When ignorance becomes a movement: Meet ‘Frank’ from Louisville, a ‘Tea Party guy’, by Brian Tucker (Insider Louisville)
... Although my work will likely never be completed, I have arrived at a milepost of sorts and am now able to begin filing my report that shall ultimately be my life’s work – defining and debunking Teabaggery.
At first I thought it would be an easy venture -and it has been in some ways- because people love to tell you everything they know about politics.
Especially when they are dead wrong.
Meet “Frank.”
Showing posts with label nutcases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nutcases. Show all posts
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Meet “Frank,” a teabagger.
Yesterday afternoon, in route to Turtle Run, we exited the interstate at Edwardsville. There, in a yard facing State Road 62, was a huge hand-lettered sign in someone's yard extolling the virtues of Romney, Ryan and Mourdock. It might as well have been "Frank's" yard.
Monday, April 18, 2011
REWIND: Truth remains stranger than fact ... Team Hammond, Team Screech, Sis 'n' Boots, and much ensuing hilarity.
In which Erika reveals why she must masquerade as Erik. Reprinted by request of the Kitchen Linoleum blog; originally published on June 24, 2009. Links might be outdated, but who cares?
---
In the end, the epiphany always finds you.
I can’t pinpoint its arrival in my case, but as an avid reader of history, it long ago became clear to me that a record of human events is inseparable from personal qualities that are fundamentally and eternally irrational. Envy, greed, disappointment, anger, pride, vanity, ego, arrogance … they’re usually the best explanations for decisions and positions that defy logic, whether in the heat of the moment or afterwards, when dispassionate observers seek to fathom motives for occurrences that simply don't make sense.
Apart from neighborhood politics, here's interesting achival reading from the TEAM HAMMOND TAXPAYERS' GROUP (that's right -- all shrieking caps and righteousness).
It's dated Tuesday, February 5, 2008, and is attributed (imagine that -- intellectual honesty) to the Hoosiers for Fair Taxation blog on the same day. There is no longer any sign of it there, if in fact it ever was posted, although HFFT's discussions from the corresponding time period are unintentionally hilarious, with leading Indiana tax activist and crypto-fascist hypocrite Eric Miller having just commenced his bizarre linkage between property taxes and gay marriage, prompting some Libertarians to look around the romper room and wonder if they came through the wrong door.
Because it may already have been deleted once, and to preserve this masterpiece of muddle in the public record, I'm reprinting it in full.
---
TEAM NEW ALBANY: "YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT IT BAD?"
We received this message today from Freedom of Speech Team, our activist friends in New Albany.
Our city is a train wreck about to happen. Our new mayor is our old mayor of 12 years ago. He is a crook and a bigger CROOK now. You cannot imagine what all he has done over the last 30 days- an $11,000 raise for himself. We now have 2 deputy mayors a 118 take home cars. In 16 years we have spend around $60 million dollars on sewers and we now have another $47 million to spend. They have been giving like $32 million dollars in 2007 in tax abatements. They have borrowed $5.3 million from sewer utility to cover our general fund and never paid it back. We have been to the city prosecutor, Indiana atty. general and even the governor and been told is too political.
You think you have it bad in other counties. Listen to this one:
My sister is the assessor for our county. I worked for her for 5 years. During the entire time I worked there she was cutting peoples' property taxes to get re-elected.
Her first deputy works doing income taxes for 3 months out of the year. She not only collects a salary FROM doing taxes but a nice check from City. It took me 2 years to figure out what was going on and then I started making copies of time sheets and everything I could get my hands on. I mean boxes of paper work.
Well to make a long story short, my sister came to my new home (I purchased Sept. 2003 and moved into November 2003) on Martin Luther King day 2004 and handed me my termination papers. And told me she didn't have to give me an excuse to terminating me. So we got a bunch of citizens and current employees together and created Freedom Of Speech, IN 2005. Of course I am the only person who knows who everyone is. People know I'd not tell if someone put a gun to my head. Our cars have been trashed, gasoline poured on my porch. Spray painted "Bitch " on my garage door. On my birthday there was a box on my porch wrapped in a telephone cord with a bullet tied to it. Of course I deny being with Freedom of Speech.
My entire family has turned against me because I promised my dad before he died if she ever fired me to take her down. Well, I have been sitting with all this information, video tapes, time sheets. They also collected comp time and are making a fortune in local government.
I couldn't afford to fight her over being fired. I could not afford an attorney. This entire town is a house of cards. It would be so easy to expose this corruption and all if someone would help. I have even considered going to the FBI. You folks think you have it bad you ought to be living here. We have cops following us everywhere.
They are playing a shell game with our city money. Our state board of accounts audits is down right criminal for 4 years. Employees have been overpaid, our parks department ran up a $10,000 cell bill in one month. State Board of Acccounts tell us they have no power.
We don't have money to fight them. People are scared and won't even attend council meetings. I wish someone had some ideas or answers how we can fight back. We're the little people, working class citizens and have no recourse. We just keep plugging along but what can we do?? I'd be willing to go into protective custody to blow the whistle on these crooked "bastards".....
No one will touch this I swear, I have been trying for 4 years....
BTW, I guarantee this could turn into a movie deal. This is nothing but pure corruption, ghost employment, criminal crap and all we want is help to put all these crooked bastards in jail.....!!!
I have all these documents and no one to help us!!!!!!!! We need more than a Tea Party in our hometown, trust me.
Freedom of Speech Team in New Albany
From Hoosiers for Fair Taxation
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Monday, January 10, 2011
Of nut jobs and nut jobbery, American-style.
I see that another of our born-and-bred American nut jobs has wreaked havoc with bullets. It’s like an assembly line that never stops running.
Before the verbal shelling begins, this is not to suggest that rhetoric alone, whether left, right or middle, is responsible for nut jobbery, only that American soil is an eternally fertile incubator for nut jobs.
Worse, like Lear’s lifeline of a Fool, we seem to crave the presence of nut jobs among us in ways that do not bode well for the future of public safety, or personal sanity.
Permit me to explain my viewpoint.
In other Western countries, nut jobs are just as prevalent as here, but lacking freely available ballistics – and more importantly, denied an accessible soapbox owing to societal indifference – they soon become reabsorbed into the hinterlands from whence they came.
Indigenous nut jobs hang out at (for instance) Norwegian or Maltese dive bars, pulling their beards, waving their arms and muttering a lot, and if particularly entertaining, they find that bored patrons will buy them drinks, treating their conspiratorial gibberish and nonsensical ramblings as part of the nightly floor show, and nothing more.
In America, nut jobs are oddly venerated, somehow emerging as role models in the strangest and highest places, ranging from the televangelist’s pulpit (Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker) to the vice-presidency (Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle), and excluding neither major league sportsmen (Dennis Rodman, Al Davis) nor captains of industry (Charles and David Koch).
Existing below this somewhat rarified level of tabloid nut job notoriety are the garden variety, localized nut jobs, who at one time in the nation’s innocent, Mayberry RFD period of post-war stolidity, may actually have been as harmless as Otis and today’s Euro-cranks, but now increasingly are feared (and rightly so) due to the easy availability of weapons of significant, if not mass, destruction.
Even more bizarre, only in America do we deign to speak to this nut job fringe of miscreants as though they mattered, and in vaguely political terms, rather than consigning nut jobs to their rightful place on the ends of bars where the spittoons used to stand, forcing me to conclude that our degraded political parties – one in particular – actively desires their votes.
In fact, America’s twisted history offers dozens of examples of pre-emptive nut job cajolery, almost always emanating from those of its kissing cousins on the right, and generally meant to counter the widespread assumption among conservative elements that unless they take the initiative to blatantly lie first, unacceptable numbers of ordinary, aimless nut jobs just might fall into the dreaded hands of leftists, socialists, miscegenationists, feminists and homosexualists, and stage a second coming of the Bolshevik fury, with Red Massacres, rapes, art exhibits and the like.
Even worst: If not properly frightened into a state of amok anti-liberalism, nut jobs might take to committing crimes against property, not people – and then what?
That’s why the historical record of armed, frothing, left-wing nut jobs takes up vastly less space in the nation's Big Chief Tablet of a hate crime ledger than the population of heavily armed survivalists in a single Idaho county (pick one, doesn't matter which, and the ratio surely will hold true).
One of them may already have been elected Senator out there.
Verily, we just don’t do left-wing nut jobbery very well in America, and at this exact moment, I’m finding no consolation whatsoever in grasping this truth. Like violence and extremism, nut jobbery is a trait that baffles me. Too bad we can't do something about it. I've often though it must be constitutionally protected.
Do we ever learn?
Wait – don’t answer that question.
Before the verbal shelling begins, this is not to suggest that rhetoric alone, whether left, right or middle, is responsible for nut jobbery, only that American soil is an eternally fertile incubator for nut jobs.
Worse, like Lear’s lifeline of a Fool, we seem to crave the presence of nut jobs among us in ways that do not bode well for the future of public safety, or personal sanity.
Permit me to explain my viewpoint.
In other Western countries, nut jobs are just as prevalent as here, but lacking freely available ballistics – and more importantly, denied an accessible soapbox owing to societal indifference – they soon become reabsorbed into the hinterlands from whence they came.
Indigenous nut jobs hang out at (for instance) Norwegian or Maltese dive bars, pulling their beards, waving their arms and muttering a lot, and if particularly entertaining, they find that bored patrons will buy them drinks, treating their conspiratorial gibberish and nonsensical ramblings as part of the nightly floor show, and nothing more.
In America, nut jobs are oddly venerated, somehow emerging as role models in the strangest and highest places, ranging from the televangelist’s pulpit (Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker) to the vice-presidency (Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle), and excluding neither major league sportsmen (Dennis Rodman, Al Davis) nor captains of industry (Charles and David Koch).
Existing below this somewhat rarified level of tabloid nut job notoriety are the garden variety, localized nut jobs, who at one time in the nation’s innocent, Mayberry RFD period of post-war stolidity, may actually have been as harmless as Otis and today’s Euro-cranks, but now increasingly are feared (and rightly so) due to the easy availability of weapons of significant, if not mass, destruction.
Even more bizarre, only in America do we deign to speak to this nut job fringe of miscreants as though they mattered, and in vaguely political terms, rather than consigning nut jobs to their rightful place on the ends of bars where the spittoons used to stand, forcing me to conclude that our degraded political parties – one in particular – actively desires their votes.
In fact, America’s twisted history offers dozens of examples of pre-emptive nut job cajolery, almost always emanating from those of its kissing cousins on the right, and generally meant to counter the widespread assumption among conservative elements that unless they take the initiative to blatantly lie first, unacceptable numbers of ordinary, aimless nut jobs just might fall into the dreaded hands of leftists, socialists, miscegenationists, feminists and homosexualists, and stage a second coming of the Bolshevik fury, with Red Massacres, rapes, art exhibits and the like.
Even worst: If not properly frightened into a state of amok anti-liberalism, nut jobs might take to committing crimes against property, not people – and then what?
That’s why the historical record of armed, frothing, left-wing nut jobs takes up vastly less space in the nation's Big Chief Tablet of a hate crime ledger than the population of heavily armed survivalists in a single Idaho county (pick one, doesn't matter which, and the ratio surely will hold true).
One of them may already have been elected Senator out there.
Verily, we just don’t do left-wing nut jobbery very well in America, and at this exact moment, I’m finding no consolation whatsoever in grasping this truth. Like violence and extremism, nut jobbery is a trait that baffles me. Too bad we can't do something about it. I've often though it must be constitutionally protected.
Do we ever learn?
Wait – don’t answer that question.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Local GOP's version of Arthur Carlson goes nutzoid ... alas, not for the first time.
And there's no Dr. Johnny Fever around for temporary comic relief.
Too bad that it seems to have become personal with Dave Matthews, but at least now I know that reading comprehension skills are not required of Republican county chairmen. Other than that, Dave is entitled to his own diatribes, but readers who correctly noted the elegiac (damn, those big words again) of my original piece universally enjoyed it, and I've seldom received more positive comments than I have since it was published.
One reader liked it so much that he dropped off a copy of his father's self-published WWI memoirs for me to read. Apparently he didn't read the part about my grandfather the mass murderer -- and rightly so, because nowhere was this written.
But in the absence of a coherent party platform, poor old Dave has bankrupt ideology to peddle, axes to grind and straw men to bludgeon. Like I said, too bad. For all his previous bluster and hokum, I actually thought he was capable of reason.
One thing's for sure: He sure isn't going to like this week's column.
Thanks for reading, big guy.
Too bad that it seems to have become personal with Dave Matthews, but at least now I know that reading comprehension skills are not required of Republican county chairmen. Other than that, Dave is entitled to his own diatribes, but readers who correctly noted the elegiac (damn, those big words again) of my original piece universally enjoyed it, and I've seldom received more positive comments than I have since it was published.
One reader liked it so much that he dropped off a copy of his father's self-published WWI memoirs for me to read. Apparently he didn't read the part about my grandfather the mass murderer -- and rightly so, because nowhere was this written.
But in the absence of a coherent party platform, poor old Dave has bankrupt ideology to peddle, axes to grind and straw men to bludgeon. Like I said, too bad. For all his previous bluster and hokum, I actually thought he was capable of reason.
One thing's for sure: He sure isn't going to like this week's column.
Thanks for reading, big guy.
LETTERS: Reader unhappy with Tribune columnist
Now, I realize that very few people can read more than one paragraph of this author’s writings without scratching their heads and saying, “huh?”
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Truth remains stranger than fact: Team Hammond, Team Screech, Sis 'n' Boots, and much ensuing hilarity.
In the end, the epiphany always finds you.
I can’t pinpoint its arrival in my case, but as an avid reader of history, it long ago became clear to me that a record of human events is inseparable from personal qualities that are fundamentally and eternally irrational. Envy, greed, disappointment, anger, pride, vanity, ego, arrogance … they’re usually the best explanations for decisions and positions that defy logic, whether in the heat of the moment or afterwards, when dispassionate observers seek to fathom motives for occurrences that simply don't make sense.
Apart from neighborhood politics, here's interesting achival reading from the TEAM HAMMOND TAXPAYERS' GROUP (that's right -- all shrieking caps and righteousness).
It's dated Tuesday, February 5, 2008, and is attributed (imagine that -- intellectual honesty) to the Hoosiers for Fair Taxation blog on the same day. There is no longer any sign of it there, if in fact it ever was posted, although HFFT's discussions from the corresponding time period are unintentionally hilarious, with leading Indiana tax activist and crypto-fascist hypocrite Eric Miller having just commenced his bizarre linkage between property taxes and gay marriage, prompting some Libertarians to look around the romper room and wonder if they came through the wrong door.
Because it may already have been deleted once, and to preserve this masterpiece of muddle in the public record, I'm reprinting it in full.
---
TEAM NEW ALBANY: "YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT IT BAD?"
We received this message today from Freedom of Speech Team, our activist friends in New Albany.
Our city is a train wreck about to happen. Our new mayor is our old mayor of 12 years ago. He is a crook and a bigger CROOK now. You cannot imagine what all he has done over the last 30 days- an $11,000 raise for himself. We now have 2 deputy mayors a 118 take home cars. In 16 years we have spend around $60 million dollars on sewers and we now have another $47 million to spend. They have been giving like $32 million dollars in 2007 in tax abatements. They have borrowed $5.3 million from sewer utility to cover our general fund and never paid it back. We have been to the city prosecutor, Indiana atty. general and even the governor and been told is too political.
You think you have it bad in other counties. Listen to this one:
My sister is the assessor for our county. I worked for her for 5 years. During the entire time I worked there she was cutting peoples' property taxes to get re-elected.
Her first deputy works doing income taxes for 3 months out of the year. She not only collects a salary FROM doing taxes but a nice check from City. It took me 2 years to figure out what was going on and then I started making copies of time sheets and everything I could get my hands on. I mean boxes of paper work.
Well to make a long story short, my sister came to my new home (I purchased Sept. 2003 and moved into November 2003) on Martin Luther King day 2004 and handed me my termination papers. And told me she didn't have to give me an excuse to terminating me. So we got a bunch of citizens and current employees together and created Freedom Of Speech, IN 2005. Of course I am the only person who knows who everyone is. People know I'd not tell if someone put a gun to my head. Our cars have been trashed, gasoline poured on my porch. Spray painted "Bitch " on my garage door. On my birthday there was a box on my porch wrapped in a telephone cord with a bullet tied to it. Of course I deny being with Freedom of Speech.
My entire family has turned against me because I promised my dad before he died if she ever fired me to take her down. Well, I have been sitting with all this information, video tapes, time sheets. They also collected comp time and are making a fortune in local government.
I couldn't afford to fight her over being fired. I could not afford an attorney. This entire town is a house of cards. It would be so easy to expose this corruption and all if someone would help. I have even considered going to the FBI. You folks think you have it bad you ought to be living here. We have cops following us everywhere.
They are playing a shell game with our city money. Our state board of accounts audits is down right criminal for 4 years. Employees have been overpaid, our parks department ran up a $10,000 cell bill in one month. State Board of Acccounts tell us they have no power.
We don't have money to fight them. People are scared and won't even attend council meetings. I wish someone had some ideas or answers how we can fight back. We're the little people, working class citizens and have no recourse. We just keep plugging along but what can we do?? I'd be willing to go into protective custody to blow the whistle on these crooked "bastards".....
No one will touch this I swear, I have been trying for 4 years....
BTW, I guarantee this could turn into a movie deal. This is nothing but pure corruption, ghost employment, criminal crap and all we want is help to put all these crooked bastards in jail.....!!!
I have all these documents and no one to help us!!!!!!!! We need more than a Tea Party in our hometown, trust me.
Freedom of Speech Team in New Albany
From Hoosiers for Fair Taxation
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
I can’t pinpoint its arrival in my case, but as an avid reader of history, it long ago became clear to me that a record of human events is inseparable from personal qualities that are fundamentally and eternally irrational. Envy, greed, disappointment, anger, pride, vanity, ego, arrogance … they’re usually the best explanations for decisions and positions that defy logic, whether in the heat of the moment or afterwards, when dispassionate observers seek to fathom motives for occurrences that simply don't make sense.
Apart from neighborhood politics, here's interesting achival reading from the TEAM HAMMOND TAXPAYERS' GROUP (that's right -- all shrieking caps and righteousness).
It's dated Tuesday, February 5, 2008, and is attributed (imagine that -- intellectual honesty) to the Hoosiers for Fair Taxation blog on the same day. There is no longer any sign of it there, if in fact it ever was posted, although HFFT's discussions from the corresponding time period are unintentionally hilarious, with leading Indiana tax activist and crypto-fascist hypocrite Eric Miller having just commenced his bizarre linkage between property taxes and gay marriage, prompting some Libertarians to look around the romper room and wonder if they came through the wrong door.
Because it may already have been deleted once, and to preserve this masterpiece of muddle in the public record, I'm reprinting it in full.
---
TEAM NEW ALBANY: "YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT IT BAD?"
We received this message today from Freedom of Speech Team, our activist friends in New Albany.
Our city is a train wreck about to happen. Our new mayor is our old mayor of 12 years ago. He is a crook and a bigger CROOK now. You cannot imagine what all he has done over the last 30 days- an $11,000 raise for himself. We now have 2 deputy mayors a 118 take home cars. In 16 years we have spend around $60 million dollars on sewers and we now have another $47 million to spend. They have been giving like $32 million dollars in 2007 in tax abatements. They have borrowed $5.3 million from sewer utility to cover our general fund and never paid it back. We have been to the city prosecutor, Indiana atty. general and even the governor and been told is too political.
You think you have it bad in other counties. Listen to this one:
My sister is the assessor for our county. I worked for her for 5 years. During the entire time I worked there she was cutting peoples' property taxes to get re-elected.
Her first deputy works doing income taxes for 3 months out of the year. She not only collects a salary FROM doing taxes but a nice check from City. It took me 2 years to figure out what was going on and then I started making copies of time sheets and everything I could get my hands on. I mean boxes of paper work.
Well to make a long story short, my sister came to my new home (I purchased Sept. 2003 and moved into November 2003) on Martin Luther King day 2004 and handed me my termination papers. And told me she didn't have to give me an excuse to terminating me. So we got a bunch of citizens and current employees together and created Freedom Of Speech, IN 2005. Of course I am the only person who knows who everyone is. People know I'd not tell if someone put a gun to my head. Our cars have been trashed, gasoline poured on my porch. Spray painted "Bitch " on my garage door. On my birthday there was a box on my porch wrapped in a telephone cord with a bullet tied to it. Of course I deny being with Freedom of Speech.
My entire family has turned against me because I promised my dad before he died if she ever fired me to take her down. Well, I have been sitting with all this information, video tapes, time sheets. They also collected comp time and are making a fortune in local government.
I couldn't afford to fight her over being fired. I could not afford an attorney. This entire town is a house of cards. It would be so easy to expose this corruption and all if someone would help. I have even considered going to the FBI. You folks think you have it bad you ought to be living here. We have cops following us everywhere.
They are playing a shell game with our city money. Our state board of accounts audits is down right criminal for 4 years. Employees have been overpaid, our parks department ran up a $10,000 cell bill in one month. State Board of Acccounts tell us they have no power.
We don't have money to fight them. People are scared and won't even attend council meetings. I wish someone had some ideas or answers how we can fight back. We're the little people, working class citizens and have no recourse. We just keep plugging along but what can we do?? I'd be willing to go into protective custody to blow the whistle on these crooked "bastards".....
No one will touch this I swear, I have been trying for 4 years....
BTW, I guarantee this could turn into a movie deal. This is nothing but pure corruption, ghost employment, criminal crap and all we want is help to put all these crooked bastards in jail.....!!!
I have all these documents and no one to help us!!!!!!!! We need more than a Tea Party in our hometown, trust me.
Freedom of Speech Team in New Albany
From Hoosiers for Fair Taxation
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
Land of the free, banks of the Wabash ... home of the cranks.
So, if the baby emerges via C-section, is that really "natural born"?
Obama election challenged; Hoosiers file suit over citizenship, by Tim Evans (Indy Star).
As the nation prepares for the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, two Indiana men have filed a lawsuit asking a judge to throw out the election results. The suit, filed in Marion Superior Court, is among five loosely coordinated challenges that question Obama's status as a "natural born citizen."
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