This just in -- Tea Party saboteurs unmasked

The Tea Party’s Tax Day protests are just around the corner on April 15. It may be a coincidence, but I’ve been reading a lot of wingnut posts advancing a conspiracy of major import. Some Tea Partiers contend that those protest signs that snarky progressives like to make fun of, those with misspelled words and terrible grammar, are actually designed and carried by snarky progressive saboteurs. Anyone else heard this?

Made me think. Why would a snarky progressive go out of his or her way to make signs and attend Tea Party rallies? Yes, there is the camaraderie of hanging out with a bunch of American patriots. And the stirring speeches – can’t forget those. You can sign petitions to nullify various nefarious government practices. You can get free copies of the Constitution. If it’s a nice day, you can get fresh air and a tan.

Then I received a copy of the following e-mail. Its origins are murky, but it smacks of authenticity. It made me rethink my entire belief system, or at least that part that covers tea bags, spelling and grammar.

The e-mail harkens back to those halcyon days of last April when Tea Partiers were first stirring the pot.

The e-mail:

Dear Fellow Conspirators:

Here’s an update on our effort to disrupt Tax Day 2009 protests planned by the Tea Party across the U.S.

We’ve had limited success on recruiting people for Operation Miss Spell. As of this writing, we were able to locate and recruit less than a dozen saboteurs for upcoming Tea Party rallies. The plan, of course, was brilliant in its simplicity. A bunch of snarky progressives were going to carry signs with misspelled words and bad grammar into the fray. An uproar would ensue. Lots of photos taken. Photos go viral. Tea Partiers would look bad. Ridicule would nip their grassroots revolution in the bud.

We ran into problems almost immediately. Several organizers (including yours truly) were veterans of sixties’ antiwar protests. We were ready to mix it up again, storm the ramparts, engage in street theatre. Problem was, I just had knee surgery and Jim’s allergies were acting up. Sunshine was all for donning her old hippie dresses and carrying signs, but she was invited to a chakra-cleansing retreat in Marin County so had to bow out.

We thought we’d be able to find some fellow travelers, old hippies who had taken one too many bad trips. We’d just hand them misspelled signs and point them in the right direction. They’d be thrilled to march again. We felt that they would fit right in with the clueless multitudes. But then we told them to get haircuts or shaved heads to fit in with the crewcut and balding crowd. They balked. “Gotta let my freak flag fly, man.” We dropped that idea.

We turned to the younger progressive crowd. The bloggers were no help, as they were too busy blogging their outrage to actually go out into the sunshine and feign outrage. One prog-blogger even said what we had expected all along – “I only go out at night – and that’s to the corner coffee shop with free wireless so I can blog some more.”

We tried some of the union members. Teachers’ union members (especially English teachers) said they wouldn’t be caught dead with a sign that spelled "socialism" as "socilism" and "liar" as "lier." We told them it was for a good cause, but they threatened to send us to the principal’s office. History teachers didn't like the idea of comparing an elected U.S. president with Hitler or Stalin. Teamsters wanted to get paid overtime – who were we to argue? Those in the service unions were overwhelmingly ethnic, which ruled them out immediately. We even tried actors and actresses, figuring they’d like to engage in a little street theatre. But they started to rewrite the plan. An avant-garde troupe from Chicago wanted to dress in drag and hold hands while carrying signs. We told them it would defeat the entire purpose. Nobody would believe they were Tea Partiers. And they might get their asses beat. Actors – always trying to rewrite the script.

This brought us to the plan’s major problem. Tea Partiers are white and old. Progressives tend to be non-white and young. Sure, there are a few of us aging white hippies in the mix. But not nearly enough to infiltrate all the Tea Party shindigs.

We’re recommending that Operation Miss Spell be abandoned. It’s turned out to be a gigantic hassle. We have some other ideas, such as hiding all dictionaries and disabling computer Spell Check programs with our "Brown Acid" virus. The committee will continue working on this.

January 11: Close Guantanamo

Beware of that "brief flash of fear"

I'm a sucker for good literary references. It's the English major in me. Possibly no book has been more abused in this arena than George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's the no-brainer lit reference for our times, the era of John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, true champions of the abridged Republican version of the Bill of Rights.

But here's a good one regarding new security methods in use by the Transportation Satety Administration. It was posted Jan. 1 by Avram Grumer at Making Light:

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 1, Chapter 5:
He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

Us, now:
TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program — called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) — that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent.

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions — a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

“In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip,” said Maccario from his office in Boston. “When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, … there are behavior cues that show it. … A brief flash of fear.”

Bush's "hoodoo science" on global warming

Ronald Reagan believed in voodoo economics. This president believes in voodoo science (maybe that's hoodoo science). Or maybe he just believes in the power of ignorance. Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued its report Monday about the Bush Administration’s interference with climate change science. It obtained more than 27,000 pages of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Commerce Department, held two investigative hearings, and interviewed officials. Most of this info has never been publicly disclosed.

The findings are available on Waxman’s site at http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1653. Here’s an executive summary:

The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

On a gut-level, we always knew this to be the case. Now we know for sure. We have proof, which is something the Republicans never pay attention to.

Secrecy an art in Wyoming

Gil Brady, writing for the Jackson Hole branch of New West, launched his "Secrecy Watch" column on Wednesday. In it, he plans to "cite specific instances, issues and ongoing news stories suffering from a paucity of sunshine."

This comes out of a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity that gave an "F" grade to the state for transparency in government. Joan Barron, writing in the Casper Star-Tribune, reports that the low grades went to the Wyoming Supreme Court and Governor Freudenthal’s office.

Says Brady:

Regardless, the problem of night swallowing up daylight in our state runs deeper than a couple of high-profile politicos playing hide the ball – excessive secrecy permeates nearly every rung of Wyoming public life right down to the county and local level.

Brady has theorized that Vice President Dick Cheney’s "obsessive penchant for secrecy and disdain for the meddling press was a byproduct of cutting his political teeth in Wyoming."

He could be right. Wyoming lacks an aggressive news-gathering corps that could insist on more transparency. When reporters alert the citizenry to transgressions, we don’t seem to pay attention. It’s almost as if we resent those who rake the muck because the muck is of the homegrown variety. Wyomingites tend to be very sensitive about exposing shortcomings in public. It’s an old sensitivity, one that comes with sparse population and a short stature on the national scene. Why is everybody always picking on us? We’ll take care of our own problems.

And then we don’t. Sometimes we export them, as we did with Dick Cheney. He’s always had a mania for secrecy. It’s not just a quirk. He really is hiding something, this time from the American people.

I look forward to Brady’s "Secrecy Watch."