I know you can no longer post on Facebook or Twitter, but here’s the rub:

YOUR RIGHTS ARE NOT BEING VIOLATED.

The latest lie blames the Democrats for the government shutdown. This is despite the fact that the Republicans couldn’t even get enough votes from their own party to reach 50%.

Mind you, this isn’t just a talking point. In a completely unprecedented and childish move that is 100% away from “Presidential,” the White House has stopped answering the phone, and people who call get a message blaming the Democrats. I am not making this up.

“The Electoral College was set up with a specific purpose in mind and we should do what the Founding Fathers want,” people say to me whenever I argue for getting rid of it.

Well, fine. If your desire is to do what the Founding Fathers wanted, then we’ll need to change a few things.

Let’s face it, Hillary Clinton has one person she will need to thank for destroying Donald Trump on November 8th, and that person is Donald Trump. She isn’t winning by a big margin so much as he is losing by a big margin. I still hold that had the Democrats nominated anyone else, the election would be even more of a wipeout.

The saddest thing is that after the election is over, the nightmare that we’ve experienced in this campaign will continue.

For many years now, ISIS and other similar radical Islamic groups have caused problems for the world. But Donald Trump knows how to deal with them. When asked recently what to do, he made a bold promise:

“Me have plan. Plan good. Me solve problem.”

Many people claim to love America while hating the vast majority of people in it.  They threaten to commit violence against our government if they don’t get their way.  They moan about how immigrants and minorities are ruining our country and how, when whites become the minority, we will no longer be America.  And they think that these positions make them patriots.

That’s not patriotic.  That’s the opposite of what America is all about.  Remember “all men are created equal”?  

Whenever I hear conservative politicians say things like “Make America great again” I have to wonder. The economy is booming. Unemployment is at its lowest rate in ten years. The deficit has been reduced by 2/3rds. The stock market is at its highest ever and gas prices are at their lowest in years.  Foreign policy-wise, ISIS leaders have been killed, Qadaffi was removed, bin Laden is dead, and we have less troops overseas than we did eight years ago.

These are all things that, if a Republican were in office, conservatives would be citing to say how wonderful their President is.

There’s lots of things our government does that I disagree with. So I try to elect people who will pass laws that I agree with. Sometimes I lose and a bunch of laws are passed I don’t like.

I don’t claim then that those laws are “forced” against me and that my rights are being violated.

Carly Fiorino and the other GOP candidates have railed about for months over a faked video that claimed that Planned Parenthood was harvesting baby parts. It’s been discredited by everyone, and the guy who made it admitted it was fake, but that hasn’t stopped them from repeating the lie.

cartoon by Rob Tornoe

According to a new poll from PPP, 30% of Republicans favor bombing Agrabah.

As any Disney fan will tell you, Agrabah is the completely fictional made-up country where Aladdin lives. But hey, it sounds Muslim and if there’s one thing Republicans love, it’s bombing things, even when they don’t have a reason to do so. 

It’s 2015.

And the leading candidates for the Republican nomination for President:

Many people are criticizing Bernie Sanders for being a “democratic socialist” without having the slightest idea what that term means.

cartoon by Matt Weurker

I predicted a while ago that the GOP would rally around one of the sane candidates, aware that they would have no chance with the crazies who want to run.  I predicted Scott Walker, and maybe Jeb Bush.

Guess I was wrong. The GOP has become crazier and stupider than even I had imagined.

President Obama hit Republican upside the head with the unAmerican stick yesterday.

They certainly deserved it.

Let’s get that straight now. Obama did not “re-name” the mountain. He removed the fake name that had been placed on top of the mountain’s real name.

The mountain had been called “Denali” (“the Great One”) by the natives for centuries until someone decided to name it after a President who had never even been to Alaska. This was done against the wishes on those in Alaska at the time. The move to make the official name “Denali” began back in 1975, when the Alaska legislature asked the President to change the name. And currently, the change has the support of the majority of Alaskans — most of whom are die-hard Republicans. In fact, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, supported the change, and was happy for Obama’s decision, saying this a few days ago:

It’s bad enough that some conservatives are trying to pretend this latest attack had nothing to do with racism when the shooter himself told everyone before and during the attack that it was all about racism. It’s bad enough that people in South Carolina are pretending like this has nothing to do with a culture that rewards racism while flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol.

But we are once again getting the asinine argument that this all could have been stopped if only everyone had a gun.

One of the reasons we can’t have nice things these days is because too many people refuse to see gray areas. You either agree with them or you’re the enemy. Moderation and compromise are not virtues to these people.

There are many people who disagree with gay marriage and gay rights who are decent, honest, and well-meaning people. They are not evil. They are just ignorant — ignorant of the harm they are causing, ignorant of what it means to be gay or lesbian. They have been misled by their religion and their leaders. I suspect that these people, like many, just haven’t yet realized that society has changed; that their views are not acceptable; that they need to re-examine what their religion is telling them. This does not come easy.

Brian Williams’s story about what happened to a helicopter  he was on changed over the years, and become more exciting each time.  He finally admitted that he had exaggerated and apologized, and has taken a leave of absence from his job as host of the NBC Nightly News.  As he should.

His job requires him to be believable.  It’s a requirement.  We expect our news to be true, and if we cannot believe the newscaster, it puts all of the rest of the news in question.

 A murder of Tea Party governors was elected four years ago and they immediately went about destroying their states’ economies.  (I wasn’t sure what word to use to describe a group of Tea Party governors, and a “murder of crows” came to mind for some reason.)  In Maine, Michigan, Kansas and Pennsylvania, these governors went on to become the most unpopular governors in the country.

Governor Wolf (artist’s approximation)

Last year I gave a challenge to which no one could meet.  So let’s try again: Find me one example of anyone trying to prevent people from celebrating Christmas.  Just one.

What you’ll find are a bunch of whiners complaining that they don’t get to force their religion on everyone else.

Why isn’t the Surgeon General doing something about this whole ebola mess?  Fox News wants to know!

Oh, right — the Republicans have been refusing to confirm Obama’s nominee for half a year or so now, because he had the nerve to say that maybe we should have background checks for guns and then we might not have as many people dying from gunshot wounds.

Seriously.  Forget that Obama is President for a minute.  Or pretend there is a Republican in there.