Hillary Clinton’s claim on the rationale behind Bill Clinton’s support for DoMA is total bull

In case you missed it, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was caught red-handed trying to rewrite history. Specifically, Hillary tried to claim that the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996, was a defensive measure designed to appease religious conservatives, who were pushing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have banned same-sex couples from getting married anywhere in the country.

A 1996 memo, written by Clinton Administration officials Jack Quinn, George Stephanopoulos, and Marsha Scott, gives some insight as to the rationale behind what prompted Bill Clinton to sign DoMA, which was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress with all but one Republican and many Democrats voting for it, into law. While the memo mentioned efforts to enact marriage equality at the state level in Hawaii in the mid-1990’s, nowhere in the memo does it reference any kind of movement to enact a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In fact, the memo clearly referenced the fact that Bill opposed marriage equality in 1996.

Chris Geidner has done a ton of research on Bill Clinton’s role in regards to DoMA, and he has found zero evidence to back up Hillary’s claim that Bill supported DoMA as any kind of defensive measure to prevent religious conservatives from enacting a federal constitutional amendment enshrining anti-LGBT bigotry in the U.S. Constitution. To put that another way, Hillary’s claim on Bill’s rationale for supporting discriminatory legislation that was struck down by a conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court long after Bill was out of office is a bunch of bull.

I’m from an area of Illinois that is full of Religious Right extremists, and I’m very familiar with the Religious Right’s political modus operandi. If they had enough support to amend the U.S. Constitution to enshrine their bigotry in the Constitution at any point in modern American history, they would have done so as quickly as possible. Their whole political modus operandi is to do everything possible to shove their religious beliefs down everybody else’s throats. For the Clintons to try to rewrite history by claiming that DoMA was some kind of defensive measure designed to ward off the Religious Right’s attempt to enshrine their bigotry in the Constitution is flatly absurd.

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Hillary Clinton and her allies are running a gender-baiting campaign

Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she is not going to run a campaign on the issues and, instead, is going to run a gender-baiting campaign by emphasizing the fact that she’s a woman (she did this at least twice that I know of at the first Democratic presidential debate) and falsely accusing Bernie Sanders of sexism. Now, some of Hillary’s allies, most notably Stephanie Schriock, a career political operative who leads the big-money Democratic establishment organization EMILY’s List, are attacking Bernie over one of his campaign operatives (idiotically, in my opinion) floating the idea of Hillary possibly being Bernie’s running mate should Bernie win the Democratic nomination.

This is disgusting gutter politics from the Hillary Clinton campaign and Hillary’s allies, and it would seriously damage the Democratic Party if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination. Hillary is, for all intents and purposes, running her presidential campaign on the fact that she’s a woman. That would be the ruination of democracy in America if Hillary were to win the nomination that way. The qualifications to be President of the United States are that one must be at least 35 years of age, a natural-born U.S. citizen, and a U.S. resident for at least 14 years at the time of inauguration. The Constitution does not include a gender qualification for the presidency, and there are, to my knowledge, four Democrats (Hillary, Bernie, Martin O’Malley, and Lawrence Lessig) running for our party’s presidential nomination who are legally qualified to run for president.

For those of you who are invariably going to accuse me of sexism, I don’t think it’s feminist for one to run a political campaign primarily on the candidate’s gender. It is feminist to run a campaign for public office in support of ideas like paid family leave, reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work, and other pro-woman ideas.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is running an ideas-based campaign. Bernie is more than willing to talk about actual political issues like women’s rights, gun safety, and legalization of marijuana. That’s the kind of campaign I support.

Former Wisconsin politician Kelda Roys finds success in the real estate business

AUTHOR’S NOTE: An aunt on my dad’s side of my family is a real estate agent in the Westville, Illinois area, and my aunt’s real estate business would be a competitor to Kelda Roys’s business, if Kelda’s Wisconsin-based business expands into Illinois as planned.

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Remember Kelda Roys? If not, I will tell you that she was a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly who represented parts of Dane County until she lost her bid for the Democratic nomination in the 2nd Congressional District of Wisconsin in 2012 to fellow Democrat Mark Pocan.

I will also tell you that Kelda is a very successful businesswoman nowadays. Kelda founded OpenHomes, a real estate business in Wisconsin, not long after losing her congressional bid, and her business has been very successful. A couple of weeks ago, the Madison Club, an elite social club in Madison, Wisconsin, held a startup business pitch competition based on the ABC (first-run) and CNBC (reruns) reality television show Shark Tank, which was won by Kelda and OpenHomes:

OpenHomes won the Shark Tank-style pitch contest at the Madison Club on (October 15), and with that, a year’s membership to the 106-year-old, private social club that looks out on Lake Monona.

[…]

The young company, at 30 W. Mifflin St., offers a new way to sell homes that it says is faster and more efficient and involves only a 1 percent commission.

“The average agent closes nine deals a year. With OpenHomes, one agent using our platform can close about 45 deals a year,” Roys said.

Kelda’s real estate business has been successful enough that Kelda is considering expanding her business outside of Wisconsin:

Roys is starting a fundraising round and hopes to get $500,000 from investors to expand into Illinois and Minnesota in 2016. “Our company is growing. Now, we want to scale and that’s going to take additional capital,” she said.

In an era where many former politicians get caught doing ridiculous things, Kelda Roys is one of the few former congressional candidates in this country who can claim that she has actually been successful at something outside of politics and hasn’t embarrassed her community in any way.

My proposed projected scoring system for projecting golf scores in stroke play tournaments

AUTHOR’S NOTE #1: The blog post includes underlined numbers to indicate that the numbers that are underlined are repeating decimals.

AUTHOR’S NOTE #2: The projected scoring system described below is not to be confused with the “most likely score” method that is part of the U.S. Golf Association (USGA) handicap system and designed mainly for recreational golf.

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Unlike most sports, it’s not fair to end a round of a stroke-play golf tournament early because of bad weather or some other condition that prevents the round from being completed on its scheduled day. That’s because it wouldn’t be fair to allow one golfer to play fewer holes than another golfer in the same tournament, as, depending on the scores being set by the golfers playing the entire course, it would either be a huge advantage or disadvantage to the golfer playing fewer holes. Also, because each round of a stroke-play golf tournament is usually scheduled for most of the available daylight hours on a given day, and golf courses don’t have artificial lighting of any kind to allow for nighttime play, any suspension of play for a significant length of time will invariably result in golfers who were among the last to tee off not being able to complete their rounds before darkness.

However, a projected scoring system, in which a mathematical formula is used to project an full-round score for a golfer who is unable to complete the full round due to the suspension of play, would eliminate the unfairness associated with ending a round of a stroke-play golf tournament early. At least one sport that I know of, cricket, uses a projected scoring system for some events. In One Day International (ODI) and List A limited-overs cricket matches, the Duckworth-Lewis method, a mathematical formula that produces a projected result if the second team to bat cannot complete their innings due to bad weather, darkness, or some other reason, can be employed in certain situations.

In order to speed up stroke-play golf tournaments (most, but not all, professional golf tournaments use the stroke-play format) that are affected by bad weather or other conditions resulting in play being suspended before the completion of a round, I’m proposing a projected scoring system that can be used if a round is suspended after all golfers have completed at least 12 holes on an 18-hole golf course (at least 6 holes played by all players for 9-hole courses), but before all golfers complete the round, and play cannot be restarted later in the day.

If a golfer had completed a hole other than the final hole he or she was scheduled to play, but had not yet hit his or her tee shot on the next hole, at the time of suspension of play, the formula used to calculate a golfer’s projected score is p/f = s/c, in which p is the projected score relative to par for the round, f is the number of holes in a full round (this is universally 18 for professional tournaments), s is the score relative to par for the holes completed, and c is the number of holes completed. Since p is the variable, one must solve for p in order to get a projected score relative to par. Should p be a number with one or more decimal places, it shall be rounded to the nearest whole number. Should p be a non-whole number ending in .5 or greater, it should be rounded away from zero (i.e., 1.67 is rounded to 2, while -1.67 is rounded to -2). Should p be a non-whole number ending in anything less than .5, it should be rounded towards zero (i.e., 1.33 is rounded to 1, while -1.33 is rounded to -1).

After the projected score relative to par is calculated, the second step involves assigning projected birdies or projected bogeys to holes that the golfer did not play because of the suspension of play. The formula used to determine how many projected birdies or projected bogeys should be assigned is |p| – |s| = b, in which |p| is the absolute value of the projected score relative to par, as rounded per the rounding rules that I described in the previous paragraph, |s| is the absolute value of the score relative to par for the holes completed, and b is the number of projected birdies or projected bogeys to be assigned. The variable in this formula is b, and whether or not p is positive or negative, not |p|, is used to determine whether to assign projected birdies or projected bogeys.

Here’s how the assignment of projected birdies and projected bogeys for each golfer would be conducted:

• Should b be zero, projected pars shall be assigned to all holes that the golfer did not play prior to the suspension of play.
• Should p be a negative number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of birdies to be assigned is less than the number of holes the golfer did not play (i.e., b < (f – c)), a number of projected birdies equal to b shall be assigned to the easiest b holes that the golfer did play, and projected pars shall be assigned on all other holes that the golfer did not play.
• Should p be a positive number, b be a non-zero number, and b < (f – c), a number of projected bogeys equal to b shall be assigned to the most difficult b holes that the golfer did not play, and projected pars shall be assigned to all other holes that the golfer did not play.
• Should p be a negative number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of birdies to be assigned is equal to number of holes the golfer did not play (i.e., b = f – c), projected birdies shall be assigned to all holes that the golfer did not play. Should p be a negative number, b be a non-zero number, and b > (f – c) but 2b < (f – c), a number of projected eagles equal to b – (f – c) shall be assigned to the easiest b – (f – c) holes that the golfer did not play, and projected birdies shall be assigned to all other holes that the golfer did not play. Should p be a negative number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of birdies to be assigned is twice the number of holes the golfer did not play (i.e., 2b = (f – c)), projected eagles shall be assigned to all holes that the golfer did not play.
• Should p be a positive number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of bogeys to be assigned is equal to number of holes the golfer did not play (i.e., b = f – c), projected bogeys shall be assigned to all holes that the golfer did not play. Should p be a positive number, b be a non-zero number, and b > (f – c) but 2b < (f – c), a number of projected double bogeys equal to b – (f – c) shall be assigned to the most difficult b – (f – c) holes that the golfer did not play, and projected bogeys shall be assigned to all other holes that the golfer did not play. Should p be a positive number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of bogeys to be assigned is twice the number of holes the golfer did not play (i.e., 2b = (f – c)), projected double bogeys shall be assigned to all holes that the golfer did not play.
• Should p be a negative number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of birdies to be assigned is more than twice the number of holes the golfer did not play, one shall use the formula a = b/(f – c), in which a is the number of projected strokes under par divided by the number of holes the golfer did not play, to calculate how many strokes under par should be assigned to each hole. Should a be a whole number, the number of strokes that shall be assigned to each hole that the golfer did not play shall be the par of the hole minus a. Should a be a fraction, a shall be rendered as an improper fraction in which the denominator shall equal (f – c), the numerator shall be divided by the denominator in order to yield a quotient with a remainder, the number of projected strokes on the easiest number of unplayed holes equal to the remainder shall be the par of the hole minus the sum of a rounded down to the nearest whole number and one, and the number of projected strokes on all other unplayed holes shall be the par of the hole minus a rounded down to the nearest whole number.
• Should p be a positive number, b be a non-zero number, and the number of bogeys to be assigned is more than twice the number of holes the golfer did not play, one shall use the formula a = b/(f – c), in which a is the number of projected strokes over par divided by the number of holes the golfer did not play, to calculate how many strokes over par should be assigned to each hole. Should a be a whole number, the number of strokes that shall be assigned to each hole that the golfer did not play shall be the par of the hole plus a. Should a be a fraction, a shall be rendered as an improper fraction in which the denominator shall equal (f – c), the numerator shall be divided by the denominator in order to yield a quotient with a remainder, the number of projected strokes on the most difficult number of unplayed holes equal to the remainder shall be the par of the hole plus the sum of a rounded down to the nearest whole number and one, and the number of projected strokes on all other unplayed holes shall be the par of the hole plus a rounded down to the nearest whole number.

To determine which holes projected birdies and bogeys are to be assigned, either average scores relative to par for each hole (counting only those who completed their round and if at least eight players completed their rounds prior to suspension of play), each hole’s handicap rating, or the lengths of the holes can be used.

For golfers who were playing a hole at the time of suspension of play, two separate projected score calculations are made. The first calculation, called the calculation for completed holes, treats the golfer as if he or she did not tee off on the hole he or she was playing at the time of suspension of play. The second calculation, called the calculation for played holes, treats the golfer as if he or she recorded a score of the number of strokes he or she made on the hole he or she was playing at the time of suspension of play, plus one stroke. The calculation that results in the higher score relative to par is the calculation used for the projected score for a golfer who was playing a hole at the time of suspension of play, then the calculation and assignment of projected birdies and bogies is done using the projected score calculation that results in the higher score relative to par.

Had this system been in use in the 2005 PGA Championship at the par-70 Lower Course at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, New Jersey, the final round would have been not restarted on Monday (as it was in real-life), projected scores would have been used for several golfers who did not complete their rounds on Sunday due to play being suspended, and the tournament would have been declared over on Sunday. This is because all golfers had played at least 12 holes (in fact, all golfers played at least 13 holes) prior to play being suspended on Sunday. I’ll use two real-life examples from that tournament in order to explain how the projected score system works.

In the 2005 PGA Championship, Steve Elkington (who finished in a tie for second place with Thomas Bjorn in real-life with a final round of 1-over-par 71 and four-round tournament score of 3-under-par 277) had finished the 15th hole and was one over par for the round at the time final round play was suspended on Sunday. Had projected scores instead of Monday play been used to determine the outcome of the 2005 PGA Championship, here’s how Elkington’s projected score would have been determined:

p/18 = 1/15
p = 1.16, rounded to 1
|1| – |1| = 0
Projected pars on all holes not played by Elkington prior to suspension of play
Projected final round score of 1-over-par 71 for Elkington
Projected tournament score of 3-under-par 277 for Elkington

In the 2005 PGA Championship, Phil Mickelson (who won the tournament in real-life with a final round of 2-over-par 72 and four-round tournament score of 4-under-par 276) had made three strokes on the par-4 14th hole, but had not yet holed out on the 14th hole, and was two over par for the round, and four under par for the entire tournament, at the time final round play was suspended on Sunday. Had projected scores instead of Monday play been used to determine the outcome of the 2005 PGA Championship, here’s how Mickelson’s projected score would have been calculated:

Calculation for completed holes
p/18 = 2/13
p=2.769230, rounded to 3

Calculation for played holes
p/18 = 2/14
p=2.571428, rounded to 3

Calculation for completed holes used to project Mickelson’s score
|3| – |2| = 1
Projected bogey on hardest hole not completed by Mickelson prior to suspension of play
Projected par on other four holes not completed by Mickelson prior to suspension of play
Projected final round score of 3-over-par 73 for Mickelson
Projected tournament score of 3-under-par 277 for Mickelson

The next example that I’ll give is a completely fictional example that takes place on a fictional par-72 golf course in the first round of a stroke-play tournament. Because of a late-afternoon thunderstorm that hit the golf course after Bogey McSandtrap (the name of the fictional golfer) finished the 12th hole of his round (McSandtrap began his round at the 1st hole), and all players in the first round were able to complete at least 12 holes prior to the suspension of play due to the thunderstorm, projected scores were used to determine first-round scores for McSandtrap and the other golfers who did not finish their rounds. The fictional golf course has a total of 16 par-4 holes, a par-3 8th hole, and a par-5 12th hole. McSandtrap did extremely poorly in the 12 holes that he played, taking a whopping 104 strokes to complete the first 12 holes of the golf course, or 56 over par. Based on average scores for each hole relative to par among those who completed their rounds prior to the suspension of play, of holes 13-18 (all par-4 holes), 18 was the most difficult (average score of 4.74), followed by 14 (average score of 4.38), 17 (average score of 4.33), 13 (average score of 4.04), 16 (average score of 3.85), and 15 (average score of 3.72). Here’s how McSandtrap’s projected score would be calculated under this fictional example:

p/18 = 56/12
p=81
|81| – |56| = 25
25/(18 – 12) = 25/6 = 4 R 1
Projected quintuple bogey (five-over-par for the hole) on hole 18 for McSandtrap
Projected quadruple bogey (four-over-par for the hole) on holes 13-17 for McSandtrap
Projected first-round score of 81-over-par 153 for McSandtrap

My projected score method cannot be used in all situations. A notable example of an instance where my projected score method couldn’t have been used was the second round of the 2015 Open Championship at the Old Course at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland, which was suspended twice on Friday (first suspension due to heavy rain; second suspension due to darkness) and once on Saturday (due to high winds), with play being suspended on Saturday for nearly 10 1/2 hours! However, in regards to the second suspension of play, projected scores couldn’t have been used in that scenario since a number of golfers were waiting to play the 11th hole at the time play was suspended. However, if play has to be suspended for any reason after all players have completed at least 12 holes of a round of golf, and the round can’t be resumed later in the day, using my projected scoring system is a great alternative to finishing the round on another day.

Wisconsin Republicans are delivering a kill shot to democracy

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post contains a link to an article that includes an error. Specifically, Wisconsin State Rep. Andy Jorgensen (D) lives in Milton, Wisconsin, not Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, although Jorgensen did live in Fort Atkinson prior to the post-2010 Census gerrymandering of Wisconsin’s state legislative districts.

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Republicans that control Wisconsin state government are delivering a kill shot to democracy by enacting a series of laws designed to effectively destroy democracy in Wisconsin.

The Progressive magazine columnist and Madison Common Council member Rebecca Kemble wrote a must-read article about Republican efforts to destroy democracy in Wisconsin, which you can read here.

The Republican efforts to destroy democracy in Wisconsin consists of the following three pieces of legislation:

• 2015 Wisconsin Act 64 – While bribery and many forms of political corruption are still illegal in Wisconsin, this law effectively decriminalizes bribery and corruption in Wisconsin by removing the only effective tool in Wisconsin state law to prosecute bribery and corruption: the John Doe investigation. Republican Governor Scott Walker, himself the target of two John Doe investigations that led to a total of six of his associates either being convicted or pleading guilty to various crimes, has already signed this bill into law.
• Wisconsin Assembly Bill 387 – This legislation, among other things, allows coordination between non-federal candidates for public office in Wisconsin and outside groups like SuperPACs, ends the legal requirement that candidates disclose their campaign donor’s employers, and eliminates campaign contribution limits in Wisconsin. When this bill was voted on in the Wisconsin Assembly, not a single member of the Assembly voted against the legislation. That’s because, in one of the most ridiculous political stunts that I’ve ever seen, Democratic members of the Wisconsin Assembly recused themselves from voting on the legislation citing a conflict of interest, but the conflict of interest statute they cited specifically exempts state legislative votes on legislation to change state laws and regulations.
• Wisconsin Assembly Bill 388 – This legislation would abolish the officially non-partisan Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), which is composed of six retired judges and is responsible for both state-level election administration and enforcing state ethics laws in Wisconsin, with separate state elections and ethics commissions composed of political appointees of major-party state legislative leaders and the governor. If this bill were to become law, major-party state legislative leaders could legally appoint themselves or other elected officials to the state elections commission in Wisconsin and remain in elected office, which would be a brazen conflict of interest.

The Wisconsin GOP’s effort to destroy democracy in Wisconsin reminds me a lot of the right-wing Fidesz party in Hungary entrenching itself into power by gerrymandering electoral districts to benefit Fidesz and other right-wing politicians, as well as amending the Hungarian Constitution to undermine civil liberties and entrench Fidesz into power in Hungary. The kind of partisan takeovers normally seen in places like Eastern Europe is taking place right here in the United States, specifically, in Wisconsin.

ENDORSEMENT: Maria Chappelle-Nadal for 1st Congressional District of Missouri

I proudly endorse Maria Chappelle-Nadal in the U.S. House Democratic primary in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, which includes the city of St. Louis and northern parts of St. Louis County.

Maria isn’t just part of the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s a way of life for her. During the Ferguson protests that were sparked by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shooting and killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, Maria was hit with tear gas that was fired by law enforcement. Make no mistake about it, Maria herself has been a victim of police brutality, and, if she’s elected to Congress, she’ll fight to end police brutality in America. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is more passionate about racial justice issues than Maria.

Maria is running against incumbent Congressman William Lacy Clay, Jr., a backbencher who was virtually silent while chaos erupted in his congressional district.

Paul Ryan opposed abortion rights for women impregnated by rapists during failed 2012 VP bid

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the unsuccessful Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2012, is now officially considering a bid for U.S. House Speaker after previously having repeatedly refused to do so.

However, Ryan won’t negotiate with the House Freedom Caucus, a group of Republican right-wing extremists in the House that have refused to back a GOP establishment candidate for speaker unless said establishment candidate agrees to giving the Republican rank-and-file, which is chock full of right-wing nuts, more power in the House and cover-your-rear-end treatment from the GOP leadership every time someone in the rank-or-file says or does something incredibly stupid.

While Ryan considers whether or not to seek the speakership, I think it’s appropriate for me to mention that this is an actual quote from Paul Ryan from when he was running for vice president in 2012:

Well, I’m very proud of my pro-life record, and I’ve always adopted the idea, the position, that the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life.

What Paul Ryan effectively said was that he thinks that any woman who was impregnated by a rapist should be forced to carry the fetus(es) to term, even if she does not want to. That’s because Ryan was asked by an interviewer about his thoughts on whether or not women who are impregnated by a rapist should be allowed to seek an abortion, and Ryan said that he was strongly anti-abortion and that the “method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life”. That is an absolutely barbaric point of view. While there was YouTube video of Ryan’s remarks online back in 2012, the video has long since been removed from YouTube. However, I’ve been able to confirm that Ryan actually made the remarks, because the International Business Times, which is where I got the Ryan quote from, and several other websites with credible political reporting and/or commentary, such as the Huffington Post and AlterNet, reported on it back in 2012, and their articles are still online.

Paul Ryan’s view that women impregnated by rapists should be forced to carry their fetuses to term is barbaric and sexist. Now, he wants to be House Speaker so that he’s in even more powerful of a position to control women’s bodies by legislative fiat, especially if a Republican were to win the White House in next year’s presidential race.

When it comes to fighting against Wisconsin Republicans’ push to dismantle good government, Dianne Hesselbein leads

Wisconsin Republicans are spending virtually all of their time trying to dismantle what little remains of Wisconsin’s once-proud tradition of good government and enact a ton of blatantly partisan legislation. One of those blatantly partisan pieces of legislation is legislation that would dismantle Wisconsin’s civil service system and allow Republicans like Governor Scott Walker to install political cronies in every kind of Wisconsin state government job that you can think of. In a recent op-ed in the Madison, Wisconsin-based newspaper The Cap Times, State Rep. Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), described the Republican plan for dismantling Wisconsin’s civil service system:

The new Republican law will introduce an element of fear in the workplace. New employees will face a full year of probation instead of the current 60 days. (It was to be two years, but the bill’s authors started to feel a chill and backed off.) During probation, new hires will be in a free-fire zone and can be fired at will. If there are layoffs, seniority will not count. Raises will become individual bonuses awarded to the favored few.

Hiring and firing will be controlled by the governor’s political arm — the Department of Administration — not the home agency. Employees will no longer have the assurance that, so long as they show up and do their job well, their job will be secure. Now, for the first time since the Progressives created it in 1905, they will have to worry about political factors.

There’s plenty of other odious pieces of legislation that Republicans want to enact in Wisconsin when it comes to dismantling good government. These include replacing Wisconsin’s non-partisan government watchdog with two separate partisan state commissions, as well as rewriting Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws to allow more money to flow into the political system and allow campaign donors to not disclose who employs them.

I’m glad that someone like Dianne Hesselbein is strongly opposing the Republicans’ efforts to make Wisconsin more like Illinois, a state rife with political corruption and cronyism.

Hillary Clinton suggests going too far on gun safety

Hillary Clinton, whether she knew the fact that Australia instituted a mandatory confiscation of assault weapons in the mid-1990’s or not, stated that “Australia is a good example” to model a federal gun buyback program after, and that a federal gun buyback program is “something worth considering”.

I want to make two points about this.

First, the gun proliferation lobby is, not surprisingly, attacking Hillary over her remarks right away. However, they’ve distorted Hillary’s words to make it look like she fully supports a mass confiscation of guns in this country. In reality, she’s not yet outright supported a mass confiscation of guns, but she did say that she would be open to the idea of supporting a federal gun buyback program of some kind. If the NRA starts running ridiculous spoofs of the “How to Speak Australian” Foster’s beer commercials, you’ll know that the NRA has no fucking clue as to what the fuck they’re doing.

Second, if Hillary does decide to fully support an Australian-style mandatory assault weapon confiscation, she would be running head-first into opposition from virtually the entire Republican Party and a large chunk of the Democratic Party. There’s two reasons for this. First, supporting taking legally-obtained firearms from law-abiding Americans is extremely unpopular in this country, even among Democrats and with gun safety being a major political issue in this country. Second, unlike the Australian Constitution, which has no provision banning the Australian Parliament from enacting a mandatory gun buyback program, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution would be interpreted by most judges, even many liberal judges, as banning the enactment of a mandatory gun buyback program in this country.

Make no mistake about it, I am not a gun nut or a puppet for the gun lobby. I support universal background checks, closing the gun show loophole, banning the sale of assault weapons, requiring gun owners to report lost or stolen guns to law enforcement, and enacting a gun registry. These are my views, and they do not necessarily line up with those of any presidential candidate.

While my political views may not line up 100% with those of Bernie Sanders on every single issue, he’s the only reasonable person running for president when it comes to gun safety, and his views on guns are the closest to mine. He supports background checks, ending the gun show loophole, and banning the sale of assault weapons. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has suggested the idea of taking legally-obtained firearms away from law-abiding Americans, something that I think goes too far.

Former Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott now lobbying for pro-rape legislation in Congress

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post contains extremely strong and profane language referring to sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.

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This is one of the most repulsive ideas I’ve ever heard of…a group of Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ), Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), have proposed legislation that would prohibit colleges and universities from disciplining students who rape someone, unless law enforcement becomes involved in a rape case.

Guess who is lobbying for this ridiculous piece of legislation? Chester Trent Lott, Sr., the former Senate Majority Leader who is more commonly known as Trent Lott. You might remember Lott from his infamous remarks from 2002, in which he publicly defended segregationist Strom Thurmond’s third-party 1948 presidential campaign (Thurmond lost to President Harry Truman). Those remarks forced Trott to resign from the leadership of the Senate Republicans. Now, Lott is lobbying for pro-rape legislation that would make it much easier for college students to rape someone, which is a criminal act in every jurisdiction in this country, and not get caught.

While the proposed legislation is called the Safe Campus Act (SCA), this legislation would actually make college campuses far more dangerous for students. What this legislation would do is effectively force college and universities in this country to give a free pass to rapists if nobody reports the criminal act to law enforcement. Congressional Republicans and Trent Lott are supporting the idea of forcing institutions of higher education to cover up sexual assaults perpetrated by their students.

Anyone who supports this ridiculous legislation apparently believes that male college students have an unfettered right to fuck every woman they want to, even if the women don’t consent to the sexual acts. No person in this country has an unfettered right to perform sexual acts on someone else without their consent, in fact, it’s a crime to rape someone.

I’ve seen the Republican Party do incredibly asinine things in my lifetime, but this is the single most repulsive thing I’ve ever seen the Republicans do.