Write and Wrong

In turns out that your friends and the NSA aren't the only ones reading your Facebook posts. A new study produced by the Wall Street Journal and Grammarly (a nifty online grammar-checking service) reviewed the Facebook comments of people supporting various GOP candidates to see which group had the most grammatical errors, and which had the fewest.

The winner: Carly Fiorina, whose erudite fans made only 6.3 errors per 100 words. The loser: Donald Trump, whose supporters made 12.6 errors - although this might be blamed on bad comb overs getting in their eyes while they're pounding their keyboards.

You can read the full results and rankings right here to see if you belong to a group which needs remedial grammar lessons. Although considering the increasing rarity of proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and the English language in general, you're probably fine. Especially since Hope n' Change readers are, by actual statistical analysis, more intelligent, more well spoken, and more likely to be audited annually than our fellow citizens.

Of course, proper grammar isn't necessarily synonymous with intelligence. Otherwise Yoda would still be in second grade. And as we point out in the cartoon above, we greatly prefer mistakes which are purely technical ("I ain't supporting them baby butchers at Planned Parenthood") to mistakes which are genuinely substantive ("The quintessential essence of my plan is that it prevents Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon").

DEBATE UPDATE

We just finished watching both Fox News GOP debates, and overall were quite pleased by the performances of most of the candidates.

Interestingly, it seems like the study by Grammarly may have had genuine predictive value - Carly Fiorna was declared the clear winner of the early debate, and in the later debate Donald Trump largely stunk up the stage with his oafish bombast.

And Just For Fun...

My delightful niece and her family are visiting North Carolina and found this in a store window...

 

And this in the local paper (the prestigious Appalachian Messenger)...

Well done, North Carolina! Keep up the good work!

Biden His Time

Yes We Vatican.

As Democrats grow increasingly nervous about having a cantankerous cackling criminal crackpot ("...and I'm a woman! Ha-ha-ha-ha!!!") as their 2016 frontrunner, momentum is building for a possible run by lovable vice president Joe Biden.

The veep is currently thought to be giving serious consideration to getting in the race, but has said he won't announce his decision until September. Which isn't surprising, considering how long anyone with an iota of sanity would want to chew on the long, long list of people who've "coincidentally" died in unpleasant and unusual ways after getting between the Clintons and a political office.

Frankly, we're hoping that Uncle Joe will throw his hat in the ring, if only for the pleasure of seeing campaign posters that say "Biden: A Big F*cking Deal."

Meanwhile, on the Republican side...

We'd tell Lucy to just watch until she needs glasses, but it's already too late.

Thursday will see the top ten Republican candidates debating simultaneously, somehow, on Fox News. Theoretically, the candidates will have only a single minute to answer questions, which doesn't sound like it's going to encourage much depth or nuance. But the format should work fine for those candidates who already express themselves in unsubtle soundbites and tweets.

Hope n' Change will be watching the debate (as well as "Close But No Cigar: 2016," the follow-up debate for the GOP candidates who didn't make the top ten list) but we're not really expecting much in the way of surprises or insights. We are looking forward, however, to taking a belt of whiskey every time the word "Trump" is mentioned.

And finally...

Yesterday was Barack Obama's 54th birthday, which he celebrated by taking a deep breath, making a wish, and then blowing out the coal industry.

Stirruptitious Behavior

This has been a public cervix announcement

Much to the delight of news coprophiliacs nationwide, Hillary Clinton took a huge document dump on Friday. (Note: for those unfamiliar with journalistic parlance, a "dump" occurs when a politician pushes out a large quantity of unpalatable, undigestible material - usually on a Friday - in hopes that the stink will clear before anyone notices. In other words, it's exactly like the other kind of dump.)

In this case, Hillary dropped a deuce - which is to say, she simultaneously released documents on two subjects: her personal health and finances.

According to her doctor, Mrs. Clinton is in "excellent physical condition" (despite needing an orthopedic pantsuit) and presented as "normal" when displaying her qualification for the presidency during a gynecological exam. He also said that she has overcome the blood clot found in her head following a concussion in 2012 which occurred when she fainted owing to an (ahem) "stomach virus." A stomach virus which, some unverified sources have suggested, she was trying to knock out at the time with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Financially, the Clintons are also in excellent condition - having "earned" (like most middle class families) $28 million in speaking fees in 2014 for talking about themselves, despite not being able to recall anything about their past when under oath. And generously, the Clintons gave $3 million to charity in 2014 - which would be a lot more heartwarming if the charity hadn't been the Clinton Family Foundation (which it was).

By wild coincidence and probably not indictable conspiracy, the State Department also took a massive Hillary dump on Friday, offering up more heavily-redacted documents which had been transmitted on the unsecured private email server which was installed in her mansion by young "Geek Squad" technicians with Russian accents.

According to a State Department spokesman, there was nothing classified in the latest round of emails and the many thick black redaction markouts were probably just scribbles left over from the period when post-blood clot Hillary was relearning how to use pens, eating utensils, and lies.