Rampant craziness

Abby Zimet at CommonDreams asks more than a fair question.    Is there "more crazy out there than ever?"   In a word, yes!

 "We dunno: Is there more crazy out there than ever? Maybe it's just that the latest - a Maine law letting you bring your gun to work and an Iowa bishop calling on believers to "violently oppose" contraception as "the devil" - were the proverbial straws. Forthwith, a look at a bunch of bizarro news in no particular order of awfulness. Spilled sperm to no lunch to public hangings to many fetuses: It's A Wonderful Life.

In New Hampshire, GOP legislators want to save the economy by eliminating  lunch breaks for (very likely) dawdling workers.

In North Carolina, Republican Rep. Larry Pittman wants to deter crime by reinstating public hangings, especially for “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers.”

In Missouri, GOP Rep. Vicky Hartzler, "a big believer in visuals," wants anti-choice activists to post pictures of aborted fetuses in college dorms.

Then again, Oklahoma GOP State Sen. Ralph Shortey wants a law to ensure that aborted human fetuses are NOT used for "enhancing flavor" in manufacturing food.

In New York, meanwhile, Fox News is worried about another "nightmare" - overpaid hotel maids. And Rick Santorum is worried the famously-anti-religion Obama administration is "on the path" to guillotining Christians.

In Arizona, GOP legislators want to ban swearing by teachers in classrooms or anywhere else on school property, and ban any profanity in any book or other material used in the classroom, which means good-bye to a whole mess of great literature from Catcher in the Rye to pretty much all of Shakespeare.

In Mississippi, patriots want to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America just to make sure who it belongs to.

And in Oklahoma, where proponents of the “personhood” movement are trying to ban abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization to protect "all the rights, privileges, and immunities (of) the unborn child," State Sen. Constance Johnson tacked on a provision ruling that "any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman's vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child" - thus outlawing oral sex, anal sex, masturbation and pulling out.

Tricky footnote: Two of these pieces of legislation were in fact offered as a joke. For now, there's still a Gulf of Mexico and you can still do whatever you want to do in the privacy of your home. For now. Most alarming part of the footnote: It's nigh-on impossible to discern them from the rest."