It's redundant to say crazy cuckoo MAGA people but it also insults Sonny the cuckoo bird

By Hal Brown, MSW,  Retired psychotherapist. More about me.

Fair Use, General Mills

Maybe I needed a second cup of coffee to clear the cobwebs out of my mind this morning but the first thing that caught my attention in the title of the following article was the first four words:

Reading this made me think of the original crazy cuckoo.

In context below these words were used by Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella explaining how Biden outmaneuvered McCarthy on the debt ceiling deal as follows:

So if this goes down because Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or any of those crazy cuckoo MAGA people decide to tank the US economy, it is one hundred percent going to be at the feet of the Republican Party and not the president."

Cocoa Puffs is a classic American cereal known for being marketed to children and for its sugar content. It was introduced in 1956. 

While the name "Sonny" may be the answer to a trivia question, the bird's catchphrase, "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" has become iconic. How deeply impeded in American culture it is can be demonstrated by the 2011 story about  a sword-swinging samurai declaring himself 'Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs' when he was arrested. In another case a man was arrested for indecent exposure when he was walking naked down a street in Tulsa and he claimed it was due to eating Cocoa Puffs.

Here's Sonny's "bio" from Wikipedia:

The mascot of Cocoa Puffs, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, was introduced in 1962. In television commercials, Sonny attempts to concentrate on a normal task but ends up coming across some reference to Cocoa Puffs themselves (usually described by the adjectives "munchy, crunchy, chocolatey") and bursts with enthusiasm, exclaiming his catchphrase "I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!"^[5] Sonny was voiced by Chuck McCann from 1962 to 1978, and has been voiced by Larry Kenney since 1978.^[6]

The line "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" has entered the vernacular as a term for somebody who is irrational.^[7]

Sonny's name comes from the original format of the commercials, in which he was paired with his grandfather (also voiced by McCann). Rather than proper names, they always referred to each other as "Gramps" and "Sonny." When the grandfather was dropped from the ads, "Sonny" remained as the character's name. In 2010, Gramps returned to the Cocoa Puffs ads, with McCann reprising his role as Gramps and Kenney continuing to voice Sonny.

Sonny was designed by Gene Cleaves. Animation pioneer "Grim" Natwick (of Fleischers' Betty Boop team) also contributed to the early images of Sonny and Gramps, according to then-contemporaries who collaborated with Natwick.^[8]

Sonny was originally depicted as wearing a pink-and-white striped shirt, then in 1995 was redesigned, this time wearing 1990s "extreme" clothes and being given a more Disney-esque appearance. In 2004, he was redesigned in a more simplistic fashion, this time without clothing.

Sonny, of course, was the original crazy cuckoo. He wasn't crazy in the sense of being mentally ill, he was crazy in sense of being extremely enthusiastic.

As far as being a cuckoo bird he didn't look anything like real cuckoos.

Here's something I didn't know until I read about cuckoos in Wikipedia:

Cuckoos have played a role in human culture for thousands of years, appearing in Greek mythology as sacred to the goddess Hera. In Europe, the cuckoo is associated with spring, and with cuckoldry, for example in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. In India, cuckoos are sacred to Kamadeva, the god of desire and longing, whereas in Japan, the cuckoo symbolises unrequited love.

Not to get too serious, oh crap, this all is very serious... but between having Donald Trump who was merely a malignant narcissist who expressed delusional beliefs to having legislators influencing policy who very well may be clinically delusional, and having so many people in MAGA world being unmoored from reality, this country really does need some intensive psychotherapy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's most famous lunacy was suggesting that California wildfires were caused by George Soro and his space laser. I wish it was possible that the ghost of Sigmund Freud, another famous Jew, could tell NASA and the NIMH how to make mental health space lasers.

Addendum: 

Freud didn't really say this, but he might have....

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Can Twitter replace Fox News? Consider what my Twitter page looked like this morning.

By Hal Brown 

Most of you, if I have an accurate sense of my blog readers, are loathe to even click on Twitter let alone actually have an account and post their own tweets there. You probably would be one of the people depicted in the DonkeyHotey image from 2022 above. You can see how he was depicted by caricaturist DonkeyHotey (website) with an impish smile in 2012 to looking mean but oblivious in his grandiose state of smug self-delusion in 2022. 

Yet Elon Musk makes the news almost every day and now, according to a featured article in Salon this morning, wants to have Twitter replace Fox News:

I am not sure how this is possible. I doubt very many people want to turn off their televisions and use their laptops or other Internet devises to get their fix of right-wing opinion. There are ways to watch the Internet on the big screen (seeWikiHow) - but how many people are going to do this? My hunch is not very many. I tried to get my laptop to play through my smart TV with a cable I had for another purpose and after considerable trial and error I manage to get it to work. 

Then  noticed that my smart TV had an Internet setting so I was able to get Twitter there.

This may all seem like techie stuff, but in order for Musk to succeed in making Twitter an alternative to Fox News he has to have numerous people willing to take the steps to put it on their televisions. 

Given that, how many people even open Twitter first thing when they look at what's online using an Internet device? The MAGA world he lusting after, even want to follow the news, are more likely to turn on their television than go to the Internet. If he really wanted to become a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch he would be better off if he purchased NewsMax or One America News (OAN) and try to expand the number of cable stations which broadcast them. This is a bit dated being from 2021 but is relevant: Large Majorities of Newsmax and OAN News Consumers Also Go to Fox News. He'd have his work cut out for him but at least he'd have an opening to break into television.

My morning online routine is to look at my overnight email, then see what HUFFPOST has as their top story, check Raw Story for their articles which summarizes news as it breaks, I scan The New York Times and Washington Post websites, and see what Salon is publishing.

I always have MSNBC on so on weekdays "Morning Joe" is playing in the background.

Among all these sources I try to come up with an original take for my blog of the day.

For those of you who rarely if ever look at Twitter, and may see screen grabs of select tweets in various articles, below are screen grabs of my Twitter page for this morning.

Clicking images will enlarge them and not take you to Twitter.

After skimming the Salon article I thought I'd see what just going to Twitter.com looked like.

The top tweet is from Musk about DeSantis and his announcement on Twitter:

What stood out to me was the Trump-like incoherent sentence "But you what isn't noise?" I assume he meant to write "But what you hear isn't noise" ending with a period rather than a question mark. The sentence after that isn't grammatical either. What would convey what (true or not) Musk meant is that what people heard wasn't noise but rather was DeSantis setting an all-time record for fund-raising.

If you click on Find out more this is what you will see:

You will have to go to Twitter (here) to read their Community Notes Guide.

In order going down the page as it appeared on my laptop are the following mishmash of tweets. I don't know if your Twitter page would look like this. I was struck by the contrast in tweets from liberal Thom Hartmann's tweet with was second under Musk's tweet to Lauren Boebert which was the next tweet. Down the page there was a similar contrast.

While alternative platforms, one of the best known being Mastodon (below)  have tried to replace Twitter, none have lured away the well known posters on Twitter as the screen grabs show.

Today there are tweets from President Biden, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Scott,  George Conway, Jim Jordan, and Barack Obama for example.

 So far I haven't seen a post on Mastodon, where I have an account where I've made 952 posts since Nov. 2022 (here) copied onto a news or opinion article they way so many tweets are.

 

Update: (Ben Collins is a senior reported at NBC News)

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It is like fleeing an obsessive and brutal regime in another country: She was trans in Texas and her family moved to Oregon

 By Hal Brown

This story was covered on Portland's KOIN TV:

Fearing for their trans daughter’s safety, a Texas family flees to Oregon

This is a poignant story. It has a happy ending.

It is a tale that reminded me of how people fled from persecution in brutal dictatorships where they rightly feared for their safety and in some instances where their lives were in jeopardy.

I won't attempt to wax poetic about Oregon and how, if you are a progressive, it is weird and wonderful. I've done this before, for example recently in my blog "Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead."

I also won't excerpt the KOIN-TV article which describes how the Texas family whose daughter, born physically male, realized at the age of three that she was a girl. 

Time went on and living in Texas became more and more stressful for the family described in the article living under Gov. Greg Abbott's anti-trans policies.

Being a member of an oppressed minority in a state or country is bad enough, but being a member of a group which is targeted for persecution or even prosecution in another matter.

Ultimately fears that Texas children's service could investigate them and even legally remove the child, then 10 years old, from the parental custody they decided to move to Pride proud Portland.

The child, now 11, and her parents, are now living safe and happily in Portland.

I urge that you read either the article or, better yet, watch the 7:41 minute video. 

There are well-known historic examples of how people fled home countries, from NAZI Germany to Cuba to North Africa to Venezuela. Now here in the divided United States (which I wrote about yesterday in "The 2024 Election will be like the new Battle of Fort Sumpter") we have the tragic spectacle of people feeling that to be safe they have to leave, or we could use the word "flee", their home states.

Women are having to temporarily leave the states where they live to get abortions. Students having to consider transferring from a college they love because the governor has decided it's was too "woke" (as in the case of New College in Florida). 

Across the country we have an uncounted number of people who may be seriously considering moving to a state where they feel they will be free from living under the boot of a dictatorship which has targeted them and their beliefs. The graphic below is from this website.

The states shown above, like Oregon, Washington, and New York, which aren't deep blue like California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have sections with more conservative residents. Here in Oregon there is even a movement in the eastern rural part of the state to secede and become a part of Idaho.

Click image below to enlarge. The most liberal states are on the top and the most conservative on the bottom.

Whether someone is or has a loved one who is a member of the LQBTQ+ community or who has lost their job like the teachers in Florida who have been suspended for teaching "woke" there are millions of people living in states the government and the majority of residents  would be pleased if they moved. The majority may consider you to be a pervert or groomer. They may think you are a baby killer. They may think you are a communist or socialist. They may think you are merely an elitist. For whatever reason they don't think you belong in their state.

Each person with the means to move who feels attacked for their choices and beliefs has to consider whether it makes sense to stay and fight for their beliefs or chose to move to a progressive state. There are some states where so many residents have their beliefs so entrenched that change in the foreseeable future is just about impossible. 

Of course some people who may want to flee their state are just are unable to move. Aside from not having the money, this may be because of their employment (the family who moved to Oregon was lucky in that the husband's employer was able to transfer him), or having a network of family and friends where they live, or for other reasons. Living where I do in a Portland suburb and having moved from a suburb of Boston I feel lucky. I also feel for everyone who feels trapped in a state where they feel oppressed.

Both in the past and in the present people risked or are risking their lives to escape authoritarian intolerant regimes. People found ways to cross national borders from Germany in the late 1930's, they tried to climb a wall in Berlin, in recent times they are embarking on perilous sea journeys, or trekking thousands of miles from Central American to the Mexico-America border. 

For example:

Click above to read article

The logistics for Americans are easier. People can rent a U-Haul and a car hitch and without the danger of getting shot or drowning they can relocate. Unfortunately for those who want to move, it isn't really that easy.