Fauxconuts

The problem with crazy campaign ads like Elbert Guillory's Coconuts thing here is the cynicism has sucked the joy out of them.  Sure, there's always been a degree of calculation in offbeat political advertising. But what we're seeing here is a different level of manufactured intentional post-modern schlock.

Guillory's ad isn't a happy accident of charming "Special Man" type eccentricity. Instead, it is the product of well paid mainstream communications professionals acting well within the scope of their current best practices. Remember earlier in the Presidential primary when Buzzfeed was producing these quirky viral videos of Republican candidates? Pretty likely the purpose of that exercise was getting some creative interns a chance to test the viral political ad as a form while also padding out their own resumes in the field. Being Weird^TM is really just plain old formulaic marketing now.

While colorful characters have long been a part of our politics, the Palin-Trump age has shown us that outrageous behavior for its own sake is actually a potent brand.  Anyone managing Elbert Guillory's campaign will know this. So get ready for more affectedly bizarre ads. The PR puke funnel is bound to have plenty more where that came from.

Witch doctor patron and chicken boxing fan will say N word on TV

What is this? Trash TV? Some sort of conceptual comedy gag?  Nah, it's just a campaign for Lt. Governor.

Republican state Sen. Elbert Guillory was expected Friday night (Aug. 14) to air a television advertisement that includes the use of the N-word and questions why black people vote in large numbers for Democrats. Guillory is a candidate for Louisiana lieutenant governor.

The racial slur is used in the context of a quotation attributed to President Lyndon Johnson in which he predicted that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would "have them n-----s voting Democratic for the next two hundred years." The quote was reported in a book by Ronald Kessler, "Inside the White House," and has never been verified, although Johnson was recorded using the slur in other situations.

 Joy.
 

The purest Christians burn blue

Elbert Guillory presented a lecture on the history of science this week.

According to the Friendly Atheist, State Senator Elbert Guillory (R) was attempting to make the case for teaching “both sides” in the evolution/creationism debate  when he provided a convoluted version of the history of scientific controversies.

“There was a time, sir, when scientists thought that the world was flat. And if you get to the end of it, you’d fall off. There was another time when scientists thought that the sun revolved around the world,” Guillory explained. “And they always thought to ensure that anyone who disagreed with their science was a heretic. People were burned for not believing that the world was flat. People were really badly treated.”

Turn in your books to page 666 where you'll find terrible story of how scientific flat-Earth inquisitors purged recalcitrant clergy by throwing them onto their terrifying Bunsen pyres.  This was, actually, somewhat helpful during the religious wars of the Reformation when it was often difficult to tell an Anabaptist from a Janesenist  without finding out what color flame they produced.

Luckily this practice began to slow down after the invention of the spectrograph although some folks in these parts still rely on even older methods of sorting out what's what.

Sen. Elbert Guillory, D-Opelousas, said he had reservations with repealing the act after a spiritual healer correctly diagnosed a specific medical ailment he had. He said he thought repealing the act could "lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures."

"Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man -- in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed -- if I had closed him off and just said, 'That's not science. I'm not going to see this doctor,' I would have shut off a very good experience for myself," Guillory said.

Senator Guillory is a candidate for Lieutenant Governor this fall. 

There's always someone worse off than you are to hate

Shorter Elbert Guillory: "Barack Obama doesn't care about black people."

His latest video, released Monday, is far more egregious. Guillory peddles pure fear and ignorance and cynically pits blacks against Latinos. Referencing President Obama's recent executive action delaying deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants, Guillory implies that the president is more concerned about Latinos than blacks. He charges that Obama has done nothing to create jobs in the black community, hasn't fixed declining schools nor has he reformed the criminal justice system.

Instead, he says, "President Obama has chosen to bypass Congress and the Constitution to grant citizenship to over five million illegal immigrants."

That statement, of course, proves that Guillory knows nothing more about Obama's immigration actions than he does about the president's concerted efforts to create jobs and push education reforms. Obama's order did not award these immigrants with citizenship. The president did not even have the authority to grant them Obamacare

The things that Guillory "knows nothing about" could fill volumes.  High school level science is particularly elusive to him.

In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up category: A Louisiana state senator defended the Louisiana Science Education Act — a 2008 law that allows creationism to be taught in public school science classrooms through materials that ostensibly “critique” evolution — by invoking a witch doctor that he visited and found helpful. (See video below)

A bill to repeal the law was recently killed for the third straight year by Louisiana’s Senate Education Committee. In this post on Slate, Zach Kopplin writes about Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory, who explained at a May hearing that he doesn’t think the law should be repealed because he wouldn’t want to dismiss faith healing as a “pseudoscience.” Guillory even describes his encounter with the faith healer, who was “half naked” and used bones in a ceremony.

On the other hand, he does know a lot about avian folk sport. 


Under normal circumstances, he'd be some sort of a joke but we do not live under normal circumstances.   We live where a hateful, medieval minded bumpkin gets to be a leading candidate for Lieutenant Governor in order for the Republican Party to demonstrate how totally diverse and inclusive it is.

Bobby Jindal is burning witches for Halloween

New Orleans, Louisiana: Where we've nearly completed construction of a new state of the art "biomedical corridor"; home to Tulane University's renowned school of Tropical Medicine; heavily invested in welcoming large groups of tourists and conference attendees from all over the world....  is off limits to scary medicine wizards by order of  Governor Jindal's Secretary of Health and Hospitals.

Louisiana’s top health official is warning researchers and medical professionals who’ve fought Ebola in West Africa to stay away from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s annual conference in New Orleans, set to begin Sunday.

“We do hope that you will consider a future visit to New Orleans, when we can welcome you appropriately,” Kathy Kliebert, state Secretary of Health & Hospitals and Kevin Davis, director of the Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness, say in the Oct. 28 letter to the society.

Ordinarily, Bobby Jindal would perform mitigating exorcism but he's currently out of state campaigning.    So now we're trying to get Elbert Guillory's witch doctor to come down and stand in but this is kind of his busy season.

Chicken boxing

Can't get through a legislative session in this state without one of these numbers showing up somewhere.

State lawmakers spent a portion of Tuesday morning discussing the finer points of a “sport” known as chicken boxing. And no, it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.

It started when state Sen. Jean-Paul Morrell, a New Orleans Democrat, introduced Senate Bill 523, a measure that would expand the state’s current ban on cockfighting to include all types of chickens. The bill also would make it a felony to possess paraphernalia such as spurs, leather training spur covers and other items commonly used in the illegal sport.

SB523 ran into a little trouble when state Sen. Elbert Guillory, an Opelousas Republican, said the bill is too broad. He said the bill would make it illegal for people that raise “15th and 20th generation fighting birds that are exported legitimately and legally to other nations”

That’s when Morrell interrupted, telling his colleague that raising chickens for fighting is illegal.

“No, no. Not for fighting,” Guillory said. “They just raise them.”

“So, they’re raising chickens who are 15th generation fighting chickens, and they’re exporting them just to export them,” Morrell asked. “That sounds like someone who buys a lot of pseudoephedrine and ships it to a trailer in the middle of Texas for the fact that someone might have a big cold.”

“I don’t know what ephedrine is,” Guillory responded.

In his defense, we already know that Guillory's constituents  raise chickens for purposes other than fighting.  Sometimes they just need their bones for reading the portents and whatnot.

A bill to repeal the law was recently killed for the third straight year by Louisiana’s Senate Education Committee. In this post on Slate, Zach Kopplin writes about Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory, who explained at a May hearing that he doesn’t think the law should be repealed because he wouldn’t want to dismiss faith healing as a “pseudoscience.” Guillory even describes his encounter with the faith healer, who was “half naked” and used bones in a ceremony.

As to his familiarity with ephedrine and its derivatives, the jury is still out. 

Saturday ICYMI links

I'd take some time to describe to you how busy I am today but that would just waste this one quick moment I've got to say anything at all.  Also, it would (mostly) be a lie. Everyone knows I'm not really busy. Just disorganized.

Here are some things I wanted to link to this week but couldn't get to.. for whatever reason.

• NOLA.com: In unusual catch, Gulf of Mexico researchers find Greenland shark near Deepwater Horizon
  
  

  TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Florida State University researchers have made an unusual catch in the Gulf of Mexico: a cold-water shark typically found in Arctic waters.
  
  Dean Grubbs of Florida State's coastal and marine research laboratory says it's the first documented catch of a Greenland shark in the Gulf.

  Guess BP was right about the possibility of Gulf Walruses after all.



• CenLamar: Why Elbert Guillory’s “Free At Last” PAC Raises Serious Questions About the Louisiana GOP Guillory, who temporarily became a Democrat in order to gain his seat in the state legislature recently became a Republican (again) in order to gain some measure of celebrity which has been leveraged into a bit of what we might call a con job.
  

  Only two months after he switched back to the Republican Party, Elbert Guillory has become a spokesman (an “honorary chair”) of a political action committee called Free At Last PAC. And if you visit their website or watch their two online commercials, you’ll likely be under the impression (among other things) that Guillory himself launched this PAC in order to encourage African-Americans to run for office as Republicans. (I have some serious problems with what Guillory says in these online commercials, but I’ll get to that in a second). FoxNews, the Weekly Standard, the Christian Post, and others erroneously reported that Elbert Guillory was the principal of Free at Last PAC.
  
  The truth is, Free At Last PAC (which was obviously named after a famous Negro spiritual) appears to have been created and is now managed by a white conservative political activist and Louisiana Family Forum Vice Chairman, a guy named Derek Babcock. If you closely follow Louisiana politics, you may remember Mr. Babcock. He ran a stupidly mean-spirited (and losing) campaign for State Senate a couple of years ago, and fortunately, his website is still online
  
  Presumably, Mr. Guillory, as an honorary chair of this PAC and as an elected official, won’t ever be financially compensated for his voluntary involvement. But it remains unclear whether Mr. Babcock, as director, hopes to draw a salary. Either way, though, Babcock’s PAC seems like a sham.

  Also a sham, witch doctors.



• David Sirota: Elites’ deplorable double-standard on corruption
  
  Read this one carefully. It tracks very closely with the kind of "dragonslaying" movement that has swept the New Boss in in New Orleans to the very loud misguided cheers of the credulous.
  

  James was a working class ward politician whose Tammany Hall-style crimes were comparatively petty. That made him the type of public official that is regularly lampooned in the entertainment world and typically derided by elites as icons of what Time’s Joe Klein infamously called “the angry hot-house of inner-city” politics. That nasty code – “inner city” – also extends to James’ corruption. His crimes were portrayed as decidedly “inner city,” involving sums in the low thousands from mostly local cronies rather than national elite powerbrokers.
  
  By contrast, Booker has a different public image. With a suburban upbringing and Oxford pedigree, he has carefully crafted a political image that is pro-Wall Street, “new economy”-ish, proudly worshipful of wealth – and decidedly not “inner city.” Indeed, as one tech entrepreneur told the Times in explaining why Booker’s wealthy tech donors gave the Newark mayor a company, “It feels like he’s one of us.”
  
  The same goes for Booker’s money: it isn’t the much-denigrated Inner City Graft, it is the much-vaunted Mahogany Paneled Conference Room Graft from rich dudes in bucolic places like Silicon Valley.
  
  Such white-collar graft comes not in four-digit wads of cash, and doesn’t go to ward bosses like James. It instead tends to come in five, six or even seven digit checks and stock certificates to professional politicians who use anodyne terms like “public-private partnership.” Importantly, the money in the latter form of corruption doesn’t come from local parochial hundred-thousand-aires easily punished when things get a bit too embarrassing. It tends to come from mega millionaires and billionaires with the same pedigree and elite credentials as Booker – and those aristocrats rarely ever get punished, lambasted or humiliated with the “corruption” label because they own much of the media and most of the political system.
  
  The result of the double standard is the oxymoron whereby the kind of cash-in-the-envelope corruption James embodied is routinely vilified, ridiculed and prosecuted, while the kind of stock-options-in-the-portfolio corruption Booker evinces is completely ignored, trumpeted as smart politics, and/or openly touted as an “asset.”
  
  In this new Gilded Age, this double standard between what is seen as acceptable and unacceptable corruption is hardly exclusive to New Jersey.

  
  As Cory Booker moves onto the national stage you're going to see him presented more and more as a "party spokesperson". He shows up on lists like this one (along with Mitch Landrieu) of technocratic "problem solvers" which is what the anti-democracy people like to call themselves these days.



• Speaking of public corruption, Aaron Bennett is still pretty much unpretentious blatant old school about it.  Which is one reason he's being held accountable.



• Jerry Romig's parting quote sounded familiar to me.
  

  The Saints did, for the man who helped lend generations of fans a singular narrative voice through the deepest lows and richest highs of the team he adores, the team he once feared would forever leave the city.
  
  “That’s it, that’s it,” he said as the clock wound to zero and he pressed down on the mike. “Final score: The Saints 28, Raiders 20.”
  
  Romig folded up his glasses and slid them in his pocket, then leaned into the mike one last time.
  
  “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been fun. Good night. Love ya.”

  
  Where have we seen that before?
  
  

Must have seen something in the entrails

State Senator Elbert Guillory, who earlier this year, voted to keep creationism in Louisiana public schools because he was impressed by a visit to his local witch doctor, has.. through some other process of divination... decided to become a Republican.

Witch Doctors

In Bobby Jindal's Louisiana, biology students don't just have to dissect small animals.  They learn to read the entrails as well.

Sen. Elbert Guillory, D-Opelousas, said he had reservations with repealing the act after a spiritual healer correctly diagnosed a specific medical ailment he had. He said he thought repealing the act could "lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures."

"Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man -- in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed -- if I had closed him off and just said, 'That's not science. I'm not going to see this doctor,' I would have shut off a very good experience for myself," Guillory said.

But don't slam your head against the desk too quickly.  At least your legislators are consistent in their endorsement of shamanism and all its accoutrements.

A Louisiana House committee debated for more than an hour Wednesday before advancing legislation that would soften the penalties for marijuana possession.

As for the non-magical thinkers still running loose in the Gret Stet, the gradual decriminalization of an intoxicant should at least soften the blow since the steady march away from modernity shows little sign of slowing.

Nearly 8,000 vouchers have been offered to students, up from about 5,000 last year, state officials said Wednesday.

Yes, the vouchers have been declared unconstitutional, but that's being appealed to the witch doctors on the state supreme court where the signs portend a more favorable ruling. 

Much more from Lamar here.

Bonus:

I couldn't decide which version of this to go with. Do you prefer Chipmunks or Muppets?