In case you’ve been stranded on a desert island with no communication with the outside world for the past few year, let me be the first to tell that you that we are now entering the final stretch of yet another election year. In other words, you should have stayed stranded for a few more weeks.

(And don’t worry, you didn’t miss much; unless the idea of a TV show starring Donald Trump becoming so popular that it inspires several rip-offs sounds like something you’d enjoy.)

It’s not that I can’t stand democracy; it’s the commercials for democracy that I can’t stand. Well, not even the commercials for democracy, but rather the commercials against democracy, and by that I mean attack ads.

It would normally be bad enough to put up with all these stupid campaign commercials, but it’s even worse since we in Wisconsin live in a "swing state," which means we aren’t red or blue. That makes sense, right?

While these campaign commercials themselves are annoying, it’s even more annoying that the people making them think the public decides which candidate it’s going to support based entirely on the commercials it happens to see while it’s busy watching small-claims courtroom television shows where some woman wearing a black shirt with wolves on it is suing her ex-boyfriend because he allegedly threw a rock through the windshield of her Monte Carlo.

And yeah, I know that the public does, in fact, decide who it’s going to vote for based on 30 seconds of selective truth that it hears in the background while it’s busy micro waving processed-cheese slices for homemade nachos during commercial breaks. But I find I can prevent high blood pressure and hypertension by pretending that that doesn’t happen.

And there are some things even more insulting to our collective intelligence, such as campaign yard signs, stickers and T-shirts. You might think it’s great that everyone can tell who you’re voting for, but you can achieve the same effect by making words come out of your mouth.

Have you ever seen a candidate’s yard sign in front of someone’s house and were then persuaded to vote for them? Have you ever said to yourself, "Wow, this person’s name looks really good on a blue background, next to an American flag design! I guess I know who I’m voting for!" I’m assuming you haven’t, because if you have, then you can’t read.

But what is easily the worst, even worse than commercials or yard signs, is when there are pro or anti candidate sentiments written on sidewalks in chalk. I don’t mean things like reminders to vote or advertisements to things going on in the union that you already plan on not caring about. I mean things that are basically the equivalent of writing, "You know this one guy? I don’t like him" on the ground.

And if you saw last week’s special pull-out advertising section known as Titanstyle, then you know the dangers associated with writing your opinions in chalk. A yard sign or commercial that announces a candidate to be "pro-America" isn’t going to offend anybody; obviously, that is puffery. But people are going to be less sympathetic to your cause if you write "Feingold: Trader (sic) to our the (sic) country" in huge letters on the ground.

And suppose the minor technical writing errors weren’t present in that persuasive chalk statement; suppose it said "Feingold: Traitor to our country" (or "Traitor to the country," I guess). Is proper spelling going to change your opinion?

If you saw the aforementioned anti-Feingold sentiment written on a sidewalk, assuming it was spelled right, and you were undecided as to whom you were going to vote for, there would be absolutely no way your decision would be swayed by chalk on a sidewalk.

And there is no defense of the chalked-up sidewalk here either. You can’t say, "Oh that’s not true, someone might be persuaded by reading someone’s name in chalk on a sidewalk," because that’s insane. Anybody who is going to be that eager to please the sidewalk they are walking on by doing exactly what it tells them to do probably isn’t allowed to leave their house without the supervision of a government-assigned caregiver.

However, it is not simply the concept of writing crap on a sidewalk with chalk that is moronic; what’s moronic is that the majority of the people who write stuff on sidewalks are putting an unacceptably low level of effort into the persuasiveness of their message.

For example, Communications Professor Tony Palmeri, who allegedly walks around wearing a fanny pack, is running for Wisconsin State Assembly as a Green party candidate, and has more garbage written on the sidewalks around campus than anybody. However, the difference between his garbage and other people’s garbage is that his garbage actually does more than suggest that you should be voting for him.

Palmeri’s sidewalk-chalk advertisements advertise that Palmeri would "stop the tuition hikes." Now, whether or not he actually would or could do that, I think we can all agree that none of us want to crap any more money away in order to get our degrees so we can all, hopefully, one day get a job answering phones at a J.C. Penny’s outlet store.

So when you walk down a sidewalk and your massive hangover is causing you to be unable to not stare directly down, you might perchance see one of Palmeri’s sidewalk testimonials and think that you would like to not have to pay any more for tuition. Thus, assuming you remember to vote and assuming you remember who’s sidewalk ad proclaimed no more tuition hikes, you might find yourself voting for Tony Palmeri.

And while that might not sound like much, it sure as Hell is a lot more effective than "Don’t vote for Feingold."