Too many weirdos to cover them all is a problem for well meaning journalists
As usual, world events are moving so fast I can’t find room to comment on all of them. I can’t even copy/paste links you really really need to read so you know when it’s time to run to your nuclear bunkers. The links just stay open as tabs on my browser, all 362 of them, just lingering waiting for some action, like a Malibu Beach bum.
So, in vain, I’ll try, hoping to keep my hard drive from frying.
Doug Mastriano won the GOP nomination for governor in Pennsylvania despite his refusal to admit that the only proven 2020 election theft effort is the ongoing Trump crusade to steal the election Joe Biden won. In addition to busing people in to the Capitol insurrection effort and attending the deadly festivities, Mastriano relies on his far right White Christian nationalist base to carry him to victory in November where he’ll lose and claim he won.
Which just goes to show us that the new strategy of perpetual losers is to redefine losing as winning, that committing crimes is legal and darkness never occurs because black lights don’t matter. Or something.
Now a third of Pennsylvanian adults have completely forgotten their state’s motto of "Virtue, Liberty, and Independence” and replaced it with “Nobody can deny that God is a carny barker with Krylon gold painted hair and a tan from a can from another mother.“
And to demonstrate his total fealty to his fake god, Mastriano grabbed the Liberty Bell by its crack and the Bell let him.
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post warns this is beyond standard election denial.
Mastriano is saying he’s “empowered as a believer to overturn election results to achieve God’s will,” Posner said. To prevent the subversion of the “Christian nation,” Posner added, he hopes to take “the God-given power to change election results” to the governor’s mansion.
As a divinely self appointed messenger from the world’s most improbable deity, the dude fulfills all the prophecies of the Magic 8 Balls of Shmucker Carlson’s testicle tanning booth.
Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy discussed his state’s high maternal mortality rate:
“About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear. Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”
The implication is that Black mothers have a genetic weakness that makes them succumb more readily than White mothers and they shouldn’t be counted as a Louisiana negative. ‘Correcting our population for race’ corrects nothing.
The combination of poverty and poor access to healthcare is the real problem Louisiana’s Black mothers have. Plus they have to put up with a racist Senator while they’re dying, which is another major problem he’ll refuse to correct.
The article also mentions another Trump-backed candidate:
Donald Trump’s pick for a Michigan state Senate seat is promising to ban all birth control if she gets the chance. “I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that ever come to a vote in the Michigan state legislature? And if it should, I would have to side with it should not be legal,” Republican Jacky Eubanks said in a recent interview with the site Church Militant. “People believe that birth control—it’s better, like you said, oh, because then you won’t get pregnant and you won’t need to have an abortion,” she added. “But I think it gives people the false sense of security that they can have consequence-free sex, and that’s not true and that’s not correct. Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage.”
I’m not certain which deity she subscribes to that lets every other creature enjoy sex without marriage (except for certain male spiders and praying mantises) but if her vision of a theocratic state comes to pass, I wonder who that one lucky man and one lucky woman will be. Will there be a raffle to decide that?
Digby has a scary article about the continued assault on LGTBQ marriage partner rights. In an ugly divorce court ruling, one of the parents was told she had no rights to the child she’s co-parented, but the sperm donor’s rights superseded hers.
I struggle fruitlessly to find a smartass quip about the situation but all I can think of is the poor kid in the middle of this mess. The judge clearly gave him no thought at all.
Yes, it’s true the ruling was prompted by one mommie’s lawyer, but bitter divorces and child custody fights aren’t confined to one gender. Judges are supposed to be impartial - at least that’s what critical impartiality theory says. But with an obviously corrupted giant ego sitting on the Supreme Court making faces at the quaint notion of both impartiality and justice, he’s clearly signaling it’s open season on all human rights.
Meanwhile, Herschel Walker is willing to forgive racists in his Senate run if they’ll forgive him for trying to kill his wife. While he’s busy selling the lie that America doesn’t have a racism problem - and civil rights workers aim only to divide us - election analysts can’t figure out whether he can win that Senate race.
I mean, he’s obviously loonier than a Three Stooges marathon, but as we’ve seen since the inception of the Tea Party, loony is no longer a disqualifier. Nor is abusive, phony, compulsively lying, traitorous, hate-promotion or knee-jerk ass-kissing. But in a state so evenly divided, Walker has to appeal outside of his base of abusive, phony, compulsively lying, traitorous, hate-promoting, knee-jerk ass-kissing voters.
And he can’t.
Just like he couldn’t do much in professional football or for military veterans.
This is the tip of a big honking iceberg.
Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.
And:
“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.
Which is exactly why far right theocratic Christian conservatives are projecting when they accuse Democrats of pedophilia all the time, even though actual cases by Democrats in government are exceedingly rare. And fewer than the record of convicted Republicans.
It’s also precisely why they’re rushing to outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and incest (also rape). They’re trying to cover their own tracks.