laws of the land. If they violate them, they either get punished or they get away with it, but there are no legal provisions giving them a pass.]
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women. Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work. [As far as I can tell, this item does not mean anything, and more than anything seems intended to mock the intelligence of anyone who would forward a message containing it.]
If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. [Really? Not sure if this is true or not; messages like this that spread generally do so at the same rate as any other contagion, so maybe it is actually accurate.]
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Endorsing a Republican Candidate
In November, millions of Americans will cast their votes for the person they most want to see become the next president of the United States. It is already shaping up to be a heated campaign and will pit one of the most controversial administrations of modern times against whoever ends up being the Republican nominee and any number of third-party candidates.
The rump hopefuls don’t have any hope to speak of, of course, and the contest is ultimately going to come to a toe-to-toe slugfest between incumbent Barrack Obama and the as-yet-unknown Republican candidate. Who that should be — perhaps more so even that who it ultimately will be — is thus a matter of great interest for Americans in general and the editors of this site in particular.
A good first step in getting to who should be the Republican nominee is to figure out who it should not be and to many of us there are some easy answers to that.
It seems obvious that the next chief executive of our country should not be someone who is stupid. Right there that rules out Rick Perry for anyone who values intelligence, and his weird antics, rambling monologues, funny faces and gestures, and memory lapses clearly mark him as someone who is mentally defective. Unfortunately, ever since that most brilliant of Democrat presidents, Jimmy Carter, was unable to resolve the Iran Hostage Crisis in the late 1970s, Republicans have responded by trying to place simpletons in the White House (just try to follow the painful thought process behind that … ). Sarah Palin has confined her involvement in this election to inane commentary and Michelle Bachmann has dropped out, and Perry is tanking in the state caucuses, so we may actually be clearing out the lower end of the intellect pool fairly early on.
To me, it seems like a foregone conclusion that the next president of the United States should not be verifiably corrupt. That pretty much rules out Washington insider Newt Gingrich, who has by all accounts been too cagey about his personal finances and accepted an awful lot of money from Freddie Mac and Fannie May — by his own admission for doing nothing! A willingness to take taxpayer money in exchange for doing admittedly nothing — and in actuality for influence peddling — should make Gingrich completely unacceptable. (Recently, there was a message making its rounds on Facebook in which the author suggested that because Gingrich was more articulate and better able to give a good speech that we should set aside his faults and elect him on that basis alone. Have we really slipped that far? That is reminiscent to me of the students who campaigned for Bill Clinton back in the ‘90s with the line “Character is not an issue!”).
In that most Americans are not wealthy and have felt the impact of the recent recession, the next leader of the American people should definitely not be party to making them the vassals of one-percenter business interests. That, by all accounts, rules out Mitt Romney, who would have business interests directly peddle their goods and services to children via commercial advertising on Sesame Street and would prevent workers from forming labor unions. It never ceases to amaze me that people of relatively modest means would get behind people without their economic interests at heart, and yet it seems to happen increasingly.
Finally, our next president should not be a bigot. Whether anyone likes it or not, America is a nation of many peoples, and intolerance for the ones that are not like oneself divides and weakens us as a country. So, even though the “young people” are rallying behind unapologetic demonstrated racist Ron Paul, that pretty much rules him out (and most of those young people are those smug little creeps who have not yet had the chance to experience much adversity in their lives and their numbers will wane as they come to the grim realization that most of us do).
Those exclusions don’t leave too many candidates on the Republican slate! There is one that remains, however, someone who cannot just be excluded by the above criteria and who beyond that is in palatable in his own right, and that is John Huntsman. He is educated and articulate. As the former U.S. ambassador to China he is experienced in foreign affairs — something that xenophobic amongst us, as well as those that think wars are a substitute for diplomacy, don’t get at all, but which is absolutely critical in the globalized real world. And, as a Republican who has served in a Democrat administration, he has demonstrated that he can work with leaders on both sides of the aisle and is not inclined to be a polarizing influence.
In light of the above, the editors of Religion, Politics, and Sex, have decided to endorse Huntsman as the Republican candidate for president. His attitudes, frankly, are so undeniably more progressive and intelligent than those of any of his other GOP colleagues — and his portfolio and experience so clearly superior — that it is somewhat inexplicable and dispiriting that, far from being a frontrunner, he is trailing behind all of the other surviving candidates mentioned above. If there is one characteristic many of this election’s extreme and weird slate of Republican candidates have shown, however, it is a tendency to self-destruct. As there is nothing to suggest that Huntsman has this particular trait, we can hope that he might be the last man standing while his opponents implode and drop out amidst shame and scandal. And, if that happens, Americans who feel the need to vote a GOP party line or want an alternative to the current administration may actually be able to make a viable choice.
The rump hopefuls don’t have any hope to speak of, of course, and the contest is ultimately going to come to a toe-to-toe slugfest between incumbent Barrack Obama and the as-yet-unknown Republican candidate. Who that should be — perhaps more so even that who it ultimately will be — is thus a matter of great interest for Americans in general and the editors of this site in particular.
A good first step in getting to who should be the Republican nominee is to figure out who it should not be and to many of us there are some easy answers to that.
It seems obvious that the next chief executive of our country should not be someone who is stupid. Right there that rules out Rick Perry for anyone who values intelligence, and his weird antics, rambling monologues, funny faces and gestures, and memory lapses clearly mark him as someone who is mentally defective. Unfortunately, ever since that most brilliant of Democrat presidents, Jimmy Carter, was unable to resolve the Iran Hostage Crisis in the late 1970s, Republicans have responded by trying to place simpletons in the White House (just try to follow the painful thought process behind that … ). Sarah Palin has confined her involvement in this election to inane commentary and Michelle Bachmann has dropped out, and Perry is tanking in the state caucuses, so we may actually be clearing out the lower end of the intellect pool fairly early on.
To me, it seems like a foregone conclusion that the next president of the United States should not be verifiably corrupt. That pretty much rules out Washington insider Newt Gingrich, who has by all accounts been too cagey about his personal finances and accepted an awful lot of money from Freddie Mac and Fannie May — by his own admission for doing nothing! A willingness to take taxpayer money in exchange for doing admittedly nothing — and in actuality for influence peddling — should make Gingrich completely unacceptable. (Recently, there was a message making its rounds on Facebook in which the author suggested that because Gingrich was more articulate and better able to give a good speech that we should set aside his faults and elect him on that basis alone. Have we really slipped that far? That is reminiscent to me of the students who campaigned for Bill Clinton back in the ‘90s with the line “Character is not an issue!”).
In that most Americans are not wealthy and have felt the impact of the recent recession, the next leader of the American people should definitely not be party to making them the vassals of one-percenter business interests. That, by all accounts, rules out Mitt Romney, who would have business interests directly peddle their goods and services to children via commercial advertising on Sesame Street and would prevent workers from forming labor unions. It never ceases to amaze me that people of relatively modest means would get behind people without their economic interests at heart, and yet it seems to happen increasingly.
Finally, our next president should not be a bigot. Whether anyone likes it or not, America is a nation of many peoples, and intolerance for the ones that are not like oneself divides and weakens us as a country. So, even though the “young people” are rallying behind unapologetic demonstrated racist Ron Paul, that pretty much rules him out (and most of those young people are those smug little creeps who have not yet had the chance to experience much adversity in their lives and their numbers will wane as they come to the grim realization that most of us do).
In light of the above, the editors of Religion, Politics, and Sex, have decided to endorse Huntsman as the Republican candidate for president. His attitudes, frankly, are so undeniably more progressive and intelligent than those of any of his other GOP colleagues — and his portfolio and experience so clearly superior — that it is somewhat inexplicable and dispiriting that, far from being a frontrunner, he is trailing behind all of the other surviving candidates mentioned above. If there is one characteristic many of this election’s extreme and weird slate of Republican candidates have shown, however, it is a tendency to self-destruct. As there is nothing to suggest that Huntsman has this particular trait, we can hope that he might be the last man standing while his opponents implode and drop out amidst shame and scandal. And, if that happens, Americans who feel the need to vote a GOP party line or want an alternative to the current administration may actually be able to make a viable choice.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Follow Us on Facebook!
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Please be sure to click "Like" on that page to get updates on everything we are doing with this project.
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