Smart Joe, Votes, Fire, Town Halls, COVID, Insider Trading, Barrett Care

Perhaps Biden’s best video yet. Is it the most effective?

• Infidel753 listens to Joe Biden’s Gettysburg speech, including happy talk about working with Republicans, and finds evidence that he is smarter than we might think. Maybe smarter than the rest of us.
   
• Sarah Cooper thinks about Trump losing the election but refusing to go away, and comes up with a way to make him happy, preserve democracy, and keep us safe.
   
• He definitely was not gonna do it. Never, never. No fire related aid to California. Buncha damn hippies.
   
  tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors went to vote, came back and found that, 2½ weeks before election day, desperation took its toll. My president suddenly changed his mind. California has been declared a disaster area, with aid on the way.
   
  Not exactly selling out, since it always was the right thing to do. So, maybe… selling in?
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger looks through all the prognostications about this year’s election and presents a quick, compelling case on which prediction will turn out to be most accurate.
   
• Jonathan Bernstein invites us to marvel at the ever more bizarre campaign antics of Donald Trump.
   
• Scotties Toy Box defines mutual loyalty between Trump and Trump followers.
   
• Max’s Dad watches the dueling town halls that voters got when Trump refused an actual debate and sees a tale of two uncles.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit also watched the Trump half of the debate substitute and posts a fair objection to how Trump was treated. Shame on you, Savannah Guthrie!
   
• Okay, so we didn’t get a Trump/Biden debate, since my president backed out. In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson does pretty well contrasting the dueling town halls we got instead. I caught a bit of Trump action but I couldn’t bear to watch more than a little of it. It made me feel a little sorry for Trump. I didn’t think that was possible.
   
  He was churlish. He looked haggard. He kept trying to catch his breath. Maybe it was the aggressive questioning from Savannah Guthrie, although I missed most of that. Maybe he was just sick or under the influence of Remdesivir or hydroxychloroquine or bleach or snake oil or something.
   
  To me he appeared anxious, desperate. He was a man sitting on a pin with no place to put his feet.
   
  I saw a candidate gazing into an electoral abyss, hoping somehow to bluster his way back to solid ground, but unable to see that ground anywhere. Perhaps part of it was some odd momentary confluence of positioning and light. Later, I found myself thinking about those glistening rivulets of orange perspiration. It occurred to me that, after evening became night, he might become the only White House occupant ever to sweat while taking a presidential shower.
   
  It is an image I’ll spend the rest of the weekend not thinking about.

• My brief impression could be way off the mark. It could be medical. Nan’s Notebook reads accounts by Covid survivors and wonders if there is any way to tell if one particular former patient is the victim of coronavirus related brain fog.
   
• The drug Remdesivir does have an effect. It made my president want to stage an event in which he would stroll from his hospital room out to his limo, rip open his shirt, and reveal the Superman pajamas he had worn the night before. Sadly, someone talked him out of it.
   
  But he has been hawking Remdesivir as a sure cure for the coronavirus. Hackwhackers looks into that claim, finds studies demonstrating that the drug does not cure the virus and has no effect on the likelihood of death, then goes on to document the Trump efforts to keep the CDC from publicizing those clinical results.
   
• Life and corruption won’t stop for mere pandemic. One type of insider trading deals in human lives as well as hedge funds. Frances Langum takes us back to February, when Trump advisor Larry Kudlow was telling us the virus was contained, while secretly telling the down and dirty truth to wealthy Trump donors.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony discovers an interactive visualization, with moving graphs from June 1 to this week, showing the spread of COVID, state by state, with each state color coded by predominant political party.
   
• Trump Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett sticks to her originalist guns. The Constitution should be interpreted by the definitions most folks thought the words meant when the Constitution was written. In the Borowitz Report soon to be Justice Barrett does support health care as it was available in the 1787.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara defends income inequality, essentially by defining any remedy as legalized theft. It is unoriginal objectivism, a slight variation of what I read as a kid, too damn many decades ago. That variation comes in a strange twisting of the Martin Niemöller confessional about the Nazis. First they came for the socialists…. Michael attempts to turn that into a defense of inequality. Here’s how it works in MichaelWorld:

  It starts with the “top 0.1%.” But there is nothing to prevent the 0.1% from morphing into the 1%, then the 10%, then the 25%, and so on and so on. There is no logical limit to the downward pull, a downward pull that ultimately must, by definition, end in universal poverty, as every communist state has demonstrated. And as communist states like Soviet Russia, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Castro’s Cuba amply demonstrate, what begins with theft often ends with murder.

  For those on the ultra end of the extremes, the slippery slope argument is not a slope and is not an argument. It is a hard, cold, slippery-cliff reality. There is little room for ideological distinctions. Life is binary. The mental and emotional tunnel vision can happen at the ragged edge of any extreme ideology.
   
  A radical publication more than 50 years ago supposedly celebrated the news of Robert Kennedy’s assassination with a front page photo of the head of a pig superimposed over that of the dying Kennedy. In Michael’s mind, there are things-as-they-are as a sort of natural law. And there is Soviet style dictatorship. Life is the coin. Choose head or tails.
   
  To the rest of us, Hobson’s choice ‑ burn to death or freeze to death ‑ seems like one hell of a limited selection. Perhaps there is the possibility of… you know… room temperature?

• Historians have, at least since I first learned to read, debated on whether the atrocities committed by, ordered by, and encouraged by Columbus (rape, dismemberment, slavery, torture) actually happened; or were fictions or exaggerations by his enemies; or, if true, were merely common to the times. At Unabashedly American, my long-time friend Darrell Michaels takes the defensible position that the life of Columbus should continue to be celebrated each year. Fair enough.
   
  He chooses to buttress his case solely with a video from Prager University. It is an unfortunate choice for his only source.
   
  Prager University is one of the strangest universities ever. It is not accredited. It has never sought accreditation. It offers no degrees. It offers no educational certificates. It offers no classes. It employs no faculty. It has no students. It is Trump University without the integrity. It is strictly a producer of videos.
   
  My friend bravely defends the no class university (See what I did there?) by pointing out that they do provide an occasional right wing scholar a brief moment in the video sun.
   
  Darrell and I have exchanged friendly messages, encouragement in times of crisis, heated posts, and passing references for years. In his defense, I can truthfully testify that my friend frequently does much better than this one post might lead a casual reader to believe..
   
• PZ Myers finds a yard sign he really likes. Sort of a political version of I’ll have what they’re having.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz reads his Bible and learns that God is pro-choice.
   
• Lapsed Catholic Dave Dubya examines the writings of the current Pontiff and determines that Pope Francis is a socialist and Jesus is antifa.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, one-time pastor, current atheist, Bruce writes about know-it-all Christians and offends an Evangelical believer who sends an introspective response.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, David Robertson studies Hell. Seems our concept of a place of eternal punishment is a long way from how Biblical writers thought and wrote of it.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil takes on a long sleep and awakens with a bit of a negative view of… well… everything.