Roy Moore.  54 point 6 percent.  Luther Strange.  45.4 percent.  Strange, a brief stint in the US Senate, and we barely knew ye.  Now Roy Moore, the Ten Commandments Judge, goes on to his coming victory on December 12 against some Democrat or other.  Doug Jones.  AND –?

 The loudest applause Mr. Moore received during an election-eve rally came when he declared, “Mitch McConnell needs to be replaced.”

With someone who will be able to enact the policy chops of their great president, (The “Health Care fiasco”, so it is said) and his major policy goal of … um… making black football players stand up for the National Anthem?  Or will the upcoming tax cuttings amoeleriate this base?  Why, oh why, would Trump’s supporters not heed the call and not support Luther Strange, with a rallying cry like this one?

“I’ll be honest, I might have made a mistake,” he told the crowd at one point during his nearly 90 minutes of remarks. “If Luther doesn’t win they’re not going to say, we picked up 25 points in a short period of time,” he added, referring to the media. “If his opponent wins, I’m going to be here campaigning like hell for him.”

By Wednesday morning, just hours after Moore held a convincing 55-45 percent advantage in the vote totals, Trump had deleted his recent tweets supporting Strange, who had been appointed to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

… And so chimes in … er… Trent Lott?

Trent Lott, a former Senate Republican leader, was blunt: “Every Republican senator had better get prepared for a challenge from the far right.”

Maybe they can stomp the threat with well placed words of support for the legacy of Strom Thurmond?

In Tennessee, reading the tea leaves, Bob Corker has thrown in the towel.  And who does his suggest as possible successor?

A white football player with no political stances to his name!  Sounds like a winner.

Entertainment Weekly does the honors of profiling the coming season of the CW “Riverdale” series…

But then there are those changes that become social-media gold, like the romantic pairing of Jughead and Betty. The odd couple became a fan favorite, garnering their own shipper fan group called, naturally, Bugheads.

Hey!  It’s been done!  (Or, maybe it just took some 65 years for Betty’s advances to work out?)

Entertainment Weekly also does the new Star Trek series…

This is darker Star Trek than tv audiences have seen before.

We’ve been there with pretty much every franchise.

For Trek traditionalists

Those with “Loyal to Kirk” bumper stickers around 1987?

there are still rousing self-contained adventures along the way (such as an episode that plays like Groundhog Day in space.)

(Rub eyes.)  Done in the Next Generation, wasn’t it?  As well as Voyager.  Sort of spoofed on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Sheesh.

Probably to appear on that weird fan fic series by Seth Macfarlane.

I’ve posted a time or two some — perhaps moderately controversial — opines on Colin Kaepernick — “good that he wants to be bigger than the game, because he isn’t big in the game right now” — and generally understand what Trent Dilfer is saying when he says his protests aren’t in keeping with the role of a backup quarterback in helping and aiding the team.

Protests aside, he would be on a team right now — probably at some point find his way starting a game or three.  That aside, it was amusing when Richard Sherman in condemnation of Kapernick not having a job, which to do so requires an implied insult to some quarterbacks with a job, do so by explicitly naming some.  (Which unless you’re blasting beating a rival who’s considered on par with the star — Crabtree?–, a pro sports player I’d think tends to identify with the hard grueling road they’re putting in to get lombasted by fat assed armchair qbs who at best were stars in high school.)

So.  Trump chimes in with comments that have some alleging he should just skip to the word he really wants to use — (“n”), shows his managerial role — (really, that working white class who voted him in oughta take note), and ensures no one on championships for other sports leagues would much want to bother with their customary visit.

And Trump takes another route to just another conservative talk radio host – blasting opinions for… no real reason.  (Weighing in on a Senate race in Alabama?  Why, or why does some protesting athletes have anything much to do with it?)

— Better non visits than any cause celebres for conservatives who skipped out on Clinton…

New variations of the Bechdel test proliferate.  The Stranger adopts the same basic editorial direction as its sister publication in Portland, which has come out swinging against the Barenaked Ladies.

It does make it easier to write movie reviews.

“Sorry.  I didn’t spot any trans-gendered female characters in this movie.  So, I’m not going to review one way or the other.  Neener neener neener“.

(Shrug.)

Three groups protested in the nation’s capital this last weekend.  The alt right, what with their copyright infringed frog mascot, under the auspices of this era’s George Lincoln Rockwell…

… and, yes indeed, they do parallel…

Currently trying to align President Trump’s recent compromises with Democrats with their need and desire to keep themselves as the Vanguard of the whole Trump Movement… (And on to the regular “right“]

… Maybe Steve Bannon has a point in chiming Trump’s moving to be Schwarzenegger?  (At first a stealth Pete Wilson, then slid into Bloomberg.)… [He also doesn’t have a point.]

And wherever the, quote in quote “alt right” assembles, they will be met with force by the antifa group, who in smashing a Starbucks window here and there and punching Richard Spencer and shouting out Ann Coulter … in their quest to take out the alt right tend to give the Weimar Republic comparisons a holding.

And the third group protesting in Washington DC.  Fans of the Insane Clown Posse, Juggalos, who’s interest are entirely self-interested and cross these last two administrations.

Several hundred Juggalos, as fans of Insane Clown Posse call themselves, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. They were protesting their designation as a criminal gang by the FBI, and some said they were uninterested in the left-right political divide on display at Saturday’s other protests.

A very specific problem, and a very specific redress.  The problem…

Much of the problems stem from 2011, when the FBI released a Gang Assessment List placing the Juggalos alongside the Crips, Bloods, and MS-13. ICP first laughed at the FBI labeling. “It wasn’t a 9/11 moment,” Violent J recalled in an interview prior to the march. The gang label seemed too absurd to be serious. “Somewhere in America, there’s a serial rapist out there that loves [the band] Bush!” Violent J pointed out.

Manson dug The Beatles.

As enormous media attention grew around the Juggalo March, other groups had latched onto its cause. A week before the March, President Donald Trump’s on-again/off-again advisor Roger Stone had an associate reach out to me to connect him with ICP. Jacobin, the intellectual socialist journal, endorsed the protest. A pro-Trump rally was happening down the street, and leading up to the March people tweeted things like, “I dream of a world where juggalos and antifa literally scare Nazis shitless to the point they never show their faces in public again.” ICP and the Juggalos’ fight with the FBI has evolved Juggalos from the world’s most mocked fanbase to a serious cause, but the Psychopathic community is uninterested in being civil rights heroes.

Their music probably contains enough bad messaging for various leftists, loosely moving around, in, and out of the “antifa” label, to protest.  (See The Mentors, who performed to a small crowd in Portland a protest greeting of commiserate size.)  Even some of their face-painting may provoke accusations of black (or white) face.  So I suppose on that sense, they’re on no one’s team.

So.  Alabama.  A special election to fill out the term of Jeff Sessions, currently the Attorney General who was insulted by his boss President Trump but won’t let that get in the way of his policy apparatus — tackling America’s weed problem.

The Democrats have nominated … hm… Doug Jones won 66.12 percent in the primary.  A sacrificial lamb, with some things to recommend him, it would seem.  Apparently he beat out Robert F Kennedy, Jr.  (No relation.) and a cast of a bunch of others.  Alabama doesn’t dig the Kennedys?  Or did Kennedy get the distant second based on his name?

And the Republicans?  Roy Moore beat out the incumbent appointed Luther Strange 38.87 to 32.83 percent.  Setting up a run off primary on the 26th.

Roy Moore of “Ten Commandments” fame.

The divisions in the Republican Party pit Mitch Mcconnell and Donald Trump for the Republican Establishment backing Strange, against Steve Bannon and … Sarah Palin … stumping for Moore.
The mind reels.

Desperate for ammunition as Roy Moore rallies the faithful around the “God punished us with 9/11” theme… the Establishments hits that Roy Moore is cozy with the trail lawyers.   Because Strange just can’t flank Moore to the right, which is — we all know — where all the energy is.

Whatever it is the “right” is.  Know a nothing?

Depending on the polls, Moore is really far ahead or in a dead heat — with the Trump endorsement perhaps pulling Strange back into the race.  What do you want to happen in this race?  Probably we want Alabama to secede from the Union so we don’t have to problem ourselves about one percent of the US Senate.

Accusations of “sour grapes” pour in on Hillary Clinton’s new book — sour grapes in the not quiet accurate common misuse that does not align to Aesop — real sour grapes in the Aesopean tradition would have Hillary Clinton saying “So I didn’t get to be president.  Who cares — it gives me more time to do some hiking.”
By long term accounts, Hillary Clinton blames the election loss on James Comey’s last minute re-opening of the email issue.  She’s probably right.  As well as wrong.  Right in that had that not happened, she would have won.  Wrong in that she should have been stronger enough to prevail against that happening.
By other accounts, this is actually a real book.  Which is to say, she’s not writing a carefully constructed campaign book, positioning herself politically.  I suppose it’ll be interesting to say how Barack Obama’s next book comes out, and if he escapes some political trap doors.
Meantime, in a world where some view the president as incipient fascism, and we run into this type of problem…

  Not an unreasonable book, in the sense that “On the Right Side of History”.

But, I’m leafing through the book.  Nowhere does it suggest Trump took some old Democratic stands on trade which Republicans never took and Democrats on the national level don’t take.  (I note a creeping neo-liberalism in the halls of the “Left” who’d traditionally not dismiss the issue but now have — perhaps correctly, I don’t know.  As too a class clodlessness on the political viability of some well heeled concepts.) Nowhere does it seem, in my leafing of it, to proffer the negatives on Hillary Clinton.  (She chased after Republicans, and found endorsements to sell the media — Meg Whitman, sure to help her win votes from Republican women working in the tech sector in the state of California.)  Hell — I can’t find the chapter on the churning about of Celebrity status, reality tv, and twitter ridden short attention span news cycles.  And it seems to exist in the same world that Hillary Clinton’s book does — that the only sane and just world is one where Hillary Clinton would, should, must be elected.