OT: What's going on with gas prices in Houghton Lake?

Shitting everywhere but the toilet  seems to be the thing at Taco Bell.  

Denny's (OH)

it"s easy to take a shit, cleaning up the mess is harder and is generally the job that comes to government (And by that, I mean countless men and women who work as career employeess at all levels of government not politicians). And I'll sit here all day defending that part of government.

A right I'm exercising right now!

But in and of itself, it does nothing to make government better and generally makes it worse because it furthers the attitude that it can"t in fact be made better. Ultimately, shitting on your own government alone is just shitting on yourself.

While I don't know either UM Proud or Humen, it is not a huge leap to think that UM Proud"s joke just might say something about his political leanings as Humen suggested. On a U of M sports blog an easy and clearly non-contreversial joke might have been, "the owner of that station must have gone to MSU (or OSU)'. If not and you picked another target for your joke (in this case, government, but could just as easily have been some of the wonderful accounting on Wall Street where both the little guy and the greater economy have been screwed while some guy who sits at a desk and doesn"t actually make anything makes billions), it might say something about your political leanings. I recognize that both of those negative descriptions are stereotypes that do not fairly represent tbe majority of the hardworking americans that work either in government or on Wall Street. On the other hand if someone chooses to make a joke about questionable accounting and used either example, I would in fact think that the underlying example might say that something about their politics. This is not to suggest that both examples don"t have truth to them or present opportunities to make changes that could benefit all americans. I will also note in Humen"s defense that he didn"t make the more political statement until asked for the clarification and that while Bernie Sanders might point out inefficincies in our health care budget his solution does not seem to suggest that he believes the federal government as a whole is incompetent while the two leading candidates in the other party have made no secret that they feel much of it is (as is their right as an American and as is the right of anyone that agrees with them) and as I believe Humen quite factually pointed out. I aopoligize if this reply is "close-minded", because I think that there in fact could be some more than subtle political undertones to UM Proud"s original post, but certainly respect (but disagree with those who don't).

People in the military who risk their lives to defend our country, people at NIH who devote their lives to curing disease, first responders to disasters - yes, certainly all parasites. While our government clearly has room to improve, I"m not sure you"d be thrilled with the way the country would look without it at all.

But all I see is someone making incredibly broad generalizations about politics on a sports blog - not sure how that is improving things. Further, the person I am responding to has called all government "parasites" that does not really suggest someone in the construcive, "how do we fix things" mode. Suggesting that all things government are a total disaster seems to ignore the fact that the public-private partnership in the US has done some amazing things and that if you want to try to change things a slightly more nuanced view looking at where things work and don"t might be useful. Making government work is really hard. Lots of people are coming from lots of different viewpoints and interests. Trying to find workable solutions that satisfy those often competing interests is hard work that is often failed at, that doesn't mean we should just call it a disaster and give up. By the way - red herrings are widely accepted as "shitty logic" - I"ve re-read my post multiple times and tried to figure out where I said - we should just shut our mouths and not try to improve things.