Clown Syndrome

Everything you need to know about Trump's appeal (such as it is) is summed up in this here article, including its main photograph. His fat-old-cracker ratio is nearly perfect; aside from that, not so much. And he's leading in five of our most useless states, most of which fall squarely into the typical red-state paradigm of low quality-of-life metrics, and aside from Florida and Texas, take more than they contribute in federal revenue.

This is a consistent dynamic, the takers who think they're makers, the stereotypical teabagger who fancies himself a rugged individualist, even though he'll be goddamned if he'll stop collecting his Social Security even after he's recouped what he put in, and he's got a brother-in-law on the public tit. These are the same fucking rubes who bought into Sarah Palin, and still hold out hope that she'll become Trump's running mate. These dipshit crackers would write in the ghost of Lester Maddox or Bull Connor if they could.

It will be fun (and hilarious!) to watch their inevitable caterwauling after their latest wampeter lets them down. There is no other possible outcome, unless every minority and everyone under forty just decides not to vote, or loses their collective fucking mind. The bottom line is, the demographics are just not there; the angry old assholes may vote 100% of the time, but there are fewer of them than they suppose. The idea that Alabama might be remotely representative of the nation as a whole would keep most of us up at night, if it weren't so ludicrous.

The Democrats oughta send Trump a thank-you card when this is all over. There is a very good chance that, as the silly season continues and solidifies, Mister Man's campaign will be the catalyzing event that either demolishes a reeling party, or in the event of an early third-party bail by Trump, allows it to jettison its nutjob base and begin a return to some version of sanity.

All In

The 2016 primaries don't even start for another five months or so, making it premature to start counting Hillary Clinton out, or even down. Way too much emphasis is placed on states like Iowa, where no one lives and whose votes align with the rest of the country mostly by statistical coincidence. And the email server scandal will probably go the way of Benghazi(!), slowing the momentum and distracting a few fence-sitters, but not much else.

The decline in Clinton's numbers lies partly due to Trump, partly to Sanders, but mostly to the fact that she's flat and uninspiring and temperamentally insincere. Her numbers will reverse and stabilize, as will Trump's, but in the context of late-summer empty speculation, it at least provides an opportunity to look both at the Democrats' bench, and how heavily the party establishment had already committed to Hillary's success. Notably absent from that is any sort of endorsement from the leaders of the current administration, the junior member of which had a weekend pow-wow with Elizabeth Warren.

Weirdness is afoot for the time being, but again, all that will shake out in the months to come. But what bodes for the party in the years to come? As the GOP becomes more and more unhinged and marginalized, a truly enterprising political party might see this as an opportunity to decouple from the ratchet-pawl pelf-grab the system has become.

Knowing the obscene amounts of money spent on this circus is one thing, knowing where it goes is another. Advertising through the same media that needs a horse race to keep the rates high is the primary use of the money; the industry of peckerhead pollsters and consultants is another. These folks get paid regardless of the outcome. In the meantime, more profit is generated by keeping it close, by inflating buffoons and downplaying contenders.

Hillary has an ace-in-the-hole that no other candidate from either party has -- Bill Clinton, easily the most charismatic politician since JFK, whose stature inexplicably wasn't even diminished by his signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall. The man is politically bulletproof, and can still convince people like the best televangelists only dream of. Once the real season gets underway, Hillary doesn't need to say much of anything -- she just needs to pull the Big Dog out of whoever he's balls-deep in that week, and put him at the podium.

In a political season where "populism" and "antiestablishment" sentiments are supposedly the driving factors, you just watch how soon the tide will predictably turn right back to tedious incrementalism. I hold out hope for Sanders, but also realize that the "left" in this country is really just a bunch of yuppie suburban assholes who would sell their children's economic prospects down the river just for the false promise of selecting a couple of SCOTUS occupants who might hold the line for the right to get an abortion (which has been severely curtailed throughout the country with or without the Supreme Court). They'll turn on Sanders the very second they can find an excuse to exhume the sad bones of Ralph Nader.

Just as the movement to curtail reproductive rights cannot survive without the involvement of misguided women, neither can you end up with a "liberal" party that does very little for true economic and social justice, without the bien pensant meddling of former idealists who play just not to lose, and have lost whatever compelling vision they thought they had when they were dropping acid and blowing Jerry Garcia at Woodstock. The only thing worse than someone who sells out is someone who refuses to admit the obvious.

OK Stupid

So looks like good ol' Josh Duggar has stepped on his dick yet again, getting caught in the Ashley Madison hack not only as a denizen of that site, but apparently he has an OK Cupid account as well. Knock me over with a feather.

Unlike sanctimonious, holier-than-thou shitheads like, well, the entire Duggar family, most of us realize that humans are messy, complex, full of contradictions and complications. The difference is that most of us do not earn a cushy living trying to legislate morality for all.

Flag Hags

It's been a minute since America's Favorite Shitbird, walking ham sandwich George Zimmerman, has done something stupid, but like the sun being forced to rise in the east to watch us collectively abuse the planet one more blessed day, it was inevitable that Zimmerman and stupid would be paired up again.

Since one would assume that Zimmerman is virtually unemployable at this point -- I mean, it's not like any of his mouth-breathing supporters have stepped up to, you know, offer him a fucking job -- it makes sense that he'd try something like this. Joining up with some other Florida doofus, this one a gun shop owner who has bravely (and illegally) declared his bidness a moooooslim-free zone, seems almost made-to-order.

When it comes to judging art, I am pretty much aligned (believe it or not) with Rush Limbaugh, of all people. Limbaugh, in a Playboy interview many years ago, once said (more or less verbatim):  "Look. If I can do it, it's not art. Okay?" As someone whose artistic output is strictly limited to musical instruments, and only then after thousands of hours of hard work and practice, I am not fond of the notion that just because someone puts a frame around a turd, that it suddenly won't stink.

And near as I can tell, Zimmerman's magnum excrementum looks like he spent about an hour slapping paint on a slab of OSB with a used Ace Hardware pig-bristle brush. He might as well have been painting a chicken coop. The stenciled letters are a nice touch, though his free-hand needs some work. I mean, there are guys in every small town across this great land of ours who do shit like this with much better lettering, for about a hundred-fifty bucks a sign. This fucking maroon thinks he's going to split high-five/low-six G's with Maynard for this thing. And knowing this country, he's got even odds on that. Nothing surprises me anymore.

But Zimmerman's yard-sale sigil is useful in plumbing the continued teleology of southern apologists and unrepentant rednecks. Why does Zimmerman choose that particular symbol, what heuristic purpose does it serve? Or, working in reverse, what does the traitor loser battle flag have to do with the pudgy killer who painted it, or the islamophobic business owner the painter has allied himself with? The answer there, of course, is absolutely nothing, except that it will piss off Those People. Which naturally answers the first question as well, its heuristic purpose in the first place.

This has been one of those summers where random internets keyboard warriors have bravely declaimed the "offense" that others have taken against their traitor loser flag. This is purely anecdotal, but everything I've seen has indicated the opposite:  countless Facebook memes whinging about how a good ol' boy jest cain't have his flag anymores without someone complainin' 'bout it, and more variations on that theme than anyone in their right mind would care to contemplate.

Maybe the best part about all of this is just how hilarious the history of the traitors' various flags really is. They kept having to change the design, first because the original flag was too close to that of the nation they were betraying, and then because there was so much white it looked like a surrender flag. I think this bespeaks the utter ineptitude around which the entire concept of this vile slave-holding traitor despotism took hold.

The biggest problem is that the south never had a true reckoning, not one that meant anything. Sure, Sherman went scorched-earth en route to Atlanta, but that was about it. The southern states spent the subsequent 100 years persecuting the people they had enslaved, kidnapped, raped, tortured, murdered, and plundered for the previous 200 years. They were unrepentant of all crimes in both eras. They have never apologized because they are not sorry.

Once again, let's simplify the entire dynamic for the cousin-fuckers out there: 

• Nobody cares about you flying your confederate flag on your truck or your house or your wall. Nobody is offended by it, they just assume that it's a signifier to like-minded halfwits, that meth and/or pit bulls can be found within fifty feet of the bespangled bumwipe.
• The Dukes of Hazzard -- a silly teevee show that no one in their right mind had even thought about in at least thirty years -- was taken off of TV Land ten days after its syndication run began, not because of some imaginary outcry by bien pensant libruls, but because Warner Brothers, which owns the rights to the show, had suspended sales of all of its confederate flag merch in the wake of the Charleston shootings. As with the Dork Density mishegas, this was not political correctness, this was pure business.
• The most outspoken supporters of your piece-of-shit flag are the worst fucking examples of humanity this country has to offer. They are straight from central casting for "someone who looks like they just got done fucking a farm animal". You are fighting a losing battle -- worse yet, for no goddamned reason at all. The biggest adherents to your lost cause are also the biggest arguments against it.

Frankly, I don't put too much stock in delving into the "mindset" of these cretins, anymore than I get the idea of trying to "understand" child rapists or animal torturers. It's a waste of time, as far as I'm concerned. But some folks of a more scientific bent like to tilt at such windmills, as if it will help in the fields of psychology or penology or what-have-you.

Once again, I'll take the liberty of repeating one of my many mantras, as they are central to understanding people and life, and we should repeat them often, to remind us of what should be obvious:  It is a waste of time trying to deal rationally with irrational people. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't try to figure out what their deal is, if only to deal predictively with their behavior, if nothing else.

But converting them, talking sense into them, showing them the light -- it ain't gonna happen. They find out on their own, when life breaks one too many off in their ass, or they never figure it out at all, dying angry and embittered at their imaginary demons. These traitor-loser-flag folks have been voting against themselves for going on three generations now. Your facts mean nothing to them.

Moral Majority

Another day, another hypocritical "values" asshole with his dick caught in some strange:

Federal and state officials are calling for a Michigan lawmaker to resign after it emerged on Friday that he used his taxpayer-funded office to launch a smear campaign against himself, claiming that he had been caught having sex with a male prostitute.

In audio recordings obtained by the Detroit News, Representative Todd Courser was heard asking a now-fired aide to email Republican activists with the false report, in an attempt to distract from an alleged affair with another social conservative, state Representative Cindy Gamrat.

....

Neither Courser, a married father of four, nor Gamrat, a married mother of three, directly confirmed or denied having a sexual relationship during the recorded conversations. But they also didn’t dispute Graham’s characterization of their relationship as an extramarital affair, the newspaper reported.

Courser said the email he wanted Graham to send would “inoculate the herd” – an apparent reference to his and Gamrat’s supporters.

I'm not sure why he would go to so much trouble to cover up his misbehavior. It's not like these "values voters" morons actually mean what they say. How do you think that shithead Scott DesJarlais keeps getting re-elected?

US Representative Candice Miller issued a statement on Friday, calling for his immediate resignation. “This behavior is a slap in the face, especially from someone who presents himself as a moralist.”

Liberal advocacy organizations also jumped into the fray, with one saying the pair violated their oath of office. And the whirlwind of a story that involves two social conservatives who consistently cite their religious beliefs – Courser has a penchant for penning verbose manifestos on state issues, and occasionally signs off with “In Christ Alone” – didn’t emerge without a joke from across the aisle.

State senator David Knezek, a Democrat, tweeted: “On the phone since 3am trying to find out which of my gay friends ruined these two traditional marriages. No leads.”

Courser and Gamrat are known for their strenuous opposition to same-sex marriage. In June, Courser introduced a bill to prohibit municipal officials from officiating marriages. Writing on the bill, he said: “Our elected officials could be forced to perform same sex marriages” if the US supreme court overturned Michigan’s ban.

Yup, same as it ever was.

Blood Libel

You knew the Clownstick implosion was inevitable, but this quickly? Maybe the most fun part of it will be watching his maroon "fans" piss and moan at the unfair treatment their wampeter got from what has basically been his home team.

This is as good an opportunity as ever to bring up again just how weird Trump is, in this observer's humble opinion anyway. I've said this before:  if I'm even a tenth as wealthy as Trump claims to be, if I have walking-away money for the next several generations, I'm fucking walking away. I am not spending my time on Twitter wars and virtual slapfights; I'm not even paying a flunky for that bullshit. I'm on my fucking 300-foot yacht wherever the weather is nicest, living on endless surf-and-turf and Ketel One and Russian supermodel poontang. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Beyond all the bluster and bullshit and dick-waving self-aggrandizement this asshole has been known for, beyond the cult of dipshits who think he can "fix" everything, this is the most unsettling thing about Trump. There's something to be said about someone who doesn't take any shit from anyone; many's the time we all wish Obama had had a little "fuck you" in his bones to throw back at McConnell and Boehner and the rest of them.

But that seems to be Clownstick's default setting. This is the guy that's going to be negotiating trade deals and arms treaties, this thin-skinned douchebag, this cartoon character blow-dried mook? He can't take a "tough question" at a dog-and-pony debate, but he's going to go balls-deep with Putin and the Chinese and the mullahs? Really?

So far, the guy has proven to be Palin with a penis and a worse hair weave. Everyone else is a loser, crude assertions are pulled directly out of the alimentary canal and waved around as empirical facts, disagreements and cheap shots are reacted to as if they were the gravest of insults. No true solutions are offered for anything, just magic-wand if-I-were-king bafflegab. He'll keep the Mexicans out by building a wall and making them pay for it. He would have resolved the Iran nuclear crisis by doubling or tripling sanctions. You bang your wife doggy style, he'd do her reverse cowgirl and make her forget all about you. And so forth.

I don't know what's scarier -- the fact that Trump's followers clearly swallow this horseshit unquestioningly, or that Trump might seriously believe it himself. He understands his audience, knows that his "message" appears to old, bewildered shitheads who don't have the goddamned decency to go find an ice floe to push themselves off onto already. The idea that he can't be bought because he's already wealthy doesn't quite stick either, because as Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina found out the hard way here in Cali, only a moron spends their own money running for office. So Clownstick has to raise money just like anyone else, once push comes to shove.

I think we need to start looking at the long game here, and what ramifications it has for the Republican Party, which may implode regardless of whether Trump goes third-party or stays in the GOP fray. The party is increasingly driven by its most vocal, loose-cannon extra-chromosome base, people who do not do nuance or big-picture thinking. The world and the nation keep moving on, have left these dopey, ancient crackers behind, and they just can't stand it.

So the question becomes which blustery goofball becomes their next rock star. They get worse and worse with each iteration, from Fredo Arbusto to Caribou Barbie to Ted Cruz to Fuckface Von Clownstick. Sooner or later they're going to strike oil on one of these kampfers, someone with the same message, but smoother, subtler, bluster-free and truly charismatic.

Watching future Cali governor Gavin Newsom last night on Bill Maher's show, sandwiched between Republican consultants Steve Schmidt and Mary Matalin, I was struck at how effortlessly charismatic the guy is. He's good-looking and well-spoken, but what sets Newsom apart is how carefully he chooses his words, and how deftly he co-opts moderate Republican talking points. He understands intrinsically that politics is niched too much to be won by doubling down on your base appeal. You have to get the fence-sitters to take a look at you, and you do that by not saying or doing stupid things that spook the horses. It will be a few more election cycles, probably 2024 or 2028 (or 2020 if Clinton somehow loses next year), but I would be very surprised if Newsom doesn't take a shot at the big ring at some point.

Sooner or later the Goopers will figure that out; indeed, they may have that very person waiting in the wings in Marco Rubio. Out of all the clown car occupants at the big kids' table Thursday night, only Rubio and maybe John Kasich came off as anything resembling reasonable. Neither of them would make a good president, but both understand the value of appearing inclusive and comparatively moderate, and not stomping every hot-button issue into the floor.

And while Hillary Clinton is no doubt dancing in her pantsuit watching this slow-motion clusterfuck, nothing is settled. She has as many negatives as positives; she turns off as many people as she appeals to. Probably ninety percent of the people who will vote for her will do so reluctantly, waiting and wishing for someone better, someone less oleaginous and transparently insincere. Why on earth would I want to vote for someone who willingly hangs out with the likes of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, did someone seriously tell her this would be a selling point to anyone? (Yes, I get it, they attended a fundraiser and snapped a selfie; the larger point remains valid.)

The Republicans will beat mercilessly on Clinton's negatives, real and fictitious, and no doubt create some new ones in the process. It is going to be ugly, and probably closer than people might assume, whether or not Clownstick blows up the narrative by going, um, rogue. If Rubio can polish his own narrative a bit, moderate his impulses, reach beyond the doddering base that can't seem to decide on which asshole of the week they want to roll with, he could make things even weirder than they already are. Getcha popcorn.

Spy Kids

Like you need to be told, but don't be fooled by the bullshit Microsoft commercial with the dopey, grinning babies. Windows 10 is just a permanent low-jack on your system, archiving your porn searches, keylogging your diatribes, compiling an ongoing dossier on your ass. "She'll be able to log in with her smile!" Hey, fuck you. I don't want it, and I don't need it. My computer ain't broke, and yet they're insisting on "fixing" it for me. Stop. Just stop.

They can't even explain why they're skipping from 8 to 10; my assumption is that they got balls-deep into 9 before realizing it was so botched, they had to get moving on 10 before they could even close out the 9 project. Having a project management degree, I know how these guys think. It would be against PMBOK principles to close out a failed project without a "lessons learned" end cycle.

From a technical standpoint, I'm caught in the middle:  not technically adept enough to work with Linux, nor do I want to learn; but also not a drooling moron who needs my computer to wait on me like a needy sex slave. I don't need something that catalogs my every thought and lets the inept gubmint look at it when they please. I just need something that I can keep my tons of books and music on, play games once in a while, work on my websites, use office software to keep writing books and working on various projects, and the occasional porn. Windows 7 does all that just fine. There is no need for this shit, and I resent them trying to push it with babies. What next, kittens playing?

Golem

I've never really been the "guilty pleasure" type, but I have to confess that I'm enjoying this Clownstick thing more and more by the day. Whether he intends it or not, Trump and his candidacy have revealed more about our sclerotic joke of a political system in general, and the Republican party in particular, than perhaps even Trump himself would want.

This is the natural, entirely foreseeable result of Citizens United, of the teatards' jabbering incoherence and raving toxicity being empowered and enabled. Since they are for nothing, only against things, and don't know or care how things actually work, the teatards act as an attacking swarm of fire ants, mindlessly converging on a target until they're bored with it, moving on to the next one. Johnny Walnuts had their reluctant fealty when he had the northern sorceress at his side, and hardly seven years later, he might as well be Jerry Brown or Jimmy Carter as far as they're concerned. Boehner and McConnell are next.

Clownstick understands how this game is played, understands his audience, knows that you never apologize and never admit wrongdoing. Even ol' Billy Jeff, likely to be your future first First Gentleman come November next year, once famously opined that 'murcans would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right. Trump has honed this knowledge to a science, perfected the technique, finessing his bluster and turning his greatest weakness -- an almost bizarrely thin skin, a complete inability to take even a mild joke at his expense -- into a "take no shit" demeanor that jibes perfectly with how his maroon followers see themselves, at least when their parole officers aren't around.

Pack all of your ongoing "cultural" signifiers into a hobo's bindle, and to an item they perfectly align with these miscreants' view of everything -- the world, the country, themselves. They seriously do not get that they are in the minority on these issues, that most people know that the traitor loser flag was a direct product of one of the most vile institutions known to humankind, and the only reason it was brought back in 1961 was to tell civil rights activists to fuck off. That most people understand that Benghazi!!1!one!! is a crock of shit kept alive by liars and intellectual perverts. That the Republican party has become a haven for crackpots and sociopaths, bankrolled by a handful of evil old men who literally do not understand money the way you or I or almost anyone else understands money.

The Iran nuclear "deal" is just the newest sack of steaming horseshit for them to sift through and smear on the walls. It is a perfect example of how their collective mindset is about fifty years out of date. The Cold War mindset is no longer operational, no matter how much Putin "rears his head" and annexes pieces of Ukraine. Iran is not going to blithely accept the conditions of a treaty signed by the hated shah 45 years ago, while its next-door neighbors build their arsenals.

Trump's reaction to the deal was just priceless, though. He said something to the effect that he would have "doubled" or "tripled" sanctions on the Iranians, presumably until they said  "uncle". That's all well and good, but it rings with the mindless bluster of someone who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. For one, sanctions were internationally imposed, and were on the verge of expiring and collapsing, with no international support for renewal. European countries trade quite freely with Iran, and as the EU continues to unravel, the sanctions are hurting their bottom line. It's just business, and even a thrice-bankrupted casino huckster like Clownstick should understand that. Without international support for sanctions, you've got another Cuba on your hands, something the rest of the world looks for decades on as a monumental waste of time.

Secondly, despite how the deal is being portrayed as a handshake between John Kerry and the mullahs, this is a multilateral deal -- Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany are also signatories to this. It's an acknowledgement of reality, that the world is multipolar rather than unipolar or bipolar (heh) and we can't just piss on any and every hydrant we feel like anymore. Trump reinforces the notion, which should have been dispelled over the last decade in the sands of Sykes-Picot's hundredth anniversary, that we call all shots. It ain't like that anymore, hoss, and no amount of John Wayne posturing will change that.

That too is the fault of the elites:  globalization really means interdependence, which means that if we fuck around too much and China decides to stop buying our T-bills as a hedge for their own economic issues, we're fucked. They're fucked too, of course, but they dropped some 20 million souls during the Great Revolution, just from famine and hardship. They're not afraid to take a hit, where we talk a big game about sacrifice, but reserve the actual sacrifice for the 1% who actually participate in the warrior caste. There are no Clownsticks in the fucking army, nor will there ever be. This is all a money game, and there is no money to be had in serving, only in contracting.

While the Koch Brothers and Shelly Adelson and Foster Friess and Donald Trump use money to keep score and measure their shriveled, lifeless cocks, the rest of the world scrambles for crumbs just to stay afloat, to pay the mortgage, to buy food and medical care and birthday presents for the kids, to keep the student loan sharks at bay one more month, to purchase the fading glimmer of hope that maybe things will work out. It would be bad enough if these obscenely wealthy, do-nothing cocksuckers just hoarded their pelf and hid from the world; far worse that they instead choose to use said pelf to turn what's left of the working class on itself, against each other.

I don't feel a bit sorry for the working-class dogs who've been tricked mercilessly into voting against their own rational self-interest. I agree with them that the beauty of freedom and capitalism is that we are free to choose a great many things. And in a world where information is free and over-abundant, they choose to run after the bright shiny object, the fools' gold of reality teevee hucksters and comic-book movie franchises. They asked for all this; they still want it. Mencken was right that they deserve to get it good and hard. Try to insulate yourselves from the consequences as best you can. As I've been saying for some time now, I hear Costa Rica is nice.

Wondering Where the Lions Are

While the spontaneous outrage over the senseless murder of a magnificent, endangered animal is heartening, it's not enough to even scratch the surface. Some 600 lions (out of about 30,000 total, so 2%)are killed by hunters every year; some two-thirds of those hunters are American. Finally the US Fish and Wildlife Service, after declining the opportunity last year, is looking into reclassifying lions from "threatened" to "endangered" status. This would ban the importation of "trophies" and other such totems for over-compensating douchebags with too much money and not enough penis.

Fuck Walter Palmer, right in the fucking eye socket with a rusty corkscrew. I respect hunters who stock their freezers for the winter, and work with wildlife ecosystems. There is a legitimate role for deer and duck hunters. But I have no respect for rich cocksuckers who just enjoy killing shit. So I'm sincerely joyful that, at least for the time being, Palmer's practice and life appear to be ruined. He's a liar and a poacher and a piece of shit. He spends more money than most hard-working people earn in a goddamned year for the cheap thrill of killing an increasingly scarce animal. Seems like Viagra or enlargement surgery would be more cost-effective.

It's been impressive to see how quickly the popular tide was turned against the currently pre-eminent symbol of division and hate, the confederate flag. The only thing good about that flag is that it comes in two-ply. If I wasn't such a lazy bastard I'd get a full-sized flag, make a video of myself taking a massive, steaming, soupy, vodka-and-beef-jerky dump on it, then wiping my ass with it, and driving to some "sacred" traitor loser monument and leaving it on Nathan Bedford Fucking Forrest Gump's bronzed fool head.

Fuck that flag and everything it stands for. But what it took for the tide to take a righteous turn was a tragic catalyzing event. Since that event and the righteous shitstorm, there has been some pushback, but mostly of the useless-white-noise ('scuse the pun) variety on Facebook. The only ones getting out there on the issue are the lunatic racist fringe, the knuckle-dragging shitbags that even hardcore teabaggers can't defend.

Maybe the same thing can happen here, with trophy hunting. The trophy hunters are bad enough, but they are at least technically legal, so they can be kept track of. Illegal hunters and poachers are worse, lurking in the shadows, waiting opportunistically, uncaring about the destruction they cause. Habitat encroachment is a huge problem as well, but one that could be managed, theoretically.

Most of us wonder from time to time what we might do if somehow awarded with what I would call "walking away" money, the kind of eight- or nine-figure windfall that would enable you to either be like some clichéd Powerball loser, or make a real difference. I shit you not that in such an event, I'd put some serious money toward rounding up a team of mercenaries, real Delta Force / Soldier of Fortune types, and just give them a hefty year's wages to go find every poaching gang or individual within 500 miles of a nature preserve, and skull-fuck the lot of them with Kalashnikovs.

I don't even care if they're poor villagers with families to feed; it is not the role of endangered animals to go extinct in order to support overpopulation of the human virus. That too is the fault of wealthier countries, though, since they pay dearly to either kill the animals or to harvest their parts for trophies or aphrodisiacs. Vicariously it'd be wonderful to hunt those fuckers down as well.

Realistically, I think we're at an impasse. Tigers are already nearly gone -- there are more tigers in Texas than in the rest of the world combined, and that has been the case for some time -- and elephants, lions, and rhinos are not that far behind. The fucking Chinese, who are almost solely responsible for the use of tiger parts, need to start cracking down on their gluttonous idiots, the way they control everything else in their citizens' lives.

I'd happily send my big-money Delta team to the tiger ranches as well, tune up those motherfuckers and their shitbird customers. These are people who add nothing to the world, they just take and kill and destroy. Fuck them. Let them find honest work. Seriously, is every dick broken over there or something, is there that much of a need to send everything into extinction because they can't get a fucking boner?

But China won't crack down on them, won't do anything about any of this. The tigers will be gone soon enough, followed by the other species mentioned, but there will be ever more humans, breeding, greeding, grasping, killing, fucking, sucking their way to oblivion. Most humans do not hate the earth and its wondrous creations, but those that do, that vile minority, do so with impunity, and have scaled their heedless destruction to the point of no return. We do not need an infinite supply of eaters in those already over-supplied areas, we need more of our precious wildlife resources and ecosystems. And we don't need any more assholes who self-actualize by destroying the rare and the beautiful.

The fucking meteor can't hit soon enough.

Watchmen

Because this nation never runs out of maroons, since last week's massacre at a Chattanooga recruiting station, self-styled "protectors" across the country have taken it upon themselves to sit outside military recruiting sites (which, you know, are generally located at shopping malls) in folding chairs, armed and ready to take all comers.

There's the Knight Templar with his bow and quiver of arrows (since he's not allowed to have a gun, even though he's a military veteran), the guy who accidentally discharged his assault rifle into the mall parking lot (for the second time), the three cosplayers (two of whom are supposedly disabled, one of those a former Marine, and the third (non-disabled but still goofy) one also a former Marine. The Pentagon has had to tell them to stop, because by definition, maroons don't already know they shouldn't be doing this in the first place.

To a certain extent, I actually feel bad for some of these folks; clearly, the VA is not keeping up with its end of the deal in providing decent mental health care and counseling. When a disabled vet is sitting in his Rascal in US flag onesie pajamas (swear to jebus, I didn't know such a thing existed, but of course it does) with a presumably loaded assault rifle, some things have gone wrong.

Definitely read the comments in the Wonkette article; a person claiming to be the female cosplayer (with the rather telling middle name in her handle of "WhiteKnight") tries to troll the snark, and rightly gets her ass handed to her. If the two men with her are in fact veterans, we thank them for their service, now please go home.

There are a couple of big issues here:  one obviously being that we cannot have random costumed weirdos brandishing weapons at mall patrons, regardless of their intent. But secondly, seriously? Is the Knight Templar and his armor and bow supposed to stop a whackjob with a semi-automatic? Are the reflexes on Onesie Marine -- you know, the disabled guy in the Rascal -- going to be superior to some dedicated madman on a rampage?

A central assumption in the gun culture is that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And one supposes that in the right circumstances and the right conditions, it's better than nothing. But that's really all it is. Shall these goofballs set up posts at movie theaters to prevent deranged racists from shooting up the next showing of Trainwreck? Or do we look at the statistics and numbers, and understand that that would by definition be a more dangerous proposition than having nothing at all?

These would-be militia mutants don't seem to get that an untrained fool with a gun is actually statistically worse than nothing at all. And by "training" I don't just mean weapons training, though that doesn't hurt, as far as knowing how to handle your weapon and use it properly. But the difference between a self-styled militia schmuck is that if he "trained" at all, he did so by shooting targets and maybe running an obstacle course set up in the grand wizard's backyard, maybe some calisthenics here and there.

But any good beat cop or even mall cop will tell you that the most effective, meaningful training is learning how to deal with the public, how to defuse situations before they even start, how to steer people into doing what you need them to do to maintain order, without them even thinking about it. Response is nice, but prevention is much more important -- and these people don't even mention or think about that. It interferes with their dream of some Osama type walking up, threatening the good citizens of Gotham, and getting dispatched righteously, with no collateral damage. That's how it works in the movies, anyway.

As with the bozo in Ohio accidentally firing his rifle into the asphalt, he's just goddamned lucky -- again, for the second time in a couple years -- that no one got hit or hurt. Pure luck, nothing else. A slightly different angle, a couple radians off on the ricochet, and you have a tragic event. Someone needs to pull these apparently jobless dopes aside and break it to them gently:  Look, you're in the minority, you're just louder. But here's the deal -- we don't want you "guarding" our schools, our malls, our military recruitment offices. We want you to take your fucking penis extension and go home, settle down, pull up whatever excites you on the internets, knock out a few generations of knuckle-children, and sleep it off.

We'll get by somehow, understanding that life has randomness built into it, and that in a nation of 320 million people, some of them are insane, incompetent, malicious, whatever. That car you just passed on the highway could easily have had a split-second distraction, swerved into your lane. A crazy asshole could take advantage of lax gun laws, get his weapon of choice, pack up his shit and crank out an incoherent manifesto in a hotel room, and walk into a movie theater and start sweeping.

This is not to say that because shit happens, no precautions should be put anywhere. That's ridiculous. But what is just as ridiculous is this notion that every man is a potential John Wayne, just needing the right place and opportunity to prove his heroism. I would rather take my statistically infinitesimal chances with the random psychopaths, than deal with the would-be do-gooders who are off their meds.

Devil's Advocate

So this must be one of those "assaults on religious freedumbs" we keep hearing about:

Shofars sounded amid the chanting and cheering, clapping and crying as about 100 people crowded together on a strip of sidewalk in Eastern Market today to pray and protest the Satanic Temple’s plans to unveil a Baphomet monument in Detroit later tonight.
....
A news release billed the unveiling as the largest Satanic ceremony in history. The event was ticket-only, and the location was to be given via email to ticket holders on Saturday.

Those in the crowd were not having it.
....
The bronze statute weighs one ton and stands nearly 9 feet tall. It has horns, hooves, wings and a beard. It had been planned for the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, until Oklahoma’s Supreme Court banned religious displays on Capitol grounds.

As the crowd grew, two women huddled on their hands and knees as people sang and prayed over them. One of them crawled through the crowd, tears falling in big drops to the pavement. “The blood of Jesus,” she recited, over and over.

Yeah, that'll help. Good grief.

It would be nice to know a little more about this "Satanic Temple" beyond the Baphomet statue. Where are they based? How many people are part of it? Do they have a spokesperson, do they have other plans? Answering questions such as those is admittedly a bit more challenging than transcribing the babblings and brayings of the addled faithful, but if this organization plays its cards right -- and so far they have -- they could conceivably push to get all religions back into their places of worship and the homes of their respective believers.

Which is where such things belong.

Injustice for All

So here's a nutty story about justice gone weird before finally setting somewhat right. Three questions immediately spring to mind:

1. Will the Commonwealth of Virginia now pursue false accusation charges against Chelsea Steiniger, and if not, why not?
2. Is this the standard of jurisprudence and evidentiary analysis applied to crimes with higher penalties, including the death penalty ?
3. What if Mark Weiner had been black?

This is the main problem with the American "adversarial" system of justice. Prosecutors and judges have vested interests in not revisiting their mistakes. But when you have a clear carriage of misjustice (as Deep Purple once put it) like this, where the judge and prosecutor essentially colluded to withhold exculpatory evidence, this calls for more scrutiny. Prosecutor Denise Lunsford's hinky sex life doesn't exactly help matters, but then maybe she and her partner have an open relationship. Keep swingin'!

This is not a small matter. Our justice system depends upon the officials entrusted with implementing it being above reproach. Sexual peccadilloes aside, Lunsford's conduct in handling Weiner's (giggity) case is questionable at best, and more likely willfully corrupt. She and the judge were willing to throw the man's life away; the only reason they finally walked back on the matter is because Steiniger is such a piece of shit, she got busted in February for trying to sell cocaine to two cops.

Forget that Steiniger had already told her boyfriend and her jailbird ex that she had fabricated the whole thing; forget that her accusations were completely impossible from a scientific perspective, that there is no magic teevee chemical that knock you out instantaneously, nor was there any cloth found with traces of such a chemical. The piece that got Virginia to do the right thing was the potential embarrassment this numb cow would cost them.

Well, bullshit. Lunsford and Higgins need to be removed from their positions, or at least rigorously investigated, at least as thoroughly as the Ferguson Police Department. How many other people have been railroaded by these two, with no recourse?

Given the prior complaints against Mark Weiner, it is entirely possible -- hell, likely -- that something happened. A good guess would be that Weiner propositioned Steiniger, she either declined or wanted more cash than Weiner had on him, so Weiner dropped her off at her mother's house and went to look for the next prospect. Sleazy, but nothing you throw people in prison for.

The main thing is that when you make false accusations, you should be prosecuted. Are obstruction of justice and perjury still crimes, or not? Would this potentially scare away legitimate accusations, especially with sexual offenses? Possibly. But think about if something like that happened to you or someone you cared about, that some sociopath could lob some random accusation and fuck up your life, just because they felt like it, and there were no consequences for any of that.

Mark Weiner is a free man now, after spending nearly two years in prison for something he didn't do, but in the meantime he lost his job, his family, his savings. Someone needs to be held responsible for all that, otherwise there is no point to any of this, no incentive whatsoever to stay within the bounds of law.

The justice system is a lot like the financial system -- most of the value lies in whether you believe in it or not. If people can't expect a fair shake, if they're at the mercy of lying accusers and corrupt officials, then it's really just another racket designed to drain people's lives and pocketbooks.

Fortunate Scum

The summer of the shark just gets sharkier, as noted Vietnam veteran Fuckface von Clownstick calls out our good friend Poor Ol' Straight Talk on his service:

"He is not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, OK? I hate to tell you," Trump said. "I believe perhaps he is a war hero."

Von Clownstick is already trying to walk his bluster back as only he can -- by throwing the Veterans' Administration scandals and illegal immigration into the mix:

As Trump keeps surfacing at or near the top of polls, it's interesting to consider the ramifications of that. Sure, you can chalk it up to the usual bullshit -- small sample sizes, idiot respondents, the fact the election is still well over a year away (though primary season starts earlier and earlier, doesn't it?), but that doesn't completely capture the situation.

As the GOP clown car keeps filling up, turning into a short bus (17 Dipshits and Counting -- there's your reality show!), it becomes more and more apparent that as the Republican party loses its collective mind and continues empowering the baffled and bewildered of this country, it (the party and its vocal contingent) will only get worse. They have no intent of moderating their style, substance, message, or intent. And the Citizens United decision makes that possible, makes it easier.

While completely different in substance, Trump's appeal (such as it is) is much the same as that of Bernie Sanders:  in a business where insincerity is not only routine, but presumed, the idea that someone is saying something that they actually mean is unexpected, to say the least. Hillary Clinton literally cannot get a meal at Chipotle without testing it first with a focus group. Sanders clearly means what he says, while Trump at least appears to do the same, which still puts him ahead of the focus-grouped chumps.

Look, don't get me wrong. Donald Trump is a pimp and a prevaricator, five pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag, a useless blowhard fortunate enough to be in nation that can't seem to get enough of such types. He's a fucking teevee personality who has never run for or held public office, and upholds his inability to work well with others as a selling point. He has no goddamned business running for anything. You might as well vote for the meteorologist on your local station.

Sanders is sincere in addressing the US' frightening -- and increasing -- levels of systematic inequality, which are on the verge of becoming destabilizing in the sense of maintaining a civilized society. He has no chance of becoming president, because the people who own and run the system do not want any actual change. And the moment he becomes remotely viable, the Clintonistas will kneecap him. This is not just in their playbook, it's in the table of contents. The Republicans do not have to worry about Sanders, because the Democrats will happily do the dirty work for them. After all, they have mostly the same donors and owners.

Back to Trump. As long as he continues barking nonsense, he paradoxically reduces his overall viability, while enhancing his appeal to (ugh) his base (read:  paste-eating morons and people who view their own relatives as fair game for sexual opportunity). In a rational world, even he knows that he has no real chance.

But we are no longer in a rational world, if we ever were. It's comical enough that there are nearly twenty candidates vying for the office from one party, though some (Jindal, Christie, Perry, and several others) are almost certainly running for veep or a random cabinet slot. They're just maintaining visibility. But it's truly scary to think that there are any people at all who sincerely think that Donald Trump is remotely qualified for the job of President of the United States of America.

I think there's at least an even chance that at some point, maybe right before the primaries, or after the first or second successful one, Trump gets disavowed by the GOP establishment, takes his ego and his money and his fanbase, and pulls a Ross Perot. I would encourage him in that endeavor, as it would pretty much turn out as it did in 1992 for Perot, horking just enough votes away from the already divided Goopers to keep them out of the White House for another decade. (Not that that will keep them out of their gerrymandered congressional seats, no sirree. The knuckle-draggers will be making their mischief for years to come.)

But maybe Trump gets a few lucky breaks along the way, moderates his approach, brings more people onboard his campaign Titanic. At that point it becomes a litmus test for all of the above -- conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, teabaggers, hippies, the young and the old. If you're the sort of fist-shaking codger who campaigned for George McGovern in your feckless youth, but are now content to pull up the Social Security/Medicare ladder and skull-fuck your grandchildren, then Trump's your guy, and we thank your candor in admitting it.

On the other foot, if you're a young person who claims to Really Care, and then voting day comes and you don't show up, then kindly shut the fuck up. If you live in a state that requires a photo ID to vote -- as wrong-headed as that rule may be -- and you really want to vote, then you have a good fifteen (15) months or so to find the massive cash necessary to do so, and/or to procure the "primary" and "secondary" forms of identification. Plenty of time there, folks, and if you do it, you might actually get someone in there who can undo the unfairness of all that.

But the bottom line is, the elderly and the foolish show up to vote, because by definition they have nothing else to do. Hell, I think that voting beyond the local or state level is a useless joke, and even I vote. That's probably the sole advantage of the endless campaign season -- unless you're a complete moron, you have no excuse for not knowing when it's time to vote, and a plan for making sure you do it. And if you are a complete moron, you should be staying home and watching courtroom shows anyway.

So maybe we're about to find out where we're really at as a nation. Maybe the divisions are too deep and wide after all; maybe after nearly 400 years, the concept of the post-Westphalian centralized nation-state has run its course. If there is really a majority of simpletons clamoring to vote against their own rational self-interest, then perhaps it's time to find ways to disentangle your interests from theirs, to make sure your fortunes are not mutually tied. Maybe the coastal states that actually produce things and revenue break away from the welfare red states, and everyone figures out what their mutual interests actually are.

Perhaps the contradictions, as they say, need to be heightened. It's not just Trump, but the rest of the maroons jockeying for position that will be illuminating things in the months to come. Every election is like that, in some respect, but as economic and environmental conditions get more and more perilous, the situation becomes magnified.

[Update:  This is an interesting theory about Trump. Nothing would surprise me anymore.]

Your Daily Darwin Award

Between the Jade Helm paranoia, retards swimming with alligators, and such like, one has to wonder:  is Texas having some sort of weird contest with Florida, that the other states just haven't heard about yet?

I've had forty-eight birthday parties so far, and they've all had at least one thing in common:  no guns. And I like guns. Honest and for true, I've never felt the need to shoot something to celebrate turning older. Or to celebrate anything for that matter; maybe it's just me but I've always felt guns serve a very specific purpose, and "toy" does not fall under that purpose.

Alcohol, sex (yes, with someone else, smartass), and some sort of grilled meat or fish seem to suffice just fine for celebrating birthdays and other occasions. It's too bad this maroon never figured that out.

Old Times There Are Selectively Remembered

I'm trying to figure out what sort of person would want to tour a preserved plantation. Having lived all my life in California, with its historically preserved Spanish missions, one could argue that there is something of a corollary, if separated by an order of magnitude. And certainly the mission tours tend to gloss over the worst abuses of the natives by the invading Spanish.

But I suppose one anecdotal difference is that in touring at least half of the missions in this state, it seems to be universally understood just what went on there, that abuse and indentured servitude were the norms. Only children would ask something like "were the priests kind to the Indians" or "were the Indians loyal to their keepers". Even then, most children (I visited at least four of the missions on school field trips over the years) had a balanced understanding of things, that while the Spanish may have brought medicine and order, they also brought disease and violence and plunder.

While common sense at least implies that the vocal contingent one usually hears defending the Traitor Loser Flag is the typical loudmouth minority, it's still clearly a substantial one that carries up to the state and federal legislative representatives of those states. And they refuse to brook any compromise on the subject, fail to consider the cognitive dissonance of slavishly supporting the emblem of a failed, awful cause.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

The only surprising thing about this story is that AOL is still apparently a going concern. Who knew?

We're going to be seeing more and more stories like this in the years to come, of outsized health care costs being spread around to everyone. This is because the numbers are what they are, politics aside. Five percent of the population accounts for almost half the expenditures, and that's just the start of it. Everything is a hockey stick, as far as tracking proportional usage.

Socializing medicine by definition means that the other ninety-five percent who make up the other half of expenditures are effectively subsidizing those five percent. Meanwhile, the usurious charges and rates have been completely unaffected by the ACA or private insurance plans.

The racket remains intact, and that's the real problem. How does an infant rack up a million-dollar hospital bill? Instead of plugging the book and harping (rightly) on the HIPAA violations, the article practically begs for an itemization of services. Of course, looking at the EOB would also constitute a HIPAA violation. But it would be helpful to all concerned to get a look at how much things cost.

Tim Armstrong may be an overcompensated asshole, and he's almost certainly not taking a hit on his $12m compensation package. No, better to engender resentment among the working dogs by making sure they have a good idea of what's affecting their 401(k) plans. But all that still doesn't mitigate the fact that consumers are getting rooked by the health care industry, that healthy people are being forced to subsidize unhealthy people, that people with coverage are paying ridonkulous costs to cover people who can't pay for their care.

The moral argument is separate from the financial argument; obviously the moral thing to do would be to have -- wait for it -- the single-payer system we were promised before Ted Kennedy died, the Democrats ran a terrible candidate to replace him and lost their supermajority, and Scott Brown fucked everything up. But we got what we got, things cost what they cost, and people who are now having to pay into the kitty are having to adjust their expectations.

There is no solution. Much like being patient with what's left of your political system, hanging your hat on dickless incrementalism and the Lucy's football promise of Real Change, you're going to have to dial down your expectations of just how much socialized medicine will make your life better. Yes, if you need health care but have no coverage and cannot get on a plan through your job, it's great. But the problem has been trying to soft-sell the cold fact to people who do have coverage and don't use it that it's going to come out of their end, instead of making the CEOs and HMOs and the rest of these high-toned assholes share the pain.

(Bearing in mind, of course, that the family in the article had coverage through their employer. That's yet another area where we're getting fucked; I work for the gubmint and I got socked with an additional $200/month taken out of my paycheck for the exact same coverage, that I don't use in the first place. There's my student loan payment.)

In another ten or twenty years, with a little luck and a lot of help, the ACA will be a lot like Social Security is now, almost untouchable by politicians. But its biggest hurdle to overcome, ironically, comes from the fact that you need to convince the people who need it least and are least likely to vote in general -- young people -- to support it. The people who need it and will use it -- old farts and boomers, getting ready to retire and scavenge every fucking dime of Medicare and Social Security they paid in and then some -- are the most likely to vote, and to vote against the ACA, figuring that they already have their fucking ladder, the rest of us can just go find another staircase or something.

It's not a matter of blaming sick people for being or getting sick. Sooner or later, that fate and more awaits us all. It's a matter of who gets stuck paying for it all, and what kind of care they get for their troubles.

The Dogs of Bore

Jesus H. Christ, this is still a thing? I suppose the fact that "competitive eating" never really took off as a true professional sport (in that a significant number of people could make a decent living solely from that) is somewhat reassuring, as is the rather obvious fact that these bozos are doing substantial damage to their gastrointestinal systems.

The dopier pro-wrestling style antics have been played up in the Nathan's competition in recent years, perhaps to overshadow the possibility that there really isn't enough prize money unless you're some sort of weirdo living in mom's basement rent-free. How'd you like to be the one trying to sell your parents on this particular path to greatness?

Here's the thing about sports:  they generally involve people routinely performing feats of athletic prowess that most people cannot do, because of levels of physical conditioning. But anyone can eat several dozen hot dogs in a short amount of time, if they choose to spend weeks or months beforehand "practicing," dunking them in glasses of water to facilitate sliding down the gullet, and drinking enormous amounts of water before and after (risking water intoxication) in order to artificially distend the stomach and intestines. Not exactly the regimen of dieting, lifting weights, running, and learning playbooks undertaken by actual athletes of pretty much every real sport.

Bottom line:  not only is it disgusting and gluttonous, it's a sport in roughly the same way Groundhog Day is a holiday, or Dr. Dre is a licensed medical professional. But considering that the most play this crap gets is on Memorial Day and Independence Day, supposedly two days to at least pretend to celebrate some level of national greatness and significance, it might be more interesting to televise and report the entire proceedings -- especially the aftermath. What's the over/under on how long Stonie and Chestnut and the rest of these maroons spend squeezing out a 15-pound growler on the can later tonight?

So Light Yet Endless, From a Leaden Sky

Rush, the band people either love or loathe, has somehow gotten into Rolling Stone's good graces over the last few years, after being exiled in Jann Wenner's doghouse for decades. Whatever the case, it's good to see them get some long-deserved recognition in a magazine that seems to have largely forgotten about what music is really about, which is fun and connection and meaning, even more so than just being lucky enough to prognosticate the next inexplicably popular trend among bored, spoiled mallrats.

The latest effort in getting Rush in the magazine's virtual pages is an extensive cover feature on the band, written by a shameless fanboy, which is fine, as the band is most likely on its last or next-to-last tour, with maybe one more studio album to be made.

Of the surviving old lions of rock, I'll take Geddy Lee every day of the week over the likes of Gene Simmons or Steven Tyler or even the Stones, though that last one is admittedly close. It seems simple now, and there have certainly been missteps along the way, but Rush have pushed boundaries over the years in ways that other bands wouldn't and didn't. A song like Tom Sawyer seems like a rock cliché at this point, but no one else could have done that in 1981, with the pungent, acrid smells of the corpses of disco and punk still in the air, preparing to metastasize into new wave.

When You Assert, You Make an "Ass" Out of "Er" and "T"

Salon continues its long slide to bien pensant clickbait irrelevancy with this extended argument by assertion regarding the supposed "slut shaming" of poor Bristol Palin. The strange thing is, if you mouse over the many hyperlinks, the only one supporting said assertion is, um, Facebook, which is perhaps second only to YouTube for inane comments consisting mostly of jabbering incoherence.

Let me be more clear, so there's no mistaking by some misguided SJW:  Bristol Palin is not, as far as I have ever read, a slut. I have never read even nasty innuendo indicating that she's slept with an inordinate amount of men (or indeed, any other than Levi Johnston and Dakota Meyer).

The problem is actually the opposite -- that aside from being an over-privileged idiot and hypocrite, Palin herself is a slut-shamer by association, making good money by aligning herself with, and "authoring" hortatory rhetoric for organized slut-shamers, people who would legislate control of women's sex and reproductive lives if they had a chance.

Bristol Palin deserves to be (verbally) smacked around just for that transgression, for enabling and profiting from people whose very industry is making women and girls feel bad about their choices. There is no need to imply that she is a slut as well. Maybe she's just a fertile Myrtle, as they used to say -- had sex with two guys, and they both knocked her up. If only there were available means to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

"Hypocrisy is not an excuse for abuse."

Bullshit. Hypocrisy -- especially involving lousy reasoning and backward assumptions in the first place -- is probably the best excuse for abuse. But the fact of the matter is, the article fails to provide a single solid example of said "abuse." I don't think most people give a shit; I certainly don't except insofar as Bristol Palin has been inexplicably given a profitable, highly visible platform in which to propagate her nonsense, nonsense which it turns out she can't even abide by herself.

It's important for self-styled pwoggies and libruls to pay attention to this sort of rear-guarding, especially as Bernie Sanders starts attracting larger crowds and making inroads. Because this is really just Nader-baiting of a different stripe, cloaked in a fog of sloppy thinking and unsubstantiated assertions.

The Continuing Adventures of Fucking Yokels

Maybe there is such a thing as karma. Nah, there isn't. But for a sweet second there, you could almost believe it.