Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Walley - The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey

A man picks up a female hitch-hiker. Both of them are concealing a secret. A murder has been committed - but who's the victim and who's the murderer?

John: Ian Puleston-Davies
Amy: Emma Atkins
Dl Barnes: Martin Reeves
George: Anthony Flanagan
Don: Seamus O'Neill


Producer/Director Pauline Harris

I just got a totally, absolutely useless post card, a mass mailing entitled

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S CORNOAVIRUS GUIDELINES FOR AMERICA 

which is pretty much a list of all of the things that the CDC has already made public for a month and which, almost to the last one, contradicts what Trump has been saying all along.  

When they start pissing and moaning about the cost of postage for voting by mail, remember they had no problem wasting postage on this piece of garbage. 

The CDC is going to need to be disinfected and decontaminated after Trump and his crew of crooks is gone. 

I Didn't Think I Was Going To Need This But It Turned Out That I Did Just Now

I'm pretty hairy, unlike so many of my detractors who have to, you know, wear a stupid looking beret, the men in my family keep all of their hair into old age.   But I'm really not into doing anything I'd need to get new clothes for.  Especially if they need dry cleaning. 

Still, it made me smile and I really needed that. 

One of my nieces who works in a health care facility has Covid-19.  Luckily, she's doing well, so far, but she has a family who are now exposed and can't get tested, she was working up till the time she became symptomatic- no choice, there were patients who needed to be taken care of - etc. 

And, yes, she lives in a state in which Republicans run the government.  Just a day or two back, one of the headlines I passed by said that state, with an enormous retiree population, was expecting to have a short fall of ventilators by about 30,000, if I recall, correctly.   We know that people are going to die because Trump and Republicans wasted the advance warning they had.  As asses like Rand Paul pushed libertarianism and others pushed other slogans of insouciant irresponsibility. 

Republicans are those "death panels" that you heard so much about on CNN and FOX ten years ago.  Irony is a real bitch, isn't it.   To say I'm pissed off is absurd, we shouldn't be pissed off, we should be volcanoes of rage.  I wonder if Rand has access to a ventilator.  My brother tells me that billionaires have been buying them to have on hand as they are telling people to get back to work. 

Bernie Sanders Is Responsible For The Worst Of His Cult's Republican Welcomed Crap

Bernies Bots are promoting a claim that three decades ago Joe Biden pressed a female staffer against the wall and digitally penetrated her vagina and once such a story is floated in Bernie-World, it never goes away.   I can almost guarantee you that if Bernie is confronted over this he will disclaim any responsibility for it and may even discourage it but he is all-in on it because as long as he keeps his vanity campaign going his true-believing bots will continue to generate Republican-fascist campaign spam.  

I very strongly doubt the claim, and that is having criticized Biden's way out of date habits of handling women, something which is way too 70s when psychologists, credentialed and As Seen on TV were telling everyone they should touch other people.  I think that's where Joe Biden probably got into the habit and like all male geezers, once a habit is established, they find it virtually impossible to change it. 

The part about him penetrating a woman digitally, I find rather difficult to believe without a number of other women making the same charge.  I don't believe it, to tell you the truth, Joe Biden is many things I don't like, he's no Donald Trump. 

It doesn't much matter if Sanders disowns it, even if the accuser retracted the accusation,  it doesn't matter at this point because the damage has been done, as I pointed out, once this stuff is being floated on Bernie media, media frequted by members of The Squad, other big name Bernie supporters, it won't ever stop being repeated.  They remind me of the John Birchers of my youth who, decades after he'd died, continually spouted similar stories about FDR. 

This is Bernie's doing, him, his wife, his vile campaign manager, the other campaign money grifters who encouraged him to do again for Trump what he did for him in 2016.

This is what you can always depend on the quasi-Marxist-Marxist play-left to do because they were doing it to FDR, running against him in elections all during the depression, propagandizing against him for preparing for war with the Nazis and Japanese Imperial fascists during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact.   They told stories similar to the ones told by the Birchers mentioned above, with some variation.  They have against every single Democrat who has ever held the presidency.  

We have got to put together a real American left that can win elections, get majorities and change things and we will never do so effectively until that dead hand of the Marxists and their dupes is removed from it.  We have to definitively, publicly and repeatedly exclude them BECAUSE THEY NEVER LEARN ANYTHING AND THEY ARE ALWAYS DUPLICITOUS BACK STABBERS.  ALWAYS!

Since Marx and Engels produced their pseudo-scientific political economic theories the Marxists have believed that it was a scientifically validated inevitability that Marxism would prevail.  That is a continuing delusion of Marxists even in the period when one after another Marxist dominated country threw it off and has not in the past thirty years tried to get it back.  That accounts for why they, in such numbers, the Marxists and those who are under their influence cannot believe that The Voters could reject Bernie Sanders and that there must be some imaginary conspiracy that has cheated him of victory.  That deep dark conspiracy is called "an election" Sanders' strength last time was in turning out his true believers in the most anti-demoratic part of the nominations process, in caucuses.   He did far worse this time than he did before because the caucuses were not as many and because a lot of people sensibly knew he was not going to ever be president.  

That true belief is the generator of imagined conspiracies and dark forces that the Bernie Bots are still claiming are afoot, depriving a life-long non-Democrat, someties anti-Democrat from winning the nomination of a party which he was never really a member of as opposed to life long Democrats running for that nomination against him.  And his opponent getting far more votes in far more states.  That's what you're always going to get from the play left, be it Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader or Eugene McCarthy who is their temporary cult figure.  That's all you'll get, that and electoral defeat.   We owe them nothing. 

Sanders loses credibility every day he continues his campaign.  If Biden died from Covid-19, a wish I've see expressed by the Bernie Bots onlline, Sanders should be rejected as the nominee because of his status as a fake Democrat and for his behavior.  I would accept any of the real Democrats who were in the race, those who got delegates, those who didn't with the exception of the Billionaires and Tulsi Gabbard who is a fake Democrat, as well.  But I'm not expecting that to happen.  If I were forced to vote for Sanders at this point, I'd have to hold my breath so long it would probably kill me.

The Shit Stain On The Republican Party

Lindsay Graham is a pathological piece of shit.  He's proven it over and over again, his grandstanding over unemployment insurance in the Covid-19 emergency bill is about the last word on that.  Him using the pathetically unsustainable wages paid in South Carolina to try to hold it up should be the end of anyone pretending that he is anything but a massive piece of shit that should be flushed out of American politics.  As if he didn't prove that by sucking up to Trump.  And he's not alone, Ben Sass and Tim Scott and Rick Scott have just told everyone in their state who needs unemployment insurance, and everyone but billionaires to drop dead. 

I'm guessing what has Miss Lindsay's pantaloons in a knot is what he imagines will happen if the wage slaves in the Palmetto State get used to having more income.  They might realize that master has been duping them all along.   They might throw his candy-ass out and elect people who will make sure they're not cheated. 

That the bill passed doesn't wipe this out, they are the shit stain on the Republican party that won't be wiped off it. 

Why Trump And The Republican-fascists Are Calling To End Social Isolation Knowing It Would Kill Hundreds of Thousands or More

The FOX-Trumpian-Republican-fascist strategy is to all insist now that the the shut-downs and isolation stop because they know 

a. Democrats and even some Republican governors and Mayors and members of Congress won't go along with that. 

b. that the economy is going to tank under shut-downs and isolation, it's going to tank no matter what they do because of the pandemic,

c. they will then blame the bad economy on Trump's and Republican-fascists' political opponents, hoping people will have "gotten over" coronavirus by the elections. 

They count on their calls to pack the churches and Trumpzi style rallies never happening because if it did what is already a catastrophe enhanced by their dithering and indecision as they had two months to plan. would turn into a summer of death.  Which would, of course, force an end to their one-sided declaration of an end of the war and an even worse economic disaster.   They are betting on that not happening before November. 

Trump's strategy - no doubt one dreamed up by the moral degenerates in the Republican-fascist think tanks and faculties and consultants - depends on Democrats and others to act in the most responsible manner KNOWING FULL WELL THAT THE MEDIA CAN BE DEPENDED TO PICK UP THEIR CAMPAIGN TO BLAME THE ECONOMIC RESULTS ON DEMOCRATS.  They will certainly do that because the mass media is a fully invested part of this. 

Their plan is to retain control of power, they don't really care if its under a seriously damaged of a totally blown out economy.  Trump and McConnell and so many other Republican-fascists know that if Democrats win big in November, getting control of the Congress and the Executive there will be a huge push to expose their crime spree which has been going on all during the Trump years and there may even be a push to go back and expose the crimes and wrongs of Republicans even in previous years.  There will be an enormous incentive for Democrats to expose the billionaires who, working with other billionaires, foreign as well as domestic, have conspired to destroy democracy here and abroad. 

The Republican Party Will Always Be The Source of Trumpian Depravity - A Strain Of It Is Mainstream Republicanism

I hope that the never-Trump Republicans, ex- and present,  are cottoning on to the fact that his depravity is rampant all through the Republican establishment.  It is especially rampant among the younger members of it, certainly in the "TeaParty" class as funded by the billionaires and promoted by the media, CNN certainly among the strongest promoters of it.  

The depravity of the "sacrifice the seniors" to Mammon, the Dow Jones, etc. is most obvious on FOX and among Republican office holders but it is just beneath the surface among even many of those who can button their lips as they vote in ways that have a similar effect.   I think that it is endemic to the Republican mindset that there are expendable populations who they don't mind dying. The disabled, anyone who couldn't get medical treatment was expendable to all but the tiniest handful of Republicans as they voted in Congress to destroy the ACA. I can assure you that that handful would have voted to kill it if they thought they could get away with it.  I suspect John McCain, feeling the weight of mortality on him, may have considered the moral consequences.  Collins, Murkowksi, not so much.  And they, as conservatives everywhere  are always fine with the impoverishment and destruction of the poor, minorities, and whose permanent status in destitution, poverty, working-poverty experience as a perpetual form of violence. 

By the way, the idea that young people are not at danger from Covid-19 is disproved as the number of even once healthy younger victims who die from it will climb.   And lots of younger people have risk factors.   I would not be surprised if smoking and, perhaps, vaping is a voluntary risk factor for making an infection worse, though there are other forms of respiratory deficiency that is already a known risk factor.  I have a middle-aged niece who has MS who I'm very worried about.  

What the merely stupid and futile play-left has been a problem for Democrats, in Republican terms turns into the stupid and far more dangerously effective amoral depravity of those who came to total power under Trump-McConnell.   It is the danger to us that is able to gain power in exactly the opposite way that the play-left never will be able to,* 

What we are seeing in the Covid-19 pandemic is the full amorality of the Republican party on full display.   And their stupidity.   If everyone went back to work, if everyone started gathering in large groups it would cause a far more catastrophic pandemic that would force the re-closing and re-isolation of the population that the most responsible governors and mayors have already taken.

I haven't heard anyone speculate on it but one question I have is if people gather in large concentrations during an active pandemic if that might not ENCOURAGE mutations of the virus that are even more capable of spreading to establish themselves in the population, sparking the emergence of a worse pandemic, a strain of the virus that kills more and may damage survivors even more than this one.  I don't know that but I'd bet on that being possible far more than that the Republican-fascist billionaire-millionaire promoted insanity getting it right.  

There is no guarantee that this is not going to happen again.  I would guess that this virus is here to stay in some form or other and that, like the influenza, it is going to recur cyclically.   And there is no guarantee that it might not return in a form that will mimic, not the 1918-19 infuenza but the black death in its decrease of the population and economic effects.   I doubt that the human population is likely to take the protective measure of becoming vegetarians and stop the industrial concentration of animals kept for slaughter and consumption that is the source of other such viruses.  As I've mentioned, it's only by chance that such a virus has not come from the mass chicken or pig raising operations in Iowa or Maine or North Carolina or anywhere that's done in the United States.  

The reported conditions in the infamous DeCoster egg factories in Maine and elsewhere produced outbreaks of infection,* and employed virtual slave workers who were terrorized into working under the most dangerous of conditions, indeed, there were deaths.   And the entire time they were protected by Republican politicians, foremost among them the cousin of the convicted Jack and Peter DeCoster, the "moderate" Republican Olympia Snowe.  Someone I know who worked at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection told me that files about the DeCoster operation were removed and destroyed from State records under her influence.   I wouldn't doubt that that's true. 

 At one time prior to 2010, the DeCoster family’s Quality Egg LLC through various silent and secret ownerships may have been the nation’s largest egg producer. Two of its companies in Iowa in 2010, Wright County and Hillandale, were blamed for a nationwide Salmonella outbreak that caused the DeCosters to recall more than one half billion shell or table eggs.

The outbreak, however, reached 1,939 confirmed cases, and disease modeling by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated as many as 56,000 people might have been sickened in the Salmonella outbreak, a fairly common bacteria.

Quality Egg came under scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice when the Food and Drug Administration found the company was shipping eggs that had tested positive for the bacteria.

It is notable that it was not in Maine, where the DeCosters held enormous influence and power through their connection to Republican politicians but in Iowa where he was finally brought to a tiny bit of justice.  Even then they were treated with velvet gloves.  

It is not unreasonable to conclude that such domestic industrial animal concentration with people working in filthy conditions is the perfect means of spreading bacterial infection and viral infection which is certainly much more dangerous, as the cycles of influenza and, now, the Covid-19 virus prove.  And they aren't the only ones that have come from the meat and egg industries.  I think the earlier ones of the 1990s and 2000s are a warning of what you get when you do that and when the politicians and judges allow it to continue.  Even the "moderates" among them. 

*  I will be writing more about why the play-left is a far bigger problem for the Democratic Party than the most depraved of amoral fascists are not for Republicans.  

Stupid Mail

I wonder when the last time Donald Trump spent an Easter morning going to church was, now many of the past fifty Easters he set foot inside a church.  If forced to guess, I'd guess none.  Perhaps he made an appearance for political purposes, he certainly wouldn't make one for any religious purpose, he's a Mammonist, he serves Mammon, not God.   He may have seen something like a full church for Easter in a movie or TV show but that's probably the extent of his experience of Easter in church.

Donald Trump's Easter is more likely all about eating chocolate and peeps and having a prostitute dressed in bunny ears pop out of an egg or something.  

Using his "christianity" which is about as real as his hair is to slam Christainity is not productive and it is counter-productive if it puts him on the side of the major religion of the American voters.  Though I doubt any of them are stupid enough to fall for either Trump or the ephemeral anti-"xian" kicks over Trump's assinine fantasy of filled churches which will disappear before next Monday.  

Update:  Is "xian" still a thing? 

Two Short Pieces

This pandemic has certainly exposed the fact that even as most of us were required to take a Biology class in high school, most people seem to be pretty clueless about even relatively simple facts about viruses and the hygiene that is needed to avoid infection.  So much for the highly vaunted emphasis on the STEM subjects - though that was only ever really about the needs of business, not the needs of the common good.   I long ago noted one of the results of that was, oddly, a deterioration in the reasoning of such human production bots.  But that's for another time. 

I wonder if, say, half of the effort that went into the great evolution wars had been spent on those areas of biology that are not controversial and which, unlike evolution, having wrong or even just foggy notions about can get us all killed, where we'd be now.  

I'm not aware of having flaky ideas about the origin of species endangered anyone's life.  Having flaky ideas about viral diseases and how to prevent them and the extreme difficulty of treating and containing them are is how we got here.  

I'm not expecting that this will cause a revision of the science curricular in the schools or, even more so, the coverage of science in the mass and popular media, viruses aren't sexy click bait like the evolution wars have been.  That topic isn't ideologically useful to fascist-fundies on one side and atheist-materialists who intersect with them at many more points than they would like anyone to point out.  

-------------------------

I've figured something out about the lefty media that I made a partial list of, yesterday, their primary motivation isn't to promote a lefty agenda or, certainly, not political victory, their primary motivation is to get the eyes and what passes as minds among the play-left to focus on their material and to support that particular venue of the play-left.   It's a well known formula that the more you thrill the paranoia and anger of intellectually degenerated peopl with easy to construct and consume nonsense, the more they'll flock to you.  The play-lefty media like all entertainment media is primarily about appealing to,if not the lowest common denominator, at least one low enough to keep it afloat and maybe grow it a bit.  That such lefty-media is never attractive to enough of an audience to really get big doesn't mean you can't make it as the kind of small fry that serves a niche market.  That such venues as In These Times and Majority Report can influence even small numbers of voters has catastrophic effects, at times.   

Probably their greatest impact has been in discrediting the wider and left which has, up till now, rather foolishly defended and even championed that left on the basis of the right of even the most dishonest and repulsive to have a right to be heard.  I think that's caused way more trouble for  the real left than it's worth.  

Seeing the same old figures of the play-left repeating their most destructive routines in 2020, it's time for the real left to get shut of them, stop supporting them, stop defending them and to disown them, publicly, repeatedly, definitively.  If Democrats are in any position to control the Senate without his membership in their caucus, they should throw out Bernie Sanders.   The Party should adopt a rule that says no one who has not been a declared member of the Democratic Party for a decade before the presidential election they want to run in is eligible to get the parties' nomination.  That would have kept both Sanders and Michael Bloomberg out of the Democratic nominations race this year. 

The Ammoral Depravity Of The Play-Left And The Trumpian Right Are Both Trying To Achieve The Same End, Four More Trump Years

The past several weeks I've been concentrating on the insanity of the allegedly leftist play-left, their perpetual scheme of winning by enabling Republican-fascists, something which they've done in election after election for decades and decades which has unsurprisingly produced increasingly bad Republican-fascism.  This elections cycle has, they having helped produce Trump last time, exposed how dangerously degenerate their grasp of reality and morality are.*  The reality they deny is what that tactic has produced by way of increasingly depraved fascism and their role in producing it and the fact that it has never worked the way they claimed it would, not once.  The morality is perhaps something that they don't really are about.  I have pointed out here, before that both the Stalinist and Maoist "lefts" were huge fans of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist governments even as it was correctly reported in the Western media that those governments were engaged in mass murders that stand with those of the Nazis in numbers and cruel immorality.  I pointed out a few years ago that a respected journalist of that left in The Nation a few years back pined for the heyday (or such heydays  as are had on the play-left) of the Maoist Progressive Labor party.**

Which I bring up because the next generation of such play-lefties are continuing to be a bunch of amoral idiots and because that amorality is something they share with the Fascist Trumpian-Murdochian right as can be seen in both the ditheringly irresponsible handling of the Covid-19 crisis from the first news of its beginning to now.  I will give this much to the Communist dictators in China, their period of dithering irresponsibility, in which they treated it more as a public relations problem than a catastrophic epidemic, was much shorter than that in the United States, Britain and some other Western countries ruled by the influence of Rupert Murdoch and his like in the media.  Our governments, alleged democracies, still deputed as such, are beginning to float a PR campaign of staggering amorality and immorality downplaying those the, now, pandemic will kill as expendable old people - which includes many of the figures of that fascist-ruling right but they figure they're OK - and other unimportant people with unimportant lives.  FOX and other Murdoch properties and people are pushing that along with his Wall Street Journal editorial board.  The things that feed the empty mind of Trump and his duped followers.  

I guess that so many of the Trump-FOX audience are exactly that part of the population who are now deemed to be at the highest risk, old people, especially those who have health problems are exactly the ones whose deaths they pooh-pooh as unimportant and not worth taking the drastic measures that Asian countries and Italy took to somewhat blunt the impact of the pandemic isn't something FOX and Murdoch and Trump worry about.   Or maybe, that audience having proved so gullible and malleable, already, they figure they can use them before pushing their bodies into the mass grave that they have suckered those people into digging for themselves.  

Bringing this piece full circle, the Bernie-dead-ender play-left is slamming Democrats for just about everything they can think of, spreading rumors of dark conspiracies of how the inevitable victory of Bernie Sanders in a party he has never really been a party of, after having run one failed campaign for the Democratic nomination, already, was thwarted by a conspiracy to cheat him out of a victory no rational person would have believed he would achieve by democratic means.  They do so after they helped bring about the Reagan years, the Bush II years, and now Trump.  They do so seeing what that has produced and will continue to produce in his stacking the courts with fascists who can be expected to dominate that branch for decades to come.  I wish I could go back in time and punch every fucking idiot lefty of both genders who said warnings about that consequences of Republican presidencies was a "scare tactic" of the Democratic Party and they weren't falling for it.  

I think that one thing we have to do is throw the play left onto the scrap heap of history, not only the major figures but the media that they used to lie us into the place we are now.  In These Times, The Nation, Democracy Now!(yeah, right) Pacifica, The Young Turks, Majority Report, Michael Moore, etc. anyone who encouraged the Bernie dead-enders any media outlet that did should be scrapped.  The entire baggage of that fraudulent Marxist, quasi-Marxist and Marxist-duped history, complete with its popular figures in pop-culture, should be seen as what they were and are.  

I think it's clear that any real American left will not be that left, I think Elizabeth Warren's policies may well mark the real left side of what we can honestly expect to be able to get the power to enact, certainly now.  Given the enthusiasms of the play-left the left of the Che tee shirts and mugs, those who nostalgically pine for the days when Progressive Labor was a thing, though a very small, very stupid thing, I don't think we should expect that even their best sounding ideas would work to produce egalitarian democracy and economic and social justice.  I have come to the conclusion that it was always a stupid thing to trust anyone who supported some of the most brutal figures of failed leftist politics, of some of the most brutal dictators in human history who managed to take control of countries by anti-democratic methods.   Revolutions are, by their nature, anti-democratic.  Their results in easily more than nine times out of ten are as bad if not worse than what they replace.   And that's when they succeed.  There is no guarantee that they will succeed. 

The play-left are spoiled brats who insist on having it all their way when that's not how politics in the United States has or will ever work.  Given their enthusiasms and history, it's nothing any rational person would suspect would produce the results they claim they would.  There is every reason to believe they are unsustainable in reality.  It never seems to occur to the Marxists among them that the dialectic, one of their god substitutes, might not swing to the left on a permanent basis, that their "revolution" could end up with it stuck at "right" for centuries.  Look how long their imaginary force kept the Pharaohs in place.  There is no dialectic, that they could believe there is one only shows what a bunch of superstitious idiots they are.   I often find atheists fall for such gods, they just don't realize that's what they have made.  Golden moon-calves.   


* I do attribute a lot of that to the influence of Marxists and to the extent that Marx and Engels are responsible for producing it, Marxism.  The moral character of Marxism as a brutal amoral system became obvious in the early years after the Russian Revolution and that was before it turned into an anti-moral, anti-humane system starting even during the Lenin years and increasingly as it turned into Stalinism.   Among the clearer truths about the history of the American left is that the Marxists here were not greatly bothered by the brutal oppression and genocidal characteristics of Lenin, Stalin etc. even as they certainly knew about it and lied about it to those lower in their own organizations and to the general public.  

** As I pointed out then:

The Progressive Labor Party was a Maoist party.  I don't know if you were alive at the time but the years mentioned in my morning post, beginning in 1966 to 1969 the foremost activity in China was Mao's Cultural Revolution.  While I'm very doubtful that it's possible for someone to look at the various claims about how many people were murdered BY THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS as the SDS and PL were shadow boxing at each other with any great confidence, anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of Chinese people and members of minorities in China were being murdered just as surely as those under the Nazis and the Japanese invaders were in the 1940s.   And that was just the people murdered under Mao in those years. Anyone who could be a Maoist then is as guilty of supporting mass murder as the Nazis here were in the 40s.   No left that could possibly have done anything positive, including ending the American war in Vietnam would have had anything to do with them.   Anyone who claims, as indeed, Katha Pollitt did in 2008 that the PL was a force for good is nuts.   

and in a later addition:

I looked it up, the PL officially SUPPORTED THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION during those years.  That would be equivalent to supporting the Nazis as the extermination camps and the Einsatzgruppen were killing people. twenty five or so years earlier.   I won't pretend that's not the case merely because the victims weren't Europeans. 

Time For Rationing

It's about two weeks late but they need to institute rationing, immediately

Get a load of this Trump fan who bought out the Dollar Store

I'll Say It

There is something so entirely satisfying that it was Dr. Senator Rand Paul who irresponsibly exposed a bunch of elderly Senators to Covid-19 AS HE KNEW HE VERY LIKELY HAD REASON TO BELIEVE HE WAS INFECTED. 

I heard someone say that he acted like a teenage asshole, which is true, though as he's a libertarian and they're more like the worst kind of two-year-old.   It's especially shocking that the asshole WHOSE LIBERTARIAN PHYSICIAN FATHER WAS SPOUTING THAT COVID-19 WAS A HOAX TO HIS CULT AS HIS ASSHOLE BRAT WAS, PERHAPS, ENDING THE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY OF THE SENATE.   

This should be the end of the blithe normalization given to the malignant ideology of libertarianism by the media.   Libertarianism might work if you live as a shelfish asshole away from other people and don't impinge on them, it's a dangerous permission to be totally irresponsible in real life among real people. 

As with Ben Carson, it's clear that shockingly defective people can be allowed to practice medicine in the United States.  Both in terms of mental debility, insanity and their equivalent in selfish irresponsibility.   I'll say it.  I hope if Rand Paul gets any of his fellow Senators killed, I hope they're Republicans.  They deserve it too, especially after yesterday's attempt to profiteer off of this crisis. 

It's Still Lent - Rowan Williams on Islam

Lent has certainly fallen apart, at least the one I'd expected to do this year.  I've even lost track of the current cycle of the lectionary.  I'm just going to post things at random, hoping to post one thing a day.   

I don't know if there's any good that would come out of trying to turn the austerity forced on us by Covid-19 into a Lenten theme but I've thought about that this morning and, after a few hours, it doesn't seem to be something I can pull off. 

Here's a short passage from a sermon by Rowan Williams who I'm finding rather good on a lot of things.  I'll never be a member of the Anglican branch of Christianity but as time goes on those distinctions count for less and less. 

William Barr's Fascist Instincts Looking For Opportunities In The Pandemic - The Play Left, Even As This Happens, Are Trying To Spoil The Election For The Only Thing Standing Between Him And Enacting His Wet Dreams

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department’s requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions.

William Barr is a fascist, he has been a fascist his entire adult life, fascism is the real name for his "Federalism" as in "Federalist Society".   While everyone was being nice and not calling it what it was, they were gaining strength, remember all of those asses who said "The first person who says 'fascist' loses,"  well, they were enabling this. 

The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing that it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could legally deploy right now to try and slow the coronavirus outbreak.

And as Majority Report and The Young Turks and In These Times and the rest of the abominable play-left slam the Democratic Party and try to drive down the chances of Democrats winning the election in November, consider this.

The DOJ requests — which are unlikely to make it through a Democratic-led House — span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated.

In one of the documents, the department proposed that Congress grant the attorney general power to ask the chief judge of any district court to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.”

Dr. Rachel Bundang preaches for the Fourth Sunday of Lent