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True story: When I was in high school, I was editor of the student newspaper. Our board of education was holding a meeting to discuss banning Erich Segal's LOVE STORY, because the F word was found -- once, I believe -- in its pages. I thought it was my journalistic duty to attend the meeting. So I went. At one point a gentleman stood up and said that he had served in the Navy and in that time had NEVER heard language such as was used in LOVE STORY. I asked him in whose Navy he had served. I was escorted out of the meeting.

I am finding it hard to believe that BELOVED caused Murphy, the Younger( who was in high school), nightmares, but if it did, he needs either a better therapist or better parents.

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Dr Seusse's - Oh the places you'll go...would have sent the kid over the edge !

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founding

When Domenech wrote 'Dipshit racist liar' I just thought he was updating his own bio....

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Re Vance' past disloyalty to Trump - it's not hurting him, because he's surging in the polls. At least, that's what I've heard. Is that no so?

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I once did a tour for a guy from Canada, and I asked him what he did for a living. He responded warily, “I want you to know, unlike America, this job is highly respected in Canada.”

He was a teacher.

I’m making my fiancé read, “Love in the Time of Cholera” and this morning he was like, “I’m at the part where that older guy is writing love letters to a 13-year-old girl.”

Should we ban Gabriel Garcia Marquez now? It was a pick for Oprah’s Book Club. Maybe we should ban that too! Maybe we should go full 15th Century Florence, Savonarola-style and burn everything except The Bible, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Jewel’s poems. Maybe then all the crazy, blonde mothers of Virginia will be happy. #BonfireOfTheIdiots

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I've always been of the belief that the best way to combat bad ideas is with good ones. That is what freedom of speech is all about. That's why the Klan and Nazis marching in public didn't ever bother me. I was confident that, if people were exposed to good and bad ideas, most would choose the good ideas.

The marketplace of ideas worked well for the first several decades of my life. Then Facebook, Twitter, YouTube entered the picture. People no longer were exposed to alternative views. The algorithms of social media meant they were just exposed to ideas that amplified their own political leanings. The process led to people becoming isolated and radicalized.

I don't know how you fix the problem without government legislating with regard to those algorithms. The libertarian in me wants to believe the market will sort things out. But the realist in me says that's not going to happen.

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Okay, I feel like Florida is a good example of the situation in America in a microcosm. Basically, representative democracy is meant to fix the problems that come with other forms of government, like autocracy. You don't want lots of unaccountable individuals wielding power, or you end up like China or Russia, where the rules are whatever those who have the power to get away with things say they are.

The idea goes that regular morons like you and me will elect people who know what they're doing, so us regular morons don't have to think about things like trade deals, military actions, and geopolitical changes. This breaks down if regular morons elect morons to positions of power.

We can see this in the Desantis situation. He's a moron who is meant to be leading, and yet his entire ruling ideology is 'you people should figure it out yourselves!' and then he appoints other morons like him, who then tell people that actually, you should just figure things out yourselves on the matter of policies that have been in place for over a century. Again, the purpose of representative government is for us normal morons to put people in charge who can think about stuff for us. Because most people are morons! I am, you are, we all have things we know nothing about, that's why we elect people to deal with stuff for us.

That people now think the purpose of elected government is basically performance art is doing more damage than we realize, because as soon as you start thinking that it doesn't matter who's in charge, you're basically one step away from accepting autocracy, because in those systems it really doesn't! But to think that it doesn't when you have the power to change that from the bottom up is horribly corrosive and leads to people like DeSantis spending his time telling people that they know better than the guy they elected to lead. If those elected aren't expected to lead, but only to tell people what they want to hear, what purpose do they serve?

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Youngkin has handed McAuliffe a gift with this ad if he is nimble enough to accept it. This is his chance to solve his problem on the education issue. Wanting to ban the work of an African-American Nobel Prize winning novelist will not go over well in suburbia.

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Wow, if Ben Domenech called Obama a dipshit racist liar for basically saying culture wars are exasperating and distracting, I wonder what he would call someone who said this about his wife and late father-in-law:

Isn’t it funny that Meghan McCain, who has always been a bully and basically a lowlife, is now complaining that it was she who was bullied by the Slobs and Radical Left maniacs of “The View.” At the request of many of her representatives, I made it possible for her father to have the world’s longest funeral, designed and orchestrated by him, even though I was never, to put it mildly, a fan. In his own very special way, he was a RINO’s RINO. Despite his fighting against me, I won Arizona by a lot in 2016 and won Arizona by even more in 2020—unfortunately the vote counters in 2020 were far more important than the candidate (See the determinative Report issued Wednesday by the Arizona Auditors!). I have since found out that McCain, who was close to last in his class at Annapolis, sent the fake and totally discredited scam Dossier to the FBI, hoping to stop the “Trump Train.” In any event, Meghan should fight the Communists instead of explaining how they beat her, hurt her, and made her “physically ill.” She should fight back against the Losers of The View the way she fights against very good and well-meaning Republicans, and she would do herself a world of good!

I think he'd probably sooner divorce her than criticize Trump over that. And Trump just loves how pathetic, castrated, and obsequious fake tough-guys like Ben are in his presence.

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DeSantis is my governor. I read the Washington Post and they have the run down on vaccination percent state by state, demographics and county by county. In Florida 68.7% have at least one dose. Most of us are not anti science about this and owning the libs even for the more right wing among us is not worth dying for. This is going to hurt him next year when he runs for reelection.

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This is all part of what Republicans are about now. They really don't want power to be exercised at the level closest to the people - for if the cities dare do something Republicans don't like, they use state power to crush it.

The alliance with the anti vaxx, anti mask crowd is the worst sort of know-nothing ism.

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