How To Use This Site

One of the great things about building a website on the Wordpress platform is that it’s free, open-source, and is constantly being expanded and updated by independent developers all over the world. And that is also the down side of using the Wordpress platform…sometimes updates don’t play well together, because they’re created by independent developers working all over the world.

A recent update to a couple of plugins appears to have broken our navigation menus. We will be working over the next few days to figure out what has gone wrong and fix it. In the mean time, please check for Recent Posts in the sidebar, and use the Google Search box to find older posts.

We will try to do any necessary site maintenance in the middle of the night. If you drop by and we’re down for maintenance, please check the Facebook page for status reports.

I wanted to take a moment today to personally thank all of HB’s readers for all of their support, most especially these last few months.

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It still amazes me that this is such a controversial issue, but I thought it might be useful to take a moment to briefly address why I have always thought it was so important to eliminate all the whining and complaining that some people insist in engaging in regarding the spam filter and comments not posting immediately because of it.

Simply, because this whining discredits the people doing it and cheapens the posts these whines are allowed to flourish on.

There are around 8,000 articles in the HB archives, dating back to February of 2008. This site will one day be part of the historical record of the 2008 campaign, the Obama presidency, and the coming Palin administration.

It is also a useful political resource in the present, with content that is routinely Googled and used by writers, reporters, students, and activists.

It took a mind-numbing amount of work to organize all of this material into its current form so that we could get this site prepped to become the solid go-to resource for political action it needs to be as we gear up for 2012.

Remarks whining about comments not posting immediately do nothing to aid these efforts.

Complaining in general does nothing to aid these efforts.

Neither of these two things are of any use to anyone. Whining and complaining might make some people feel good. This might be a favorite hobby of some. If this was an entertainment site, I probably would not care how much someone whined about Ryan Reynolds’ new haircut or the scruffiness of Jake Gyllenhaal’s beard. I might even find that funny. Same with this being a site about food or Chicago travel or a sports team.

But, this site from day one has been about doing something…something to stop the Left from getting away with tanking this country and ruining your children’s futures.

Indulging the whiners and complainers results in zero productivity for ANYONE.

When old articles pulled up months after they are written are viewed because someone needs information on something, a thread of comments whining about something not posting immediately looks ridiculous. It makes the people who wrote those whines look foolish.

While you might be frustrated by the spam filter in the moment, you need to remember that your comments become part of the archive of this site…and might end up in the Smithsonian some day if HB becomes the force I know it can be with our Action Items.

So, that’s why there’s such a solid policy against the whining.

If you want to whine and complain, feel free to do so via email. Someone will read it, even if you might not get a response back…because I’ll be damned if any time is wasted responding back to whining and complaining.

There is just no way around it: the spam and troll filters are needed to keep this site from being inundated with the nastiness and venom the Left infects everything it touches with.

There is a clear bar set for a maturity level unique to this site, where I truly believe we have the best commenters around ANYWHERE…because the site itself demands quality and does not accept whining and complaining.

Whining and complaining belongs in the Cocktail Party GOP establishment ranks. It does not fit here, either with our personalities or with what we want to achieve in the interests of this country.

I am sorry if you are someone who likes to complain about a comment not posting immediately, but we are not going to indulge that whining or allow it to post.

Complain all you want to us via email, but we are going to make sure all comments on a post refer to that post and offer something intelligent and interesting that advances the post’s ideas or call to action in some way.

If we are to defeat Obama, decimate the Left, and usurp the Cocktail Party GOP establishment, we need to work hard to change the way politics in this country have been conducted.

I think that starts with the no whining and complaining policy…which is consistent with our zeal to be a site of political analysis, action and adventure.

Whining and complaining is inconsistent with all of this…hence the firm stance on it.

There’s something that happens here, and on other sites, every once in a while that I personally read as a pejorative, even if I know 100% it’s not meant to be; it’s when someone refers to me as a “former lib”, a “reformed Liberal”, or even — most ridiculously — “a onetime Leftist”.

I was NEVER (bold, ALL-CAPS, NEVER) a “lib” or a “Liberal” or a Leftist…even if I spent my first 30 years or so of life being a Democrat.

Really, the first 16 years or so of that wasn’t a choice of mine, because growing up in a Democrat household in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1980s and 1990s meant there were pictures of John and Jackie Kennedy up on all our walls…until they were replaced by photos of Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1992.

In grade school, I remember Sister Mary Howard asking our third grade class what the difference between Democrats and Republicans was…and I raised my hand to say “Democrats are good and Republicans are evil”. As a child, with few frames of reference, I boiled politics down to something I could understand from the TV shows and movies I liked. Transformers. Thundercats. Jem. Star Wars.

I thought Democrats were the Autobots, Thundercats, Holograms, and Rebel Alliance…and Republicans were the Decepticons, the Mutants, the Misfits, and the Evil Galactic Empire.

I politically came of age in the early 1990s, when the Clintons — through immense personal effort — dragged the Democrat party kicking and screaming towards the center. To this day, the Clintons are hated by many in Democrat party ranks for this. It is why Hillary Clinton is not sitting in her Oval Office right now…and the reason the Democrat party worked so hard against her to make Obama the 2008 nominee and current president. Because the Clintons are not Leftists…no matter how much many of you in conservative ranks have claimed through the years that they are. If you want to see Leftists, look at the Obamas. If you don’t think there would be any difference between an Obama and a Clinton presidency, then I am sorry to tell you that you are nuts. Multiply by 100 every bad thing you ever thought about the Clintons, or ever irrational nightmare fantasy written about them, and you will only just scratch the surface on how Leftist and dangerous the Obama presidency is.

This site began as a Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign site. Since Hillary is no longer in politics, and this is a political site, Hillary is no longer the focus of HillBuzz. You can think whatever you want of her, and I do not proselytize for the Clintons, but my support for Hillary Clinton does not brand me a “lib”, “Liberal”, or Leftist.

I honestly would rather be called a cannibal than a “lib”, or even “former lib”, since that’s like calling me a “former cannibal”.

I consider the words “lib”, “Liberal”, and Leftist to be pejoratives.

It horrifies me whenever I see someone describe me as “a former lib who saw the light and became conservative”.

No.

That’s not what happened at all.

I was a centrist who grew up in a centrist Democrat household that hated Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter, and essentially all the fools who hijacked the Democrat party and ran it into the ground after President Kennedy was assassinated. If he had lived, and if he was still around today, President Kennedy would be a REPUBLICAN.

Once upon a time, Democrats did not want to see this country destroyed. They didn’t want government spending to race out of control and didn’t want tax dollars funneled endlessly into the labor unions, so the unions could pump the cash back into the DNC in a taxpayer stick ‘em up pyramid scheme.

Absent the arrival of the Clintons on the scene in 1992…in an alternate universe where Mario Cuomo or Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown became the presidential nominee instead of then Governor Clinton…I bet I would have voted Republican that year…and every year since.

They are the only reasons I decided to pull Democrat levers for so long…so it’s fitting that the betrayal of the Clintons by the Democrat party, and the grotesque lurch to the far Left the party has taken with Obama as standard bearer, is what divorced me from the Democrat party for good.

If the ghost of Sister Mary Howard ever asked me again what the difference between Democrats and Republicans is, I’d raise my hand and say “Democrats are Leftists who hate America and want to turn this into a Third World thogocracy while Republicans for the most part are Cocktail Party establishment buffoons too afraid of their own shadows to stand up to Democrat bullies and radicals”.

I am a conservative.

A gay conservative.

I am a guy who spent every cent he had and gave up his life for two years to elect Hillary Clinton president…and who is ready, willing, and hopefully able to do the same thing to elect Sarah Palin our next president.

I know it is my destiny that this will forever perplex a great many of you out there. I have answered repeatedly how and why I can support both of these extraordinary women…in the moments of time when I believe they were the best choice on the field to lead America when the country needed them.

Hillary Clinton would have made a much better president than Obama, John McCain, or anyone in the 2008 race.

Sarah Palin will make a much better president than anyone else alive I can think of at the moment, save for possibly Allen West.

In the future, if one of you reading this appears on the horizon as the best choice in my opinion, I might possibly champion you…and put everything I have in life into your campaign.

Because I love this country more than I could ever tell you, and I would never want to be associated with those who wish to see it harmed, who want America “changed at its core” in ways that turn us at best into a failed European socialist dystopia and more realistically into a Central or South American, African, or Middle Eastern thug-controlled garbage heap.

So, it honestly does boil my blood to be called “a former lib” or a “reformed Liberal”…when I was never, ever anything like that.

It horrifies me that some of you think this, because I take this to mean you believe that at one point in my life I would have sided against this country and only now see this as a bad thing to do.

It’s preposterous and more than a little hurtful to me.

And it’s worth mentioning because I see conservatives do this a lot, actually…in terms of the tens of millions of former Democrats who were alienated by the Obama lurch to the Left in 2008.

It is beyond madness for conservatives to give these people any pause about voting Republican now. Shouting, “Hey lookit, Suzie used to be a cannibal but now she wants to come to the hotdog cookout like a normal person…and she won’t be eating anyone there this time!” would be strange to your ears.

Calling me, and all the former Dems I know like me, “ex libs” or “reformed Liberals” is bizarre too.

The right terminology to use is “former Democrat”. If you really want to get hyper accurate and ultra specific, you can say “former Centrist Democrat Hillary supporters”, which I’d wager 99% of us are.

Not everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries is now voting Republican under Obama…but I bet almost all former Democrats who now identify as Republican in the Golden Age of Hope and Change we currently live in were Hillary voters three years ago.

There is a reason for that: because we were never “libs”, “Liberals”, Leftists, or whatever you want to call the lunatics who control the Democrat party completely today.

So please don’t slander us with those pejoratives.

Save them for the loons who really deserve them.

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NOTE: It’s always dangerous when reading anything I write on this site or anywhere my work is published to assume I am talking about YOU, specifically, or something YOU, individually, did…where you think YOU prompted or inspired whatever that post was about.

I am not shy. Trust me, if you did something I thought was counterproductive or any sort of attack on me or the site, you would hear personally from me about it. And it would not be via an essay on HB, it would more likely than not be in an email asking why you did whatever it was to us.

Tonight a dozen or so people wrote in wondering if something they said today or yesterday made me write the above post regarding the “lib/Liberal/Leftist” pejoratives.
Actually, this note was prompted by a conservative site I like that talked about the recent HB 3.0 upgrade in an article that gave us kudos for the redesign. As stated at the very beginning, the person who called me a “reformed lib” didn’t mean any harm and didn’t really think about what he was saying. To him “Democrat” and “lib/Liberal/Leftist” are all synonymous. Which might be the case today, with the Obama Democrat party as your reference, but it was not the case while I was a Democrat for all those years in the Clinton Democrat party.

Do you know how the word “gay” used to exclusively mean “happy” or “high-spirited”, so when watching old movies immature people today giggle uncontrollably whenever “gay” is used to describe people who are clearly not homosexual? Well, words sometimes change and become co-opted in unforeseen ways. So someone who may have described him or herself as “gay” in 1920 in hopes of nailing their gregarious nature in a bio might very well blush in 2011 now that the terminology has taken on a radically different meaning.

Honestly, this is what even the word “Democrat” itself feels like in this the Golden Age of Hope and Change under Obama. I still can’t believe that every single Democrat in the Senate voted for the Obamacare bill on Christmas Eve in 2009 without even reading it…including people I had liked for my entire adult life, like supposedly “centrist” Evan Bayh, whom I had gotten to know fairly well during Hillary’s 2008 campaign when I worked events in Indiana every day in the runup to that primary.

When Bayh walked into the Senate to vote with all the loons like Claire McCaskill, Ben Nelson, Russ Feingold and others who gleefully backed the economy-killing horror of Obamacare – WITHOUT EVER READING IT FIRST – I knew the word I used to know as “Democrat” now meant something else entirely for all intents and purposes, since Obama had redefined the party so drastically.

So don’t be too hard on anyone who labeled themselves a Democrat prior to 2008…and appreciate just how radically the party altered itself in just the last three years.

Remember, also, that you should never be too quick to tar someone with a brush that should be reserved for the very worst peolpe belonging to a group, just because that person calls themselves a “Democrat”, “Republican”, or whatever.

It would be like someone misguided calling you a “rightwinger” just because you are a Republican and lumping you in the same boat as the lunatic fringe of the GOP (or, even worse, assuming you’re like Olympia Snow, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and other terrible Cocktail Party buffoons just because you all put an (R) after your name and favor spotlessly dry-cleaned blazers).

I doubt lifelong Republicans who focus on fiscal responsibility and limited government enjoy being linked to the loons of the GOP on the far right or the useful (to Democrats) idiots in the Cocktail Party crowd.

So, yes, I am a former Democrat. I am a reformed Democrat. I am an ex-Democrat. I am a gay Hillary Clinton supporting Democrat who left the party because it deliberately veered to the Left and party leaders like Donna Brazile, Howard Dean, and others decided bitter-clinging-Midwesterners with conservative beliefs were no longer welcome in Democrat ranks.

But I am not and never have been a lib, Liberal, or Leftist any more than I bet a single one of you reading this has ever been a “rightwinger nutjob”, as the Media likes to call members of that dangerous fringe.

On Tuesday, Justin and I went to an advance screening of Jodie Foster’s new movie, “The Beaver”, here in Chicago.

Jodie was there, and held a Q&A after the movie where she answered questions from the audience.

Since I used to be an event planner, and I spent the majority of 2008 organizing candidate events for first the Clinton campaign and then Democrats for McCain efforts, I know how things like this work…so I got us seats right in front of where I knew Jodie would be seated as she did the Q&A (hint:  if it’s a movie screening, and you want to meet whomever is going to speak afterwards, sit in the front row dead center if you can…because that is where the person will stand with a microphone to address the crowd, and there is no way that person can avoid meeting you if you are right in front of her like that…since most people fight over sitting in the actual middle of the theater and balk at being in the front row, if you don’t mind craning your neck during the movie you will get your desired facetime with Clarice Starling/Nell/the lady from the Panic Room if you want it). ( more )

One of the big reasons I decided to invest so much time, energy, and resources into building a new HB site was to improve the commenting ability on all of the threads.  The big goal was to make the comments easier not just for the readers to make, but for us to moderate.  I wanted to find a way to give people a chance to spellcheck their comments, edit them, and have them be as reflective of their intentions and thoughts as possible.

But, I wanted to make sure that the unique vibe we have in the comments section of each thread remains, because I maintain it’s one of the most special things I’ve ever encountered on the Internet. ( more )

Hillbuzz readers — you asked for it, you got it!

Starting today, you can spell check your comment before posting it! The new feature will underline misspelled words in red as you type. You’ll also have the option of clicking a “spell check” link above the comment box.

Bon Appetit!

Now you can spell check comments before posting them on Hillbuzz.org!

If you like the new features we’ve put in place, please consider making a donation to help us pay our new ongoing expenses and pay off our debts to create this new site. Check out our Donations Page for a list of suggested donations you can make via PayPal or Google Checkout.

The new site design is shiny and powerful, and a little confusing, too. We’re still adjusting to the new site design and functionality ourselves, and we’ve been looking at this thing for weeks.

So, you may be wondering how to get to the Comments section.

We will probably update this in the very near future, but in the mean time, to read and make comments, click on the name of the post, or in the “Thought Balloon” to the right of the post name. Both will ( more )

One of the most frustrating things for Hillbuzz readers has been “Comment Limbo,” which is where the Wordpress gremlin frequently sent comments that you tried to post. There was almost no rhyme or reason to the gremlin’s choices about which comments to approve and which to send to Limbo. ( more )

After literally months of effort, we are proud to unveil the third version of HillBuzz.org!

A small team of very dedicated Hillbuzzers have come together to achieve a massive site redesign and content migration.

We’ve reorganized, relabeled, and recategorized 7,712 posts and pages, and migrated 289,086 approved comments. By hand. ( more )