The crap that piles up in the Hall

Budding Journalist and former propaganda generator for Michele Bachmann, Torey Hall, is proving his mettle at the corporate funded wing-nut Accuracy in Media website by interviewing the one and only Myron Ebell on a matter of national importance: The use of inefficient and out of date lightbulb technology.

Myron Ebell would complain about the use of transistors and silicon chips in place of vacuum tubes if he could find an idiot to print it.

Torey writes:

Myron Ebell, Director of Freedom Action, has found that the U.S. government’s favor of incandescent light bulbs over normal bulbs is another broken idea with damaging side effects to American businesses and citizens.

Presumably he meant to write "compact flourescent bulbs" and imply to his readers that the old fashioned 6-times more inefficient incandescent bulbs are the "normal" kind, but the copy-editing at AiM is so poor they failed to pick this up.

We get more:

At the bloggers briefing at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Ebell said, "Cass Sunstein believes the government can regulate the rules a bit because they know what’s good for the people,"... The illogical thing about government-regulated light bulbs is that they are marketed in a way that tries to convince people that they are actually good for business and the economy. In fact the "economy is being regulated to death, which is why it’s not growing," Ebell explained... He went on to say that "The light bulb ban is an outrageous government limitation on consumer choices and it’s an intrusion into the home of every American."

Reviewing Torey's recent output, it seems he is going to quite a few of these crappy bloggers briefings where he learns the art of listening to complete unadulterated crap and printing it without the slightest degree of further research.

Like this one by the a right wing christian home-schooling group parentalrights.org engaged in a long running battle to keep the United States out of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The only other nation in the world not to ratify this treaty is Somalia.

Somalia has an excuse (they've got other problems). Their government is not willing to openly defend rights of parents to, for example, mutilate the genitalia of their daughters. But in America right wing groups are quite happy to defend the execution of children, physical assaults on children and religious home imprisonment of children in order to starve them of contact with the outside world.

The United States has managed to ratify the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. This too was brokered by the United Nations, which presumably means it's suspect and strangles the market with too much regulation.

Do you know how much money you can make from selling children? It's big bucks. A lot of poor desperate people can lift themselves out of poverty by selling their younger daughters.

I guess even Mr Hall would be able to see through his veil of ideology to feel a little bit queasy at the idea. Somehow there's less of a problem with the sale of children's future in terms of the prospects for survival in the future of a wrecked environment.

A video for your edutainment