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Back in June of 2010, SayUncle and I got into it a little bit over a study purporting to show that liberals are Teh Suck at basic economics while libertarians and conservatives are Teh Smart. I alleged that the questions were biased in a way that made liberals in particular more likely to do poorly; i.e., that the test, by its very design, was biased against liberals.

Please excuse me while I do my I was right, neener-neener happy dance.

My shocked face!

Hell, No

I picked up Penn Jillette’s new book God, No!, yesterday, and am already most of the way through it. It’s pitched as an atheist’s version of the “Ten Commandments”. (This apparently was prompted by an exchange Penn had with Glenn Beck that resulted in Penn dashing off his own version of the Ten Commandments and Beck distributing them at his right-wing rallies. I’m still not entirely clear how that makes any sense.)

In fact, the book – like most of Penn’s stuff – just turns out to be a loose collection of breezy anecdotes and rants, dubiously organized thematically around his “Ten Atheist Suggestions”. It’s basically a compilation of Penn’s show-biz stories and video-blog ramblings, apparently intended to illustrate how his “Suggestions” work in his daily life – the connections are thin in most cases. The first chapter is a lengthy and utterly pointless, but fascinating, profile of Vegas performers Siegfried and Roy; it has about one paragraph of material that even mentions religion, and ends with Penn paying several thousand dollars for a pair of tight leather pants as a kind of tribute to Roy after he was injured in his tiger-taming act. That also makes no sense, and sets the tone for the rest of the book. Many of the chapters are hilarious (his story about being one of the first to ride the civilian “vomit comet” zero-g plane, while doing a striptease with a member of ZZ Top and a woman with huge breast implants, is indescribably bizarre; his visit to one of San Francisco’s infamous gay bathhouses at the height of the gay-bar scene – in which he couldn’t get a single gay guy to hit on him in a place that exists only for men to have sex with each other – is equally whacky). Many are touching, especially when he talks about his family. But many have virtually nothing to do with religion, or even with the moral principles that open each section of the book. (He includes a long story about his $100 bet with radio host Alex Bennet – that he couldn’t have sex while SCUBA diving with a fashion model – that is clearly in there only for the purpose of bragging. He even includes the text of his unpublished letter to Penthouse magazine about it.)

On only partial familiarity, my reaction is that the book is vintage Penn – funny and irreverent and not too rigorous. I am enjoying reading it, but I don’t think it contributes anything to the “New Atheism” or to any understanding of atheism or religion. Fans of Penn & Teller – and I am one – will find it a lot of fun, but I don’t think it rises above that level. And that’s what really gets me – not so much about the book, but about Penn himself.

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Children flinging poo to get attention: dipshit College Republicans (there is no other kind) at UC Berkeley have been loudly touting their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” – a racist provocation that has been standard fare for campus right-wing groups for 10 years or more. The gag is simple: they offer cupcakes for sale with prices set by race, with whites paying more and people of color getting lower prices as a form of “affirmative action”. This seems stupid, and so they figure they have scored some kind of point against affirmative action for things that really matter.

The real point, of course, is to anger people who actually care about race issues, and to get attention for themselves. It usually works. This week, there’s a lot of media attention, and both the UC campus student organization and the university administration have issued condemnations. But as student-activism scholar, and sometime Lean Left commenter, Angus Johnston points out, even these reactions have generally missed the mark.

On Sunday night ASUC — Berkeley’s student government — unanimously passed a resolution that, after a page of careful laying out of the various jurisdictional issues and imperatives involved, “condemn[ed] the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or seriousness by any student group.”

And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”

Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.) . . .

[Chancellor] Birgenau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.

Maintaining a professorial neutrality, Angus also doesn’t offer a detailed critique of the bake sale. It is obviously mean-spirited, and obviously fails to engage its nominal subject in any intelligent or substantive way. But what exactly is wrong with it, and why exactly is it a bad thing for them to be doing? Here’s how I understand the issues:

First, start with the fact that it’s deliberately provocative. It’s a parody of affirmative action policies such as scholarships for the underprivileged, and an expression of the right’s generally parodic understanding of affirmative action in general as being “special benefits for minorities and women”. (I’m not aware of any affirmative action program that consists of explicitly race-based price discounts for retail items, but I’m willing to bet these CR morons don’t actually know that their price list isn’t a real form of affirmative action.) It trivializes the issue of racial privilege and affirmative action by applying it at a trivial level, to frivolous items, and creates a parody instance of the right’s characterization of affirmative action as “reverse discrimination” with whites as victims. By moving the entire issue onto a silly and false footing, they mock the issue and the people it addresses.

Second, it makes no sense. There’s no way a bake sale “increases diversity”, and “diversity” and “affirmative action” aren’t the same thing. Again, the whole thing is just an expression of the right wing’s stupid and willfully ignorant understanding not only of race issues but affirmative action in general. In the same way that the right approaches every political and social issue by simply pushing buttons to generate canned responses from their followers, and mouthing code words and slogans that don’t actually mean anything – “family values”, “protect our children”, “traditional marriage”, “pro-life”, “fair tax”, “socialism”, “death panels” – they regard race as just another issue to demagogue with its particular set of meaningless and interchangeable code words: “diversity”, “affirmative action”, “reverse discrimination”. As an approach to its actual topic, the bake sale is not just provocative, but consists only in provocation. It claims to be more than just a demonstration or protest – the pricing scheme is apparently intended as a symbolic commentary on race-based aid programs, and as such substantive and meaningful – but it is in fact grounded in stupidity all the way down to the level of vocabulary. Yet for the right, being incoherent and dishonest is just a tactic, not an embarrassment.

But there is more than just that involved.

As a provocation, the stunt is crude and self-centered. It’s a childish act of mockery mostly intended to gain attention for its perpetrators – to make themselves interesting and relevant in a way that avoids taking an articulate position against helping people hurt by racism and racial history, and taking responsibility for that indifference. By treating their own chosen issue as a joke, they treat the concerns of those who take the issue seriously, and the harms that affirmative action seeks to address, as a joke. Just as right-wingers can’t see the history and reality of racism as real, and so see no problem elevating “reverse racism” as a response to affirmative action – because racism in America is all about white people’s problems – these clowns can’t see a difference between their own stupid joke and a serious social issue that affects other people’s lives. For Republicans, complaining about the inconvenience to white people of helping under-represented groups is a civil rights issue fully equivalent to, and more important than, doing something about the social consequences of hundreds of years of slavery, segregation, and racism.

So the stunt is wrong not just because it’s cruel and childish, and not just because it’s stupid and ignorant. It’s wrong because it’s a selfish and self-centered display of moral blindness – a false equivalency between racism and the attempt to make up for racism, a deep inability and unwillingness to see the difference between privilege and lack of privilege. It’s a fundamental, and to a large degree deliberate and gleeful, act of moral perversion – a self-centered demand for more privilege by the privileged out of a sense of entitlement so pervasive it is impervious to fact, feeling, or a sense of decency.

Complaining that you’re being harmed by other people objecting to your privilege is pretty much what the GOP is for. “’In order to move society forward, we’ve got to look past race’ said Derek Zhou, vice president of [College Republicans]. Yep. The same people who think the Confederate flag is “a symbol of heritage” also think it’s imperative to “look past race”.

PS: Live-blog of the event at UCB here.

The onward march of progress: Gallup reports today that overall US public approval of interracial marriage stands at an all-time high of 85% – up from 4% barely 50 years ago. What’s really striking is the almost linear trendline:

Marriage Graph

Predictably, it slows during Republican administrations, and jumped dramatically during the Clinton years, but overall that’s a steady straight line from virtually universal, open racism (at the height of “The Greatest Generation”‘s pro-segregation stagnation) to overwhelming acceptance just two generations later. There are no significant reversals of the trend over that period.

Even more interesting is that the trend is the result of major shifts in opinion within generations: even older people, taken in groups, have shifted their opinions 30% or more in only 20 years.

Of course, the news isn’t all positive. The lowest percentage approvals are found among the typical troglodyte contingencies: “Southerners, Republicans, conservatives, and those with no college education”, as well as the oldest age cohort. But even among those groups the vast majority approves, and the shifts have been huge (again: 50 years ago, 96% of the entire population disapproved).

Which goes to reinforce a general point about progress: it surely isn’t guaranteed, but it is not impossible, or even rare. And it is incremental: when irrational prejudices are dissolved, they don’t return. And it feeds off of almost-inevitable demographic trends: as the population becomes more diverse, as people become more educated, and as more-prejudiced generations die out, large-scale shifts occur in the direction of greater comfort and greater knowledge (i.e., away from prejudice and toward acceptance). Conservatism and prejudice are both doomed for the same reason: people don’t voluntarily give up what they’ve learned, and when they’ve learned the truth – about so many things – they turn away from conservatism, reactionism, and prejudice.

As Gallup notes:

The trend mimics the growing support for gay marriage — though Americans are still less likely to accept that practice than interracial marriage. It also follows the trend toward increasing racial tolerance on other measures such as voting for a black president and an increasing belief in progress and equality for blacks in the U.S. more generally.

In all of these cases, opinion shifts have been dramatic. In all of these cases and others, the eventual cure will be the same as regarding marriage: truth, time, and demographics.

This has implications for other progressive causes. Ethnic prejudices are relatively responsive to education because they are so fully grounded on stereotypes and prejudice, and also because it doesn’t cost anything to give them up. Other conservative issues persist because they have been deliberately obfuscated as to their factual basis, they depend on scientific questions that may seem counter-intuitive to people who are ignorant of the facts, and they have been worked into religion in such a way that giving up one’s prejudice regarding the factual issue also requires giving up some part of one’s religious beliefs. This is true in varying degrees of all the hot-button “red meat” issues that conservatives continue to inflame to maintain their base: abortion, birth control, evolution, global warming, environmentalism, economic policy, and a bewildering variety of other issues – all of them issues on which there are clear and established facts that lead to an unambiguous enlightened or progressive position, and which have been systematically distorted through lies and religious demagoguery.

The solution in these cases is to create a dynamic similar to that in cases of prejudice pure and simple: create familiarity, expose the lies, create conditions in which the younger generation grows up with the un-prejudiced perception as a default. In some ways progressives have done this (the “I Had an Abortion” T-shirt is one attempt; Gay Pride parades are another). In many ways reactionaries have chosen the same tactics (the desperate proselytizing you see on high school and college campuses is an attempt to convert the young before they get too comfortable with progress; home-schooling and public-school creationism are attempts to shut out the truth before they learn it); they’re fighting a battle against reality itself, so it’s more problematic for them, but they at least know how to fight it. The increasingly-visible atheist contingent is an important trend as well: whether or not most people become atheists, it does a lot of good to put the idea in their minds that they can make their own decisions about religion, and that religion is not a default social constraint that everyone has to live by against their will.

Nothing is certain, but history is inherently progressive.

Addendum: The dumbest headline on this issue comes from Andew Malcolm’s column in the LA Times: “Not that it matters to interracial couples, but Americans near unanimity in approval”. Well, of course it matters. That headline could only have been written by someone (probably an editor, not Malcolm himself) who had the luxury of ignoring the issue. Even though interracial marriage has been legal since Loving v. Virginia in 1967 (back when less than 20% of the nation approved of interracial marriage, and the Supreme Court did the nation a favor with its judicial activism), the fact that prejudice has always existed has always mattered to those who were its targets. I presume the headline was intended to reflect the fact that interracial marriage has always existed regardless of public feeling – which is true. But changes in public feeling have a tremendous impact on how well people can actually make use of the legal rights they nominally have – consider current attempts to block legal gay marriages by allowing Christians to refuse to provide services to gay couples, or even register the fact of the marriage in county clerks’ offices; consider also attempts to block access to abortion through legal restrictions that make it inaccessible even though legal, and to allow Christian healthcare providers to refuse to provide services they personally disapprove of. In addition, the simple ability to feel that one has a place in one’s own community – to be free from prejudice and harassment even when it does not amount to legal discrimination – is of immense importance, and something that people from majority groups take for granted. Prejudice has a tremendously debilitating affect, even when it does not amount to legal discrimination. For that reason, progressivism in all its aspects is a great victory for so much of society whose interests can otherwise conveniently be dismissed.

Okay, so I commented once previously on the Washington Post‘s editorial standards, vis a’ vis whiney upper-class white guys and their entitlement to attention. The occasion was that a guy in one of the most affluent sections of Washington, DC  (in the Northwest quadrant) got his tires slashed. The Post did 20 column inches on that story.

The result was to garner me scores of angry comments, virtually all of them fixated on the fact that I wasn’t properly admiring of this self-absorbed dickhead and his self-absorbed life. Almost nobody noticed the actual point: that the incident was trivial and only got the attention it did because of the distorted values of our society and our media.

As I noted:

The idea of the Washington Post devoting 20 paragraphs and an anguished photo to the story of a single car vandalism in the NE would be gut-splittingly ludicrous. Murders go unreported there, by the dozens. Every lesser crime, every imaginable urban misery, occurs there in handfuls, or scores, or hundreds of repetitions on a daily basis.

Nobody seemed to care that this was true, or even question whether it was. (Tgirsch later posted a revised version of the story, further insulating the dickhead from any negative attention so as to cajole people into noticing the real issue. His theory was that any failure to coddle people like him distracts readers. My theory was, and is, that whiney, self-absorbed, wealthy white dickheads get too much attention.)

But as it happens, we have a similar incident for comparison. Here’s how the Washington Post handled a story about a car-related incident in the Northeast quadrant this week:

Two people on bicycles fired shots as they pursued a car late Saturday in a Northeast Washington neighborhood on the edge of Capitol Hill, authorities said.

D.C. police said they received no reports of injuries or damage in connection with the incident, which occurred about 11:30 p.m. near 10th and F Streets NE.

Police said they had not yet learned of a motive in the incident, but said it did not appear to be a random attack.

Officers will patrol the area and will give special attention to people on bicycles as well as to enforcing traffic regulations, police said.

The area involved is a residential rowhouse neighborhood a bit more than a mile from the Capitol, and two blocks south of H Street NE.

That was it: 5 sentences. An attempted murder in the open street, shots fired in a residential neighborhood – the police have nothing and don’t even know where the bullets ended up; the Post gives it a couple inches of mostly whitespace.

Admittedly, nobody was actually hurt, but then, nobody was in the tire-slashing incident, either. The “shooters-on-bicycles” angle may seem kind of amusing (actually, it’s a telling clue to the social status of the shooters, if you know anything about DC), but I thought the mother’s-basement Hummer-loving dickhead was pretty chuckleicious, too. So why does that clown get 20 inches and a photo for some minor property damage, and the people affected by this incident get almost no attention for an attempted murder and life-threatening gunfire?

Here it is: “10th and F Streets NE“. Just to make that clearer, Wikipedia notes “The more affluent neighborhoods of Northwest Washington are typically safe, but reports of violent crime increase in poorer neighborhoods generally concentrated in the eastern portion of the city.”

This might help:

Crime in DC
Still confused? Oh:

DC Population
Okay, then.

But please, feel free to call Hummer Boy again and tell him how bad you feel for him.

Paul Krugman has a good column up, noting that this year’s crop of GOP candidates is even crazier than usual – all of them, with the exception of doomed atavistic sane Republican John Huntsman, are creationist, anti-choice, and climate-change denialists. All of them, that is, make medical and scientific decisions on the basis of religion, even in outright defiance of simple fact, and seek to impose their religious beliefs on others by law.

Predictably, the wingers are aspew with dudgeonified invective, as is their wont. But Roger Simon takes some kind of prize with this doozy:

Tedious New York Times reactionary (sorry for the redundancy) Paul Krugman . . .

Um . . . huh? It being yet another item of faith on the right that The New York Times is some kind of far-left publication, and Krugman being in fact certifiably liberal, Simon finds it somehow possible to call them both reactionary because they criticize politicians who are so far gone to the religious right that they engage in deliberate factual self-delusion about issues that are not controversial in rational circles.

What can this even mean? “Reactionary” is a term that, for good reason, is essentially synonymous with “right-wing”, but it does not technically mean “right-wing”. It means something like “blindly rejecting change or progress”. One cannot be reactionary to the status quo, because an unchanging state – a state of inaction – cannot provoke a reaction. Reactionaries reject progress, not stasis, by definition – and thus are anti-progressive, by definition. (Possibly one could be reactionary towards a retrogression, but that’s not how the term is usually used, and presumably not how Simon understands it. These would indeed be good times for a progressive reactionism, but Simon can’t mean that about Krugman, since he wouldn’t accept that creationism and AGW-denialism in any way represent a move backwards.)

As in so many cases, the right wing just makes up terms to suit itself (“intelligent design”, “pro-life”, “death tax”). A favored tactic is projection of right-wing crimes onto progressives (recall Liberal Fascism, and those two paeans to closed-mindedness, The Closing of the American Mind, and Illiberal Education – both arguing that higher education was ruined by letting more people have it on their own terms). Now Simon calls Paul Krugman – as mild-mannered, but sincere, a progressive as you could ever find – “reactionary”. Judging from the content of his blog, here are some things that are not reactionary, in Simon’s mind: complaining about Hollywood liberals; evangelical Christianity; conservative Christian prayer rallies officially hosted by elected officials; Rick Perry; Sarah Palin.

It goes without saying that someone who doesn’t even know what his own words mean can’t be relied on for any wisdom in speaking them. Like the rest of the right wing, he should just be ignored. But their vacuous stupidity still has the power to stun.

Running true to a very tedious and familiar form, some nutcase makes waves to prove how Christian he is by proving how crazy he is:

Brothers and Sisters , I have been seriously considering forming a ( Christian ) grassroots type of organization to be named “The Christian National Registry of Atheists” or something similar . I mean , think about it . There are already National Registrys for convicted sex offenders , ex-convicts , terrorist cells , hate groups like the KKK , skinheads , radical Islamists , etc..

This type of “National Registry” would merely be for information purposes . To inform the public of KNOWN ( i.e., self-admitted) atheists . . . .

Now , many (especially the atheists ) , may ask “Why do this , what’s the purpose ?” Duhhh , Mr. Atheist , for the same purpose many States put the names and photos of convicted sex offenders and other ex-felons on the I-Net – to INFORM the public ! I mean , in the City of Miramar , Florida , where I live , the population is approx. 109,000 . My family and I would sure like to know how many of those 109,000 are ADMITTED atheists ! Perhaps we may actually know some . In which case we could begin to witness to them and warn them of the dangers of atheism . Or perhaps they are radical atheists , whose hearts are as hard as Pharaoh’s , in that case , if they are business owners , we would encourage all our Christian friends , as well as the various churches and their congregations NOT to patronize them as we would only be “feeding” Satan .

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The Stadium Collection

UPDATED 22 August 2011: Added Nationals Park (Nationals), Citi Field (Mets)

I’m a sports fan, and I “collect” stadiums (stadia?). Especially major league baseball, NFL football, and NHL hockey. My goal, before I die, is to see a baseball game in the home stadium of every MLB team. It would be an added bonus if I could do the NHL and NFL venues, but right now, I’m focusing primarily on baseball.

Problem is, I keep forgetting where I’ve been, and losing count. Therefore, mostly for my own reference (and because I expect few others to be interested), I’m posting a list of venues attended below the fold. I’ve ordered them in roughly the order in which I first visited them, to the best of my ability to recall.

However, if you have comments concerning favorite (or least favorite) venues, feel free to leave them.

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Perry vs. Obama

So it’s going to be Perry.

I haven’t been paying real attention to the Republican primary run-up, because (a) it’s repulsive, and (b) whatever happens, happens – somebody will be the candidate, and then the real race begins. I see primaries as being largely just opportunities for people to make mistakes that can be used against them later. But things are shaking out now, and the end result is almost a foregone conclusion.

Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll in a walk – an incredibly scary thought tempered by the fact that the Ames poll is essentially a test of who’s willing to pay the most to register supporters on their behalf. (But as Nate Silver points out, it has a good predictive track record.) Pawlenty immediately dropped out; nobody expected him to do anything anyway, but it clears the ground a bit. Most of the rest of the field are joke candidates – Cain, McCotter, Huntsman (who somehow didn’t get the message that sane, decent Republicans died with Nelson Rockefeller). Gingrich is, bizarrely, still taken seriously but he’s getting no traction and has no hope. Ron Paul is polling well but that ain’t happenin’, nohow. That pretty much leaves Perry and Santorum as contenders who at least somebody believes might have a chance at the nomination.

Santorum is strictly from hunger. He’s tainted by his resounding defeat in his own state in his last Senatorial race, and the immense loathing he inspires from anyone who’s not as crazy as he is. He finished well behind Pawlenty in the Ames poll, and barely 1% above Herman Cain. He’ll probably stagger along for awhile because he’s just that narcissistic, but he’s dead meat, and thank God for that.

That leaves Perry, Romney, and Bachmann. Perry trailed in the Ames poll, but he didn’t officially enter there – preferring to upstage the event by officially announcing his candidacy on the same day, from a different state, which pissed off some Iowans but I thought was a clever publicity stunt. Romney is a serious candidate but he’s hampered by the fact that he used to be less crazy than now, and, worse, on the two main issues that the wingers are campaigning on: healthcare and abortion. He’s going to get his bell rung from left and right the further he goes, and I just don’t see it happening for him – plus which he polled about 1/8th what Bachmann did in Iowa, and got about 1/4 the number of votes of Pawlenty, who then quit, and about 80% of the votes of Perry, who wasn’t even there. [UPDATE: See below.]

So it’s Bachmann – the Teabagger favorite – against Perry – the angry-good-ole-boy-plus-reluctant-non-Teabagger standardbearer. The Teabaggers are powerful but I don’t think they have the votes, plus some people are finally going to wake up and back away from the super-crazy. (Palin’s a dark-horse candidate but she’s really just milking publicity to feed her own ego and money machine. I predict she’ll tease for as long as it’s profitable, but won’t enter. If she does, she’ll split the crazy vote with Bachmann.)

So it’s Perry. I suspect Bachmann/Palin and Romney will hang in for quite some time, and probably win some primaries, but Perry will gain traction as the convention approaches and people realize that one of these clowns has to run for President in their names.

Frankly, I’m hoping Bachmann stays in it to the end. I’d almost be willing to take the chance of her as the nominee. But even if it goes to Perry, the longer Bachmann pushes his crazy buttons the better chance it will give the rest of the country to see how really extreme he is, and to negate his claim to being less loony than her. It would be unfortunate if the GOP field clears out too quickly and Perry gets to whitewash himself as some kind of moderate. (The weak-governor system in Texas plays to the advantage of wingnuts, who get to say all the crazy crap they want down home, and then pretend they didn’t really do anything when they run on the national level.) If Bachmann gets Perry to show his true colors clearly enough and long enough, that may help downplay his hair and stupidity as electoral advantages. (One benefit of this campaign: we get to resurrect decades of choice Molly Ivins quotations about Rick “Goodhair” Perry.)

But however it turns out, it will be Perry vs. Obama, with Bachmann fading down the wind with an evil screech like the Wicked Witch of the West. Mark my words.

UPDATE: Steve Kornacki, at Salon, offers a similar analysis, but sees Perry and Bachmann in a serious fight for the religious-right vote, and that that will give Romney a better shot at the less-extreme faction. I have to admit that my prediction is predicated on the assumption that GOP voters will see Romney as not extreme enough, and Bachmann as too extreme; but if the religious/economic division that used to be a cliche about the Republican base is still operative, then it could be that those factions will go for Bachmann and Romney, respectively, and leave Perry falling between two stools. I think that division has faded – the entire GOP base have become wingnuts, but not all of them are lemmings. We’ll see.

UPDATE: Romney was also not an official participant in the Ames poll, which makes his weak showing less significant. Lots of commentators are seeing Romney as a major player. Still don’t see it myself, but I’m always wrong about candidate predictions, so this post is looking less and less prescient. We’ll see.

Time For A Judd Update

Way back in December of 2009, commenter Judd wrote:

… I have always and still continue to believe Barack Obama will be a one-term president, unless of course the Republicans go full-retard and Huck things up again.

My guess is that you’re very happy you put that “unless” in there. What say you?

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