The Fucking Hammer

There has been a lot of talk lately about coming together and looking at each other not as liberals or conservatives but as Americans. My interest in doing this begins when conservatives in our country own their insane bullshit. 

The facts are that they are in a cult and have spent the better part of three decades demonizing liberals. They have done a great job of getting people to believe that “both sides” are just as bad and there are such things as “alternative facts.” They have actively worked to erode faith in our institutions for the express intent of holding on to their slipping power. 

If they take responsibility for all this crap, I’m more than willing to address the minor transgressions of the left (cancel culture, partisan spin). Until then, they get the hammer.

Every. Single. Day.

Rudy Melts Down Amid Republican Campaign to Disenfranchise Voters

In trying to steal the 2020 election, the Trump campaign must be getting tired of all that losing. A conservative Republican Pennsylvania judge just tossed out Trump's case, ridiculing Trump's legal team. In particular, Rudy Giuliani is doing an absolutely abysmal job while literally melting down.

The Trump campaign’s main argument challenges an email that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sent to county-level voting officials, encouraging those officials to “provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected,” so that those voters can be notified that they made an error while submitting those ballots, and will have the opportunity to cure that error.

As it turns out, not all counties took this advice. The Trump campaign claims that Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, notified voters that they needed to cure errors in their absentee ballots, while county officials in Republican-leaning counties did not. Thus, the campaign claims, absentee ballots cast in Biden-friendly Philadelphia were more likely to be counted than ballots cast in more Trump-friendly regions of the state — and this discrepancy amounts to unconstitutional discrimination.

The judge dismissed this argument as total crap. The Republican officials who didn't allow ballot curing were the ones doing the unconstitutional discrimination: suppressing Democratic votes to steal the election. 

Trump has been doing everything in his power to discourage Republicans from voting by mail, encouraging them to vote in person on election day (and to vote twice, causing even more mayhem and confusion on election day). That means absentee ballots are going to skew Democratic. 

Republican county officials refused to allow absentee ballots to be "cured," knowing that they were more than likely to be Democratic.

There's nothing at all wrong with curing ballots. It's done all the time: when you vote in person your ballot is run through the tabulator, and if there are any inconsistencies the machine spits it out and you get a new ballot. This is almost always innocent: for example, accidentally voting for two judges in the same race, which is really easy to do when there are like 20 judge races, most of which only have one candidate.

Republican officials -- intentionally disregarding instructions from the secretary of state -- prevented voters from fixing erroneous mail-in ballots stole votes from people who made trivial clerical errors.

Those Republican officials should be prosecuted for disenfranchising voters. But, like always, the Republicans are trying to their own crimes to their advantage.

Radical New Democratic Ideas

 

Is this the world that the "far-left" wants? OMGGG!!!!!!! Hide the women and children. Evil is about to reign down on all of us. Soon we will be floating in a boiling pit of sewage...

The Year 2020

2020 has been labeled many things but the simple fact is that it will be remembered for the year that alternative facts literally killed Americans. 

And our national obsession with “both sides” let those responsible (conservatives) off the hook.

What I Wish Would Happen, What Actually Happens

What I Wish Would Happen: 

 

-Facts are presented. 

-People change their minds based on reality. 

-People are more enlightened and humanity progresses 

What Actually Happens: 

-Facts are presented. 

-People experience cognitive dissonance and feel personally attacked. 

-People dig into their beliefs, refused to be enlightened and we don’t progress.

The Guide On The Side

With much of the country steeped in distance learning, an inherent flaw in our education system has been exposed. This flaw is one of perception by the general public and has unfortunately been fueled by many in the field of education. In fact, it's a belief that needs to be extinguished. Here it is... 

The responsibility of education lies solely with educators. In fact, it lies primarily with parents and the scholars themselves. 

If neither takes this responsibility seriously or understand how to assume this responsibility, then school officials face a losing battle. 

This is what we need to teach the families of our country. Teach your children at the earliest age possible to take control of their learning. Devote time to supporting them in this endeavor. Show them successful ways to learn and be good scholars. 

And educators, you aren't the "Sage on the Stage." You should be the Guide on the Side. That's what leads to more successful scholars. They need to own it. So do their parents. Give them the space to do that. 

If we don't burst this myth and change our course, we will have serious problems with people who can't function for themselves in our culture.

The Problem with Polling

There's a lot of handwringing in the press about polls that indicated Joe Biden would win by a larger margin than he actually did:

While the polls generally underestimated Trump, the errors were more acute in some states. In Wisconsin, which has mostly completed its count, Biden won by seven-tenths of a percentage point, 49.6 percent to 48.9 percent. But that’s after taking an 8.4-point lead into Election Day in the FiveThirtyEight average.

Other states where the polls missed: Ohio, where Trump had an advantage of 0.8 points in the FiveThirtyEight average, currently shows an 8.2-point lead for Trump in the vote count. In Florida, preelection polls showed Biden up by an average of 2.5 points, suggesting the Democrat had a slight edge in an election he’s currently trailing by 3.2 points.

There were some polls that hit the mark in those states. Trafalgar Group, which says it tries to account for respondents who lie to pollsters about their support for Trump, performed well in Wisconsin (Biden +1 in their last poll) and Florida (Trump +2). But the firm also released other polls that overstated Trump’s position, like a survey in too-close-to-call Georgia that showed Trump leading by 5 points, and one in Michigan that gave Trump a slight edge in a state he lost by 3 points.

Still, the more common miss for public pollsters was in the other direction. The ABC News/Washington Post poll in October showing Biden ahead by 17 in Wisconsin got a lot of ink as an outlier, but the problems were more pervasive than that. The final New York Times/Siena College polls in Wisconsin and Florida had Biden up 11 points and 6 points, respectively.

There are lots of theories as to why this is the case. Some theorize that Trump voters are "shy;" which is the politically correct way of saying that Trump voters are ashamed to admit they support such a morally and ethically corrupt scumbag.

Others say that Trump voters are just plain liars, trying to screw with the polls. Which doesn't really make any sense, because nothing ticks off Trump more than bad poll numbers.

The most likely reason, though, is what I've been saying for years: likely voters just don't answer their phones when pollsters call. Why would they? It's been at least a decade since I gave up answering the phone when I get a call from a number I don't recognize.

Before VOIP dialing technology made telephone spam calls the plague of the Internet age, I used to answer the phone. And back in the day I answered some political preference polls. 

 

But that brings up another issue: the polls themselves. The problem is that so many polls are dishonest "push polls." They aren't legitimate attempts by a news organization to find out how you plan to vote. They're run by political hacks who ask misleading questions packed with lies in an attempt to influence your vote.

The real question about polls in this election cycle is whether people were ashamed about voting for Trump and lied about it, or whether polling in general is just not working anymore. I think it's the latter, because so many polls got House and Senate races wrong too.

 

News organizations and political campaigns are seriously worried about whether polling is completely broken. Polls are useful for telling the general mood of the country, which is important for business as well as governance. Campaigns definitely need them to decide where to spend money.

 

But because legitimate polling organizations can't get through to a representative sample of the electorate, I think phone-based polling is done for.

It's likely that polling will be replaced by measuring people's online habits: their search engine queries, what Twitter feeds they follow, what Facebook posts they click on and share, what news sites they visit, etc. 

 

Which means the opinions of people who aren't online won't be measured, which includes the elderly and certain minority groups.

 

That also means that our online lives will be under even more scrutiny, and companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter will have even more power. 

Given what havoc Twitter and Facebook have wreaked on our lives these last five years, with all the evil misinformation and outright lies spread through them on the election and the pandemic, this is not a Good Thing.

Unless we all delete our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we are going to be one very unhappy and dysfunctional country.

Dear Democrats...

Democrats, the core goal of Republicans and conservatives is to get you to hand wring through trolling. That’s how they get you to put yourselves in losing positions. It’s a specific strategy. 

So, when you get shit for the lack of a blue wave (even though we still don’t know how things are going to clarify over the next few weeks), don’t fall for it. Be reflective, make changes but don’t fall back into running from a position of apology. That’s just what they want you to do because they know it’s a loser. 

If the Democrats want to fix their problems, they should put the following four people in charge of the party. 

Pete Buttigieg 

Stacey Abrams 

Rachel Bitecofer 

Andrew Yang

Trump Intentionally Let the Pandemic Get Out of Control to Screw Up Voting by Mail

In June it took a week to count all the absentee ballots in the Pennsylvania primary. Back then everyone predicted that it would be worse in November.

It was also in June when Donald Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, a Republican fundraiser with huge conflicts of interest, to be postmaster general. Almost immediately DeJoy started sabotaging the post office's efficiency. He eliminated collection boxes. He got rid of automated sorting machines. He cut back on overtime.

Of course, the mail backed up. Thousands of chicks sent to Maine farmers died due to these delays.

In August Trump admitted he was intentionally screwing up voting by mail.

And to make sure that as many people voted by mail, Trump encouraged everyone to run around and spread the coronavirus. He wanted the pandemic to be out of control on election day, because he needed more Democrats to vote by mail. The crush of ballots would overwhelm the post office and the election judges who have to go through a complex process to handle them.

Meanwhile he encouraged Republicans to go out and vote in person. He even had the CDC declare that people infected with the coronavirus could break quarantine and vote in person.

In Missouri an election judge supervisor who had tested positive for COVID broke quarantine and worked at a polling site. She then died.

Now Trump is trying to stop the election count with another mountain of lies. He's trying to run out the clock on the election, falsely claiming that ballots postmarked but not counted on election day should not be counted.

That includes thousands of ballots that found sitting in post offices around the country the day after the election because the post office refused a court order to process them expeditiously.

This election was intentionally sabotaged by Trump and DeJoy. That is the fraud.

And what made that possible? An out-of-countrol epidemic that has killed 235,000 Americans. Trump is using misery and death from the coronavirus to steal this election.

Trump Strands Hundreds of Supporters in Freezing Cold, Seven Sent to Hospital

In a situation emblematic of his entire tenure, dozens of supporters at Donald Trump's rally in Omaha required medical attention after standing in the cold for hours:

By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.

But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear something was wrong.

The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the cold as police scrambled to help those most at risk get to warmth.

Thirty people needed medical attention over the course of the rally, Omaha police spokesman Michael Pecha told The Washington Post on Wednesday. Seven were taken to hospitals “with a variety of medical conditions.” It was not immediately clear how many of those were related to the wait outside the venue.

 

Could it be any clearer? He holds a rally in a city that's got a 20% COVID positivity rate, which means hundreds of people at the rally are likely contagious, and even though the rally's outside, hundreds more will be infected because they were huddled together for hours waiting for buses and the virus is airborne.

 

How do you think he reacted when he heard about this?

"I don't take any responsibility. What a bunch of suckers and losers, freezing their asses off and exposing each other to COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID."

By the time Trump is gone we're going to have half a million dead from COVID, we will have spent trillions on medical treatment for the virus, our foreign policy will be in total disarray, our allies will have deserted us, we will have lost all gains we made in Afghanistan because Trump is surrendering to the Taliban, our farming and manufacturing economies will be in a shambles because of his moronic trade wars, and the positions of North Korea, China and Russia will all be strengthened because Trump is constantly kowtowing to dictators and cutting our allies loose and sending them to our enemies.

How Rich People Are Doing

 

Native American, Slave or Immigrant

 

Corona Mike Is Coming To Town!

Wow. The level of sheer incompetence is mind-boggling.

At least five members of Mike Pence's staff, including the chief of staff, have come down with the coronavirus. This is the man Trump put in charge of the country's response to the pandemic, and now they're all infected.

To make it worse, Pence -- who has been exposed to these clowns -- is not quarantining. He's still running around the country, spreading the disease to aged Republican supporters at rallies.

Remember Typhoid Mary? Now we've got Corona Mike.

Now Trump's chief of staff tells us, "We’re not going to control the pandemic." Jesus Christ! Trump has just given up. The virus has beaten him. He's making no attempt whatsoever to prevent vulnerable populations -- that is, elderly white people who vote for Trump -- from being infected.

COVID-19 is at least 10 times more lethal than the flu. In nine months it has killed 224,000 Americans, while 8,000-20,000 die from the flu. By comparison about 40,000 people die per year in car crashes.

Remember when Trump told us that it would disappear like magic? That there would be no second wave? That only the big cities were going to be hit by the disease. Now North Dakota is a no-go hot zone for the coronavirus.

These are the same people who pretend to be pro-life. They are opposed to abortion. They are opposed to assisted suicide for people with terminal cancer. But they're just fine with Pence running around the country, spreading the coronavirus to supporters at fundraisers and rallies.

Trump and his cronies have all got high-priced doctors and access to the best health care and most advanced treatments in the world. So what if the suckers who attend the rallies, and the Secret Service personnel and waiters and janitors and security guards and drivers who make it all possible, get infected?

The Trump White House has nothing but contempt for the well-being of the people of this country. Countries like Taiwan and Japan are practically back to normal just through the "magic" of wearing masks. 

But Trump would rather egg on the militias to kidnap governors because they don't want to wear masks than do the simplest thing to slow down the spread of a potentially deadly disease.

The Cultish Descent Into Madness

I'm hoping that someone is doing a study somewhere on the cultish descent into madness that we are seeing with conservatives in this country today. It reminds me a lot of what happened to my grandmother when she developed dementia in the last years of her life. Everything was someone else's fault, never her own. A great example of all of this is Kevin Baker's latest posts over at his blog. 

Today he has a post up that is full-on Russian propaganda which he easily laps up.  He also mentions "plots" by Facebook and Twitter to suppress it. Sorry, Kevin, those are private companies. They can do whatever they want, right? It's a good thing that they are finally acting responsibly in the weaponization of information. 

Wednesday he had something up about "Obamagate" which has made so little sense that it's not even being investigated. 

Then there was a post about how the right is actually peaceful and it's the left that is violent. That lie has recently been torpedoed with this arrest as well as the ADL's ongoing investigations. 

But the most shocking of all is a full-on embrace of an Islamic fundamentalist merely because she is saying bad things about liberals. I supposed I shouldn't be surprised given that he and his other cult members now embrace totalitarian states like Russia. 

Folks like Kevin and his crew have feared deprogramming for years. But maybe that's just what they need. A steady diet of fact-based media like Reuters, AP News, and the Christian Science Monitor for a few months. I think a ban or out and out blocking of all batshit crazy web sites that specifically weaponize information and turn people into cult members is also in order.  

The only demons out there are the ones they have made up. And Americans are literally paying with their lives for it. 

Trump's American Carnage Hits His Own Supporters the Hardest

When Donald Trump ran for president he campaigned on the idea of "American carnage," that eight years of Obama had wrecked the country.

Yeah. Right. The stock market was at record highs. Unemployment was at record lows. Under Trump things just kept going in the direction that Obama had set them. Trump's economic successes were all built on the recovery made possible by George Bush's decision to bail out big business and Obama's careful stewardship of the country despite endless obstruction by Republicans in Congress.

The carnage started with Trump's endless trade wars. Thousands of businesses are struggling and millions of farmers are on the precipice now, holding on solely because of government aid they've been forced to take to survive. Trump thinks this will buy their votes, but how many farmers relish the idea of living on government hand-outs for another four years?

But this year the carnage has hit America with full force. Because of Trump's incompetent and malicious leadership, the coronavirus has killed 221,000 Americans, and eight million have been infected. The toll is more likely about 300,000, if you compare the excess deaths this year, direct and indirect from COVID-19.

For the people who made Trump's election possible the carnage started much sooner than that. The list of those who have been convicted or charged with all manner of crimes is very long: Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for numerous tax evasion and money laundering scams. Trump's national security advisor, Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI about the Russians. Trump's campaign advisor, Roger Stone, for lying about Russia and Wikileaks. Trump's campaign advisor, Steve Bannon, for defrauding contributors to the private wall on the Mexican border. Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, for lying to Congress and lying about paying off Trump's former mistresses. Trump campaign operatives Rick Gates, George Nader and George Papadopoulos, for various other crimes. Trump fundraiser, Elliot Broidy, who pleaded guilty to illegally lobbying for Chinese and Malaysian interests.

The list of for Trump appointees who have been fired or left in disgrace numbers literally in the hundreds, from Jeff Sessions, three chiefs of staff, the Mooch, John Bolton, Rick Perry, to Tom Price, etc., etc., etc. This administration has been the most unstable and chaotic in American history.

And we can't forget Herman Cain, one of Trump's few black supporters, who caught COVID-19 campaigning for Trump and promptly died.

But it's not just Trump's direct hires and surrogates who have crashed and burned. Many of Trump's loyal followers, regular Americans, have committed crimes either in Trump's name, or prompted by his rabble rousing. 

There was Cesar Sayoc, a big Trump supporter, who sent pipe bombs to Trump critics. There was Patrick Crusius, who killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart. There are literally dozens more documented cases of attackers citing Trump directly as the motivation for their assaults and crimes. On a less deadly note, there was Cheryl Hall, a big Trump supporter, who was charged with voter registration fraud in Florida.

Then there's the recent high-profile conspiracy in which 14 men were arrested for plotting to kidnap the governors of Michigan (Gretchen Whitmer) and Virginia (Ralph Northam). Trump has tweeted numerous times against measures these governors had taken to limit the spread of the coronavirus, broadcasting to the world his support for attacks on these governors. After the arrests Trump did what he always does: tried to pin his own crimes on his enemies by claiming Whitmer was the one inciting terrorism.

It's like a mob boss accusing the FBI of murder when he kills their informant. "Hey, if you hadn't gotten him to squeal he'd still be alive!"

Then there's case of Randal Thom, who is a living metaphor for the disaster of the Trump years:

A southwestern Minnesota man whose passionate support for President Donald Trump took him to dozens of political events around the country and recently to the White House was killed in a highway crash while returning from a political celebration in Florida.

Randal J. Thom, 60, of Lakefield died in a collision shortly before 4:30 p.m. Monday on Hwy. 169 north of St. Peter, the State Patrol said. Thom was driving his minivan south and hit a pickup truck that also was heading south, the patrol said.

Evidence of recent alcohol use by Thom was detected at the scene, according to the patrol. Thom was not wearing a seat belt, the patrol added.

 

The other driver, James A. Mollenhauer, 67, of nearby Le Sueur, survived his injuries and was taken to a Mankato hospital. 

 

This guy was driving drunk down the highway, practically hollering "I don't need no fucking seat belt!" and he got himself killed, almost killing another man.

Donald Trump has been holding meetings at the White House and rallies across the country, yelling, "I don't need no fucking face mask," and he got himself infected with the coronavirus along with hundreds or thousands of others at his meetings and rallies. Eight million Americans have been infected because of his stupidity, and hundreds of thousands are dead, and in the end the bill for this disaster will be over $16 trillion.

Meanwhile, countries like New Zealand and Japan have basically to returned to life as normal.  

 

In Japan a movie opened in theaters to the biggest box office in history. All because the Japanese government and people took the coronavirus seriously, acted quickly and decisively and together, and wore -- and continue to wear -- masks in public.

Trump's Coronavirus Immunity Is Another Lie

Donald Trump makes a habit of getting other people to do his work for him. His supporters claim he's a genius for his tax avoidance scams, but he didn't actually do his own taxes. He hires guys (usually short ones wearing yarmulkes) to do his taxes. 

According to his own sister, Trump had someone else take the SATs to get him into Penn.

And Trump has a long history of getting other people to finance shaky projects, like his casinos, when he declared bankruptcy and left his investors holding the bag while he earned millions.

That's not smart. That's criminal.

Trump has been parading around the country after his bout with the coronavirus, claiming that he's immune even as the virus was still in his system, exposing everyone he came into contact with. 

And it's not even true that being infected with the coronavirus makes you immune: viruses mutate (which is why there's a new flu vaccine every year), and there are already numerous cases where people have been reinfected with the coronavirus.

Trump's idolators think he's got some kind of god-like immune system. Needing oxygen to breathe and being rushed to the hospital in a helicopter doesn't sound very god-like. But like everything with Trump it's a lie: he got someone else to do the work.

He announced his diagnosis early on Oct. 2, and a test did not pick up any antibodies in his blood, according to a report released by his physician, Dr. Sean Conley.

The lack of antibodies that early in the course of illness is not unusual. It can take from 10 days to three weeks for powerful antibodies to surface.

“If he had tested positive, then we would know for sure that he has his own antibodies,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“Since he was antibody-negative, it is less likely but not ruled out,” he added. “He could have been in the early stage of generating his own antibodies.” (Dr. Barouch is an investigator for Regeneron’s trial of the cocktail for preventing coronavirus infections.)

On Oct. 2, Mr. Trump received eight grams of a cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies made by Regeneron. These antibodies are infused into people — like those of Mr. Trump’s age, sex and weight — who may struggle to produce an immune response of their own.

A test on Oct. 5 confirmed the presence of the antibodies, according to Dr. Conley.

But Dr. Barouch noted that “the antibodies detected in the bloodstream are not his antibodies. They’re antibodies that were administered. Those antibodies will wane over time.”

“If you get the antibodies early on, and you either prevent or rapidly treat infections,” Dr. Barouch said, “then you probably will actually inhibit the generation of your own body’s antibodies.”

Mr. Trump was also treated with dexamethasone, a steroid that is known to suppress the immune system. And he received it much earlier in the course of his illness than usual. 

 

That means Trump is likely not immune to the coronavirus, and since he's taking steroids, he's more susceptible to being infected again.

Trump supporters, take note: the guy did not take hydroxychloroquine when he got infected, even though he kept hawking that as some kind of miracle treatment, nor did he inject bleach or ram a tube down his trachea to irradiate his lung tissue with UV. He did what the experts said to do, ignoring all the nonsense advice he spouted before he got hit by the virus because of his rank stupidity.

Also of concern: more than half of all coronavirus patients suffer long-term neurological effects from the disease, which means Trump's already tenuous grasp on sanity has a 50-50 chance of slipping even further.

Why would anyone trust this clown with their health, when he can't even protect himself, his staff, his visitors, the supporters at his rallies, his wife, or his son Barron?

They Die

 

Quote of the Year

Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.

When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.

It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale.

And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office.

---Steve Schmidt, GOP Strategist. 

Will a Barrett Confirmation Doom Trump's Reelection?

I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Most of my friends were Catholic and went to "parochial school," as we called it. A lot of them were Mexican. They all went to church every Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, though I never did.

My mom had been a Jehovah's Witness, and the battles between her and my dad over religion convinced me that religion was basically a scam, a way to control people and extract money from them.

If Barrett is confirmed, pro-life Catholics can vote for Biden with a clear conscience, knowing that the future of abortion will rest in the hands of seven Catholics on the Supreme Court.

My first girlfriend was Catholic. I went to mass with her because I was over at her house on Saturday afternoons. It was kind of funny because Father Esterka, the priest who gave the mass (he was Czech), sounded like Bela Lugosi when he said the words "the bahdy and blahd of Christ." Even back then the whole ritual vampirism and cannibalism of the eucharist seemed kind of creepy to me.

My best friend in high school and college, and best man, is Catholic.

My wife was raised a Catholic and we were married in a Catholic church. The priest who married us didn't care that I wasn't baptized, and I found out years later that he left the priesthood and married a former nun.

When I was a kid all my friends' families had five or six kids. It wasn't just a Catholic thing, my family had six kids too: birth control was just coming out in the Sixties. My wife's brothers and sisters, all good practicing Catholics, have zero, two or three kids in their families. Which is to say that all of them practice birth control, completely ignoring the dictates of the Catholic Church.

My step mother-in-law is an even more devout Catholic than my father-in-law was. But when they left their house for an assisted living facility, they gave their house to her gay grandson and his partner. Even though the Church itself still preaches against homosexuality it's an open secret that perhaps half of all priests are gay, and this has been the case for a thousand years.

This is all to say that pretty much everyone I knew growing up was Catholic, so I know Catholics. The reality is that the average Catholic is just an average American. That is, they're just like Joe Biden.

They probably wouldn't have an abortion if they got pregnant unexpectedly, but they also don't want to force anyone else to have an unwanted child. Like Joe Biden. But there are Catholics who have a much more doctrinaire stand on abortion.

Which brings us to Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Specifically, Barrett was a member of a fringe Catholic group called People of Praise, where she held the creepy title of "handmaid." More disturbingly:

Also, while in law school, Barrett lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles. The group was one of many to grow out of the charismatic Christian movement, which sought a more intense and communal religious experience by embracing such practices as shared living, faith healing and speaking in tongues.

 

When Republicans claim that Democrats are demonizing Barrett for her religion they imply that Democrats are anti-Catholic. Which is false. The Democratic party platform, with the exception of reproductive rights, tracks much more closely with Catholic teaching than the Republicans, especially on questions such as the death penalty, guns, social justice, immigration, etc., etc., etc. Republicans are mostly Old Testament reactionaries who completely disregard Christ's moral teachings, while most Catholics are New Testament Christians who embrace tolerance.

It is Barrett's relationship with this man Ranaghan that brings up the question of undue religious influence of this fringe group on the judge, not Catholicism in general. The Supreme Court currently has five Catholic justices, one Episcopalian/Catholic justice and two Jewish justices.

Which brings up an interesting question: why aren't there any Protestant justices? (Episcopalians are basically Catholics with the serial numbers filed off.) You'd think that all the Baptist Trump supporters in the South and would be asking this question. Why should there be seven Catholics on the Supreme Court? Especially since Baptists like major Trump supporter Robert Jeffress think Catholics are Satanists.

According to Pew Research, Catholics are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But as I mentioned above, the teachings of the Catholic Church are much more in line with the Democrats than the Republicans on everything except abortion. 

 

Abortion is the single issue that I think convinced a sufficient number of Catholic voters in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which Trump took by only a few tens of thousands of votes, to hold their noses and vote for Trump on the promise that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

 

Now, imagine you're a pro-life Catholic. If Barrett is confirmed, a six-to-three conservative majority will be ensconced on the Supreme Court, which could spell doom for Roe v. Wade.

 

Catholics will have no further use for Trump. The man clearly has no use for religion: he just uses it as prop. Remember Trump's Two Corinthians debacle, his religious tests for refugees, how he secretly mocks his religious supporters, and how Trump sicced the military on protesters so he could cynically stand in front of church with a Bible?

As police sirens blared in the background, Mr. Trump, his lips set in a thin line, stood with his back to the boarded-up, graffiti-laden facade of the buttermilk yellow church.

He cradled a Bible, bouncing it in his hands as if testing its weight.

“Is that your Bible?” a reporter yelled.

“It’s a Bible,” Mr. Trump responded, and hoisted up the book so reporters could see. 

Trump's racism, immorality, selfishness, greed, mendacity, vengefulness, arrogance, hubris and vulgarity are the antithesis of everything that the Catholic Church -- and every other church -- stand for.

 

If Barrett is confirmed, pro-life Catholics can vote for fellow Catholic Biden with a clear conscience, knowing that the future of abortion will rest in the hands of seven Catholics on the Supreme Court.

 

It would be irony of ironies if Trump sabotaged his own reelection bid by actually carrying out a campaign promise. Especially since it's the only one he's kept.

What Has Donald Trump Done To America?