The media IS the Democraptic party!

Garrison Keillor has some interesting thoughts.

The triumph of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama's Republican Senate primary was a ray of sunshine for those of us who'd like to restore stoning to our legal system and remove the curse of profanity once and for all from our country. Scripture is very clear:

Thou shalt not swear.

But God's chosen party, the Republican Party, has waffled on this issue, as it has on the issue of adultery and obedience to parents and observance of the Sabbath and the engraving industry. And that is why our country today is on the verge of destruction. The signs are everywhere. Judge Moore is the only man who dares say so.

Beatitudes v. Ten Commandments...

Democrats are fine with the Beatitudes --

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

and all that -- but blessing people is no substitute for upholding God's standards, and there are people in spiritual poverty who express that by taking the Lord's name in vain, or by shopping on Sunday, or disobeying their parents, or by coveting their neighbor's wife, and if we don't punish sin, then sin will overrun the nation, as it has done already. That is why Judge Moore is not a Beatitudes guy but a Ten Commandments man. The law is the law.

Population control…

Let us be honest here. There are too many people in this country. You know it and I know it. When we reduce the excess population by stoning and become a nation of 10 or 15 million, this country will be a paradise. You'll be able to drive and not languish in traffic. No waiting for tee times. Our enemies will be gone, all of them, bonked to death, and we will gain their homes and their wives and their cleaning ladies. It will be perfect.

[url= http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/09/garrison_keillor_maybe_roy_moo.html ]Full article...

What's worse to have in Congress, a child molester or a Democrat?

The question posed by the election is apparently, for Republicans, existential. Both Roy Moore supporters and Roy Moore detractors in the party have framed the political debate as a clear choice: Would you rather have an actual child molester in office—or someone from the other party? This is apparently a profound and difficult choice. Republican leaders and functionaries continue to be at odds with each other over whether installing a child molester and serial predator as their newest Republican senator would be worth it if the child molester is willing to vote with the party to cut corporate taxes.

You would think that this is a joke, or a philosophical what-if scenario presented to demonstrate to students what true public corruption looks like. Nope. Alabama Republican leaders and supposed

evangelical

Moore backers alike are all struggling with whether Child Molestation Is Really That Bad, if it helps cement party or church power. Those people are monsters.

If you’re a Republican voter, I have some bad news for you. The people who lead the movement that supposedly represents your views — the politicians, the media figures, the activists — think you’re an idiot. In fact, they count on it.

That’s the real meaning of an extraordinary story The Post has published, about an effort by well-known right-wing fraudster James O’Keefe and his organization Project Veritas to entrap this newspaper into publishing a false story about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, with the obvious intention of using that to discredit the well-documented allegations that Moore preyed on teenage girls when he was in his 30s.

The latest conservative scam got exposed But it’s just one piece of a much bigger fraud.

In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.

That rate has been accelerating. Starting in early October, The Post’s tracking showed that Trump told a remarkable nine lies a day, outpacing even the biggest liars in our research.

I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.

The sheer frequency of Trump’s lies appears to be having an effect, and it may not be the one he is going for. A Politico/Morning Consult poll from late October showed that only 35 percent of voters believed that Trump was honest, while 51 percent said he was not honest. (The others said they didn’t know or had no opinion.) Results of a Quinnipiac University poll from November were similar: Thirty-seven percent of voters thought Trump was honest, compared with 58 percent who thought he was not.

I work in a clinic where the vast majority of my patients are on government-funded health care and have never worked a day in their lives.

I used to believe that everyone deserved health care. Now, I work in a clinic where the vast majority of my patients are on government-funded health care. I have learned that the stereotypes about these people are true: Most of my patients have never worked a day in their lives.

They are extremely ungrateful for the care that hardworking taxpayers provide for them. Patients have punched me, bitten me, screamed at me, and even urinated on me. I often leave with vomit on my clothes.

Sometimes, I have to bribe my patients with bright-colored objects, juice or graham crackers just to examine them. Do my patients thank me? Do they contribute to the economy? No!

They just suck up low-cost health care, whining the whole time, and then go pick up their free government milk. Often, they are literally carried from place to place in the arms of a real taxpayer.

As a pediatrician, I provide these scowling little freeloaders with life-saving therapies like vaccinations and antibiotics. I test their hearing and make sure any hearing loss is caught while it can still be corrected. I make sure kids with developmental delays get into therapy early so they’re ready to compete by the time they reach kindergarten.

Do they utter a word of gratitude? No! Not unless their mom or dad tells them to.

Nationwide, patients like mine represent almost half of the people who get insurance through Medicaid or CHIP, the Children’s Health Plan. In Texas, children constitute 3.4 million of the 4.5 million total people covered by these programs. So when you think about government health care, you should think about my patients: ungrateful, yowling, diapered maniacs who don’t even use language right.

CHIP covers 8.9 million children nationwide, and Congress has so far failed to fund the program for next year. If stopgap funding isn’t found soon, more than 450,000 kids in Texas alone will lose access to health care on February 1. Apparently the state plans to send a letter to these kids on December 22, right before Christmas, announcing the cuts.

I hope the letter goes something like this:

Ho ho ho, milk-breath! There will be no more free vaccinations for you. We hope you get an old-timey disease like diphtheria and die! Or maybe the cost of care will deter your parents from taking you to the doctor, so that your easily treatable infection turns into septic shock. Because your immune system is immature, your lungs are still developing, and you didn’t bother to vote!

Sincerely, America

Research has shown that people are more likely to die when they lose access to health care. Letting more American children die preventable deaths will send a strong message to kids across the country: Pull your thumbs out of your mouths, get potty-trained and GET A JOB!

Rachel Pearson, M.D., Ph.D., is a native Texan and a pediatrics resident.

So I'm an American living in Sweden, the socialist nanny-state hellscape of the GOP's fantasies. Here's what it's like to live in a country with a high effective tax rate and a commitment to spending for the common good:

I don't worry that a minor accident, illness, or other bump in the road will derail my family's future or mean that we lose everything. We have excellent health care and social insurance, and the state steps up when we are in a crisis. It's not perfect, of course. There are emergency room wait times and such, just like everywhere else. But, for example: I broke the crap out of my foot a while back, in a pretty awful accident involving a zipline.

The local hospital in Malmö took a couple of hours to get me through intake, doctors, x-rays, and diagnosis. They sent me home with a soft cast and instructions to come back for a hard cast in two weeks or so. The next day two handsome gentlemen showed up at my apartment. They were from the city's

hjälpmedel

office, which I hadn't known existed. They take responsibility for providing resources to people with permanent or temporary disabilities.

Their goal is to provide the aids necessary

to independently, or with help, meet basic personal needs and perform daily activities.

. In my case, this meant that they installed a seat in my shower and fitted me out with a wheelchair. The wheelchair was brand new and they unwrapped a soft seat and made sure the foot rests were adjusted to the correct heights. Then they carried it back down a few flights of stairs and parked it just inside the front door, ready to go. They gave me a crazy grabber stick thing so I could get things from the comfort of my sofa, and pimped the crutches we'd gotten from the doctor with reflectors and soft grips. All of this was free. They gave me their numbers so I could call if I needed anything else.

I fooled myself into thinking that I was fine to work from home for a couple of days before I realized that the painkillers I was taking were not exactly helping me to do my best work. I called the HR person at my job, and she walked me through how to call out sick (after scolding me for not calling earlier and for trying to work, which she found ridiculous). I was unpaid for one mysterious

karensdag

, then received the standard 80% of my salary as long as I was out sick - plus a bump up to 90%, since i was employed by the state. Probably if I'd been out for a long time it would've involved some hassle, but for a few weeks it was just that call and a form. I had get some folks to cover my classes for me, which everyone treated like a reasonable part of working life. You're sick. Obviously we'll solve it.

Later I got the hard cast, got the cast removed, got more x rays, then started physical therapy with an amazing PT that I chose from the many options in town. Money was never a part of my decision making. You do pay a small amount to see a doctor here, up to about $50, but you only have to pay $130 per year for such visits, and then you get a

free card

for the rest of the year. There's a similar system for medication. There is, obviously, no discrimination against those with free cards. I still see that physical therapist from time to time.

About a year after the accident the zipline place's insurance company sent me some money - about $1000 - intended to cover any costs I might have had : new shoes with better support, a couple of taxi rides, etc - this because they had filled out a form when the accident happened.

That's enough of that. Let's see. Oh! Yes, I had a kid here. Obviously very intense prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care was included in this medical system - though a good deal of it is actually exempted from those small $20-50 fees, so those visits are totally free. We chose to have our kid at an extremely hippy dippy hospital about an hour away from where we lived; it was the home of Swedish Midwifery. The main differences were, as far as we could tell, that a) it was not a big deal to get vegan meals and b) the essential oils that they would drop into the large whirlpool tub that was provided were biodynamically produced. We stayed for a couple of days after the birth, in a

family room

that was basically a hotel room with constant excellent room service and adjustable beds.

An ultrasound had suggested our kid might have something up with his kidneys, so he saw a doctor earlier than most; on day 3 they took him for a lil' scan. Everything was fine. We stayed for

only

3 days with the cable TV and vegan food deliveries, then headed home. I don't remember anything at all about the costs of all this, because there were none, basically. Mothers' and childrens' health care is free. We did have to pay for gas to get to that faraway hippy hospital, so that's probably like $40 round trip.

Alison Gerber

... voted for Doug Jones.

The Jewish attorney who Roy Moore's wife touted employing in an attempt to fight off claims of anti-Semitism is actually a longtime friend and supporter of Senator-elect Doug Jones, who defeated Moore last month. Richard Jaffe is an Alabama defense attorney hired by the Moores to defend their son, Caleb Moore, against drug charges in 2016.

Jaffe told the Washington Examiner he has been close personal friends with Doug Jones for more than 30 years and he both contributed to, and raised money for, his campaign.

There could not be a more passionate supporter of Doug than me!

Jaffe said.

The Birmingham-based lawyer walked alongside Jones as he took center stage to deliver his acceptance speech and plans to be in the Senate gallery on Wednesday as Jones is sworn in.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!

Statement from the President of the United States

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

Until recently, the famous liar’s paradox was a liar saying, “I am lying.” Now, though, it has to be when any of Donald Trump’s friends or associates claims not to have called the president an ignoramus, a liar, an egomaniac or heroically unsuited for the presidency. Their choice is either to confirm the obvious or to appear a liar. Michael Wolff’s new book has put them all on the spot.

Wolff is a controversial figure whose journalistic reputation falls somewhat short of impeccable. What matters at the moment, though, is that most everything he has written in the excerpts I’ve read of “Fire and Fury” strikes me as true and, moreover, has already been said by others.

As every journalist knows, news is not that a dog bit a man but that a man bit a dog. In the same vein, it would be news if someone confided to an author or journalist that Trump was a reasonable man, self-effacing, considerate of others, cautious in his approach to major decisions, knowledgeable about the grand issues of national security or, even, aware that his hero Andrew Jackson did not live to the Civil War. This would be startling stuff. It would be similar in a way to the revisionist assessment of Dwight D. Eisenhower, considered a mumbler in his time, but understood now as a president who cleverly shielded his intentions by being purposely inarticulate. Maybe so.

From the White House and in the House of Lies known as the Republican National Committee have come denials aplenty. Who believes them? The president himself has gone into his Rumpelstiltskin act, stomping his foot and tweeting his innocence, but who believes him, either? Trump has effectively lent credence to Wolff’s reporting by having his lawyer threaten to sue Wolff for, of all things, “outright defamatory statements … about Mr. Trump, his family members, and the Company.” So huffed lawyer Charles Harder.

How is it possible to defame Trump? When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a “moron,” was that defamatory or merely the prosaic truth? When others in the White House said something similar, was that defamatory or was it a statement of fact? Actually, these statements would constitute matters of opinion, so clearly protected by the First Amendment that only a Supreme Court packed by Trump with caddies from his golf courses could rule in his favor.

That same holds for the effort to restrain Wolff’s publisher from publishing the book. Ain’t going to happen. As the eminent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams reminded me, the issue of prior restraint was settled by the Supreme Court in the famous Pentagon Papers case. If Trump and his legal team want, I will arrange for them to see “The Post,” the Steven Spielberg movie about how The Washington Post came to publish the Pentagon Papers. The question there revolved around national security — not a president’s hurt feelings — and still the court supported The Post and The New York Times.

Trump’s anger has clouded his PR sense. In essence, he’s promoting the Wolff book. The president and the presidency are unraveling. Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar’s Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called?

Fox News, I think.

Good morning,

How are you feeling today, Todd ?????????????

Odd that, before he ran against a democrat, he was seen as a hell ova guy by everybody.

NO one EVER considered him a racist until he ran against a corrupt democrat. Just sayin'.

Mental health professionals read Trump's letter: A study in

the psychotic mind

at work

Bandy Lee, Justin Frank, Lance Dodes, David Reiss and others unpack a

venomous and vitriolic

historic document

On Wednesday night, Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives. Trump will now — perhaps after some delay — be put on trial in the Senate, where he will then be acquitted by Republicans who have sworn personal fealty to him.

Trump’s impeachment is one of the few moments in his life when he has ever been held accountable for his behavior. Consequences are the enemy of Donald Trump. As such, in response to the Ukraine scandal, the Mueller report, the 2018 midterm elections and various other moments when Democrats and the public defied Trump’s authoritarian goal of becoming a de facto king or emperor, he has lashed out in the form of (another) temper tantrum.

On Tuesday, Trump continued with this ugly and deeply troubling behavior in the form of a six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, fueled by exaggerated rage that Democrats had dared to impeach him. Reportedly co-authored by Stephen Miller, Trump's white supremacist White House adviser, Trump’s letter continued numerous obvious lies about impeachment, the Ukraine scandal and other matters.

In keeping with his strategy of stochastic terrorism, Trump’s letter is an incitement to violence by his followers against the Democrats for the “crime” of impeachment.

Trump is possessed of the delusional belief that he (and by implication his supporters) is a victim of a “witch hunt” akin to the famous event in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. In keeping with his malignant narcissism, Trump’s letter, of course, boasts of his strength and fortitude against the Democrats and other enemies.

In total, Trump’s

impeachment letter

to Nancy Pelosi is but one data point among many demonstrating that he is mentally unwell and a threat to the safety of the United States and the world.

To gain more context and insight into this ongoing crisis, I asked several of the country’s leading mental health experts for their thoughts on Trump’s impeachment letter and what it indicates about the president’s emotional state and behavior.

Dr. Bandy Lee, assistant clinical professor, Yale University School of Medicine and president of the World Mental Health Organization. Lee is editor of the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

This letter is a very obvious demonstration of Donald Trump’s severe mental compromise. His assertions should alarm not only those who believe that a president of the United States and a commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military should be mentally sound, but also those who are concerned about the potential implications of such a compromised individual bringing out pathological elements in his supporters and in society in general. I have been following and interpreting Donald Trump’s tweets as a public service, since merely reading them “gaslights” you and reforms your thoughts in unhealthy ways. Without arming yourself with the right interpretation, you end up playing into the hands of pathology and helping it — even if you do not fully believe it. This is because of a common phenomenon that happens when you are continually exposed to a severely compromised person without appropriate intervention. You start taking on the person’s symptoms in a phenomenon called “shared psychosis.”

It happens often in households where a sick individual goes untreated, and I have seen some of the most intelligent and otherwise healthy persons succumb to the most bizarre delusions. It can also happen at national scale, as renowned mental health experts such as Erich Fromm have noted. Shared psychosis at large scale is also called “mass hysteria.”

The president is quite conscious of his ability to generate mass hysteria, which is the purpose of the letter.

The book I edited, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” contained three warnings: that the president was more dangerous than people suspected; that he would grow more dangerous with time; and that ultimately, he would become

uncontainable.

We are entering the “uncontainable” stage because of shared psychosis.

Dan P. McAdams, chair and professor of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University, author of the forthcoming book “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning.”

Venomous and vitriolic, obsessively focused on the self and nothing else, this letter is what we have come to know as vintage Trump. Had we been handed this document just three years ago and told it was once written by a president of the United States, we would have been aghast, and we would have considered it to be one of the most remarkable texts ever unearthed — worthy to be remembered as the antithesis of, say, the Gettysburg Address.

In terms of what we have come to expect from President Trump, the only remarkable thing about this letter is that it is so long — and that it contains a few big words, like “solemnity.” But in nearly every other way, the letter is like the vitriolic, grievance-filled tweets he sends out every day, full of falsehoods, hyperbole and hate. As an extended expression of who Trump really is, the letter shows you how his mind works and what his raw experience is like.

For over 50 years, Donald Trump has lived this way. Trump has fought every day of his adult life as if he were being impeached by his enemies. And there have always been countless enemies, because his antagonism brings them out of the woodwork. To quote what Trump told People Magazine when asked to recite his philosophy of life, “Man is the most vicious of all animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” This is truly how Trump has always experienced the world. The letter merely reinforces his world view.

Moreover, Trump is right about the Democrats. Many of them have been wanting to impeach him since Day One. They recoil against him just the way countless others have recoiled against Trump going back to his real estate days in the late 1970s. Trump needs to hate Democrats. If suddenly all his enemies lay down as lambs and promised to cooperate with him, he might kill himself. He would have no reason to go on. He needs enemies as much as he needs air to breathe.

Dr. David Reiss, psychiatrist, expert in mental fitness evaluations and contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”

Content-wise it is the typical Trump distortions, outright lies, and exclusive focus on his feelings. For Trump, his feelings define reality. It would be interesting if someone in the media was able to ask Trump,

What does the word 'fair' mean to you?

Because, objectively, Trump complains he is being treated

unfairly

anytime he does not get his way, his feelings are hurt, and/or others are not accepting what he says at face value and without question — even if it is contrary to proven fact or internally inconsistent.

Whoever actually wrote the letter, it accurately reflects Trump's immaturity that has been obvious in public as long as he has been a public figure: insisting that his needs be met in a child-like manner; having very poor problem-solving ability; having an inability to take responsibility for anything and projecting his own negative attributes onto others; an inability to look at consequences of his statements or actions. Basically, acting as a frustrated or emotionally hurt toddler would react, looking for a parent to protect him and

make the bad people go away.

Dr. Lance Dodes, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry (retired), Harvard Medical School, currently training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is also a contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”

Mr. Trump's letter shows his incapacity to recognize other people as separate from him or having worth.

As he always does, he accuses others of precisely what he has done, in precisely the same language. When confronted with violating the Constitution he says his accusers are violating the Constitution. When others point out that he undermines democracy, he says they undermine democracy. Through these very simpleminded projections he deletes others' selfhood and replaces who they are with what is unacceptable in himself.

The letter also has a remarkable list of boasts about what he says are his successes, stated as facts, with no acknowledgment that Speaker Pelosi has a vastly different view (about gun control, appointing judges who conform to his views, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement, etc). It is as if her independent views are unworthy of noting or existing. She is treated as invisible in his eyes.

In reflecting his projecting (paranoid) view of the world and his primitive focus on himself with denial of the rights and feelings of others, the letter is consistent with what we already know about Mr. Trump.

Dr. John Gartner, co-founder of the Duty to Warn PAC and co-editor of

Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump.

When you read excerpts of the Trump letter to Pelosi it doesn't do justice to how unhinged, paranoid and manic it is in its entirety.

It shows the usual formal properties of a Trump rant: proclaiming himself the victim of an evil conspiracy, while projecting onto his critics everything bad he is actually doing.

For example:

You are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy...

All blended seamlessly with outright lies:

Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses ...

Dr. Justin Frank, former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center, and author of “Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.”

When I first read Donald Trump’s six-page letter to Speaker Pelosi, I marveled at the ease with which he shared what goes on in his mind openly, and without reservation. His letter is the quintessential example of how professional victims actually think. They turn the prosecutor into the persecutor.

Trump’s letter is just such an expression of entitled, delusional grievance. He accuses Pelosi of injuring his family, but it is his nepotism that exposes his older children to public scrutiny and his teenager (to whom he refers as “Melania’s son

) to life in a fishbowl. More damning, in making her a public figure, he subjected the First Lady to humiliation. He knew full well he paid a stripper $130,000 not to talk about their affair and was surely aware that this and other unsavory behaviors would surface when he sought the presidency.

Trump is a con artist who succeeds by tricking his marks into not seeing the con. But the biggest mark — bigger than the GOP and his base — is himself. He believes the lies he tells, the delinquent traits he disavows. It’s what psychoanalysts call delusional projection. We see it the simple sentence he wrote to the speaker: “You view democracy as your enemy.” Trump confirms my findings published in

Trump on the Couch." But now his defenses are writ large, because instead of changing in moments of crisis, people become more the way they are. Trump has reverted to the most familiar means to cope with fears of being caught, punished and humiliated.

Finally, the letter is a treasure trove for psychiatric residents who want to study the psychotic mind. Trump’s paradoxical sleight of hand makes him think he can hide in plain sight. But he can’t anymore. This is why he accuses Pelosi of hating democracy: It is he who hates a system that promotes the idea that no one is above the law.

H1616 are you still on the Island?

Interesting article, thank you for sharing. Read it all

McConnell signal to Republican Senate candidates: Distance from Trump if necessary

Hahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaha!!

I thought this was a sailing website. I would rather no posts than ANY political posts!

You know which forum you clicked on right?