041 The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

041 The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

Now for a regular feature, Two Weeks of Stupid, Clowns and Outrages. And we start, as usual, with the Clowns.

Our first Clown this time out is President Joe Coal Baron Manchin. After his event at the Economic Club of DC on October 26, three climate hunger strikers confronted him on his demand to cut climate provisions from the reconciliation package.

Manchin replied by asserting “the United States has done more than any other country. All the emissions are coming from Asia.”

So apparently all that West Virginia coal from which he gains a million a bucks a year from investments is being used for what, doing artists' sketches?

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Next there is Texas Republican state Rep. Matt Krause, who has a 16-page list of roughly 850 books and he intends to "investigate" to see if Texas school libraries might be harboring any of them.

Krause has used his position as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating to dispatch a letter wanting school districts to report whether they have any copies of any of the named books and if so, to report how many of them and how much money the district spent to get them.

Beyond such titles as The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the list, not at all oddly, seems obsessed with LGBTQ+ titles and ones about reproduction.

A peek under Krause's mattress might be interesting.

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Then there is the case of a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch uncovering a flaw in the website of Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that left the Social Security numbers for 100,000 staff members vulnerable. The information was contained in the html source code for the site.

The paper notified the agency and held the story until the agency had a chance to correct the error.

But it seems true that no good deed goes unpunished, because Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, apparently jealous of all the other GOPpes who've been awarded The Order of Big Red Nose, is vowing to prosecute the staff of the paper, charging they are "hackers" who "decoded" the source code to uncover the data. He claimed such an investigation would cost taxpayers $50 million.

Now, not only is that figure manifestly absurd, the thing is, the source code for a website is easily available to anyone with at most a couple of clicks because your own computer must have access to that information in order to display the web page correctly. Try it. Look for the Tools menu in your web browser, where you should find something listed like "View source code." In fact, if your browser is Firefox, just do control-u.

In other words, all this proves is that Mike Parson has absolutely no idea what hacking is.

I love this one because it gets back to the true meaning of Clown.

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But finally, sometimes it's hard to say if something is a Clown or an Outrage, it straddles the line between. Here's an example.

It's an unnamed teacher at Ridgefield Memorial High School in Ridgefield, New Jersey.

On October 18, Mohammed Zubi, A Muslim Arab-American senior at the school, asked for an extension on completing a math assignment. The teacher responded with 'We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Shortly after making the comment, the teacher supposedly told Zubi he did not “mean it like that.”

Excuse me, teacher person, but just how the hell did you mean it?

A supporting Clown award goes to the school administration which initially dismissed it as a “personal matter.” Only after the incident became known through social media did school board members take it seriously. In a statement a couple of days later, the district said it is conducting a full investigation and that the teacher in question has been suspended until further notice.