Chris Adams

Like many people, I have a few relatives who have persistent honesty problems when it comes to politics. I'm not talking about things like disagreeing over the best way to deal with poverty or trade but people who consider things like “Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly” to constitute a legitimate description of the opposition party. This election, I've been receiving these entirely in the form of multiply-forwarded smears directed at Hillary Clinton and now Barack Obama and it's been getting a bit repetitive listening to the same “Cryto-Muslim-terrorist-eats-babies-hates-America” tirade over and over again. Unfortunately, these are also the people who consider forwarding urban legends their best way to combat the dread menace facing our country and they tend not to listen to either fact-checking or requests not to forward unsourced rumours.

It turns out, however, that there's a way to both lower the volume of crap received and do some good: take a page from the people at Planned Parenthood who started the Pledge-a-Picket program and set a bounty for vicious slander: I picked $50 donated to the target (Obama, the ACLU, etc.) — $500 later and my inbox has remained clear for the first time in recent memory.

Update: the flood has gone down but not dried up. At the conservative inability to stick to facts and logic has raised ~$750 for something better…