Posted: February 6, 2013 at 5:15 pm

The Nutjoby-est Bill in America

by Cowgirl

…does not, alas, emanate from the Montana Legislature. It comes from Idaho, our neighbor.  The Idaho Statesman reports that the chair of the education committee in the Idaho state Senate has introduced a bill to require school children to read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand.

66 comments

  2. Publius II

    Come on ‘baggers’ in ‘bat-crap crazy’ session, we cannot let
    Idaho be loonier than us!!!!!!!

  3. Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

    OMG! No “Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, or “Black Like me” by John Howard Griffin, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown let alone FROZEN GRASS – by Kenneth D. Scott. Some of the best books about US conflict within its Borders… I have ever read as a student. It is a sorry sight to see children not know our history or prose.

    Why even Ayn Rand? “Atlas Shrugged” it is probably one of the least factual fictions I have ever read! It doesn’t teach anyone a better fiscal understanding… and the woman hated religion, and totally believed in exceptionalism (Self interest and preservation at any cost).

    The GOP is getting crazier and crazier by the day.

  5. Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

    Dipshit Daines replaces Dopey Reeburp as the new dumbest bastard in the House! Dipshit is in the Spitoon today with his no pay until balanced budget. Geez, what a moron. He’s Sarah Palin’s inbred cousin!

    • lan

      Is that how you run your household budget? Do you spend more than you earn and print endless IOUs for the next generation to cover?

      Clearly following the laws of the land is something Congress and the president have trouble with so holding back pay and perks may get their attention… once their lobbyists stop picking up the tab. No work, no pay.

      • Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

        Yep. That’s how I run my household budget! ExCEPT I don’t start three unnecessary wars and BANKRUPT the freakin’ budget, and THEN try to balance it on the backs of the poor!

        Geez, Yawn, you’re too simple to post here, dude. It’s a wee bit more complicated than you and dipshit daines.

      • Montana Mom

        It’s much more complex than household budgeting, as is business debt management. You don’t think GE or Bain Capital or any other large corporation functions without debt, do you?
        “Governments really can and do borrow forever.” – from http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/why-the-us-government-never-ever-has-to-pay-back-all-its-debt/272747/
        It helps to be open enough to read other sources than radical fiction such as Ayn Rand. Her books were incredibly convincing, similar to Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code. It’s easy to buy into them hook, line, and sinker. I sure did, with both authors, until I started looking into the subjects further and realized just how good these writers were, to create such intensely believable fiction. To bank an entire country’s future on the imaginings of someone who, if you knew her, you would probably think was creepy and crazy, is not just ridiculous, it’s disastrous.

        • Pundet

          Her books, even to this day, are marketed at impressionable youth. Her characters are caricatures of her philosophy, which itself is unworkable and which has led to disaster at every implementation. She would be just another forgotten author had she not been adopted by the wealthy barons that control this land, her ideas suiting their objectives to a tee – oligarchy and empire.

    • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

      So what Daines is saying is he is willing to chuck the constitution to further his Agenda. Seems Usual for the extreme Daines.

      See since 1789 in the constitution, congress needs to be paid. they must except their paychecks.

      Just more Misdirection and Tomfoolery to a guy who looks to beat Rehberg on stupid by the beginning of Summer.

  7. Drunks for Denny

    Personally, I think our public flogging bill is nuttier than reading Atlas Shrugged in high school.

  8. Rob Kailey

    It is time to once again remember the sage words of Kung Fu Monkey:

    There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

    For the record, I agree completely with Drunks for Denny. The required reading of any book which has had significant impact (good or bad) should never be discouraged as “nutty”. Personally, I think everyone in high school should have to read Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries and other ‘dangerous’ books, simply because it’s hard to think critically concerning ideas one is ignorant of. Public flogging, in the 21st century? Now that’s Nutty.

  9. Farmboy

    Too funny for words, and ironic at the same time, a government owned school requiring kids to read a woman who hates the government, if Obama or a Democrat proposed a bill like this to say read Mao’s little red book, it would be all over Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would be screaming right now.

  10. Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

    Bill Maher made the Idaho senator a national laughing stock last night on real time. Lets face it Idaho won stupid this week hands down.

    • Craig Moore

      Lynn, your comment and link certainly belongs under this post as such a legislative recognition is, well, a grasp of the obvious without any merit whatsovever. Climate always is changing. Never has there been a period of stasis. Not sure why this piece of nonsense is important but it certainly is an example of nuttery.

      • larry kurtz

        A similar transmogrification occurred with the word nimrod, a generic reference to the biblical character of that name, who in the Good Book is referred to as “a mighty hunter.” How, then, did the word become a synonym for jerk or idiot? In a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Bugs’s fumbling nemesis Elmer Fudd as a hunter on the rabbit’s trail, the carrot-chomping coney sardonically refers to Fudd as a nimrod — insulting him by derisively comparing him to a biblical personage renowned for his hunting skills.

        http://www.dailywritingtips.com/accidental-shifts-in-meaning/

        • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

          Well that figures! Craig doesn’t believe in climate science…..(wandering off while chuckling how well Craig fits Nimrod the Fudd version)

          • Craig Moore

            I love science, especially the cutting edge. http://news.rice.edu/2013/02/06/volcano-location-could-be-greenhouse-icehouse-key/

            Study: Episodic purging of ‘carbonate capacitor’ drives long-term climate cycle

            HOUSTON — (Feb. 6, 2013) — A new Rice University-led study finds the real estate mantra “location, location, location” may also explain one of Earth’s enduring climate mysteries. The study suggests that Earth’s repeated flip-flopping between greenhouse and icehouse states over the past 500 million years may have been driven by the episodic flare-up of volcanoes at key locations where enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are poised for release into the atmosphere.

            Cin-Ty Lee

            “We found that Earth’s continents serve as enormous ‘carbonate capacitors,’” said Rice’s Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study in this month’s GeoSphere. “Continents store massive amounts of carbon dioxide in sedimentary carbonates like limestone and marble, and it appears that these reservoirs are tapped from time to time by volcanoes, which release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

            Lee said as much as 44 percent of carbonates by weight is carbon dioxide. Under most circumstances that carbon stays locked inside Earth’s rigid continental crust.

            “One process that can release carbon dioxide from these carbonates is interaction with magma,” he said. “But that rarely happens on Earth today because most volcanoes are located on island arcs, tectonic plate boundaries that don’t contain continental crust.”

            Earth’s climate continually cycles between greenhouse and icehouse states, which each last on timescales of 10 million to 100 million years. Icehouse states — like the one Earth has been in for the past 50 million years — are marked by ice at the poles and periods of glacial activity. By contrast, the warmer greenhouse states are marked by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and by an ice-free surface, even at the poles. The last greenhouse period lasted about 50 million to 70 million years and spanned the late Cretaceous, when dinosaurs roamed, and the early Paleogene, when mammals began to diversify.
            Lee and colleagues found that the planet’s greenhouse-icehouse oscillations are a natural consequence of plate tectonics. The research showed that tectonic activity drives an episodic flare-up of volcanoes along continental arcs, particularly during periods when oceans are forming and continents are breaking apart. The continental arc volcanoes that arise during these periods are located on the edges of continents, and the magma that rises through the volcanoes releases enormous quantities of carbon dioxide as it passes through layers of carbonates in the continental crust.

            Lee, professor of Earth science at Rice, led the four-year study, which was co-authored by three Rice faculty members and additional colleagues at the University of Tokyo, the University of British Columbia, the California Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University and Pomona College.

            • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

              What your not saying is, you don’t believe in Man Made caused, climate change. The tipping point for our planet is that. sorry Craig you lose again.

              • Craig Moore

                Norma, what makes you think you know what I believe?

                As to climate change and humankind’s role in it, I have plowed that ground before in many forums. It is you who lose, and look extremely foolish doing it. Now focus on the word, “cause.”

                    • Craig Moore

                      Norma, I don’t hate you in any way. I pity you.

                      As to “hate” remember this
                      Norma Duffy for HD 72
                      Slogan: “Fuck off” and get a life! and how your little tiff here with a couple of gentlemen led to it?

                    • Craig Moore

                      lost the formatting. Trying again.

                      Norma, I don’t hate you in any way. I pity you.

                      As to “hate” remember this

                      Norma Duffy for HD 72
                      Slogan: “Fuck off” and get a life!

                      and how your little tiff here with a couple of gentlemen led to it?

                    • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

                      I dont need your pity, Craig. I wont except it.

                      By the way I didn’t write the slogan others did, and in America they have a right to their opinions about me… so that didn’t bother me either!

                      I guess this means your still are playing the victim, with hopes someone else will come to save your pathetic life, using a woman as the bully…. Your looking in the wrong direction Craig.

                      Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere!

                    • Craig Moore

                      That’s right Norma. It didn’t bother you, that’s why you stormed out and didn’t return for something like 3 months. Seemed it took you a long time to heal over the earned drubbing you took.

                      As to pity, it’s not a gift one gives another. It’s a reaction to seeing someone flail about helpless without a clue as to how to save them self from self inflicted misery. I hope you wouldn’t accept pity but rather do something about your situation.

                    • Norma Duffy

                      I was to busy running for office, and seeing to my moms last wishes, sorry but you weren’t important enough to list near the top. More like the bottom of the list, somewhere between cleaning the windows, and picking dog do up in the backyard.

                      Which come to think of it I did those items more often then thinking of you!

                    • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

                      And lastly, what is my situation Craig? Dont pretend to know me. because when all is said and done. I have been in the deepest of places and crawled out. I am successful at what I do, not rich, but I outright own my houses and cars, I pay my taxes. I am not afraid to take chances… ergo like running for office to help people, I dont mind putting my ass on the line.

                      Sorry Dude, I have never been an Armchair quarterback, like you! When I say I am gonna do something I do it. I might not be perfect, but I can look in the mirror everyday, and be proud of every wrinkle on my face, every scar from a days hard work, every undercut dealt me,every promise I made to my family. and each day I can look out of my backyard, and see this Craig. What say you?

                    • Craig Moore

                      Pathetic.
                      Your behavior here is what I was talking about. But as to your run for office, I was gobsmacked by your abrasive, rude commenting here while pursing office. How could you possibly believed that was a winning strategy. It got so bad that one person in your area said that he was going to actively oppose you. Now saying you were too busy running doesn’t erase all of your ill-considered commentary while you should have been campaigning while measuring the impact of your every word.

                      As to your mother, sorry about that. Lost mine too this past year.

                      Now, your hypocrisy reeks like a barn in a hot sun. You constantly create manufactured images about me while the same time saying, ” Dont pretend to know me.”

                      BTW, I deeply respect strong, independent, accomplished women like my mother, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Condalezza Rice. Now there is you. When the going gets rough around here, you pull out the gender card and play the victim. Look at this thread for example

                    • larry kurtz

                      Norma: why are you wasting your time with Moore? His broken, battered psyche is irrevocably tied to his white supremacist roots and hatred of the Earth. He only comments here to prop up his need to hide his short-guy’s disease in the face of his otherwise hopeless existence.

                    • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

                      Your right Larry, I got better things to do, then argue with people who really need to stand on a bleach soapbox, while wearing teabags off their baseball cap to have a say!

                    • Craig Moore

                      Kurtz, Norma has promised on multiple occasions, before her storm off, to not engage me. But yet she sticks her head up like a gopher to a whistle while proclaiming aggrieved status.

                      My psyche is quite intact.

                    • Norma Duffy @ilikewoods

                      Like a little kid who keeps getting in the way and asking questions…. How does anyone ignore a selfish little brat like that Craig. Dont engage me, and I wont have to make you look stupid!!!!

                  • Rob Kailey

                    Norma, considering that your famous quote was directed straight at me, I would presume to exactly have right to my opinion of it, just as Craig does. No one else wrote it. You did. Let it go.

                    • Norma Duffy

                      To you, I said this, to your brother as well, but not anyone else. You speak for everyone(which you don’t), male and now win whatever prize, worthy of a man who speaks out of the side of his mouth.

                      Good for you, you also saved Craig from absolutely everything that scares most conservative men… like a independent woman who doesn’t give a damn about wussy ,backpeddling, males.

                • larry kurtz

                  Denial is the just the river where you use rocks that block your stream of consciousness, Moore. Fall on your sword and let Rob write your obit.

  12. Publius II

    Where’s the moral outrage from the ‘baggers’ as they should be LIVID Chrysler (Dodge) was ‘bailed out’ and sponsoring an ad honoring family farmers I hope, but the sad truth is, Agri-BIZ like Cargill, ADM and Monsanto run amok over family farmers and ranchers who are NOT getting the big subsidies like our dear GOP legislators like Janna Taylor, Knudsen (Mr. Charter School and take NO federal ‘gummint’ medicaid, food stamps for our seniors, etc) Brendan, and other hypocrites you can see exposed at Bill LaCroix’s wonderful site.

  13. Publius II

    Speaking of literature, ‘not all that glitters is gold, and not all who wander are lost’ – except for ‘baggers’ and Koch Brother acolytes.