Garrison Keillor has some interesting thoughts.

The triumph of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama's Republican Senate primary was a ray of sunshine for those of us who'd like to restore stoning to our legal system and remove the curse of profanity once and for all from our country. Scripture is very clear: "Thou shalt not swear." But God's chosen party, the Republican Party, has waffled on this issue, as it has on the issue of adultery and obedience to parents and observance of the Sabbath and the engraving industry. And that is why our country today is on the verge of destruction. The signs are everywhere. Judge Moore is the only man who dares say so.

Beatitudes v. Ten Commandments...

Democrats are fine with the Beatitudes -- "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" and all that -- but blessing people is no substitute for upholding God's standards, and there are people in spiritual poverty who express that by taking the Lord's name in vain, or by shopping on Sunday, or disobeying their parents, or by coveting their neighbor's wife, and if we don't punish sin, then sin will overrun the nation, as it has done already. That is why Judge Moore is not a Beatitudes guy but a Ten Commandments man. The law is the law.

Population control…

Let us be honest here. There are too many people in this country. You know it and I know it. When we reduce the excess population by stoning and become a nation of 10 or 15 million, this country will be a paradise. You'll be able to drive and not languish in traffic. No waiting for tee times. Our enemies will be gone, all of them, bonked to death, and we will gain their homes and their wives and their cleaning ladies. It will be perfect.

[url=http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/09/garrison_keillor_maybe_roy_moo.html]Full article...

What's worse to have in Congress, a child molester or a Democrat?

The question posed by the election is apparently, for Republicans, existential. Both Roy Moore supporters and Roy Moore detractors in the party have framed the political debate as a clear choice: Would you rather have an actual child molester in office—or someone from the other party? This is apparently a profound and difficult choice. Republican leaders and functionaries continue to be at odds with each other over whether installing a child molester and serial predator as their newest Republican senator would be worth it if the child molester is willing to vote with the party to cut corporate taxes.

You would think that this is a joke, or a philosophical what-if scenario presented to demonstrate to students what true public corruption looks like. Nope. Alabama Republican leaders and supposed "evangelical" Moore backers alike are all struggling with whether Child Molestation Is Really That Bad, if it helps cement party or church power. Those people are monsters.

If you’re a Republican voter, I have some bad news for you. The people who lead the movement that supposedly represents your views — the politicians, the media figures, the activists — think you’re an idiot. In fact, they count on it.

That’s the real meaning of an extraordinary story The Post has published, about an effort by well-known right-wing fraudster James O’Keefe and his organization Project Veritas to entrap this newspaper into publishing a false story about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, with the obvious intention of using that to discredit the well-documented allegations that Moore preyed on teenage girls when he was in his 30s.

The latest conservative scam got exposed But it’s just one piece of a much bigger fraud.

In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.

That rate has been accelerating. Starting in early October, The Post’s tracking showed that Trump told a remarkable nine lies a day, outpacing even the biggest liars in our research.


I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.

The sheer frequency of Trump’s lies appears to be having an effect, and it may not be the one he is going for. A Politico/Morning Consult poll from late October showed that only 35 percent of voters believed that Trump was honest, while 51 percent said he was not honest. (The others said they didn’t know or had no opinion.) Results of a Quinnipiac University poll from November were similar: Thirty-seven percent of voters thought Trump was honest, compared with 58 percent who thought he was not.

I work in a clinic where the vast majority of my patients are on government-funded health care and have never worked a day in their lives.

I used to believe that everyone deserved health care. Now, I work in a clinic where the vast majority of my patients are on government-funded health care. I have learned that the stereotypes about these people are true: Most of my patients have never worked a day in their lives.

They are extremely ungrateful for the care that hardworking taxpayers provide for them. Patients have punched me, bitten me, screamed at me, and even urinated on me. I often leave with vomit on my clothes.

Sometimes, I have to bribe my patients with bright-colored objects, juice or graham crackers just to examine them. Do my patients thank me? Do they contribute to the economy? No!

They just suck up low-cost health care, whining the whole time, and then go pick up their free government milk. Often, they are literally carried from place to place in the arms of a real taxpayer.

As a pediatrician, I provide these scowling little freeloaders with life-saving therapies like vaccinations and antibiotics. I test their hearing and make sure any hearing loss is caught while it can still be corrected. I make sure kids with developmental delays get into therapy early so they’re ready to compete by the time they reach kindergarten.

Do they utter a word of gratitude? No! Not unless their mom or dad tells them to.

Nationwide, patients like mine represent almost half of the people who get insurance through Medicaid or CHIP, the Children’s Health Plan. In Texas, children constitute 3.4 million of the 4.5 million total people covered by these programs. So when you think about government health care, you should think about my patients: ungrateful, yowling, diapered maniacs who don’t even use language right.

CHIP covers 8.9 million children nationwide, and Congress has so far failed to fund the program for next year. If stopgap funding isn’t found soon, more than 450,000 kids in Texas alone will lose access to health care on February 1. Apparently the state plans to send a letter to these kids on December 22, right before Christmas, announcing the cuts.

I hope the letter goes something like this:

Ho ho ho, milk-breath! There will be no more free vaccinations for you. We hope you get an old-timey disease like diphtheria and die! Or maybe the cost of care will deter your parents from taking you to the doctor, so that your easily treatable infection turns into septic shock. Because your immune system is immature, your lungs are still developing, and you didn’t bother to vote!

Sincerely, America

Research has shown that people are more likely to die when they lose access to health care. Letting more American children die preventable deaths will send a strong message to kids across the country: Pull your thumbs out of your mouths, get potty-trained and GET A JOB!

Rachel Pearson, M.D., Ph.D., is a native Texan and a pediatrics resident.

So I'm an American living in Sweden, the socialist nanny-state hellscape of the GOP's fantasies. Here's what it's like to live in a country with a high effective tax rate and a commitment to spending for the common good:

I don't worry that a minor accident, illness, or other bump in the road will derail my family's future or mean that we lose everything. We have excellent health care and social insurance, and the state steps up when we are in a crisis. It's not perfect, of course. There are emergency room wait times and such, just like everywhere else. But, for example: I broke the crap out of my foot a while back, in a pretty awful accident involving a zipline.

The local hospital in Malmö took a couple of hours to get me through intake, doctors, x-rays, and diagnosis. They sent me home with a soft cast and instructions to come back for a hard cast in two weeks or so. The next day two handsome gentlemen showed up at my apartment. They were from the city's "hjälpmedel" office, which I hadn't known existed. They take responsibility for providing resources to people with permanent or temporary disabilities.

Their goal is to provide the aids necessary "to independently, or with help, meet basic personal needs and perform daily activities.". In my case, this meant that they installed a seat in my shower and fitted me out with a wheelchair. The wheelchair was brand new and they unwrapped a soft seat and made sure the foot rests were adjusted to the correct heights. Then they carried it back down a few flights of stairs and parked it just inside the front door, ready to go. They gave me a crazy grabber stick thing so I could get things from the comfort of my sofa, and pimped the crutches we'd gotten from the doctor with reflectors and soft grips. All of this was free. They gave me their numbers so I could call if I needed anything else.

I fooled myself into thinking that I was fine to work from home for a couple of days before I realized that the painkillers I was taking were not exactly helping me to do my best work. I called the HR person at my job, and she walked me through how to call out sick (after scolding me for not calling earlier and for trying to work, which she found ridiculous). I was unpaid for one mysterious "karensdag", then received the standard 80% of my salary as long as I was out sick - plus a bump up to 90%, since i was employed by the state. Probably if I'd been out for a long time it would've involved some hassle, but for a few weeks it was just that call and a form. I had get some folks to cover my classes for me, which everyone treated like a reasonable part of working life. You're sick. Obviously we'll solve it.

Later I got the hard cast, got the cast removed, got more x rays, then started physical therapy with an amazing PT that I chose from the many options in town. Money was never a part of my decision making. You do pay a small amount to see a doctor here, up to about $50, but you only have to pay $130 per year for such visits, and then you get a "free card" for the rest of the year. There's a similar system for medication. There is, obviously, no discrimination against those with free cards. I still see that physical therapist from time to time.

About a year after the accident the zipline place's insurance company sent me some money - about $1000 - intended to cover any costs I might have had : new shoes with better support, a couple of taxi rides, etc - this because they had filled out a form when the accident happened.

That's enough of that. Let's see. Oh! Yes, I had a kid here. Obviously very intense prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care was included in this medical system - though a good deal of it is actually exempted from those small $20-50 fees, so those visits are totally free. We chose to have our kid at an extremely hippy dippy hospital about an hour away from where we lived; it was the home of Swedish Midwifery. The main differences were, as far as we could tell, that a) it was not a big deal to get vegan meals and b) the essential oils that they would drop into the large whirlpool tub that was provided were biodynamically produced. We stayed for a couple of days after the birth, in a "family room" that was basically a hotel room with constant excellent room service and adjustable beds.

An ultrasound had suggested our kid might have something up with his kidneys, so he saw a doctor earlier than most; on day 3 they took him for a lil' scan. Everything was fine. We stayed for "only" 3 days with the cable TV and vegan food deliveries, then headed home. I don't remember anything at all about the costs of all this, because there were none, basically. Mothers' and childrens' health care is free. We did have to pay for gas to get to that faraway hippy hospital, so that's probably like $40 round trip.

Alison Gerber

... voted for Doug Jones.



The Jewish attorney who Roy Moore's wife touted employing in an attempt to fight off claims of anti-Semitism is actually a longtime friend and supporter of Senator-elect Doug Jones, who defeated Moore last month. Richard Jaffe is an Alabama defense attorney hired by the Moores to defend their son, Caleb Moore, against drug charges in 2016.

Jaffe told the Washington Examiner he has been close personal friends with Doug Jones for more than 30 years and he both contributed to, and raised money for, his campaign. "There could not be a more passionate supporter of Doug than me!" Jaffe said.

The Birmingham-based lawyer walked alongside Jones as he took center stage to deliver his acceptance speech and plans to be in the Senate gallery on Wednesday as Jones is sworn in.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!

Statement from the President of the United States

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

Until recently, the famous liar’s paradox was a liar saying, “I am lying.” Now, though, it has to be when any of Donald Trump’s friends or associates claims not to have called the president an ignoramus, a liar, an egomaniac or heroically unsuited for the presidency. Their choice is either to confirm the obvious or to appear a liar. Michael Wolff’s new book has put them all on the spot.

Wolff is a controversial figure whose journalistic reputation falls somewhat short of impeccable. What matters at the moment, though, is that most everything he has written in the excerpts I’ve read of “Fire and Fury” strikes me as true and, moreover, has already been said by others.

As every journalist knows, news is not that a dog bit a man but that a man bit a dog. In the same vein, it would be news if someone confided to an author or journalist that Trump was a reasonable man, self-effacing, considerate of others, cautious in his approach to major decisions, knowledgeable about the grand issues of national security or, even, aware that his hero Andrew Jackson did not live to the Civil War. This would be startling stuff. It would be similar in a way to the revisionist assessment of Dwight D. Eisenhower, considered a mumbler in his time, but understood now as a president who cleverly shielded his intentions by being purposely inarticulate. Maybe so.

From the White House and in the House of Lies known as the Republican National Committee have come denials aplenty. Who believes them? The president himself has gone into his Rumpelstiltskin act, stomping his foot and tweeting his innocence, but who believes him, either? Trump has effectively lent credence to Wolff’s reporting by having his lawyer threaten to sue Wolff for, of all things, “outright defamatory statements … about Mr. Trump, his family members, and the Company.” So huffed lawyer Charles Harder.

How is it possible to defame Trump? When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a “moron,” was that defamatory or merely the prosaic truth? When others in the White House said something similar, was that defamatory or was it a statement of fact? Actually, these statements would constitute matters of opinion, so clearly protected by the First Amendment that only a Supreme Court packed by Trump with caddies from his golf courses could rule in his favor.

That same holds for the effort to restrain Wolff’s publisher from publishing the book. Ain’t going to happen. As the eminent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams reminded me, the issue of prior restraint was settled by the Supreme Court in the famous Pentagon Papers case. If Trump and his legal team want, I will arrange for them to see “The Post,” the Steven Spielberg movie about how The Washington Post came to publish the Pentagon Papers. The question there revolved around national security — not a president’s hurt feelings — and still the court supported The Post and The New York Times.

Trump’s anger has clouded his PR sense. In essence, he’s promoting the Wolff book. The president and the presidency are unraveling. Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar’s Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called?

Fox News, I think.