Currently it is important to speak and write about Congress and its failure to do basic things like pass a budget, repair its nonsensical cuts to health care subsidies, and defend its authority to budget and not allow Donald Trump to trash any allocation he wants.

Yet, at both the federal and state level, instead legislative attention has drifted toward the non-serious. Sometimes it’s hard to separate genuine legislator stupidity from mere pandering to confused and misled, but nevertheless adamant, constituents. Few things demonstrate this better than the efforts, both in the Tennessee legislature and the U.S. Congress (with help from one Tennessee legislator), to tackle the conspiracy bug-a-boo of chemtrails, sometimes called contrails.