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During a conversation in her Washington office last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann asked me if I was working on any interesting stories. I told her that, oddly enough, I was doing a story on sport fishing, at which point she asked me if I'd heard that President Obama might be trying to ban sport fishing.

It's a small rumor by Washington standards, but has spread around the conservative talk circuit, including the microphones and pens of Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck. It sparked a pair of questions (and an official denial) in a congressional hearing and is worrisome enough to the White House that they've moved aggressively to quash it in its infancy.

"They just make up stuff, I mean, this is just silly talk, it's crazy talk," said Rep. Keith Ellison of both the fishing and ammunition rumors. "They make up these god-awful lies to distract people from the real issues facing them."

Back to that conversation with Bachmann. I told her I'd heard the rumor too, but the White House had pretty flatly denied it when I asked them about it.

"Oh yeah, just because the White House says it, you can take THAT to the bank," Bachmann said sarcastically. "I'd believe legislation more than I believe anything Obama says."

Among the many listed challenges facing those aquatic ecosystems is "fishing impacts," a point of almost no contention among environmentalists who worry that species like bluefin tuna are being overfished to the point of possible extinction.

"The task force has a wealth of opportunity to make our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes healthier — both environmentally and economically," said Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

"More and more people in the general public only listen to news outlets that reflect their point of view," Smith said. "To combat that sort of thing in the specialized media is very difficult," both because the hosts aren't inclined to take the administration's word for it and because the audience is more predisposed to believe a story that works against the White House.

"I think the White House has to figure that 25 to 30 percent of the electorate is simply out of reach," he said.

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By now, any person with half a brain (this leaves out a lot of people) knows that the idiotic rumor that the Obama administration is planning to ban recreational fishing in the "oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes and even inland waters" was just that, an idiotic rumor.

The rumor started early last week when Robert Mongomery, a columnist (another blight on that title) for ESPN's outdoors Web site, wrote exactly those words without checking to see if they had any basis in fact. He went on to opine that the alleged ban had the fingerprints of (gasp!) environmental groups all over it. The Drudge Report, that bastion of misinformation, picked up Montgomery's report and the rumor went viral.

The Obama administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration quickly acted to shoot the rumor down, but you can bet they were only partially successful because so many people out there, mostly on the right-wing side of Nutso Street, want to believe it.

What is true is that the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued some draft reports on planning for a new policy on oceans. One element of that plan would designate areas of the sea for various uses. A ban on fishing was not even hinted at.

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