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Yet another post about weak Democrats

Friday, December 18, 2020

A day or so ago Little Marco tweeted out how outraged he was that Biden aide Jen O’Malley Dillon called Republicans “fuckers” in an interview in Glamour magazine.

Before I go on, let me be clear that the source of his outrage was not the fact that some Republicans are not fuckers at all, such as Mike Pence and the genius (at least if Melania has anything to say about it). No, this was yet another example of a Republican consumed by faux outrage over something that pales in comparison to the sort of thing that Republicans do all the time.

Now, this is the part of the post where I would ordinarily start ranting about the fact that Democrats will remain in their defensive crouch, and utter not a word about the totally hypocrisy of a Trump loving Republican complaining about such insults. But let me defer that for a moment, because there is actually, or at least possibly, a possibility that there’s something happening here from another part of the political eco-system. So I’ll defer the rant about Democrats for a while.

Rubio tweeted out his outrage, so it goes without saying that he got a lot of responsive tweets pointing out his hypocrisy in various ways, but what’s even more encouraging is that some media types are beginning to call out the Republican hypocrisy. Some examples here and here. It is at least possible that after 4 years of being browbeaten by Republicans, many in the media have decided that they might as well tell it like it is, rather than play the both sidism game. We’ll have to see if that continues, but the pushback to Marco is at least somewhat encouraging.

Now, on to the rant. It has been reported that some in Biden’s inner circle are very concerned about Dillon’s comments. That is unfortunately typical of establishment Democrats. Whether they are actually concerned or not, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to leak that they were concerned. Yet another example of the failure on the part of a substantial number of Democrats to learn the lessons of the past 40 years. The proper response, of course, is to laugh at Rubio and his ilk, while noting that they’re the ones that are always calling Democrats snowflakes. The Democrats who get it are still far and few between, AOC and her compatriots being the rare exceptions. This country may never recover from the fact that Obama failed to stomp on the Republicans when he truly had them down at the start of his first term, instead handing Republican “moderates” veto power over the stimulus plan and the health care bill, both of which emerged weaker and more compromised that if he had just done what needed doing and had it rammed through Congress the way McConnell has rammed through everything he has wanted. If,as the Axios article to which I’ve linked states, Biden’s advisers really think they’ll be able to work with Republicans they are living in a fool’s paradise. The Republicans are already hard at work trying to destroy the economy, after which they will make it impossible for Biden to fix it, assuming 1) the Republicans maintain control of the Senate, or 2) Democrats take the Senate but allow Republicans to filibuster. The Democrats inability to respond to Little Marco’s outrage with derision is merely emblematic of their larger problem of somehow believing that the relationship between the parties is what it was in the 1960’s.

End of rant.

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Home Grown Grifter avoids the spotlight

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

A few days ago I mentioned to my wife that Linda McMahon, who failed to buy a Senate seat here in Connecticut despite two tries-much to the credit of Connecticut voters- had managed to avoid being openly corrupt in her administration of the Small Business Administration. But that doesn’t mean that the agency hasn’t been corrupt, only that she’s managed to keep her head down somewhat. Well, she can raise her head up high now, because if she’s not the most corrupt person in the administration, she is at least in the running, since there’s no way she wasn’t involved in the following.

The SBA administers the Paycheck Protection Program, which Congress passed last year, and, of course, it was fertile ground for corruption, given the inability of Congress to effectively oversee it, and the need to quickly implement it. Priority number one for the Trump administration has always been rewarding its supporters to the detriment of the rest of the country, including those who are supposed to benefit from a given program, and McMahon’s administration of the PPP has been, to say the least, questionable, and is also infected with unconstitutional support of “religious” organizations. Nowadays, many religious organizations are actually just massive grifts, but they dress up as religions.

“The federal government can’t take our money and give it to Joel Osteen or Robert Jeffress or Paula White—even in the wake of a pandemic,” I wrote back in May. But that’s exactly what Trump’s Small Business Administration has done by giving Paycheck Protection Program funds to churches. Paula White’s church took in between $150,000 and $350,000, Jeffress’s church grabbed between $2 million and $5 million and, now we know that Osteen’s megachurch pocketed $4.4 million. Other megachurches snagged millions of taxpayer dollars. As time passes, the inevitable abuses are coming to light. One megachurch televangelist even bought a private jet two weeks after receiving $4 million in PPP funds.

…

The CARES Act extended eligibility for loans from the Small Business Administration to nonprofits, something new. But the law did not give the SBA the power to extend this eligibility to churches, nor could it—the Constitution prohibits government funding of religion. In fact, the CARES Act only mentions religion once, to prevent universities from using taxpayer funds for “capital outlays associated with facilities related to athletics, sectarian instruction, or religious worship.” However, the SBA ignored that language along with the centuries-old bar on taxpayer-funded religious worship, and instead issued rules and guidance declaring that the forgivable loans distributed under the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program “can be used to pay the salaries of ministers and other staff engaged in the religious mission of institutions.” To do this, SBA had to suspend numerous rules that, correctly, prevented taxpayer funds from flowing to churches.

Read the entire linked article. It’s an outrage that religions got a dime, but it’s even more outrageous that they are effectively exempted from having to prove they used the funds as required by law, and there is a stench emanating from at least one big time grifter:

Lisa Guerrero of Inside Edition has been digging too, and she discovered a private jet likely financed with PPP money. Marcus Lamb runs Daystar Television, which may have as many as 2 billion viewers and is valued at a quarter of a billion dollars. Two weeks after it took $4 million in taxpayer PPP funds, it bought a private jet, a Gulfstream V, valued at between $9 million and $10 million.

Lamb denied using taxpayer funds to get the private jet two weeks after it got the loan: “We had our own money.” If so, why didn’t it use that money for their employees? But you know why. Like any kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they denied it and then paid the money back. But only because Guerrero caught them.

I believe the reference to 2 “billion” viewers is probably a typo, but the rest has been reported elsewhere.

Give McMahon credit, though she’s ultimately responsible for allowing these abuses, her name never seems to surface.

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The court has spoken

Saturday, December 12, 2020

To no one’s great surprise,the Supreme Court has rejected the ridiculous suit in which some 17 Republican Attorney Generals, 120 plus Republican Congressmembers, and two fictitious states sought to cast aside the votes of millions of Americans. Contradictions were rife, including the fact that they sought a ruling that voting procedures should be declared unconstitutional only in those states Trump lost, while the same procedures in states he won were just fine, not to mention that many of the Congressmembers in question were arguing, sub silentio, that their own elections were illegal.

The court lost no time in throwing the case out, with only Thomas and Alito arguing on jurisdictional grounds they should have heard the case before throwing it out.

Why did the most partisan Supreme Court in history make such short work of this legal bullshit, many might ask.

Here’s my take.

None of the actors here have any particular love for the very stable genius. He was, however, a useful tool for them to get a lot of what they’ve been wanting to achieve over the course of the last 50 years or so, but he’s also been inconvenient in a lot of ways, so they’re not that sorry to see the back of him. But they have differing political problems.

One might think that at least the judges that the genius appointed would feel some sense of obligation to him, but step back a bit. He never cared who he put on the court, just like he never really ever cared about any policies that did not directly affect him. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett don’t owe their appointments to him, nor do the other judges he “named” to the lower courts owe him anything. They owe their appointments to the Federalist Society, and they will, until they leave the court in their coffins, rule consistent with the interests of the folks who run and fund that organization. They are perfectly willing to dismember our democracy, but as the wicked witch said about killing Dorothy, it must be done “slowly” and imperceptibly to the average American. A coup simply won’t do. They have lifetime appointments, so they don’t need to get re-elected.

The Attorneys General and the Congressmembers, on the other hand, have to deal with a monster their party has created: those who vote for them, who have become thoroughgoing fascists and who see the genius as their Supreme Leader. As the very stupid Ron Johnson pointed out in a moment of excessive candor, the Republicans need their votes. It is no longer the case that they can simply reap those votes and then deliver for the rich, they must also throw heaping helpings of red meat. They all, except perhaps the leader of the fictitious states, knew this was going nowhere, but it’s a way to keep the base red hot and in their corner, so they’ll do it.

This may be the last time that we avoid the complete destruction of the republic at the hands of the right. Things have now gotten to the point where they can’t whip up the base and then expect them to vote for a Mitt Romney. The base will insist that they renominate Trump or a similar whackjob. That means they will have an ever more difficult time garnering a majority of popular votes, or even electoral votes, so they will have to resort to the equivalent of gerrymandering the presidential election. There are a number of ways to do this. They could simply pass a law in already gerrymandered legislatures doing away with the popular vote in their state. This is perfectly constitutional. They could, alternatively, assign electoral votes like Maine and Nebraska do, by gerrymandered congressional districts, so that, in Pennsylvania, for instance, a 100,000 vote popular margin for the Democrat would translate into a majority of Republican electors. This is something that Pennsylvania Republicans were considering doing a few years ago. They didn’t, but if they can get a Republican governor, they may reconsider. And, of course, there’s always more sophisticated voter suppression, which the Supreme Court will facilitate. The coup, when it happens, will be far more subtle than what the genius is asking the court to grant him now.

It’s extremely hard to see how we can claw back our democracy, given the constitutional system under which we live. A small minority can frustrate any attempt to amend the constitution to correct its ever more obvious flaws. The Senate is ruled by states well stocked with whackos, which states contain a small percentage of the actual people in this country. The Republican Party has proven adept at manipulating these people and even though they have, to a certain extent, evaded the party’s complete control, they have still enabled the Republican Party to achieve most of its policy goals. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, shows no interest in sticking up for its base, or for delivering real benefits to those upon whom it relies for its votes. As the Republican Party moves ever farther to the right, the Democrats constantly adjust to the new “center” and please no one. When people like AOC come along, people who could actually energize the Democratic base and are capable of giving as good as they get, the Democrats instinctively try to marginalize them. The Democrats have been in a defensive crouch since 1972, and you can’t score decisive victories that way.

We are headed toward a state in which the forms of democracy will be maintained, at least for a while. There will be elected non-Republicans, but they will remain powerless and we will in actuality be a one party state. I hope I’m wrong, but the events of the last few weeks, though they won’t keep Trump in office, have demonstrated where we’re heading.

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A delicious irony

Monday, December 7, 2020

I haven’t seen this noted elsewhere, though no doubt it has. It is a somewhat delicious irony that Brian Kemp, who most assuredly stole his own election, has been rather up-front about leaking the fact that he told Trump to shove it when Trump asked for similar treatment.Trump, after all, must be aware of Kemp’s previous transgressions, so that must make Kemp’s refusal all the more difficult to take.

Of course the times are a bit different. Kemp stole the governorship in plain sight, but with enough deniability that a cooperative judicial system, had the results been legally challenged, would have found a way to minimize Kemp’s criminality. No so this time, as the avalanche of adverse decisions against Trump’s almost comedic series of lawsuits has demonstrated.

This time around, the theft would have had to be both open and retroactive, and apparently that’s where Kemp drew the line. And after all, why should he take any risks for Trump, who is on his way out anyway? The fact is, they should have put some effort into stealing the election prior to the vote, like Kemp did when it was his turn. But whether it was due to Stacey Abrams work, or complaisance on the part of Republicans about their prospects in Georgia, they just didn’t do enough spadework to enable an Election Day theft. Don’t be surprised if some gerrymandered legislatures start looking at their current method of selecting electors to see if it might be a good idea to write in a method of overriding the popular state vote if the legislature is so inclined.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Grifters gotta grift

Saturday, December 5, 2020

When you think about it, the Republican Party is one massive grifting operation, inasmuch as even before Trump came along, in fact long before Trump came along, it relied on conning its “base” into not just voting against their own interests, but in ponying up money to aid in their own destruction.

It’s worked really well, but it does have its drawbacks, one of which is that grifters gotta grift; they can’t help themselves, and if that means the grift hurts the Republican Party then that’s the way it goes.

It’s debatable whether Trump could have legitimately won the 2020 election if his campaign had been well run, but it couldn’t have helped that various grifters, possibly including Trump himself, were siphoning money away from the campaign. Here’s the latest:

In August, Salon reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had paid about $5 million to a mystery marketing services company called Digital Consulting Group LLC, starting with a $2 million expenditure in February, just a month after the company was formed.

Now, filings with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC paid Digital Consulting Group more than $42 million for media buys, consulting and marketing between February and October. The company went from nonexistent to being the Republican Party’s highest-paid vendor of the 2020 election, all in the space of eight months.

But Digital Consulting Group presents a mystery. No other political campaign or committee has reported any payments at all to the company. While a number of organizations share the name, this particular Digital Consulting Group — a Delaware company founded Jan. 15, 2020 — does not appear to have a website, and a Delaware business entity search does not reveal an owner or location. The RNC’s spending reports list a virtual address in Wilmington, but beyond that the company cannot be traced.

That $42 million in expenditures makes this anonymous company the RNC’s highest-paid vendor of the last two years, pulling in nearly $3.5 million more than the next-largest vendor, the direct-mail firm Communications Corporation of America (CCA), and topping third-place JDB Marketing, another direct mail provider, by about $19 million.

Salon was unable to ascertain the identity of the person or persons behind Digital Consulting Group, but the evidence appears to point to Brad Parscale, the grifter who was officially offloaded as Trump’s campaign manager after, among other things, he suddenly became the proud owner of a very expensive yacht, two million dollar condos, a 24 million dollar waterfront house, and other goodies after he soaked $40 million from the campaign. That’s $40 million that has nothing to do with Digital Consulting, so it’s very possible that his total haul was more than $80 million dollars.

Just think. If the Republican Party were not infested with grifters, that money might have been used to actually try to get Trump reelected. It might have worked, in which case we’d be living in an alternative universe in which the American Republic had already been destroyed. As it is, we’ve deferred that unhappy denouement for at least four years. Here’s hoping the grifters continue to destroy the Republican Party from within.

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One born every second

Friday, December 4, 2020

There’s been a lot of speculation about the nature of the grift that Trump will embark on when he’s escorted out of the White House. It will likely be multi-faceted, the up-side being that if he runs true to form, part of the grift will be an assault on the people who he claims let him down-the Republicans. He has sent mixed signals about the Georgia Senate race, and once he’s out for good there’s a good chance he’ll see an opportunity in making mischief for the Republicans. If nothing else he’ll likely make noises about running for President, whether he’s serious about it or not, as that will bring in the bucks from the suckers.

And that’s what this post is actually about: the suckers. Because if recent events prove anything, they prove that P.T. Barnum was wrong, if in fact the quote is attributable to him. There’s not a sucker born every minute. They’re born every nanosecond in this country alone. The recent election proved there’s upwards of 75,000,000 of them in this country alone, and there’s plenty of grifters out there planning on taking advantage of them.

A certain slice of Americans has an insatiable hunger for conspiracy theories, and they are thus easy marks. This one really got to me.

If you’re scared of 5G giving you COVID-19 or otherwise polluting your precious bodily fluids, then some companies on Amazon would love to sell you a cage for your router. According to sellers, the metal cages block 5G. According to reviews, they’re destroying people’s Wi-Fi signal, which makes sense. The metal boxes are just Faraday cages marketed to people who believe in baseless conspiracy theories about 5G.

A Faraday cage is simply a metal cage designed to block signals, so these folks are plunking down money so they can interfere with their own Wi-Fi signal. This really makes the anti-vaxxers look almost rational. It’s yet more proof that if Trump avoids jail he’ll have a huge number of suckers to grift, though given his track record, it’s not a sure thing he can avoid yet another bankruptcy, this time, perhaps, of the personal sort.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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More voter fraud uncovered!

Thursday, December 3, 2020

If you made this stuff up the media would accuse you of outrageous partisanship, but here we go again, with Republicans encouraging voter fraud while accusing the Democrats of…, what else: voter fraud:

Guys – we FOUND voter fraud! And it is ON VIDEO! And it is SHOCKING! WSBTV in Atlanta is reporting that a Florida attorney was in a Facebook live video, taped just hours after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of the Presidential election.

In the video, he encouraged viewers to pretend to move to Georgia to allow them to vote in the Senate runoff on January 5th.

This is illegal.

It will be interesting to see if this gets any attention in the mainstream. I have yet to see an article in any of the three newspapers I read pointing out that the only documented voter fraud in recent times has been the work of Republicans, and that’s not even counting the systematic voter suppression and unconscionable gerrymandering that allows a minority party to govern in so many states.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Democrats playing hardball!!?

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

We are constantly bombarded with news articles about Democrats being in disarray, but it often happens that Republicans can be in that state as well. It’s great that Trump is encouraging Georgians to believe the election there has been rigged, as it will likely dampen turnout.

A few days ago my wife and I were talking and agreed that the Democrats should be doing what Republicans would do: reinforce Republican beliefs in a rigged election to discourage turnout. Well, it may not be the Democrats officially doing it, but someone, calling themselves the Really American PAC is doing it.

Here’s the billboard they’re putting up in Georgia.

It is rather amazing that this is simply reinforcing Trump’s complaint that Loeffler and Perdue didn’t steal Georgia for him, but if it gets us the Senate, then I’m all for it.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Hypocrisy in America

Monday, November 30, 2020

It’s hardly news that modern day Republicans are hypocrites of the first order. Here’s the latest example-actually probably not the latest as it’s some hours old, but it’s illustrative:

Republicans have now decided the tax returns of nominees and people in power matter, as they want to scrutinize Biden’s nominees.

Outgoing Senate Finance Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wants to examine Biden Treasury nominee Janet Yellen’s tax returns:

…

Just a few months ago in September, Grassley complained Trump’s tax returns got out, “That information should have never gotten out, and whoever got it out violated the law…All I’ve got is the president saying he’s paid millions of dollars in taxes, and you’ve got the New York Times printing what they think, and we don’t have the facts to make a judgment. But let me say that I’d be very concerned about how it got out.”

Republicans defended Trump and his nominees hiding their tax returns and brushed off any red flags that were in the financial dealings of Trump and his cabinet nominees.

Lest we forget, hypocrisy has a long and hallowed tradition in this country.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of history, including some Connecticut history. I just finished a biography of William Williams, who few Connecticans (yes-that’s a word) know was a Connecticut born and bred signer of the Declaration of Independence, and I am now working on a biography of Sam Adams, who did more than make beer. Williams, by the way, was from Lebanon, Connecticut, which was a powerhouse town back in those revolutionary days, and his house still sits near the green, the only commons left in America.

The revolutionary generation did a lot of complaining about English assaults on their liberty, and I am constantly amazed at the frequency with which they claimed that the English were trying to reduce them to slavery, a charge that appears in both of the books I’ve mentioned, and which I’ve seen countless times in other history books. After the revolution, that complaint continued, directed at Northerners by Southerners, who constantly complained that Northerners were trying to reduce them (the white thems) to slavery. This is at the same time they were defending slavery as an institution and maintaining that the slaves just loved being slaves. Give Sam Adams credit, he, at least, refused to own slaves, but you have to wonder how slave holders could make this charge without feeling just a bit hypocritical. Well, not just a bit.

Sam Adams, by the way, had something to say about this sort of hypocrisy that’s still relevant today. This quote could be just as much about the Koch Brothers and their ilk as the libertarians of Adams’ day:

It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it than their own liberty, -to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all those who are poorer or weaker than themselves.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Has the mainstream learned from bloggers?

Saturday, November 28, 2020

I’ve been reading the Political Animal blog for years, and I generally agree with them, but I’m not sure about this particular piece.

Political blogging was born in the Bush years, peaked under Obama, and mostly died in the Trump Era. The decline is partly explained by the mainstream media adopting some of blogging’s strongest features and hiring some of its talent—think Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent. But the most important factor is that straight journalists finally internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to.

…

A good example of this admirable adoption of blogging sensibilities can be found in Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s coverage of Trump’s Thanksgiving appearance from a diminutive desk in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, where he took questions for the first time since he lost the November 3 election.

Trump said he planned to continue to make claims of fraud about the results and said, without evidence, that Biden could not have won close to 80 million votes. His legal team has been widely mocked — and has lost almost every claim in every state, as officials certify results for Biden.

I try to imagine what it would have been like in 2002-03 if the Washington Post had written, “Bush said he planned to invade Iraq and said, without evidence, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. His foreign policy team has been widely mocked­­ – and the United Nations inspectors have contradicted almost every claim as they’ve scoured the country in vain looking for weapons of mass destruction.”

Not that I was ever in the big time, but I’ve been blogging since 2005, and I think what really destroyed, or at least reduced the reach of, blogging, was Twitter. That’s a shame, in my humble opinion, because it is a format that encourages simplistic thinking, confined as it is to a certain number of characters.

I don’t think that journalists have “internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to”. The very words “lie” or “liar” are still very much verboten. In the very limited case of Trump, it’s true that the euphemisms are getting more direct. I think they now feel that they can let loose on Trump, because he’s on his way out the door, and they have probably always disliked him. But he is not the only liar out there. Make a list of every Republican in the Senate. Now, attempt to strike out the names of every one that is not a liar. Funny how your list doesn’t shrink much, if at all. Mitch McConnell is the most high profile of those liars, but it is doubtful we will see stories in the mainstream about him that are even as direct as that cited in the Political Animal piece.

Come January 20th the press will be anxious to retreat to a Republican biased both siderism. If Biden tries to get the funding we need to get the economy on track, Republicans will spout tropes about the deficit, and the press will not recall that the deficit didn’t matter at all during the Trump crime spree, when it was increased in order to shovel money towards the rich. Pointing out the hypocrisy will be the job of the bloggers and non-mainstream tweeters. The media will very much want to get back to normal, and normal means never calling out a Republican liar, though it’s okay to imply that a Democrat is a liar, even when he’s not. See, Gore, Al.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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