I made fun of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' gun trafficking investigation known as "Fast and Furious" in April. Here is a follow-up article from today's NY Times. The investigation, as it was reported in the sources I used, still seems foolish in conception and execution, but the Times articles puts some new perspective on the situation. It seems that Charles Grassley, the leading Senate investigator whom I knew was a Republican, is very pro-National Rifle Association, as is his House counterpart. They seem to have been interested in showing it up as incompetent, which it certainly seemed to be. However, the bigger debate is really over the existence of the Agency itself which is caught in the "gun wars" of the US, another one of the truly nutty issues with which the right is dividing the country.
Not dividing the country but demonstrative of at least some Americans' blindness to reality is this story on Texas's reaction to nine months of drought. After nine rainless months, a major concern appears to be keeping football fields watered. According to an April post on the Green blog in the NY Times,
"Texas weather experts attribute this drought to the Niña effect. Some observers are wondering whether it is also related to global warming, though that's a delicate question in Texas, the only state refusing to carry out greenhouse gas regulations recently introduced by the Environmental Protection Agency. Gov. Rick Perry, who just issued a proclamation urging prayers for rain this weekend [they failed], has said that the climate is always changing but that it is not clear that humans are affecting it."
Having lived in San Antonio for eight years, I have to add that not everyone in Texas is nuts. Not by a long shot. It's just that the nuts tend to be drawn to politics and business.