I’m back to the world of presidential debating, people. Yay! Let’s see if our opinions on the debate coincide.

19:43 – Carson can afford to be conciliatory since he lost the race.

19:48 – “We either do or don’t have a country,” Trump said. And he’s right, this is the central question of this election cycle. What does a nation-state mean any longer?

19:53 – Trump said that Romney ran a horrible campaign. Which is true.

19:54 – wow, Trump is on a roll. He wiped the floor with Rubio with his “I’m the only person here who hired anybody.” The fellow is deadly in a debate.

19:58 – Cruz is promising to stand up for the working men and women. What a fool. This is the perfect entry for Trump to hit him with Goldman Sachs.

20:02 – now they are actually discussing Vicente Fox’s “fucking wall” comment. Classy as always.

20:06 – everybody is yelling over everybody else. I so hope somebody gets socked in the face.

20:09 – Rubio is such a sleaze ball. He doesn’t even have the courage of his opinions and can’t say honestly that he will get the children of immigrants deported.

20:15 – Rubio uses himself and Cruz as proof that GOP is diverse. And then he’ll wonder why Hispanics hate his pasty mug.

20:17 – Kasich: “I think Hispanics like me!” That’s simply pathetic. Do they know who you are, boring fellow with zero recognition value?

20:26 – Trump ridicules Cruz’s pathetic filibuster. Good for him. “We should get an apology from Ted.” Hear, hear!

20:28 – Trump called Cruz “a crazy zealot.” That’s exactly why I detest Cruz. He looks like a crazy zealot.

20:38 – Rubio is actually right when he makes fun of Trump’s obsession with “lines around the states.”

20:40 – Finally, Rubio manages to get in a few punches against Trump.

20:44 – Carson sounds like a sociopath. “Healthcare is not a right”? Who the hell says this kind of thing?

20:50 – will these people ever wake up and notice that nobody is dying on the sidewalks because of the already existing Medicaid and Medicare?

20:59 – is it true what Rubio is saying about 83% of the budget going to Social Security, Medicaid and debt servicing?

21:04 – so I hate Trump, right? But I see him battle these slick, smug idiots Cruz and Rubio, and I want him to beat them badly. I’m not surprised he’s winning the nomination.

21:11 – oh, enough with Israel already. It’s becoming creepy.

21:16 – if Rubio can’t win a state even after all the effort he put into this debate, he’s hopeless.

21:24 – Of course, the Syria ceasefire is a joke. Putin is laughing his head off.

21:27 – Rubio is absolutely right: the people of Libya removed Gaddafi. They hated him so much that they dragged him out of his palace and raped him with the handle of a shovel. Only America-centrist degenerates pretend that the removal of Gaddafi was up to Americans. Good job, Rubio!

That speech” was a 1996 address at New Hampshire’s Keene State College in support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, otherwise known as the crime bill. In her remarks, then-first lady Clinton said, “They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

Ah, the terrible comments we’ve been hearing about all day long!  Somebody bring me my fainting couch and smelling salts. Twenty years of outrage are nothing. Let’s fret over this for at least 5 more decades.

Some “activists” are making such a mockery of activism that it’s painful to watch.

Asher Potts was a high school senior in Harrisburg, PA. He stood out from the rest of the students by virtue of his stellar academic record, his extensive extracurricular activities, and his great maturity.

Of course, this is not surprising if you take into consideration that Potts was actually a 23 – year-old Ukrainian man Artur Samarin who had started posing as a 9th grader when his US visa expired 4 years ago.

One must be truly desperate to stay in a country to be willing to repeat high school.

In the XV-XVII-century Ukraine, it was quite acceptable for women to propose marriage to men. If a woman wanted to propose, she would come to the house of the man she liked with a loaf of bread. She’d place the loaf in the middle of the table without saying anything and wait for the man’s parents to give an answer.

I’m annoyed by this article in The Atlantic that accuses talk show radio, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, etc for promoting the kind of rhetoric that made Trump’s rise possible. Anybody can get access to any information they want these days, and if people gravitate towards this kind of stuff, that’s because this is what speaks to them.

I don’t see any poor innocent victims duped by evil talk show radio here. I see people who are getting exactly what they want and have wanted for a long time.

The Norwegian TV show Occupied is not realistic in the specifics but it’s eerily realistic in the underlying idea: Europeans will accept anything, swallow anything, turn a blind eye to anything in order to avoid conflict. They are so comfortable in their status quo and so used to the idea that all the risks attendant on preserving it are shouldered by somebody else that they’ll pretend nothing is happening to the bitter end.

It snowed so hard today that classes were canceled. This is especially weird given that it was +70°F on Saturday and will be +68°F on Sunday.

A colleague wrote a passionate email exhorting the professors to stop working and go outside.

“We will have to wait for 9-10 dreary months to see snow again,” he wrote. “Let’s not waste this beautiful, rare moment by staying inside and writing work emails!”

And here I thought I was all alone on this campus in my belief that a day without snow is a day wasted.

Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with the freeing of slaves in Southern states after the Civil War.

I had no idea these. . . erm, people existed, especially in such numbers.

I’m really floored.

One literally can’t turn away for two seconds without weird things happening. While I’m on maternity leave, my colleagues decided to request a new position in Spanish. It sounds like a great thing until you find out that the position is in. . . completely dead and irrelevant Chicano Studies. Maybe one could somehow justify a specialist in Chicano Studies somewhere at a huge school in California that has every other specialist possible and is trying to sound hip in a very 1980s kind of way. But in Southern Illinois, it’s pretty much the most irrelevant thing on the planet. If there are still people who are not academics and who identify as Chicanos, they are not located in this region, that’s for sure. 

It’s always a bad sign when schools abandon the meaningful traditional model of Medieval / Golden Age / Enlightenment / Colonial / XIXth century / XXth century / poetry / drama, etc model and engage in manufacturing weird fields that will fall out of fashion 15 minutes from now. The most bizarre example of this was a professorial position in Disability Studies offered by a Department of Spanish of a certain huge university. The professor in question concentrated on studying depictions of disability in literature. The department has been going to the dogs ever since.

I’m afraid that by the time I emerge from my maternity leave, we will have not only Chicano Studies but also the expired Comparative Literature track at my department. It’s like we are in the business of picking up everything the world has joyfully discarded. Or we could go completely Californian and offer a course on how Spanglish is a real language and it’s perfectly OK to say “diecitres” instead of “trece” because requiring that anybody speak Spanish correctly is imperialist and oppressive.

Bernie is losing hope. The indifference of the African-American community is hitting him hard. He is slipping away from his graceful early – election persona of “enough with your damn emails” into “let me manufacture an email scandal of my own.” Now Bernie screeches – screeches “Speeches-speeches!” All that’s left for him to do is to say “Benghazi” or any equivalent thereof, and we’ll know he’s done.

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Rubio is so hapless. He appeared on TV standing under a sign that said, in large letters, “SALIDA” and in small letters “exit.” The poor fellow will always end up in the worst place for him to stand.

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It is not in the least surprising that Trump won the Hispanic vote in Nevada. Republican – voting Hispanics are a lot more likely to come out for Trump than for Rubio. Documented immigrants dislike undocumented immigrants and tend to wish for the border to slam shut right behind their backs. As for Rubio, non-Cuban Hispanics feel about Cuban Hispanics the way I feel about Russians.