I'm not the most prolific diarist or commenter, but anyone familiar with my contributions knows something about my temperament.  I've cheered our field of candidates since before any of them announced.   I've contributed long essays where I've tried to be constructive in both praising and criticizing my favorite candidate, John Edwards.

I've tried to be very respectful toward other members of this community.  On those occasions when I think someone's made a particularly inane remark, the harshest you might expect from me is satire, not bile.

In other words, to use an old-fashioned idiom, I've kept a civil tongue in my head.

But not in this post. Because some members of this community have gone beyond the pale, and I don't feel like being at all polite toward them. I'm talking about this comment and response - the latter by someone who is accorded frontpage posting privileges on this blog.  I'm not going to blockquote their comments, because they don't deserve to be quoted.  They are shitty comments.  And the original commenter continues to smear this fecal matter in a new thread today.

There's more...

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Several days ago, I wrote about the prison industrial complex in America that is driven largely by profit motive rather than improving society through rehabilitation or crime reduction. One component of America's incarceration industry is the criminalization of the mentally ill.

An example of this callous ineptitude is former Massachusetts Governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The November 27th, 2006 edition of the Worcester Business Journal, reported that the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health refused to admit any more patients to its hospitals or units. The drastic action was the direct result of cuts Romney imposed on the agency. Perhaps he did so to burnish his credentials as a fiscal conservate prior to announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

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Like most, I've got mixed feelings, but no malice, about President Ford.  He will be known as the guy who pardoned Nixon and the first & hopefully the last unelected President.  Sure, he gets high marks for being a good guy, in contrast to the guy he pardoned.  He was honest.  Everybody knows about the pardon, but few know that he gave the go-ahead green light to Indonesia before the bloody invaision of East Timor.  It was not Ford's idea, but he did not do anything about it -- though his options were few.

There's more...