Click on the picture for the larger version.

 
Fight for everlasting peace, Mega Man!
 

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.

“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

“Why? Where are you going to, John?”

“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”

“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

“I got a better chance of getting laid.”

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”

…

Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”

…

Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.” McCain exploded: “Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone in the room.”

The article goes through his role in the Keating Five (a cover-up for a bank that lost its customers’ money by gambling it on real estate speculation), his exploits as an extremely spoiled, privileged brat in school and the Navy, and plenty of his other supremely selfish exploits.

There’s a similar relaxingness about painting, especially if you don’t really know how to paint. Paint, to me, is quite uncontrollable. I brush out a stroke, and usually, it ends up not having the HSV value that I thought it would, or it starts dribbling into adjacent strokes, or it’s all streaky instead of smooth. Once you accept that, then the unpredictability becomes amusing. Usually.
 

So, here’s my guy:

Somehow, he ended up with the color scheme from the Five Alive carton. (I bet that stuff would be not so great if I had it now, but I remember it as the pinnacle of fruit drinks when I was 7. I hear it’s still in grocery stores in other states, so I’ll have to look out for it.)
 

As is often the case with the color schemes I come up with, it looked better when I moved the hue slider on it in Photoshop:

Lesson learned: When painting stylish flame decals, don’t skip out on the red. It activates the “Aw, hell yeah” centers of the brain.
 

Here’s Katt’s dragon:

He’s definitely way more animal-like than my dragon, what with the snout, tongue, and curly toes, yet at the same time, he knows the ways of man.

Art, like, makes you think and stuff.

‘The problem with this debate is that there’s way too much “There’s Big Scary Stuff out there that’s gonna get you!”

And any time that feeling is established, simplistic conservative talking points play better.’

So, yeah, I can’t say who “won.”

Update: EDS thinks McCain won. I can kinda see that, but what I’ve realized is that I have no idea what criteria these people who are still undecided are using to judge debates and candidate worthiness. Here’s some of his thoughts on the debate:

EDS

Hey, here’s some good news: I think I’m the only person who thought McCain easily won that debate!

Me

The Corner at the National Review also thinks that.

EDS

Well, they probably don’t count.

Me

The problem with figuring out who won the debates is that I can never figure out exactly what is going to play and what isn’t.

EDS

All those undecideds on CBS thought Obama won, which I thought would’ve gone exactly the other way.
 

Me

In 2000, sighing and smirking was a big deal.

Now? Who knows?

McCain had more pure aggression, but I really couldn’t tell if these nutty undecideds would like that.

EDS

Yeah, I thought for sure the condescension by McCain would go over well.

Me

Ah, that’s good.

Yeah, I thought he looked like a dick, but I’m biased.

EDS

But people loved it when GWB was a dick!

Me

But they hated when Gore was a dick! It’s all so confusing.

I was sort of thinking at points Obama was losing because he wasn’t saying things I would have said.

Bridge to Nowhere, bullshit that’s not really a win in Iraq, etc.

But at least he had stuff to say. That may have played better.

I’ve come to realize that I have no idea how these people are that still haven’t decided think at all.

And when he did the basic math with earmarks vs. huge tax cuts, I was at first like, yeah!

Then, later, wait - but people hate all math.

EDS

Yeah… even with me, when it comes to SotU or debates and they start throwing around numbers, I stop paying attention, because I know they’re all crap anyway.

I finally noticed something: if you’re careful, you can make 900 million sound like a bigger number than 18 billion.

Me

Heh, that is a good point.
Today

Me

Oh, yeah, there was a point at which Obama said the war had cost over a trillion dollars, but he said it casually, and I’m not sure people get how much that is without someone putting really heavy emphasis on it.

EDS

“Yes, my plan will cost eighteen billion dollars. But Senator Obama’s plan will raise your taxes by nine…. HUNDRED…. million… dollars.”

Me

Hahaha.

EDS

I think the proper response would be, “John wants to spend eighteen thousand million dollars.”

Me

Oh, I liked McCain’s prop usage.

“I have a pen right here, and…”

“I have a bracelet.”

EDS

I HAZ A PEN!

Me

Heh, there’s three lol candidate images waiting to be made right there.

EDS

I HAZ A PEN. WAIT, PEN IZ OLD. I CAN HAZ BETTER PEN?

Me

I HAS BRASELET

EDS

Thinking back, that was probably the one real doddering old man moment. What the hell was wrong with the pen?

Me

I ALSO HAS BRASELET

Yeah. It’s not like it had to work.

It’s a prop!

I don’t remember what exactly when it was, but McCain totally froze at some point.

I think it was when he was asked what lessons were learned from Vietnam.

EDS

OMG. The transcript of that moment is great:

“As president of the United States, I want to assure you, I’ve got a pen. This one’s kind of old. I’ve got a pen…”

Me

You know, for the most part, he was way sharper than in the Republican primary debates.

Well, the pieces of them that I saw.

The Mississippi State Athletic Commission should have done drug tests beforehand.

EDS

Yeah, it was one of the most issue-y debates I’ve seen in a long time. The format was great.

heh…

Me

Maybe he had some Adderall.

• I’ve kept the link posts from del.icio.us and the Flickr posts out of the main weblog. They show up on the side.
• They update every hour instead of each day.
• Each link or picture is its own post, upon which you can comment.
• They stay out of the main RSS feed, too. However, you can subscribe to a separate feed just for the sidebloggin’! If you’re into that kind of thing.

 
Because WordPress (understandably) as a really clunky way of posting by email (you have to send the email, then hit Wordpress to make it POP into the email account) and no documented REST interface, I ended up doing this using the Python mechanize module. It seemed hacky, but then I got over it.

Mechanize is pretty smooth, but unfortunately, the current nature of web forms is going to make it less useful, unless it extends to be able to execute javascript. Forms are generated now, and what’s generated is often pretty messy, with a lot of unnamed elements. That can be gotten around, though. The real problem is that, instead of having the form do the POST, submit buttons on forms are often just javascript triggers, and some javascript function creates the actual POST request.

This is what stopped me from extending my autoposting script to also drop the links into Facebook “Posted Items,” which also have no explicit API support. Then, even more people could have seen my links and my important opinions about them! I actually started to try to determine what kind of POST request the javascript in their “share on Facebook” bookmarklet generated, but then I thought: Wait. Why the hell am I doing this? And then, I stopped.

I’m hesitant to report a negative canvassing experience because I already know that there’s a lot of irrational fear about it. But hey, if you want to hear about a smooth and positive canvassing experience, you can check out Dan’s account of his trip. What I’m going to describe here is pretty close to a worst case scenario.

Before I do that, though, let me sum up the results. Our team hit about fifty houses (well, that we could account for), partly because of the rain delaying our arrival. In those houses, which were thought by the campaign to contain undecideds and sproadic Democratic voters (SVDs), there were six (I think) people that were definitely going to vote for Obama, four that were for McCain, several that were undecided, and even more several that weren’t home.

That’s far from being statistically significant. Nonetheless, it was encouraging to see in a neighborhood with so many McCain signs. And I needed to be encouraged. That McCain’s outright lying seems to have made this a close election disgusts me.

So, here’s the cast:

Bill: He graciously drove us in the worst driving weather I’ve seen in a long time. I was planning to drive, but the turnout was large enough (around 70 people, according to the thank you email they sent) that the organizers said that they had enough drivers, to my relief.

He’s an active member of AFSCME (he’s a municipal worker), a (liberal) Catholic, and a widower. He’s probably in his sixties and is incredibly well-read when it comes to history, politics, religion, and probably other stuff, too.

Mary Jane: A single mother with kids in college, she immigrated to the US in the ’80s from Canada. Like Sarah Palin, she grew up playing hockey and has a quaint accent. Unlike Sarah Palin, she’s a secular Jew. One of her kids was pretty sickly while growing up, so she had to deal with a lot of healthcare system bullshit. She almost had to move her kids to Canada when her daughter contracted a life-threatening illness that she couldn’t pay the treatment costs for. Fortunately, a friend knew a charitable doctor who was willing to do the work for free.

Me: You know. 31-year-old elitist, currently unemployed by choice. Asian, no kids, no wife. Enjoys board games, metal, Apple products, reading about Pokémon, martial arts, and shrimp. Does not enjoy working or lattes. Is OK with but not crazy about arugula.

Senor Cardgage: Well, that’s who this tale is all about.

Senor Cardgage was tall and rather lanky and wore a trench coat. He also had a large adhesive bandage on his forehead. I’m not great at telling people in their sixties and seventies apart, I’d guess he was in his seventies. Later, he said that he was as old as John McCain, but I’m not sure how seriously to take that. I feel that way about quite a few of the things he said.

Like the real Senor Cardgage, he seemed a bit out of it, but that didn’t stop him from talking. I think one of the first things he said to us after we got in the car was that he was ready to go because he had a good breakfast, thanks to Ensure. I was like, “Oh, great.”

I put my seat belt on and watched him struggle with his for a while. (He and I were sitting in the back seat.) I tried explaining to him the whereabouts of the clip into which his seat belt should be inserted. It wasn’t helping, though, and he was getting exasperated. So, I buckled his seat belt for him. Which I felt weird about.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 60%

After he got buckled in, he offered everyone in the car an Ensure. Everyone declined. Senor Cardgage was disappointed and said something about it having all the nutrients and stuff a bottle of Ensure back into his bag, which I think contained either a six- or twelve-pack of Ensure. I’m not sure which, but I know he drank a lot of that stuff. Next, he offered everyone a copy of either the New York Times or the Chicago Reader. I took a copy of the Times.

All four of us conversed as a group about what you’d expect us to converse about: Obama, the increasing ridiculousness of the McCain campaign, and the crazy weather. It had been raining all day, and we were passing kids walking waist-deep in water in Niles and rivers that had flooded enough to make trees look like bridges.

Eventually, the group conversation broke up into front seat and back seat conversations. Being in the back seat, my conversation partner was Senor Cardgage, and man, did that guy like to talk. I learned some impressive things about the man. He was canvassing every weekend for two months in 2004. He showed up at a lot of peace rallies around the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Also, he said up front, he had bought a new alarm clock from Walgreen’s the day before. It worked great, but he wasn’t able to sleep that well last night.

It turned out that the bandage on his head was there because he had gotten into a fight over Obama. He was in an argument with a man on the street that was half his age about Obama and McCain, and the younger man actually punched Senor Cardgage. Senor Cardgage tried to duck but wasn’t quite fast enough, and then he kicked his attack “right where it counts.” He left the guy groaning on the sidewalk.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 80%

What a tough old man! What a despicable asshole he had run into! I kind of hoped that I’d be like him when I was seventy. At the least, I wanted to subscribe to his newsletter.

I learned more about the life of this extraordinary old fellow, who I previously saw as possibly senile. He had a girlfriend! And not only did he have a girlfriend, she, like his McCain supporting attacker, was half his age, in her mid-thirties. She was, as he called her, a “jill of all trades” that was good at everything. She knew how to install a web site! Did I know how to install a web site, he asked? She played in a rock-and-roll band! They were pressing CDs right now! Senor Cardgage had enough charisma and spunk to make a relatively young, well-rounded young lady overlook his nursing home looks and lack of fine motor skills. Dag, yo.

Senor Cardgage’s life wasn’t all hot young rock-and-roll chicks and beating up McCain goons, however. Since the sixties, he had worked for the National Labor Relations Board. He found it to be a very satisfying career. He had also raised a family and was now a widower. In the nineties, his mother had gotten ill, and as the only son, he had to quit his job at the NLRB and take care of her. When she died, he had to sell her house and car.

Since then, he’s been retired but works odd jobs to supplement his income. He mentioned jobs like ushering at a church and selling hot dogs. Nonetheless, he was about to donate $600 to the Obama campaign last month and had donated $1,000 previously.

Also, he had bought a new alarm clock from Walgreen’s the day before. It worked great! However, he wasn’t able to very sleep well last night.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 90%

As impressed as I was, I was getting tired of listening to Senor Cardgage at that point. In the front, I think Mary Jane was talking about discovering that her grandfather was a bigamist after his death. I wanted to hear that, but Senor Cardgage was coming around to the subject of travel.

It was a shame, he said, that the dollar was so weak. Europe used to be super cheap for Americans to visit. He remembered fondly how far his dollar got him when he visited Europe in the seventies. He was excited to go there because he had heard that European women knew how to treat a man, as opposed to American women who were spoiled and were after your money.

In Germany, he visited historical sites, including the concentration camp at Dachau. The Germans are an industrious, great-beer-making people, he opined, but that chapter of history will always tarnish them. I agreed.

They also had good hookers, he continued. I think I said something like, “Ah. I see.”

He informed me that prostitutes in Germany were pretty cheap and that the people were OK with them. It was no big deal. Senor Cardgage was also a big fan of Scandinavia. You’d think the best hookers would be in Sweden, wouldn’t you? Nope! Senor Cardgage cleared this misconception up for me. The #1 prostitutes in Scandinavia are in Norway! Yeah, in Norway, you go to the prostitute allocation center, and like it probably is in Soviet Russia, the prostitutes choose you! So, he had some pretty good sex with some Norwegian prostitutes. Denmark wasn’t bad, however. They had some sex show that got him so worked up that he scared the ladies.

At this point, I mentioned that I had visited Iceland and that it had some pretty bizarre and amazing landscape. Senor Cardgage nodded and asked what I thought of the ladies there. In actuality, I found the women in Iceland to be fairly attractive, but in an effort to escape from Senor-Cardgage-talking-about-sex territory, I said that they were pretty average. The effort failed.

Senor Cardgage had also crossed Checkpoint Charlie into East Germany back when the Berlin Wall was still up. There, he met some Eastern Bloc chick that didn’t speak English. He expounded at length that there weren’t many places where a Westerner could have privacy. However, he still prevailed and had sex with that chick right underneath the Berlin Wall! Senor Cardgage had launched an American payload deep within enemy territory. Take that, Stalin!

Would I like an Ensure? Was I sure I didn’t? Because it has nutrients! OK, fine, suit yourself.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 50%

Somehow, Senor Cardgage fell asleep, and we got to Davenport. We got our assignments (lists of probably undecided voters and their addresses), maps, and materials from the local Obama HQ and drove a few more minutes to a neighborhood in Bettendorf. So, how were we going to cover the neighborhood? I suggested that we divide the route into four and each take a part. The group favored working in pairs more, so we went with that. Somehow, I ended up suggesting that Bill and Mary Jane form a pair, leaving me and Senor Cardgage. They dropped us off, and we hit our first street.

We had one map between us, Senor Cardgage and I. Reasoning that I had the better ability to deduce house locations from addresses, I let Senor Cardgage hold the map, along with the lists of addresses we decided that he would hit. Right away, it resumed pouring, and Senor Cardgage was having trouble reading the lists. We were soaked down to our socks and the lists and materials were getting wet. Fucking awesome. I suggested to Senor Cardgage that we try to shelter our papers as best we can, then pointed him to the first house.

He asked me if he should take off the “Fuck McCain” pin he was wearing. I said yes. I took the opportunity to point out the dollop of dribble in the corner of his mouth. (Possibly, it was Ensure.) It had been there for about four hours, but no one wanted to tell him. I figured it’s probably important to represent Obama with a clean mouth, free of globs in the corners.

After hitting my first five houses, I checked back on Senor Cardgage. I had to go way back down the street to do so. Why was he still all the way down here? Was he using the house list?

No, he wasn’t. His list of houses to hit, and a lot of the campaign literature, were a pile of wet shreds. Unreadable. Senor Cardgage, you fuck! We needed that shit! I did some inward sighing and tried to be all “Oh, that’s totally OK” about it.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 30%

Thus, instead of hitting the assigned houses, he was improvising and hitting every single house on the block. What would the Obama campaign think of him hitting every single house after they deliberately researched specific houses to target? Well, on the other hand, what else could he do?

A. He could skip the houses that were on his list, and I could give him another list. What are the chances that he’ll destroy that sheet? Pretty goddamned high, I had to estimate.

B. We could stay together and double team each house. Of course, that would mean we’d cover roughly half as much territory. I was wet and miserable, and I really didn’t want to suffer in vain. Frankly, I also needed a break from Senor Cardgage and was afraid to watch him in action.

C. He could just hit every house and just bother a few more people than the campaign had planned.

Well, you know how this goes. I chose C, for reasons both pragmatic and selfish.

After I finished the houses on my side of the street, I had to move on to other streets. Once again, I could leave him to continue to carpet bomb the current street, or I could take him with me. And once again, I chose to move on without him.

This time, I hesitated, though. Senor Cardgage was the only one on the team that didn’t have a cellphone. He was also the only one on the team that told me over and over again that cell phones cause brain cancer. So, I tried to really drive home that he should stay on this street until I come back to pick him up. No, I said, you shouldn’t go around the block. You should stay on this street. I felt bad about talking to an old man with undertones usually applied to conversations with children. Then again, I figured, when I’m dying of brain cancer, he’ll have the last laugh. It all evens out.

The first time I checked back with him after moving a street over, he was still on the original street. Looked like he was going to get to the end of the street, though. Here’s where I suggested that he wait on that street for a while if he finished, but if I didn’t show up after a while, to come over to next street over.

When I had finished, and the others had picked me up in the car, we drove back down the street to pick him up. He wasn’t there.

We slowly cruised down the original street. No Senor Cardgage.

Now we were worried. Bill pointed out, not accusingly, though, that he should have never been left alone. He was right. What if Senor Cardgage had a stroke and was twitching in some ditch right now? What if he had tripped on something and was twitching in some ditch right now?

We drove the entire subdivision, scanning for Senor Cardgage’s lanky, betrenchcoated figure. We couldn’t find him. Maybe he had traveled to another subdivision. Maybe he was inside someone’s house at the moment we drove by him. Whatever the case, I had gotten an old man lost in a strange land, partly because I had been annoyed by him.

Fortunately, we got a call from the local Obama office while we were scanning the subdivision. Senor Cardgage was there. Senor Cardgage had been waiting for me on a street corner for thirty minutes, and someone saw him looking forlorn and lost. She, an Obama supporter, it turns out, picked him up and drove him to the office.

Senor Cardgage told me that she was a looker, and that if he had been younger, they probably would have gotten together. Maybe she was under 35. I apologized, did the canvassing tally (excluding Senor Cardgage’s results: “I can’t quite make out this note, but I think this guy named Bob really liked Obama!”), and we left Iowa. All four of us.

On the long, soggy drive home, Senor Cardgage:

- Fought the seat belts really hard and got one of the belts stuck in the hole that it comes out of. We gave up on his seat belt this time.

- Offered us some Ensure. Our declinations mystified him once again.

- Expressed his concerns about hockey moms like 50 times.

- Picked hard at Bill’s faith. He did this right after telling me that he believed that sitting before the Buddha and saying certain words balances his karma. However! The words that some other Buddhist sect chants don’t work at all. They are not special like his sect’s special words. Bill took it all with good humor.

- Tried to convince me to go to Unitarian Church. Several times. “They’re very liberal!” Great.

- Told me he had a great new alarm clock from Walgreen’s. Unfortunately, it did not help him sleep well last night.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 60%

You know, he’s a good guy. He’s just really old, can’t stop talking, and can’t tell if someone doesn’t want to hear what he’s talking about. Which is all the better for him because he loves talking to strangers about himself having sex!

Here’s what Poplicks and FiveThirtyEight.com have to say about action in these last fifty days:

Let’s do this:

“The story of the organizer and volunteer effort is one that needs to be told. It was much underreported in 2004 just how potently the Bush ground campaign organized. Say what you want about his governance – and we all have – but his competitive fire was lit for the election race. Republicans turned their voters out. Who’s got more heart this time? Missouri boys say: Show-Me.

This year, all available evidence suggests the Obama campaign is doing something unprecedented with its organizing efforts. Is it this: 29’2.5”?”

“Finally, an appeal to all Americans, regardless of voting age or partisan bent: do something tangible. It is now or never. Fifty-four days. Do something that will make the face you see in the mirror on November 5 proud. Push yourself. Suck it up. Work for it. Make a sacrifice you would not otherwise make. Leave the confusion and nonsense behind and perform your one and only noble function of the time – move.”

This is what it comes down to. Not the bad tabloid story that is Sarah Palin. Not sucking at the teat of polling data. Not even Matt Damon (but we still luh you).

As the 538 dudes recognize, Bush didn’t win in 2004 because Americans are stupid. He won because the GOP turned out their base and did it impressively. Mathematically, it should be the Democrats turn but only if they turn out their base.

(Emphasis added by me.)

Sign up and help out. If you don’t live near a battleground state, phonebank. When we’re invading Iran and Roe v. Wade is overturned, don’t cry into your corn flakes that you didn’t do shit to try to stop it.

To quote from Exodus:

Get up on your feet
Don’t look so obsolete
And thrash like an athlete!
Don’t sit there on your ass
Don’t look like you’ve got too much class
To be harassed!
You know we guarantee
This is the key
So rage or get the third degree!

You know what’s at stake right now, so FIGHT!

They booed Rousimar Palhares when he entered the cage. He’s Brazilian, and Brazilians are pretty commonplace in the UFC and in MMA in general, so my guess is that they’re not longtime fans. Katt was surmised that they were probably the kind of people that wanted all Brazilians to go back to Mexico. And unsurprisingly, at the main event, they booed Rashad Evans, who’s American, but also black.

When Korean fighter Dong-Hyun Kim walked out, they broke out the “U! S! A! U! S! A!” chant. When he won by split decision, they booed like crazy to take away from his win.

Now, decisions in MMA and pretty much any other combat sport are subjective and always subject to controversy, and I could understand this fight being called either for Kim or his opponent, Matt Brown. Kim easily took the first round. Brown had the second. In the third, Brown threw more strikes and Kim’s takedown attempts were mostly unsuccessful. However, Kim landed a very heavy elbow shot to Brown’s head, the only significant event of the round.

Had the decision gone the other way, there is no way the crowd would have booed Brown and cast doubt over his win. Had Kim been some unknown white fighter, I doubt there would have been booing or any “U! S! A!” chanting.

Luke Thomas of Bloody Elbow summed it up well:

Atlanta’s fans are disgusting - I grew up in Atlanta and have not returned for obvious reasons. In fact, last night was my 10 year high school reunion in Atlanta and I still didn’t want to attend. Jingoistic fans who caterwaul buffoonish “USA” yelps need to be executed on site. A love of nation and support for the home team is never wrong. But that is expressed through support of Brown, not support of some phony notion of nationalistic obligation.

And by the way, there’s nothing controversial about Kim’s win. NOTHING. Take that to the bank and cash it because it will be true forever.

The worst part of it all was the post-fight interview. The UFC usually has Joe Rogan talk to the fighters in the cage after each fight for a couple of minutes. The Georgians continued to boo while Kim answered the questions. He didn’t seem to know exactly why they were so hostile and actually apologized to them for not finishing the fight with either a submission or KO. I felt terrible for him. Can you imagine having to explain to this guy, or anyone not familiar with the US from the inside, why they were booing so fervently?

First, you’d have to explain that some people in the country hate non-whites and that foreign competitors are not welcomed by them, even as guests. Then, you’d have to qualify that most people in the United States aren’t like that at all, and in fact, this is the least racist country in the world. Of course, that qualification would smell like bullshit in light of an event like this, making the explanation quite awkward.

Somehow, I got the impression that Atlanta was a fairly progressive place. It’s in the deep south, but it is ethnically diverse. The people coming to the UFC show, however, are probably drawn from all over Georgia. Perhaps a contingent from Lynn Westmoreland’s district showed up. Who knows.

Regardless of how racist or non-racist Georgia may be, the UFC should stick to putting on shows in Vegas, Boston, LA, and Montreal. These are places where, on top of not being blantantly xenophobic and racist, they respect mixed martial arts and its participants. They understand that there’s some strategy involved in an MMA match, and don’t start booing whenever the fight stops resembling a game of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.

Oh, and about being ashamed of America: Despite what the Republican National Convention would have you believe, being ashamed of your country now and then is nothing to be ashamed of. It means that you care about the country and have standards for its conduct and progress. I don’t understand at all why so many people seem to buy that saying everything the US does is great is somehow better for the country.