Month: June 2016

BREXITED!!!

Just before the “Brexit” referendum in which the United Kingdom voted on whether to leave the European Union, the “Remain” (in the EU) side was predicted to eke out a narrow victory, such that even supporters of “Leave” were starting to concede defeat on the day of the vote. As it turned out, Leave won by a percentage of 52 to 48. When I heard about this on Thursday, I couldn’t help but think of the Monty Python “Election Night” sketch where the Sensible Party candidate lost a Parliament seat to Silly Party candidate Jethro Walrus-titty, and the network anchor asked for the opinion of the poll analyst, and the analyst said, “Well, this is largely as I predicted, except that the Silly Party won.”

The results of the Brexit vote were such that they not only offended a lot of people who were betting on the other result, they supposedly offended a lot of the people who voted for Leave. In fact in the few days since the vote there have been various news stories showing a spike in British Google searches on questions like “what is the EU?”, and requests for a second referendum on the grounds that voters didn’t know what they were getting into.

Eh, wot?

The EU referendum came on the heels of two other important votes in the nation. In September 2014, Scotland held its own vote on whether to begin separation from the United Kingdom, one reason being that there is much greater support for the European Union project within Scotland than there is in England. Thus even though the independence vote lost (by a 55-45 percent margin), there has since been an implied threat that if the anti-EU movement did stage a “Brexit” that this would result in a second independence vote.  And last year, Britain had scheduled a parliamentary election in which Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron had pledged to allow a referendum on EU membership if his party won a majority,  a referendum which was called for because of growing unease within Britain towards the continental institution. So it’s not as though none of these issues had been outside public debate.

In reaction to the results, most Remain supporters, especially on the Left, have chalked up the results to ugly nativist racism in the UK population. Analysis reveals it isn’t that simple. The UK has already accepted non-white immigrants from India, Trinidad and other Commonwealth nations for generations since World War II, before the EU was integrated. They are a part of the culture now. Indian food is now more popular than native British food. (If only because native British food is stuff like spotted dick and haggis.) It is however true that EU rules oblige Britain to take in a certain number of immigrants from other EU countries (there were 2.3 million foreign-born in the UK in 1993, when Britain joined the EU, and there are 8.2 million immigrants as of 2014). This led to an impression that workers who were white Europeans, but from economically depressed, low-wage areas like Poland, would compete with natives for jobs and thus lower wages. This is because of demographics that are not being acknowledged.

The current leader of Britain’s leftist Labour party is Jeremy Corbyn, an old-school socialist who is against capitalism in general and the “neo-liberal” free trade policies represented by the EU in particular. In the 1970s, he had opposed the initial negotiations to enter the EU. He has since come out in favor of remaining in the organization as long as the EU and the Cameron government did not “dilute” workers’ rights, although during and especially after the vote campaign he has been criticized for a supposedly lukewarm support for the Remain position. That may be because, as it turns out, 37% of Labour voters went for the Leave side of the initiative.  Thus the Left has to face at least one of two possibilities: Either not everyone who voted for Brexit is a right-wing, racist, crabby old meanie, or being a Labour voter is not mutually exclusive with being a racist, crabby old meanie.

Conservatives and other critics have pointed out that the actual maintenance of the European Union is through the European Commission, whose leaders are not elected by Britons or anyone else. As with most transnational agreements, European Union rules override those of national governments, and are determined within its structure and not those of the governments. Thus even apologists who say that the system can be reformed from within cannot refer to meaningful ways of doing so. Moreover the whole premise of the European Union is putting disparate economies on the same currency and structure regardless of what is good for the local economy. In the case of Greece in the last few years, it has no power to set its own currency policy because it is in the eurozone, and what economists say would be a better policy for depressed Greece (printing more money) is not a good policy for Germany (because the German economy is already strong) and Germany as the overall stronger country and more important factor in the world economy has more say. Mind you, I much prefer a prosperous and liberal Germany that is dominating Europe economically to a hungry, authoritarian Germany that is getting into wars every twenty years, but let’s not act like the current system doesn’t have flaws.

It’s much like the current debate in America and elsewhere over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which raises similar questions over how much say we will have over our own economic policy, something that offends both the Right for sovereignty reasons and the Left because of its favoritism to the corporate order. Well, the European Union is a good case of what a TPP would look like after more than a decade of integration, and even Britain, which deliberately did not integrate into the eurozone, can see that the more involved it is in the structure, the more painful it will be to get out, even if the drawbacks are (allegedly) outweighing the advantages. But that may mean that Continental countries that are even more integrated may feel more impetus towards their own exit movements, not less.

Pushing the idea that people voted for the Brexit referendum without knowing what they were getting into is not just a way for Conventional Wisdom to save face for being wrong about people’s opinion, it also sells the overall philosophy of such people: We’re too stupid and naive to make our own decisions. Which might be the case. It’s been pointed out that a clear majority of Britain’s younger population, including those who were more affected by the economic downturn than older workers, supported remaining in the EU. Yet, the higher the median age of a district, the more likely it was to go Leave.   So we could be dealing with the equivalent of Sanders Democrats.

Given the problems with the EU, voting to Leave was probably the right choice in the long run. But it creates many, MANY problems in the short run, some of which, like the renewed prospect of Scottish independence, were known well in advance. There were enough consequences that it might have persuaded me to vote Remain, were I in Britain. The fact that the vote was both a close and clear margin for the other position ought to be taken as a loud vote of no confidence not only in the Cameron government but the presumptions of the European Union.

It also ought to serve as a warning to those in America who think they know what “the people” want and what’s best for them.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the Stupid Economy

In the wake of his mishandling of public relations after the Orlando massacre, presidential candidate Donald Trump has finally started to slump in the polls, although he was still only 6 points behind Hillary Clinton.  One reason Clinton isn’t pulling further away is because of her own negatives (which I’ve already discussed). However the reason Trump retains such polling as he does is the same reason the Republicans can’t just get rid of him: He represents a certain voter base that seems as resistant to empirical evidence as the Inquisitors who tried Galileo. “Trump will never get Mexico to pay for a wall.” “Yes he will.” “The Wall didn’t work for East Germany.” “Yes it will.” “We can’t balance the budget by defaulting on our debt.” “I don’t care.”

“Two plus two makes four.” “I don’t care.” “Gravity does not make things fall up.” “I don’t care.” “The sun does not rise in the west.” “Sez you, commie.”

When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”

According to the government figures for April 2016, the US economy added fewer jobs than expected as the job market approached “full employment” even as the GDP figures showed that the economy grew by only 0.5 percent, its lowest rate in two years. What isn’t being mentioned in the low unemployment is figure is part of why the economy is still so sluggish: the near-employment figure doesn’t count those formerly employed people who have just flat out stopped looking for work.  According to a recent survey cited in a CNBC article, overall 43 percent of the jobless told pollsters that they had given up looking for work. “There was one optimistic sign in the survey” according to the article: 22 percent of those who reported being unemployed was because they quit their last job, up from a score of 15 percent in 2015, which supposedly is “a trend economists generally equate with a more mobile labor force.” But then the same survey said that more than half of those polled had not had a job interview since 2014, which may indicate that anybody who quits a job in this economy must hate it that much.

Of course the reason things have been stuck where they are is that businesses refuse to raise real wages, citing “the economy” and weak demand, blanking out the fact that demand is weak because no one has any disposable income.

The reason Walmart is such a great business model for this economy is due to a similar kind of circular logic: Walmart keeps their wages low, in order to keep their prices low, so that the kind of people who work at shitty jobs like Walmart HAVE to shop at Walmart cause that’s the only place they can afford to buy stuff.

Generally, I describe myself as right-wing and capitalist as opposed to left-wing and socialist, because I think the Right has a better grasp of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Which isn’t to say they don’t have their blind spots.

For instance, conservatives and libertarians mostly think that we shouldn’t make the welfare system too “cushy” because that will de-incentivize work since at some level you could get a better standard of living without working. But that policy has two issues: One, given the “Puritan work ethic” of this country, it’s very unlikely that we ever will have a comprehensive welfare state on the level of an EU country, at least not with our current political class. And two, given that fact, the gradual desertion of the workforce is not so much because the benefits of welfare are so great, but because the benefits of work are so meager. Put another way, if you’re going to be just scraping by whether you have a job or not, you might as well be just scraping by with plenty of free time on the government dole as opposed to just scraping by while busting your ass over 40 hours a week.

For my part, one of my last jobs was working in a call center for ten dollars an hour, doing a outsourcer campaign in support of a major insurer that offered Medicare Advantage policies, and I was one of the people who took calls from customers and pharmacies investigating why a drug claim wasn’t paid, or whether the policy was in effect, or some such. And at least once a day, sometimes once an hour, I’d have to tell some senior citizen that their claim didn’t run through because (rarely) the policy wasn’t even in effect due to a mistake on someone’s end, or more commonly because they were still in the deductible, or they were in the “donut hole”, or whatever, and that’s why the prescription that cost $30 last month cost almost $300 this month. And I’d have to hear them wailing and panicking, going, “How do you expect me to pay for this? Ooh, just you WAIT til you get to be my age! You don’t know what it’s LIKE to live on a fixed income! I have 800 dollars a month, to cover food, and rent, and utilities, and now you’re telling me I have to pay 300 of that every month for the rest of the year, just to get the medicine that I need to LIVE? Where am I supposed to FIND all this money???”

And I would have to listen to this, and I would think to myself, “Lady, I am half your age, with a full-time job, and I have the exact same problems.”

 

 

Sigh

I got up Sunday morning and checked my phone and the first thing I saw on Facebook was “X and Y friend were marked safe during The Shooting in Orlando, Florida.” And I went, “Oh, fuck.”
There has already been a lot of bloviating on this matter, and I’m not sure what difference this post is going to make, but here goes. I am going to make a wild-ass prediction here:
THERE WILL BE NO ANTI-GUN LEGISLATION PASSED DUE TO THIS MASS SHOOTING.
If it wasn’t going to be passed after Sandy Hook, it will NOT be passed. Obstructionism has gotten WORSE since then. We can’t even fill a Supreme Court vacancy. This government is of such a nature that we probably couldn’t pass such legislation even if the Democrats regained a majority in Congress.
But if banning AR-15s arguably violates the Second Amendment, banning Muslims (as Donald Trump wants to do) definitely violates the First Amendment. And half the conservatives who accuse liberals of “playing politics with this tragedy” are at the same time pointing out that the shooter was an ISIS-affiliated Muslim.
And if we can’t pretend that access to semi-automatic firearms doesn’t allow for mass shooting, we also can’t pretend that religion isn’t a motive. If we are willing to say that Eric Rudolph attacked the Atlanta Olympics because his religious bent made him think he had to attack abortion and the “homosexual agenda”, we ought to be able to say so in this case.  Omar Mateen‘s father said that religion wasn’t a factor in the case, but did say that his son was angry at seeing two men kissing in Miami recently and that that could have been “a factor.”
How many atheists would get that worked up over two men kissing, and how many of those would feel the need to get illicit arms to strike a blow for Objectivism or dialectical materialism?
One has to feel for the family members in such a situation, as with the case of the Stanford rapist, who feel the need to point out that they didn’t raise their kids to be monsters. No one is blaming them. They’re not at fault unless they DID raise their kids in cages and train them like combat pit bulls. That not being the case, one has to assume that an adult is responsible for his actions. Religion in itself did not make Mateen kill gays. But he did make the choice to follow a viewpoint that justified hatred.
Years ago, I was at a party and somebody brought up the topic, “what causes more wars, religion or greed?” My friend Don said, “greed causes more wars than religion.” My friend Tony said, “No, religion causes more wars than greed.” I stepped in and said, “I agree with Tony. Religion causes more wars than greed, because on issues of greed, people are willing to negotiate.”
This is yet another reason why the “punching down” argument – that prejudice or violence from a minority is not just understandable, but justifiable, based on power imbalance – is garbage, because it avoids addressing the issue, and it doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t matter whether the homophobe who kills you is a Christian or Muslim, you’re still dead.  In the same way, banning guns wouldn’t stop a terrorist from building pipe bombs (like Rudolph did and the Tsarnaev brothers did) and those have always been illegal for civilians.
I just see everybody using the issue to score political points, and I’m fucking sick of it, because it’s not going to do any good. It might be better to examine the circumstances of a case to see exactly what the contributing factors are so law enforcement has a better chance of forestalling such violence with the tools they have, rather than us

getting worked up and writing stupid laws (like The PATRIOT Act) that make our situation worse. But maybe that’s too much to ask.

The Ineffable Wrongness of Hillary Clinton

Not even after voting starts June 7th, the press is saying that Hillary Clinton  (after votes in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) has achieved a delegate majority for the Democratic presidential nomination (with party ‘superdelegates’). Nevertheless challenger Bernie Sanders still says he is going to take the fight to the convention. Meanwhile all of Donald Trump’s opponents for the Republican nomination have bowed out, giving the appearance of a united party and a lead in some polls before the conventions, as the “inevitable” Clinton is still finding it hard to close the deal in her own ranks.

This was of course also an issue for Clinton in her 2008 primary race against other candidates including the eventual winner, Barack Obama. Then it was assessed as a factor of “likeability.” But with only Sanders as a serious challenger in her party and Trump not only lacking Clinton’s experience but being that much more actively repulsive, Hillary is not being embraced. She is in fact considered almost as untrustworthy as Donald Trump. Historically, Trump’s unfavorable numbers in polls are higher than those of any other presidential candidate since polls were taken. That’s the good news for Clinton. The bad news is that Trump is the only one who exceeds her historical unfavorables.

Is it because she’s a woman? How did she get elected to the Senate then? How do Elizabeth Warren, Diane Feinstein or other women get elected? Is it because of the Republican Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy ™? Well, riddle me this: In the almost eight years since Barack Obama became President, the Republicans have not repealed the Affordable Care Act. They have not banned abortion. They have actually managed to create more sympathy for gay and trans rights than existed eight years ago. How is it that making Clinton seem untrustworthy is the ONLY thing they’ve managed to do right? Unless they’re not the ones who made her seem untrustworthy.

It is true that Clinton’s June 2nd speech showed some welcome signs of life, in that she ridiculed her presumptive Republican opponent Donald Trump simply by reading his actual quotes and daring her audience to take them seriously. But up until that point she was not really responding publicly to her presumptive general election opponent, even to the degree that Sanders was. And again, even though Trump is that much more deliberately offensive, Clinton still doesn’t seem “likeable.” On the whole she doesn’t respond quickly to criticism. Actually, she maneuvers as well as an oil tanker.  The real issue with this is that she has become a magnet for negative publicity which is exacerbated by a defensive attitude.

For instance, the matter of her “damn emails.” While Clinton and her defenders say her use of a private email server was not unprecedented for the office, Madeline Albright and Condolezza Rice did not use email at all. Secretary of State Colin Powell did use a personal email account, he did not have it on a private server. Moreover, Albright, Powell and Rice, along with current SoS John Kerry cooperated with the Inspector General investigation and the Clinton staff did not.

It has been postulated by some that Clinton’s obsession with secrecy is because of being burned by the press and on the right wing by these issues and others such as the Whitewater real estate investigation, but it begs the question of whether she would have gotten in Dutch with the press (if not partisan Republicans) if she hadn’t been so secretive in the first place.

In any case, objections to the Clintons from the Right are of decades’ vintage, and there has been plenty of time to go over them, and most people who aren’t conservative dittoheads have dismissed them. But these days the most strenuous objections to Hillary Clinton are from the Left. The last time she ran in 2008, most Democrats had no objection to Mr. And Mrs. Clinton; they thought Bill was a great President and Hillary was a great Senator. They just thought Senator Obama had more to offer as a presidential candidate. But this year people are not objecting to Benghazi, or Vince Foster. The attacks on Hillary Clinton are coming from leftists offering critique of the last eight years of economic policy in comparison to the Clinton’s Administration’s push of NAFTA and its results on the American and international economies. In short, they’re a good deal more relevant to the average person than what the National Enquirer or Sean Hannity thinks of Hillary Clinton or her husband. And again, Clinton’s sense of optics is flawed: She is no more willing to reveal what she said in her speeches to Goldman Sachs than Trump is willing to reveal his full tax returns. (And if liberals say no one can prove a quid pro quo in her case, why do they support campaign-finance laws to begin with?)

It’s in this context that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became Clinton’s primary challenger after Clinton’s political machine pushed away almost all other competition. He was able to hold on because of word-of-mouth and an Internet presence that allowed him to fund his campaign with many small-scale contributions, thus negating the need for the big-money sources that Clinton’s prospective opponents (and most Republicans) would have otherwise relied on – and incidentally undermining Sanders’ own thesis that you can’t get anything done in politics because of billionaire contributors. In any case, Sanders didn’t lose because of the “billionaire class.” He didn’t even lose because the system is rigged. It IS, but that’s not why he lost. Hillary Clinton was already on track to get the nomination with a majority of delegates not counting superdelegates, because she’d won more states, and by enough of a proportional margin, than Bernie did. And that’s because however compelling the leftist argument is in this economy, Sanders IS a socialist, and thus a materialist, and even on the Left, public concerns are not entirely economic. Hillary Clinton managed to regain her support in the black community and the South from 2008, and even if Sanders had been better able to address black concerns, he hadn’t done the legwork over years that the Clintons have in each of the state Democratic parties. And frankly, that’s because Sanders wasn’t a Democrat until this election, because like Trump, he rationalized that taking over a major party for a presidential race would make things a lot easier than running for president without one.

Which is why the Democratic Party’s engineering of the Nevada state convention on May 14 was both remarkable and unnecessary.

Among other things, they asked to hold a voice vote to approve changes in the rules without much of the audience having a hardcopy to review the rules. (I was at the Clark County convention the previous month where the Democrats tried the same thing, claiming that they didn’t print enough booklets for everyone as part of a ‘green’ initiative to save paper). Voice votes were held and then approved by the chairwoman on behalf of Clinton’s team despite the results by volume being rather dubious. Eventually after over ten hours of such manipulation, the chairwoman summarily ruled Clinton as the winner and left behind a screen of hotel security.  The thing is, even if Sanders supporters had won Nevada for their candidate, it would have been a net difference of four delegates (a Clinton lead of 278 delegates as opposed to 282, as of May 14).

Given that, it should not just be alarming that party officials were so obviously on one side, but that they were so determined to engineer a result when the outcome was already decided in their favor, almost as though there was a need to rub it in. That in itself doesn’t mean fixing the desired result was Clinton’s idea or Clinton’s order. But again, these shenanigans paralleled similar tactics in the Clark County Democratic Convention in the previous month, although with far less media attention, and that, on top of a lack of polling places in Arizona that Democrats were conveniently able to blame on Republican state officials, (since apparently they had no problems with the state election boards before) meant there was already a negative perception brewing that Clinton either saw no need to address or had no ability to de-escalate.

The convention is of a piece with the email issue, and the real estate issue, and everything else that liberals seem to think shouldn’t be a factor in making Clinton untrustworthy. Hillary Clinton is a control freak who needs to eliminate all outside random factors while having a dangerous tendency to make unforced errors that create more problems for her than the actions of others.

Up until fairly recently, I didn’t believe the theory that Sanders voters would get so sour-grapes that they would actually vote for Trump in November. After the Nevada convention, I’m not so sure. There’s no point in aligning with the Democratic Party if you’re a “progressive” who wants change when it’s pretty damn clear that the Clinton-centered Democratic National Committee doesn’t want progress and doesn’t want change.

On May 13, on Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill featured left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill, who said that Clinton was the candidate of “empire” and the candidate of regime change, and thus not that much of an alternative to Trump. Maher asked Scahill, “You really hate Hillary, don’t you?” Scahill basically said that wasn’t the case, but I mean, Maher was saying that like it was a bad thing. Not liking Clinton is not something you have to apologize for. You could ask me, “You really hate gonorrhea, don’t you?” And I’d say, “Well, yeah… doesn’t everybody?”

I mean yes, gonorrhea is something that you could survive and get under control, as opposed to sticking your dick in a glowing green drum of radioactive waste, which is what voting for Trump would be, but that still doesn’t mean you WANT to get gonorrhea. And if I’m being told that the healthiest option for me REQUIRES contracting gonorrhea, then you shouldn’t be surprised that so many people, especially this year, want to join a third party, because the logic of “you HAVE to vote for the lesser evil” is the downward spiral that got us to where we are now. Now as to whether a third party vote is a good idea really depends on circumstances (I intend to elaborate on this in future posts) but make no mistake: The fact that things have been allowed to get to this point means THEY WILL get worse. Next election cycle, the Democrats will try to front David Petraeus as the “sensible moderate” candidate while the Republicans nominate the Bearded Lady, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, or Sid from the Rob Zombie movies. Whatever, just as long as they’re anti-abortion.

And there’s the problem. Hillary’s best selling points are that she is a more experienced candidate who represents the sensible establishment position. But the reason Trump ate the Republican Party and Sanders almost snuck up on Hillary is because after eight years of Obama, (however much better he is in comparison to McCain and Romney) there’s no more hope and people have no more change in their pockets. Obama won because people were sick of the old way of doing things, and now they’re that much sicker. Trump is running as the opposite of the establishment mentality and Clinton is running as the representative of it. And it’s going to be that much more of a problem because of who she is. Obama at least has some ability to think outside the box. Whereas Hillary Clinton not only doesn’t think outside the box, she practically is the box.

A few days ago I participated in an online discussion elsewhere, and someone’s friend said she thought that Hillary might lose this election. I said, “I don’t think she’ll lose, but certainly not for lack of trying.”

There Are No Comments

Just to get to something before I start posting in earnest, you may notice there is not an option for posting comments.

There will not be one.

This is a deliberate decision on my part, as opposed to just not having certain features on the site cause I don’t know where all the buttons are yet.

There are no comments for several reasons. Again, one of my primary inspirations for blogging is Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Daily Dish, and he decided fairly early not to allow comment posts on the site, although he did sometimes respond to mail. At first, free speech advocate that I am, I didn’t agree with this idea, but as I’ve gotten more and more involved in social media, I have come to see the wisdom of it. And when I refer to involvement in social media, I mean Facebook. And I’ve noticed that posting something usually sets up a debate that really isn’t a debate, just two or more people reiterating their pre-decided talking points and not actually getting anywhere. The more disturbing aspect of this was when two people would get into a particularly angry argument and one of those people wasn’t ME. It was like my post had been hijacked. So in addition to losing the post, there was a lot of negative feeling associated with it. (And if you’re one of my Facebook friends, and you feel the need to ask ‘am I the person he’s talking about?’ … you probably are.)

The other issue being that as a free speech advocate, I posted on Facebook because I wanted debate. And again, I eventually saw the wisdom of changing that opinion. I frequently advocate for libertarian positions, and while some of my leftist friends will go into detailed discussions of the movement’s flaws, that at least indicates they’re taking the subject seriously. Then there’s people who invoke “Somalia!” as an example of libertarianism in action, as though some guys in Mogadishu got together with Ayn Rand and Chicago School economist books and decided to run the country, or as if “Somalia!” was a magic word that strikes you with lightning and gives you superpowers. A similar line of “argument” is when they’ll say something like “if you don’t like the government, why don’t you get John Galt to run this for you?”

(The joke being that for every reader who thought, ‘that poster obviously never read Atlas Shrugged,’ there’s at least two more thinking, ‘who is John Galt?’)

Now sometimes on Facebook I will look at the pages of certain lingerie models and former PLAYBOY models and make the mistake of enlarging the photo which causes the comments to become visible. And while I am hardly a politically correct man (for one thing, I like looking at nude and lingerie models) I really can’t understand why a woman would get involved in that business, or even non-sexual cosplay, given the knuckle-dragger comments I see on their pages. Adrienne Curry, for one, has been very outspoken about this. Generally speaking, such comments are made by men whose names and mangling of the English language indicate they live in countries where white slavery is still legal, and their posts usually involve putting the woman through maneuvers that are probably still illegal in Utah.

On the other hand, I consider the medium, and I think, “what do you expect? It’s FUCKING FACEBOOK.” It is a perfect example of casting pearls before swine. And then there’s Instagram and Twitter, which are apparently designed for people who think that Facebook is too intellectual.

To me, when you go “Somalia!” to a libertarian, you’re basically saying, “My opinion can be summarily dismissed because I’ve demonstrated that I have no clue what I’m talking about.” It is the political equivalent of going on the lingerie model’s Facebook page and posting “YOU GOT GRATE JUGS LETS MAKE FUCK”.

Don’t be that guy.

And don’t waste my time.

If you really need to express your opinion, do what I did: Research how to start a blog, and then just do it.

Having said that, I’d obviously appreciate it if this site got some traffic, and I’d be willing to correspond to somebody who is serious. I am also willing to post the most ridiculous trolls to the site for the purpose of making fun of their stupidity.

Sorta like this guy.