There Are Some Odd Folks On Those Heller Town Hall Calls

I like the fact that Nevada Congressman Dean Heller does town hall telephone calls.  Some may say it's not the most high-tech way to communicate, but I think it is pretty effective and a lot better than just receiving franking letters a couple times a year from your representative.  That said, I have to wonder about the constituents that end up on these.  I've been on a few of them and they seem to always end up with the same damn questions, most of the wacko variety.  This past Monday it happened again.

About 7 p.m. or so we received an automated call asking if we wanted to participate in a Heller town hall, so I stayed on and entered the queue to ask a question.  But it was like every other time I've participated -- time ran out before I could ask and some of the questions I had to listen to were more of the ilk you'd hear from some bearded dude in a bunker with a year's worth of c-rations at his side.  For every "I've got a social security or mortgage problem" question, for which Heller helpfully referred to his Reno office, there would be a couple of the "Get us out of the U.N.!", "Close our borders now!" or "They're coming to get my guns!" variety. 

However, none of those could top the caller who wanted Heller's opinion on news that Nancy Pelosi plans to tax her 401K earnings at 100% for the sole purpose of giving those dollars to illegal aliens.  You could almost imagine Heller's eyes roll as he had to stumble out a "I haven't heard that."  He should have just sent the nut to Snopes.com where the caller could see this chestnut has been around since 2006 and, whether you like or dislike Pelosi, is obviously false.  (In fact, a person should always run any kind of wild claim or story, whether it's from the internet or some friend of a friend, through Snopes before blindly passing it on as gospel.  Not only will you look a lot smarter, but it will help cut down on needless email forwards too.)

I doubt there is a call list of nutcases out there, if so what's that say about me, so I can only guess that much like most (but not all) political bloggers tend to represent the more extreme partisan views so do the people who when given the opportunity to listen to politics on their phone for a an hour or two say "Cool!" instead of 'click.'  Well, except for present company of course.