JoeWeber

I could not agree more. Bill, directness is a form of free speech. You need to relax control by a lot. Private site isn’t covered by free speech. Yense why bill can keep deleting my posts for calling out his hypocrisy. Leeroy, Bill is a damn smart guy and, I hope, still a friend. He's banned me deservedly and warned me often. He fly's a hard slot, that's sure. I do not agree with how he moderates when it gets close to the bone. Yes, he has vested interests here but he is not a hypocrite. Joe

I could not agree more. Bill, directness is a form of free speech. You need to relax control by a lot.

We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do

Are you still glad that you voted for Trump? Jerry Baumchen Hi Jerry, Absolutely. I would have voted for Kermit to keep HRC out of office. Keith BIGUN, Perhaps that was your mind at the time but I think Jerry was looking for any misgivings you may have now. The thing is you can now only guess if you were right about HRC. With Trump there are now data points. For just one example, did you read Admiral McRavens rebuke of Trump? Seems to me that he has a few misgivings. Do you? Joe BIGUN, I think that based on today's events it is fair to ask again. Do you now have any misgivings? And if not, just what will it take? Joe

Are you still glad that you voted for Trump? Jerry Baumchen Hi Jerry, Absolutely. I would have voted for Kermit to keep HRC out of office. Keith BIGUN, Perhaps that was your mind at the time but I think Jerry was looking for any misgivings you may have now. The thing is you can now only guess if you were right about HRC. With Trump there are now data points. For just one example, did you read Admiral McRavens rebuke of Trump? Seems to me that he has a few misgivings. Do you? Joe

Since this came up I have been pondering the concept. There are two, for the purpose of this discussion, aspects of Christianity. One is salvation and the other is spiritual enlightenment. Salvation is basically linear. If I accept Jesus's atoning death on the cross as The Son of God and His resurrection then I am saved. Then I receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to guide me in sanctification. Spiritual enlightenment is non-linear. It is the development of sanctification on the path of eternal life. The Holy Spirit is constantly enhancing individual spirit and soul in sanctification. It is dynamic creating the wonders of God as the attachment to the world is forsaken. I'm not sure whether "gobbledegook" or "mumbo-jumbo" is the better description of that. Neither, that is grade A, gluten free, non-GMO, free range and absolutely guaranteed to be undiluted woo-woo. Non linearly speaking, of course.

I honestly don't get it. Why does no one seem to understand that he doesn't care? He won't answer your questions. He won't provide proof for his ludicrous assertions (which doesn't exist in the first place). He won't post in a rational manner, or even in decent English (unless it serves his needs). He posts links where the headline sort of matches the point he wants to push, but doesn't care if the actual text in the article agrees or disagrees. As was noted by Billvon somewhere recently, he's in favor of anything that opposes the Democrats. It doesn't have to be true. If someone says it and it makes the Ds look bad, he repeats it. Provide proof that he's wrong and he ignores it. Ask for proof and he ignores it. He refuses to acknowledge anything that makes Trump or the Rs look bad. He simply ignores it. The repeated demands by many for him to back up his claims are foolish. He ignores them and keeps posting his garbage. WHY does anyone treat him as if he is going to do anything different? Because the powers that be, and some posters, seem to enjoy arguing with walls.

All right, but apart from the Budweiser, margaritas, frankfurters, hamburgers, Cajun culture, jambalaya, kindergarten, apple pie, cars, cowboys, the music to the Star Spangled Banner, morality, language, and religions, what have the immigrants ever done for us? Pole dancing.

Yup. I know an instructor who starts off her Carry Permit classes by telling the students: "Write a list of everyone you are willing to die for. Now write down everyone you are willing to go to prison for the rest of your life for. Now write down everyone you are willing to give up everything you own for; house, car, savings, everything. The reality is if you use a gun to defend someone, those are very real possibilities. Be very careful using that gun." Yesterday, in the local ACE Hardware store I passed an angry looking dude with a Glock in a thigh holster. Never mind that this store has a "No Open Carry" sign on the front door, this deluded asshole was out to exercise his second amendment rights and fuck anyone who disagreed. How is it that anyone views this as necessary? For fucks sake, I just wanted to buy a piece of 2" PVC pipe in a town that has 3 marijuana stores and not a single goddamn 3 way stop light. Not to mention that it would have been child's play to grab a shovel and whack the moron on the head if necessary. WTF? I'm a gun guy but this is just ridiculous bullshit. You do realize not everyone carrying a gun is some gun nut ass hole? Great story. Here is another story that just happened yesterday. A dude and his friend were trying to steal some cars parked at a popular hiking location. A guy with a concealed weapon approached them. The thief got in his car and tried to flee, striking a women in the process and backing into one of the parked cars. After the thief backed into the women and tried to ram her a second time to flee the location, the man pulled out his weapon and shot the thief. The thief was later charged with attempted murder and auto theft. The guy with a gun quite literally saved the day in very measurable sense and if someone with a gun wasent present someone would have died. The sign on the front door states "No Open Carry Allowed". That makes this particular constitutional scholar both an asshole and a moron. Seriously, that is compensating behavior at best. "Look everyone! I got a bulge, too. Just not where it's supposed to be."

You give me too much power. Ephesians 6: 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. I am simply one of the watchmen on the wall. Armed and ready to shoot, too! Why not:...a simple, humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord..... It isn't me that gives you too much power. If it was up to me you'd be paying property taxes on your Church and receiving zero tax deductions on your donations. If you were still personally compelled to help others see the light, and read them a little scripture to aid digestion, you'd be doing it without helping yourself to public money.

That's Jeff Sessions announcing his task force and that's what we are up against. I'm also pretty sure that I'm one of the many that didn't detect said dangerous movement. Must be my tin foil hat needs tuning. No matter if I, or anyone else, likes it or not it may already be too late. With the courts packed with right wingers who have lifetime appointments, and with decades of social progress eroded or destroyed by the likes of Sessions and others, having Trump in the rear view mirror may not matter. Whether or not yo's that blindly love Trump and their own ignorance can spell, answer asked questions, or get their facts in order is probably the least of our troubles. Don't forget Jeff Sessions stood up to trump re Mueller. Give America credit. The time of trump will end and the pendulum will swing the other way. IMO this is a wake up call. Politically active concerned citizens will answer the call for equality and justice. The democrats have seen a wave of women, gays, Muslim women, etc. All entering politics. Hopefully the pendulum will not swing the other way too far, or too fast. Sure thing, everyone will come to their senses and not vote for the next Jill Stein. Those folks are more responsible for Trump as President than the Russians or Hillary's many faults, I believe. Then there are also the folks who didn't want Trump but didn't vote for Hillary because she had it in the bag nationally or in their state or because FUN! We might have had a better shot at fixing the electoral college ridiculousness if she had won the popular vote by a few million more. There would be a number, right? If naught else we still have geologic time to fall back on, that's longer than lifetime appointments. Or maybe space aliens will turn Mar-a-Lago into a scorched spot as a wake up call. Take that, you knuckleheads! And by the by when is the next season of Deadwood? I think it's too glib to wait on a pendulum swing when innocent lives are being hammered during their one lifetime. Right wing authoritarianism is ascendant worldwide. Every one of those places is a place of wide income disparity and civil oppression. It's not about not giving America credit, it's about the law of large numbers. In this case it's that we have such a large number of dipsey-doodles with voter registration cards.

Yup. I know an instructor who starts off her Carry Permit classes by telling the students: "Write a list of everyone you are willing to die for. Now write down everyone you are willing to go to prison for the rest of your life for. Now write down everyone you are willing to give up everything you own for; house, car, savings, everything. The reality is if you use a gun to defend someone, those are very real possibilities. Be very careful using that gun." Yesterday, in the local ACE Hardware store I passed an angry looking dude with a Glock in a thigh holster. Never mind that this store has a "No Open Carry" sign on the front door, this deluded asshole was out to exercise his second amendment rights and fuck anyone who disagreed. How is it that anyone views this as necessary? For fucks sake, I just wanted to buy a piece of 2" PVC pipe in a town that has 3 marijuana stores and not a single goddamn 3 way stop light. Not to mention that it would have been child's play to grab a shovel and whack the moron on the head if necessary. WTF? I'm a gun guy but this is just ridiculous bullshit.

Marc seems to have some sort of learning and communication disability. Except in crowds, or internet forums, people like him are sort of harmless. Take away his bull horn and he's back to being a frustrated nobody. He'll never be dissuaded from a single wrong opinion because he is finally on a winning team and that justifies everything. Like Marc, I'd bet that most of the droids at Trump rallies couldn't organize a three person marble game if two of us showed up and also brought the marbles. I believe the best defense against people like Marc is to disperse them: when alone they are mostly silent. Here he has an audience. He can tell Professors they are poor thinkers and then run away with a flag like it's touch football. Surely all can now agree that it is obvious Marc will never give an inch much less a straight answer. So why bother? That’s where you're wrong, people like Rush are the people that got Trump elected. They feel embodied by him because Trump is one of them. I can almost guarantee Rush would rather have Trump admit to openly working with Putin to get elected because that means Hilary and democrats lost. Democrat is a four letter word to thes people. Even calling them these people is part of the problem. They have felt left behind for too long. They finally come out of there holes and latched on to trump. The America they knew when they were younder is gone. Trump promised to bring it back. They are loud, they are ignorant, and worst is they vote while uninformed. The public education system failed them, the news failed them, and they likely work in fields that are echochambers. This does apply to all trump supporters, but it does apply the the most hardcore trump supporters. You are right and I will step back from my statement that people like Marc are harmless. That is clearly incorrect. Indeed, by voting in large numbers they cause great harm. I more meant that alone in daily life they cause little harm. My point is that with the internet a whole lot of willfully ignorant people now have speaking roles in what should have been a silent movie. Given that they already have enough voice and power to elect someone like Trump as President (with witless help from fools on the Left) I see little reason to gift them more. I actually think it's people like Ron who need to be feared most. They are dangerous. They tend to grasp the rules of grammar and can somehow locate the spell check feature on their computers. They can come off as sensible. They have an agenda and a playbook and they are generally isolationists. They don't care about science, international relationships, social equality or equal rights. They are, as Ron's avatar advertises, holy warriors. Everyone else, of course, are their unholy enemies. Most importantly, they are already organized, have meeting houses spread across the land and are subsidized with your tax dollars. Also, they don't mind suffering a bit to get their way. Just take AG Jeff Sessions as an example. Why would he take the constant taunts, insults and humiliations of the President? Because he's a patriot? Hardly, I'm certain he despises Trump. His eye was on the prize: the coming opportunity, as the head of the United States Department of Justice, to jam his "Religious Liberty Task Force" down our throats. That's Jeff Sessions announcing his task force and that's what we are up against. I'm also pretty sure that I'm one of the many that didn't detect said dangerous movement. Must be my tin foil hat needs tuning. No matter if I, or anyone else, likes it or not it may already be too late. With the courts packed with right wingers who have lifetime appointments, and with decades of social progress eroded or destroyed by the likes of Sessions and others, having Trump in the rear view mirror may not matter. Whether or not yo's that blindly love Trump and their own ignorance can spell, answer asked questions, or get their facts in order is probably the least of our troubles.

Marc seems to have some sort of learning and communication disability. Except in crowds, or internet forums, people like him are sort of harmless. Take away his bull horn and he's back to being a frustrated nobody. He'll never be dissuaded from a single wrong opinion because he is finally on a winning team and that justifies everything. Like Marc, I'd bet that most of the droids at Trump rallies couldn't organize a three person marble game if two of us showed up and also brought the marbles. I believe the best defense against people like Marc is to disperse them: when alone they are mostly silent. Here he has an audience. He can tell Professors they are poor thinkers and then run away with a flag like it's touch football. Surely all can now agree that it is obvious Marc will never give an inch much less a straight answer. So why bother?

LOL I wish I could put into words the image in my mind of you sitting at a computer trying to find my all caps posts. I will laugh at that image forever! Sort of like the image I laugh at in my mind: you, totally free to do whatever you want, sitting alone in your boat on Lake Ahmayoyo, Schlitz in hand and waiting on the Blue Gill to bite. Ahh, buddy, it don't get no better than this!

Don't feel bad. Human memory sucks. Most everybody has a few very vivid, completely fabricated memories, pretty much indistinguishable from real ones. You mean Ron, right? Did I win?

So this revelation, if true, would directly implicate Trump himself in an effort to conspire with a foreign power to tip the election to him, and a subsequent effort to cover that up. We already know that Trump helped dictate a statement lying to America about the real purpose of the meeting, and, if Cohen is right, the coverup would also include falsely denying not just knowledge of the meeting, but also his approval of it. And now he's twitter threatened Iran with a massive attack, implying it would be nuclear, for throwing threatening words at the U.S. I hope the grown ups have it to where he can not use war to divert everyones attention from his crimes.

I'm thinking you didn't put enough spit in your hand. That or by everyone else you meant an exclusive everyone else.

Nice to see more people enslaved by giving them free money. If we don't destroy ourselves and our planet and if we find a way to keep the Luddites under control is it not likely that something akin to the Star Trek economy will, some day, take the place of our current system? I don't know if a guaranteed basic income is a good idea right now. But it seems to me that it's a forward looking idea that may seem prescient some day. That alone should protect the thought from derision.

If you feel you can't ignore it on your own, find the Google Chrome plugin called Hide Heid. It hides posts from specific users; it was written for the penultimate troll, Robin Heid. ***Marc and Ron's comments either dominate, divert attention or become integrated into every thread they jump into. They wouldn't if you (and everyone else) ignored them. Shall we spit in our palms and shake on it?

I thought you were the joke! You always make me laugh. Most folks know me as a jokester. Us Christians make fun of a lot of stuff. Proverbs 17:22 New King James Version (NKJV) A merry heart does good, like medicine, But a broken spirit dries the bones. Progressive liberalism tends to break one's spirit. Yes, you so called friends of Jesus do make fun of a lot of stuff. Mostly people not like yourself. You are far from what the book you hold up preach. So is Putin and Trump. Putin is a killer and a brutal dictator. Trump is a liar, cheater and, a wannabe dictator. Hardly that what your book preach. You can toss out all of the Proverbs you can find to paste. They do not define you. Your words do and, they define you well. It is clear where your heart and beliefs lie. You idolize the likes of Trump. That is clear. There could be no God of peace and love that would approve of Trump, Putin and, Kim Jong Un. How can you? Religious zealots are always “The ends justifies the means” type of folks. While I know that people like Marc and Ron exist in large multiples I usually, and thankfully, don't know if one is nearby. They seem only to find their voices in pitch fork and torch bearing crowds and in internet forums like Speakers Corner. In the former they have strength of numbers and in the latter protectors who insist on decorum and reason when ridicule would do better. At any gathering of people who enjoy ideas they would be as welcome as a turd in the punchbowl. Thier hosts, unless their pleasures came from self flagellation, would quickly grasp that only a small group of adherents would suffer it for long. I draw no parallels. Bill has told Leroy, who only wanted to get a damn answer to his question, that Marc could just be ignored. Bullshit. Marc and Ron's comments either dominate, divert attention or become integrated into every thread they jump into. I have read some brilliant attempts to get them to see things differently or at least consider having an open mind. Nada. They just ignore it and go off to screw up another conversation in another thread. Speakers Corner, which I initially found surprisingly fun, is turning into an unwelcome party invite.

As if that was your intent. You just lied, Ron. Time to go fetch some more forgiveness.

You have us by the short hairs, Mr. Rush. I can only imagine what it must be like to have in my social circle, probably several circles as do you no doubt, so many serious thinkers, professionals, educators and accomplished entrepreneurs with whom I might discuss weighty issues. You know, like here on an obscure internet forum like SC. That your gifts give you that entree must be both humbling and rewarding. So much so, I'd guess, that even putting a worm on a hook while blue gill fishing must seem trite.

I find it very interesting that you don't have a problem with all of this if Hillary had one. Remember Obama said that there's no way that anybody could affect the elections. But since Trump won the whole thing changed now didn't it. The two-faced double standard is appalling disgusting and obviously evident anybody who cares to pay any attention to the bullshit that you parrot here daily. But please keep it up. Do you suffer from written expression disorder? I ask kindly because what you just wrote is a grammar and cohesive thought disaster of the sort that often elicits unkind observations about your writing and thinking style. You said you graduated from High School and I'm willing to believe you. But truly, bits like this: "I find it very interesting that you don't have a problem if Hillary had one." Huh? Do you mean a meeting with Putin, an interpreter or, perhaps, different plumbing? In previous posts you wrote: "But he is not a politician now is he!" and ..."but he still my president needs the best I've seen in a long time", and "They'll had good things to say about Trump!", and "Know you want to talk about unkept promises?" Those are not examples of High School level writing. You make it seem that you do not know the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark. You also seem unable to frame simple sentences. To be clear, I think the grammar police are assholes. I am also a big fan of breaking the rules of writing. The thing is that you seem clueless as to which rule you are breaking. It is rather odd that you make no effort to improve your writing no matter how often your failures are publicly noted. That's why I'm wondering if it's something you simply can not control. If that's so, please say so and I'll be first to tell people to get off of your back. If it's not a consequence of a learning disability then please understand that one reason you are, by the many here, not taken seriously is because you express yourself so poorly. And you continue to do so even though the very computer you write from has spellcheck, grammar check and access to a number of fact checking search engines.

No worries Bill, and no offense taken. Some truths are so self evident they bear repeating.