This week's game was a lot of fun, with no mention of Nazism at all!  My older, Republican buddies repeated one of the same talking points from the week before which is that Michelle Obama has 22 personal assist while "no one else ever had more than three."  The article I read called them "household staff" and said the Bush household had 17 such workers.   Since the reporting on these kinds of things can be so bad, I'm not sure what to believe.  I mentioned the details of the article I read to the group and had to fend off a few heated comments in response.

Anyway, I was prepared for discussion this week because last week one of the gentlemen sent me one of those viral e-mails with all the erroneous claims about health-care, and I took the time to debunk each and every claim (thanks to the internet and a posting by lisB here at TPM) in a return e-mail.  There was a brief, very civil discussion about that, and I made some comments on how they could read the stuff if they really wanted to.  There is a technical barrier because at least some of these guys don't have browsers that can actually open the large document which is the health care bill (thanks AOL!).  The others haven't actually read it, which is understandable because it is pretty dry (IMO).

I've mentioned before that one of the guys is a bit more vocal and emotional about anything anti-Obama.  This week I learned that his son's company, in which his son has part ownership, went public with an IPO.  You might have heard of this company called Emdeon.  They handled about half of all the health care related electronic transactions in this country last year, which is way up in the billions.  Now I have no reason to believe that Emdeon is anything but legitimate and law-abiding, but the thing I took away is the interest this gentlman has in maintaining the status quo. 

I asked a few questions about Emdeon, and "jeff" colored the discussion somewhat by how burdened Emdeon was with government regulation, citing a recent audit request where the company was asked to provide a dump of transactions to the federal government.  "I told my boy, 'don't worry, no one can audit 400 billion transactions.'"  Now, I don't know why "jeff" would tell his boy "don't worry", as if there was something to worry about, but it struck me as odd.  Conservative mainstream thinking assumes large-scale fraud is everywhere, so I think these folks assume the worst about everyone.

My acquaintances, who repeat Glenn Beck verbatim at times, are anything but the fringe of the Republican party.  I am left to think "is the fringe really the fringe?"  More and more, I'm thinking no.  These guys aren't whack-jobs.  The brain-washing of Americans is affecting more people than I want to admit, and it clearly affects everyone that I know who still calls himself a Republican.

I don't think the stupidity will stop until the people with money stop paying Fox News for advertising.

The question is, how do you organize to hit the advertisers in the wallet?  If a few million people stopped buying products, would they notice?

I don't have any experience with this kind of thing, but I have the motivation.  Please give me some good ideas if you have them.