Simple Jack Bakes Kwanzaa Cake.

I enjoy the Food Network, despite (or perhaps because) much of it is shot like porn, with the extreme closeups and the money shots.

I never gave much thought to Sandra Lee until I saw this. It's something she calls a Kwanzaa Cake - which naturally commemorates African heritage with popcorn, corn nuts, and apple pie filling.  It's as if she saw the one Friends episode where Rachel makes that trifle with jam and ground beef and peas and sponge cake and thought "not only does that Jennifer Aniston have kick ass hair and sure can keep a man, but look how colorful that dessert looks!  Peas and Jam!  Why had no one thought of this before!"

It's as big a revelatory train wreck as you're likely to see, it's the moment where you recognize not that Sandra Lee had a bad day, it's that she simply has no idea what she's doing.  It's bad enough that I'm always surprised she's been able to keep her gig; she was just so exposed as fraudulent, I can't believe anyone could view that and ever take her seriously again.

It was precisely the same thought I had watching this.  Simple Jack goes on a nearly ten minute rant about how Rockefeller Center (and therefore NBC) is ground zero for a secret communist/fasicst/progressive plot based on hidden messages in the artwork that prefigure the rise of Obama.

No.  I'm not kidding. 

These types of lunatics used to be confined to the outhouse of political debate; Lyndon LaRouche has been around for decades; the John Birch Society decades before that.  Probably you've gotten a INCOME TAX IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL, HERE'S THE PROOF! email from some wingnut (or Wesley Snipes); I used to encounter the occasional criminal defendant who said the .19 that he blew should be excluded from evidence as under principles of maritime law American criminal courts had no jurisdiction over his actions. 

But now they're on TV.  And the radio.  And they have book deals.  And they run school boards.

School districts in 7 states aren't going to run Obama's "hey kids, work hard, study, stay in school" speech next week out of concern that it will be communist propaganda. A "keep your kids at home" movement is underway among the right.

It seems, as has much of the right blather since the election, like purposeless hyperbole.  You know Obama's not building an unholy socialist army of the night.  If there are people who don't, they're too far gone to reason with.

But simultaneously in the news cycle comes this. That's the Texas state board of education preparing to change the way US history is taught in Texas, in a way that props up "significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority" without any sort of progressive equivalent.  This is important because Texas and California drive the high school textbook market - a version of US History taught in Texas may well become the version of US History taught everywhere. 

Under the shouts of "Obama's indoctrinating schoolchildren" comes actual propaganda forced into curricula. 

You want to laugh when conservatives talk about death panels and concentration camps and not providing Republicans health care.  You know it's bonkers.  You know they're just Birchers with power.

But then you recognize they're Birchers with power.  And you wonder what it is they have in store for us.

Unrelated: (1) Start Buster Posey.  (2) I'm on Team Michele.