Capitol Hill Blue Forums Hot Topics & Breaking News The RoundTable Roundtable for March 2016

Let's be honest, when you picture a 2nd Amendmenteur in your mind, you're picturing a guy who looks like this - I know I do!

(Images removed. REASON: Once is enough LOL)

This is what I grew up with:



Or this:



SOMEWHERE along the way it all morphed into some lunatic bunch of cult members who simply couldn't exist if there wasn't an imaginary enemy to attack.

Yes imaginary, because when it all started going koo koo, there wasn't NEARLY as much impetus behind a gun ban as there is now, and I am confident that the NRA brought it all upon themselves.

Guns have been around forever in this country, they only became a problem when Chuck Heston and his progeny decided that his fellow Americans were the enemy for merely suggesting some standard regulation.

Rick, I know you love the hairy guys but take a look at his surroundings. A single bed and a folding chair at a ladies writing desk. Is that a sock on the floor beside the chair.....

I imagine that 2nd Amendmentuers still live in their mother's basement as well - those hairy knuckle-draggers.

Hey all — so glad as I rejoin Reader Rant to see so many of you alive and hopefully well and still posting -
my life in the past two years has been one of amazing change marked by a cross country move. My wife of 40 years died five years ago and I was stuck in an existence of - rather than spend time with a lot of adjectives for let’ss say I was stuck in the muck and mire of loneliness and boredom. Then I decided to move to a retirement community, Willamette View, in Portland Oregon…. and here I am adjusting (in fits and starts) to living in a continuing care retirement community on the bluffs above the Willamette River. It is a mostly liberal group of residents from backgrounds of teaching, science, and human services, with very few retired business people.

HOSKINS: Is that you as pdx Rick? Is that the same old avatar too? If it is you, go to my blog halbrown.org and email me or PM me, and let’s get together at long last. In fact, any of my old Reader Rant friends, check out my blog to see what my life is like now.

Since March 6th I’ve added a brief daily opinion section. Today’s follows:

March 19, 2016

Politics: “Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land.” Fox News spokesperson

Is Trump really a human? Trump, speaking in Utah (video) doubted that Mitt Romney was really a Mormon. This got me to wondering. I compared side-by-side photos of Megyn Kelly and Trump. Take a look at his facial structure and compare them to Kelly's, arguably a real human. Trump’s eyes are near the top of his head, each brow and each eye are a different size, he has no cheekbones, his nose looks like it is pasted on, the distance from the tip of his nose to the bottom of his chin is abnormally large, and of course is mouth his abnormally small. Oh, and then there are those stubby fingers! I will have to run this by one of my friends who is an expert on DNA anomalies.

I won’t say it’s true, but I heard that his orange dyed hair and face hides translucent skin.

Hillary goes stumping.

My avatar is Gromit, as in Wallace & Gromit

Well stuff me into a suit and call me Freddy, it sure is good to see you back again, Hal Brown!

Far as I know, Mr. Hoskins is still Mr. Hoskins but CALIFORNIA RICK went and became PDX Rick because: PORTLANDIA!

I think Trump is the end product of three or more decades of dumbing down, reality TV, shortcuts in higher education and billions of right wing think tank dollars all funneled into a brute force propaganda bludgeon that is used to shape fact free fluff into dog whistle nuggets guaranteed to make the common man feel important.

California Rick transformed to PDX Rick…. glad Portland let him in as there’s an attitude among Portlandia hipsters against California carpetbaggers. I recognized him from his avatar. I was confusing him with Phil Hoskins for a bit - old age I guess.

My new avatar is the nose of one of my Westies.

I agree that Trump’s popularity comes from everything you say. We thought we lived through the celebration of mediocrity - when many of us thought Milton Berle and Red Skelton appealed to pinheads. Little did we know what would happen when the TV networks discovered there was an audience for cheaply produced so-called reality shows.

I am lucky to have found a retirement facility to live where there are a lot of smart liberals. We discuss the dumbing down of America all the time, not that propaganda doesn’t persuade reasonably intelligent people too. I attempted to persuade an Obama-Hillary-Bernie hater, though intelligent, resident and friend at our coffee shop this morning that most of what she was saying about those three were lies put out by the right wing agit-prop machine. “Hillary wants to raise my taxes by 18%! I’m already paying $4,000 a quarter in estimated taxes." I figure since she probably brings in $500 k a year maybe she should have her taxes raised 18%. But we got down to me saying Hillary never said that, and she insisting Hillary did say it. Of course I couldn’t look it up until now and see that what she must have heard was something about Hillary’s proposal to increase taxes on short term capital gains to encourage investors to hold stock for longer periods.

Personally, I never got the whole capital gains tax break. Income is income, and all it did was favor investors over wage earners. I am currently a beneficiary of this tax loophole (as I'm living on investments) but I'd rather pay the taxes.