On the long continuum between mildly addled and certifiably psychotic, I say Montana State Representative Krayton Kerns has hit the latter end and is about to topple off into the abyss. (Hat tip Charles Pierce) On his blog, Kerns writes,

This winter, under the cloak of darkness and against Montana Code, 60 bison were relocated from the quarantine facilities of Yellowstone National Park (YNP) to the Fort Peck Reservation along the Missouri Breaks. This is the second of a four step process to crush the republic and bring our populace into perfect dependence on big government—just as Karl Marx dreamed. If you missed steps one and two, you will likely refuse to acknowledge steps three and four, but I will explain them anyway.

According to Kerns, the first step was Bambi. Bambi persuaded us that animals deserve compassion, which established environmentalism as a religion. “Simultaneously and incrementally, government schools began promoting the religion of environmentalism until eventually state sponsored worship of the earth and creation surpassed worship of our Creator.”

Step two, the “US Senate discussed legislation to designate the bison as our national mammal, while activists quietly acquired conservation easements and commandeered Montana water rights through the Clean Water Act. The noose of federal control quietly tightened around massive tracts of Montana’s Missouri Breaks, and just as planned, 60 YNP bison appeared on the Fort Peck Reservation.” He’s talking about federal territory administered by the Bureau of Land Management, plus the Fort Peck Reservation, a reservation for the Assiniboine and Sioux nations.

In Step Three, the bison will overpopulate and stampede across the badlands or the prairie or whatever they’ve got in Montana that bison can stampede over, and then we reach Step Four:

The world’s economy will grind to a halt due to instability in the Middle East driving the price of gasoline over $25 per gallon. In desperation, America will attempt to develop the massive Bakken oil reserves of Montana and North Dakota only to learn a future leftist president has issued a moratorium on all oil exploration to protect the habitat of our national mammal, the noble, YNP-origin, American Bison. Think about it.

Think about it. I say we round up all those bison and attach ’em to giant turbines and make ’em stampede round and round and round. Who needs oil?

Seriously, I am something of an aficionado of goofy conspiracy theories, and this is probably the most awesome goofy conspiracy theory I’ve come across in a long time. There’s a kind of perverse genius to it. Kerns needs to be medicated, of course.

You might remember that after Hurricane Katrina, forces on the Right closed down many public schools in New Orleans and rammed a voucher system into place to replace the old system.

Louisiana officials insist that the voucher program is delivering a better education to Louisiana students. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu says that reform has been made possible by sapping the power of the teachers’ unions, because you know how teachers just hate education.

However, as Freddie deBoer points out,

As several commenters on the post discuss, a population decrease of somewhere between a quarter to a third of a city’s residents would make apples to apples comparisons a bit difficult, wouldn’t you say? Especially when the three demographic features most consistently correlated with educational outcomes—economic class, race, and parents’ education level—each had a significant post-Katrina swing towards the groups most likely to score highly. Might be worth mentioning!

If only we had some sort of systematized guidelines for how to accurately evaluate sociological data….

In May some reporters visited a private school in the voucher program. Turned out the school had no library, and the curriculum appeared to consist of showing the kids Christian DVDs. The school also intended to charge voucher students higher tuition than non-voucher students.

In other words, the school didn’t come close to meeting the requirements for teaching the 315 voucher students the state said it could accept. Asked about the lax oversight, the state education department said it would let parents decide if their children were being educated or not.

Now other reporters have turned up emails between State Superintendent of Schools John White and officials in Gov. Jindal’s administration about how this little mess might be spun away. The idea was to “muddy up” the newspaper narrative somehow.

The bottom line is that this voucher nonsense was imposed on poor Louisiana by players in the private education industry — who are profiting, no doubt — plus Christian conservatives. Providing better education has nothing to do with this. See also “Jindal’s Louisiana Vouchers Face Growing Legal Backlash.”

Related — last week Gov. Jindal signed a budget that eliminates all state funding for public libraries.