There is truth in that certainly, though I actually haven't disparaged him for his skin color, but what he did to it.  The former is indefensible, the latter somewhat ribald.

I'm lost, what are you talking about?  Trump did something to make his skin more orange?

Well I myself am guilty of hit and run posts and of vanishing completely. I've left the AOPA board several times, and my presence on the PoA board is spotty and inconsistent.  But the reason I do it is not like what you say about liberals, because I lose an argument because it's based on emotion, not fact.  When I vanish in the middle of a debate, it is because I spend a whole lot of time on a board, and any debate I get involved in, I can waste hours and hours, days even, and not get anything done in real life.  So when topics get hot and I post some big rant, often I vanish because I have already wasted a whole work day making that big post and I don't want to waste the NEXT day or the one after that, sitting here on the internet neglecting my real life.

But it does seem like some liberals left because Trump won and/or they can't logically win against the conservatives/libertarians here.  I myself wish they'd come back because I don't want the place to be just a big circle jerk agreeing with ourselves.

I hear you about the voting hypocrisy. One of my brothers is the exact example you cite. He's into firearms and keeps them to defend his family, but votes completely Democrat all the time.  He isn't stupid, he knows Democrats are for gun control.  I think it's not so much hypocrisy as prioritizing values.  The Democrats stand for something that is more important to him than gun rights, and so it outweighs them in his mind.  I do the same thing myself in reverse. I vote conservative but on some issues I side with the liberals.  If you're a Libertarian, most of the time you have to be this way when the third party isn't a realistic option.

Another part of it is my brother gets all his information from mainstream media. When they (liberals) do not open their minds to other sources, and they live in a culture of liberalism with their friends and coworkers (and in my brother's case, his socialist wife), you get brainwashed.  For example, I would think a lot of people if they listened to Sean Hannity for three hours every weekday for a month or two, would seriously begin to question their liberalism. But they absolutely will not consider it. So they get NO exposure to conservative ideas, whereas if you are a conservative, you cannot help but be exposed to liberal ideas all around you. Yes there is such a thing as rigid conservatives that shut themselves off from viewpoints other than their own. Maybe fundamentalist cults living in the wilderness.  But in general, conservatives are far more widely exposed to multiple viewpoints than liberals.

I like Hannity more than Beck, although he certainly isn't my favorite.  Beck is a LOON.

Hannity is amazing.  I haven't had that much of a chance to listen to Beck but in the past have been very impressed with some of his stuff, he is brilliant, but also have heard him say things that made me go, what???  Can't agree with him all the time and when I don't it's major, where I usually find myself enthusiastically agreeing with Hannity.

At first I thought they didn't but now I'm thinking they do somehow, though I don't know how they program it that way.

http://www.canirank.com/blog/analysis-of-political-bias-in-internet-search-engine-results/

Among our key findings were that top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant than they were pages from the right. Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results.

Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.

One of the down sides to changing leaders every 4 or 8 years. Obama (and Hillary) completely screwed up Iraq.  Without proper following through after a victory - which is arguably THE single most important thing in war other than actually winning it - we would have been better off leaving Sadam in charge.  Look what happened after WWI how we followed up with Germany vs following up with Japan after WWII.

Checkers not chess is a good analogy, you need to know your long term plan and be able to foresee decades ahead. With our system that allows something like Obama to take over, there is no good long term plan.  I often wonder how other countries trust us at all. Any promise made by a President can be broken by the next one. Sometimes I think benevolent dictatorship would be better than what we've got. But you can't risk that; no guarantees a dictator would be or stay benevolent.  It is what it is and I guess history has shown the U.S. system of government the best man has come up with so far. At least for a couple hundred years until people figure out they can vote themselves other people's money.

That's the funniest thing I've read all year.  I think the social sciences are 99% bullshit anyway.

North Korea fired off another missile.

Does (or should) Trump do anything about it?  Didn't he mention something about consequences?  At least he didn't draw a red line.

Just a thought experiment.  What if we just nuked Pyongyang. Flatten it. We'd take out Kim and most of the Party hopefully. Would that end North Korea once and for all or would there be too much of the military left to keep the country intact?  Or are they hiding nukes somewhere they'd just launch at us, or at Seoul?