Why Buffalo Bill still matters, a century later

Paul Andrew Hutton has published ten books and teaches history at the University of New Mexico. For more on Cody, he recommends Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen by Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill’s America by Louis S. Warren, and The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill by Don Russell, and has an article in True West about William Frederick 'Buffalo Bill' Cody:

William F. Cody (photo) was a man seemingly trapped in the distant past, yet one who cared desperately about the onrushing future, for himself, his family, his business, and his country.
He was progressive in politics (he favored the vote for women long before President Woodrow Wilson came around) and was, for his time and place, enlightened on questions of race and equality. He had risen from poverty to incredible wealth, was fawned over by kings and queens, presidents and captains of industry and, in his time, was the living symbol of The American.
President Theodore Roosevelt described Cody as an “American of Americans”, adding that "his memory should be dear to all Americans, for he embodied those traits of courage, strength, and self-reliant hardihood which are vital to the well-being of our nation.”
He was, like the nation he came to symbolize, a bundle of contradictions: a hunter who became a conservationist; a friend to Native Americans, though famed as an Indian fighter; a rugged frontier scout best remembered as a sequined showman; a living artifact of a pioneer past playing out his role in a world of telephones, motion pictures, automobiles, airplanes, skyscrapers, and world wars.
Even while Cody was alive, his impressive exploits in the frontier West inspired artists to forever preserve the illustrious frontiersman in works of art mighty enough to match the man, including Paul Frenzeny, in a painting, possibly created around the time he sailed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to England in April pf 1887. If true, then his portrayal of the iconic showman, mounted on his snow-white stallion (below), predates a similar portrayal by Rosa Bonheur, created during the international exhibition in Paris, France, in 1889. Prints of her painting were sold throughout the US and Europe.

 

Cody’s life, from 1846-1917, spanned a period of astonishing change, and he participated in much of it. After his father became a martyr in the fight to keep Kansas free of slavery, the boy fought as a teenager in the Civil War. He rode for the Pony Express; hunted buffalo for the railroad (and earned his nickname, Buffalo Bill); scouted for the Army (General Philip Sheridan appointed him chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry); earned the Medal of Honor in a fight with the Sioux; took the so-called “first scalp for Custer” in a celebrated duel at Warbonnet Creek in 1876; and numbered among his frontier friends Wild Bill Hickok, California Joe Milner, Texas Jack Omohundro, Frank North, Ned Buntline, Jack Stilwell, Spotted Tail, Sitting Bull, and Generals Sheridan, Carr, Merritt, and Nelson Miles.
Cody lived the Wild West from 1846 to 1876, and then he took it on the road, first in stage shows and then in the greatest arena extravaganza of the nineteenth century (if not of all time) with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Congress of Rough Riders of the World (he never called it a show).  It was a romantic adventure, a gilded historical pageant, a combination rodeo and circus, and, most important, a tale of progress.
Cody told Americans, and then people around the world, the story of the birth of the United States. He became the embodiment of the American spirit and presented to the world an image of the rugged American as important to the nineteenth century as Benjamin Franklin was to the previous century.
Cody inherited the frontier crown of Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and Kit Carson. With an assist from James Fenimore Cooper, Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Theodore Roosevelt, he made the story of the American frontier into the nation’s creation myth. Buffalo Bill, astride his snow-white stallion presented an image that all the people of a rapidly changing nation could embrace no matter their place of origin.
When Cody died on 10 January 1917, his country— about to march into a future of steam, steel, world wars, and international power— paused and reflected on just how far the nation had come in so short a time. Cody, the quintessential American, had all been encompassed in the life of one man. With the passing of Buffalo Bill, the first epoch of America’s story had come to a close. 

Rico says some history shouldn't be forgotten...

Da Mooch is out

People.com has an article by Lindsay Kimble about the latest rat off Trump's ship of state:

Just over a week into his new role as White House communications director, financier Anthony Scaramucci has been removed from the position, the White House confirmed on Monday.

“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving as White House Communications Director. Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best,” the White House press secretary said in a statement.

Multiple sources told The New York Times that President Trump chose to remove Scaramucci at the request of the administration’s new chief of staff, General John Kelly.
Scaramucci’s short tenure was a whirlwind. After giving an expletive-laden interview to The New Yorker about his new White House colleagues, it was revealed Friday that his wife had filed for divorce earlier this month while nine months pregnant with Scaramucci’s son.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Monday that Trump found Scaramucci’s comments to The New Yorker “inappropriate for a person in the position” of White House communications director. She added, amid questions of whether Scaramucci was staying on in some other position, that he does not have any administration role “at this time.”

Rico says you're wife's gotta really be pissed to leave you when she's nine months pregnant...

Trump disses the mayor of San Juan

Yahoo has an article by Colin Campbell about Trump's latest rant:

President Trump (photo) lashed out on Twitter at Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan on Saturday morning over what he implied was insufficient gratitude for Federal help in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
“The mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that she must be nasty to Trump,” the commander-in-chief wrote. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”
It’s not clear what, exactly, caused Trump to lash out against Cruz, who has issued increasingly desperate pleas for help as her island of 3.4 million people struggles to obtain clean water, fuel, electricity, and other basic supplies.
Cruz has criticized the federal relief effort generally. “We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency,” Cruz said at a news conference on Friday. “I am begging, begging anyone that can hear us, to save us from dying.”
Trump has repeatedly touted the response effort, suggesting that Puerto Rico’s poor infrastructure and “massive debt” is to blame for the territory’s ongoing crisis. The Oresident also frequently points out that Puerto Rico is an island, which complicates recovery efforts. “This is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water,” he said Friday.

Rico says that, speaking of all that water, he's surprised no one's shipped in a big desalinization plant like Tampa's and solved the problem...

Fighting ISIS

Rico says some say ISIS, some say ISIL, he says let's call the whole thing off, but The Clarion Project has an article by Elliott Friedland about the coalition fighting them:

Rico says it's a nice coalition, but he wishes they'd get the job done...

More Trump trouble

Yahoo has an article by Christopher Wilson about another Trump bailee:

The White House announced on Friday that President Trump had accepted the resignation of beleaguered Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price (photo, left).
Press secretary Sarah Sanders released a statement saying Price had submitted his resignation earlier Friday and Trump had accepted it. She added that Don J. Wright (photo, right) of Virginia, deputy assistant secretary for health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, will take over as acting head of Health and Human Services, now the second Cabinet department without a permanent confirmed secretary, following John Kelly’s move from Homeland Security to chief of staff.
According to his bio at HHS, Wright began working there in 2007 as principal deputy assistant secretary for health. He is a physician with a medical degree from the University of Texas.
Politico reported earlier in September that Price had been chartering private planes for travel, breaking a precedent with previous Health and Human Services chiefs. Among the flights was a $25,000 trip from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia, a trip that takes less than three hours driving or ninety minutes via Amtrak, and an $18,000 visit to Nashville, Tennessee that included ninety minutes of work and a lengthy lunch with his son.
Price released a statement Thursday saying he would repay the treasury for the flights, but his department later told media outlets that he would pay just the prorated cost of his own seat, about $52,000, not the whole expense of the charters, which cost more than $400,000. (He was generally accompanied by aides and security personnel who flew with him.) Following his statement, Politico further reported that Price had spent an additional five hundred thousand dollar of taxpayer funds using military planes while traveling with his wife in Europe and Asia.
As a congressman, Price consistently attacked what he called wasteful spending by Democrats, including criticizing then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “flying over our country in a private jet.” Twitter users have spent the past few days surfacing old tweets from Price’s time as a legislator in which he posed as a relentless guardian of the public purse. “Reckless spending habits employed by Democrats in Washington are driving the debt,” wrote then-Representative Price in 2011. “We need #spendingcutsnow.”
“If you can’t budget, you can’t govern,” wrote Price in 2010.
Price has also been criticized for profiting off the trading of medical stock that his congressional votes directly influenced. Asked if Price’s job was in jeopardy on Thursday, Sanders said, “We’ll see what happens.” The Associated Press reported earlier Friday that Trump had begun calling Price a “distraction”.
Price was appointed by Trump after more than a decade in Congress, where he represented Georgia’s Sixth District. He served as chair of the House Budget Committee from 2015 to 2017.

Rico says is it just him, or does Georgia seem to have a problem?

Incoming

Space.com has an article by Sarah Lewin about the first sighting of a new comet:

Sarah Lewin, Space.com associate editor, started writing for Space.com in June of 2015. Her work has been featured in Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, Quanta Magazine, Wired, The Scientist, Science Friday, and WGBH's Inside NOVA. She has an MA from NYU's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program and an AB in mathematics from Brown University. When not writing, reading or thinking about space, Sarah enjoys musical theatre and mathematical papercraft. You can follow her on Twitter @SarahExplains. Original article on Space.com.

A new image (above) reveals a distant newcomer to our solar system: the farthest active comet ever spotted, heading toward the sun for the first time. The Hubble Space Telescope captured a view of Comet C/2017 K2, called K2 for short, as it came in from out beyond Saturn's orbit, over a billion miles from the sun. As it approaches the sun and the temperature rises from minus 440 degrees Fahrenheit, the comet is developing a fluffy cloud of dust, called a coma, which surrounds its frozen body. While the comet's nucleus appears to be just twelve miles across, the coma stretches to ten times Earth's diameter. The newfound distant comet, 1.5 billion miles from the sun, boasts the earliest signs of activity ever seen on a comet entering the Solar System. The comet's fuzzy halo likely comes from substances such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide turning from a solid to a gas as the comet approaches the sun's warmth for the first time. "I think these volatiles are spread all through K2, and in the beginning, billions of years ago, they were probably all through every comet presently in the Oort Cloud," David Jewitt, lead author on the study and a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said in the statement. "But the volatiles on the surface are the ones that absorb the heat from the sun, so, in a sense, the comet is shedding its outer skin. Most comets are discovered much closer to the sun, near Jupiter's orbit so, by the time we see them, these surface volatiles have already been baked off," he added. "That's why I think K2 is the most primitive comet we've seen." Most comets' comas come from evaporating water and ice, but K2 is too far from the sun for that process to have begun. Comet C/2017 K2 is on its first journey into the Solar System. The comet was observed halfway between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus (Pluto is the furthest orbit visible in the image). Researchers first spotted K2 in May of 2017 with data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). The new Hubble view let Jewitt's team measure the size of K2's nucleus and confirm that it hasn't yet developed a comet's signature tail. They also spotted K2 in earlier images, gathered in 2013 by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawai'i; at the time, nobody had noticed the incredibly faint object, according to the statement, but Jewitt's team was able to identify the comet and its growing coma of material. "We think the comet has been continuously active for at least four years," Jewitt said. "In the CFHT data, K2 had a coma already at two billion miles from the sun, when it was between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. It was already active, and I think it has been continuously active coming in. As it approaches the sun, it's getting warmer and warmer, and the activity is ramping up," he added. Over the next five years, the comet will travel closer to the sun, allowing researchers to follow its journey; it will approach closest to the sun in 2022, just outside Mars' orbit. "We will be able to monitor for the first time the developing activity of a comet falling in from the Oort Cloud over an extraordinary range of distances," Jewitt said. "It should become more and more active as it nears the Sun and presumably will form a tail." The new work was detailed on 28 September in The Astrophysical Journal.

Rico says let's hope this one misses us, too...

Trump blocking travel to Cuba again

Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee have an Associated Press article via Yahoo about why Rico won't be going there anytime soon (let alone what the recent hurricane might've done to the place, though Insight Cuba says not):

The United States is warning Americans against visiting Cuba and ordering more than half of American personnel to leave the island, senior officials said Friday, in a dramatic response to what they described as "specific attacks" on diplomats.
The decision deals a blow to already delicate ties between the US and Cuba, longtime enemies who only recently began putting their hostility behind them. The embassy in Havana (photo) will lose roughly sixty percent of its American staff, and will stop processing visas in Cuba indefinitely, American officials said.
In a new travel warning to be issued Friday, the US will say some of the attacks have occurred in Cuban hotels, and that, while American tourists are not known to have been hurt, they could be exposed if they travel to Cuba. Tourism is a critical component of Cuba's economy that has grown in recent years as the US relaxed restrictions.
For now, the United States is not ordering any Cuban diplomats to leave Washington, another move that the administration had considered, officials said. Several US lawmakers have called on the administration to expel all Cuban diplomats. In May of 2017, Washington asked two to leave, but emphasized it was to protest Havana's failure to protect diplomats on its soil, not an accusation of blame.
Almost a year after diplomats began describing unexplained health problems, US investigators still don't know what or who is behind the attacks, which have harmed at least twenty diplomats and their families, some with injuries as serious as traumatic brain injury and permanent hearing loss. Although the State Department has called them "incidents" and generally avoided deeming them attacks, officials said Friday the US has now determined there were "specific attacks" on American personnel in Cuba.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made the decision to draw down the embassy overnight while traveling to China, officials said, after considering other options that included a full embassy shutdown. President Donald Trump reviewed the options with Tillerson in a meeting earlier in the week. The officials demanded anonymity because the moves were yet unannounced.
The United States notified Cuba of the moves Friday via its embassy in Washington. Cuba's embassy had no immediate comment. Cubans seeking visas to enter the US may be able to apply through embassies in nearby countries, officials said. The US will also stop sending official delegations to Cuba, though diplomatic discussions will continue in Washington.
The moves deliver a significant setback to the delicate reconciliation between the US and Cuba, two countries that endured a half-century estrangement despite their locations only ninety miles apart. In 2015, President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro restored diplomatic ties. Embassies re-opened, and travel and commerce restrictions were eased. Trump has reversed some changes, but has broadly left the rapprochement in place.
The Trump administration has pointedly not blamed Cuba for perpetrating the attacks. Officials involved in the deliberations said the administration had weighed the best way to minimize potential risk for Americans in Havana without unnecessarily harming relations between the countries. Rather than describe it as punitive, the administration will emphasize Cuba's responsibility to keep diplomats on its soil safe.
To investigators' dismay, the symptoms in the attacks vary widely from person to person. In addition to hearing loss and concussions, some experienced nausea, headaches, and ear-ringing, and the Associated Press has reported some now suffer from problems with concentration and common word recall.
Though officials initially suspected some futuristic "sonic attack", the picture has grown muddier. The FBI and other agencies that searched homes and hotels where incidents had occurred found no devices. Clues about the circumstances of the incidents seem to make any explanation scientifically implausible.
Some US diplomats reported hearing various loud noises or feeling vibrations when the incidents occurred, but others heard and felt nothing yet reported symptoms later. In some cases, the effects were narrowly confined, with victims able to walk "in" and "out" of blaring noises audible in only certain rooms or parts of rooms, the Associated Press has reported. Though the incidents stopped for a time, they recurred as recently as late August of 2017. The U.S. has said the tally of Americans affected could grow.
Already, staffing at the embassy in Havana was at lower-than-usual levels due to recent hurricanes that have whipped through Cuba. In early September of 2017, the State Department issued an "authorized departure", allowing embassy employees and relatives who wanted to leave voluntarily to depart ahead of Hurricane Irma.
Though Cuba implored the United States not to react hastily, it appeared that last-minute lobbying by Castro's diplomats was unsuccessful. The days leading up to the decision involved a frantic bout of diplomacy that brought about the highest-level diplomatic contacts between the countries since the start of Trump's administration in January.
Last week, the Cuban official who has been the public face of the diplomatic opening with the US, Josefina Vidal, came to the State Department for a meeting with American officials in which the US pressed its concerns. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez used his speech to the UN General Assembly to insist Cuba had no idea what was harming American diplomats, while discouraging Trump from letting the matter become "politicized".
As concerns grew about a possible embassy shut-down, Cuba requested an urgent meeting Tuesday between Rodriguez and Tillerson, in which the Cuban again insisted his government had nothing to do with the incidents. Rodriguez added that his government also would never let another country hostile to the US use Cuban territory to attack Americans.
Citing its own investigation, Cuba's embassy said after the meeting that "there is no evidence so far of the cause or the origin of the health disorders reported by the American diplomats."

Rico says he agrees with the commenter who said "fuck Trump; I'll go there if I please." But the likely suspect: microwaves...

PR gets more aid

Danica Coto and Laurie Kellman have an Associated Press article about getting aid to Puerto Rico:

President Donald Trump cleared the way Thursday for more supplies to head to Puerto Rico and tweeted that relief was getting through but, on the island, food and water remained scarce in devastated towns where a growing number of people decried the Federal response as an uncoordinated disaster.
Nine days after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Trump issued a ten-day waiver of Federal restrictions on foreign shipments of cargo to the island. And House Speaker Paul Ryan said the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) disaster relief account would get a seven billion dollar boost by the end of the week.
The developments came after Trump came under sharp criticism for what critics said was a slow response to a humanitarian crisis among Puerto Rico's four million residents.
"The Federal response has been a disaster," said lawmaker Jose Enrique Melendez, a member of Governor Ricardo Rossello's New Progressive Party. "It's been really slow."
He said the Trump administration had focused more on making a good impression on members of the media gathered at San Juan's convention center than bringing aid to rural Puerto Rico. "There are people literally just modeling their uniforms," Melendez said. "People are suffering outside."
Trump and his advisers defended the administration's response to the hurricane, which destroyed much of the island's infrastructure and left many residents desperate for fresh water, power, food and other supplies. "The electric power grid in Puerto Rico is totally shot. Large numbers of generators are now on the Island. Food and water on site," Trump tweeted early in the day. But, in many cases, "on site" meant stored on pallets and in containers in seaports and airports far from the towns where Puerto Ricans desperately lined up for fresh water and pre-made meals being distributed by Federal officials.
"I have not received any help, and we ran out of food yesterday," said Mari Olivo, a 27-year-old homemaker whose husband was pushing a shopping cart with empty plastic gallon jugs while their two children, nine and seven, each toted a large bucket. They stood in line in a parking lot in the town of Bayamon on the hard-hit northern coast, where police used hoses to fill up containers from a city water truck. Bayamon Mayor Ramon Luis Rivera told The Associated Press that FEMA officials sent a truck with a limited amount of food on Monday. Rivera said he began distributing it to hard-hit rural areas. "I don't wait," he said when asked whether Federal officials helped with distribution."I have not seen any Federal help around here," said Javier San Miguel, a fifty-year-old accountant.
Meanwhile, in the nearby fishing town of Cataño, authorities said they would open a distribution point over the weekend to hand out food and water, nearly two weeks after the hurricane hit. "We need food," said Maritza Gonzalez, a fifty-year-old government worker.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke said she signed the waiver of a Federal law to clear the way for foreign-flagged ships to deliver supplies between US ports. The nearly century-old measure, known as the Jones Act, has bolstered the US shipping industry, but made consumer goods much pricier and scarcer in this US territory than on the mainland. "You are seeing devastation in Puerto Rico. That is the fault of the hurricane," Duke told reporters in the White House driveway. "The relief effort is under control."
Meanwhile, the military was sending a three-star general to Puerto Rico to help direct the hurricane response. Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan, commander of US Army North, was to arrive on Thursday to assess the situation so that the military can provide the highest level of support for the disaster, Northern Command spokesman John Cornelio said; he said there were still problems getting supplies and aid to residents on the island, where twelve of the thirty bridges that have been assessed were closed, and another sixty-five were damaged. Cornelio also said that the number of open gas stations has increased from about four hundred to nearly seven hundred. FEMA officials said a million meals and two million liters of fresh water had been distributed in Puerto Rico and two million more meals and two million more liters of water were on the way.
Presidential spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said ten thousand government workers, including more than seven thousand troops, were helping Puerto Rico recover.
The Department of Homeland Security's acting administrator of the region that includes Puerto Rico said that distribution had been hampered by the destruction of roads and bridges, which made it hard to get supplies to those in need.v"In addition to building that first line of the supply chain, we are also rebuilding the entire distribution system of how we're going to deliver commodities and resources to the people of Puerto Rico," acting administrator John Rabin told reporters in the capital of San Juan. "We have often had to recreate the system in order to deliver food, water, and commodities throughout the island."
Tom Bossert, Trump's homeland security adviser, said the impression of a slow response isn't so much wrong as it is outdated. He said more than forty of the island's seventy hospitals were now accepting patients.
FEMA Administrator Brock Long said the efforts have been hampered by damaged airports and ports on the island. "The question is that last mile," Long told CNN, speaking of the difficulty of getting aid all the way to those in need.
Meanwhile, Ryan announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's
(FEMA) disaster relief account would get "a huge capital injection" of nearly seven billion dollars by the end of the week to help Puerto Rico recover. He noted that Trump had waived a matching funds requirement, which means the cash-strapped island won't have to contribute to the initial costs of the Federal assistance. The Wisconsin Republican said he expects the Trump administration to send Congress a request for a long-term recovery package once damage assessments are conducted. "We will quickly act on that request," Ryan said. Duke, the acting homeland security secretary, had waived the Jones Act earlier this month to help ease fuel shortages in the Southeast following hurricanes Harvey and Irma. That order included Puerto Rico but expired last week, shortly after Maria struck.
The Trump administration initially said a waiver was not needed for Puerto Rico because there were enough US-flagged ships available to ferry goods to the island.

Rico says this is still a disaster, but getting better...

Trump gets trumped

Matt Bai has a column for Yahoo News about Trump:

Whatever else you want to say about him, Trump is smarter than a lot of analysts think, particularly when it comes to intuiting the single largest shift in the culture. Donald Trump gets that our faith in all-powerful organizations has so completely deteriorated that he can win points and ratings by bashing even the most sacred institutions, as long as he doesn’t go after the people who rely on them.
So when Trump rips into generals, or the Pope, or the lords of professional football (whom he accuses, among other things, of trying too hard to prevent brain damage), all the commentators in my industry jump up and down and scream about how he’s courting political suicide. But soldiers and Catholics and Cowboys fans react pretty much as Trump expects them to.
Those who love the provocateur president only love him more for his audacity. Those who hate him only give him more attention. To most everyone else, the argument over whether to trust Trump or some cloistered group of elites is pretty much a wash.
Which is why Trump’s foray into this week’s Senate primary in Alabama struck me as uncharacteristically unintuitive. Rather than kicking around the beleaguered establishment, as he usually does, Trump tried to shore it up. And the consequences of that for his troubled presidency could be severe.
Generally speaking, I’m skeptical of the outsize importance we tend to place on mid-cycle campaigns like the one in Alabama. We always look to some special election for Congress or the off-year governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, the first two that occur after a presidential election, for signs of the national mood.
As often as not, the outcomes reflect nothing, really, beyond local issues and the skill sets of a few candidates we know nothing about. For all the talk about testing a president’s prestige and popularity, rarely does the White House have much ability to sway a local election more than a few points in either direction.
But perceptions matter in politics, and Trump probably should have thought about that more deeply before he plunged into the Alabama race. For whatever reason, maybe he was trying to do a solid for Mitch McConnell, or maybe he just liked this guy, Trump felt compelled to campaign for Luther Strange, who inherited the open Senate seat after Jeff Sessions became attorney general.
Meanwhile, most of Trump’s supporters (including his erstwhile alter ego, Steve Bannon) got behind Roy Moore, a former justice and aspiring theocrat who, if history is any guide, would probably try to replace the Lincoln Memorial with a mountain-size replica of the Ten Commandments. Moore won the primary in an avalanche.
And just by the way, this wasn’t in Utah or Ohio, or just about any other state outside the South, where Trump’s influence right now would be questionable. This was Alabama, where Confederate flags hang like street signs, and where Trump supposedly remains a folk hero.
Trump immediately responded to this humiliation by deleting the tweets he issued endorsing Strange, and basically pretending the whole thing never happened. It’s like I always tell my kids: stand by your friends until they embarrass you, and then run like hell in the other direction.
Trump won’t so easily put the whole episode behind him, though, and I’ll tell you why. The plain fact is that Republicans in Washington— senators, congressmen, party insiders, and hangers-on —don’t like or trust him very much, and they never have. You may not have noticed, but right now the President couldn’t persuade majorities in his own party to sign a birthday card, much less repeal the health care law.
(McConnell responded to yet another defeat on health care this week by proclaiming that Republicans were moving on to their next big priority, which is tax cuts. We came here to do the business of the American people, and so help me, we’re going to work our way down this list of policies until we’ve failed to enact each and every one of them.)
About the only leverage Trump has with his party’s congressional wing is the idea that he can create all kinds of mayhem on the local level. Trump proved during last year’s presidential campaign that his supporters, a loud and passionate minority, can be an overwhelming force in low-turnout primaries. And so Trump’s best shot at bending all these politicians to his will was to make them believe— true or not —that he would recruit and encourage primary candidates to make their lives a nightmare if they didn’t have his back.
Related to that is that idea that Trump could also protect them from primaries if they voted the right way. In other words: you can break with me and take the chance that I’ll take you out in a nasty primary, or you can be an ally and trust me to keep the antiestablishment current from washing you away.
In Alabama, somehow, Trump managed to prove that he can actually do neither. He didn’t have anything like the sway necessary to protect Strange from a right-wing rebellion, even after he visited the state and rambled on for an hour and a half.
And it turns out that anti-Washington insurgencies will materialize and succeed even if he has nothing to do with them, so whatever threats he might make on that score are irrelevant.
You heard echoes of this from Tennessee’s Bob Corker, a moderate Republican, when he announced this week he would stand down rather than run for reelection to the Senate. Corker seemed resigned to the idea that he would have to endure a divisive and costly primary, whether Trump was with him or not. That pretty much removes any incentive a senator might have to go along with Trump’s agenda or to defend him when he says something incredibly boneheaded, which is about twice a week.
At the same time, Trump’s choice in Alabama sent a strong signal to traditional Republican activists— especially religious conservatives, who have always viewed him with some suspicion but who embraced him as a vehicle anyway— that he’ll align against them when he feels like it.
Put that together with his recent outreach to Democrats on immigration, and you can begin to see real cracks in Trump’s already porous patchwork of constituencies.
What does all this mean, practically speaking? In the short term, it means that Trump can expect to encounter more futility in Congress, just as he did on health care.
In the medium term, it means that he has almost certainly invited his own serious primary challenge in 2020 (and, as I’ve written before, I’m betting he draws more than one). If you’re John Kasich or Marco Rubio or Rand Paul, or one of the other hundred Republicans circling this White House like buzzards, watching Trump’s Senate pick get thrashed by the most reliable Republican voters in the South had to feel a little like Christmas morning.
This is how it goes at the highest levels in Washington, when you’re not just tweeting and manipulating crowds, but actually trying to build coalitions and get some things done. Making the wrong bet with your political capital can resound for years.
Hey, Mr. President: welcome to the NFL.

Rico says that's just what we don't need in the Senate: a rabid religious nut...

Another idiot for the day

Charles Pierce has an Esquire article about Roy Moore:

On Tuesday night, the voters in the great state of Alabama pushed a lawless theocratic lunatic named Roy Moore (photo) one tiny step away from a seat in the Senate. Moore lost his job as chief justice of that state’s supreme court twice; on both occasions, he lost it by flouting the authority of the Federal court system as though he were Orval Faubus in 1957.
Moore believes that homosexual conduct should be illegal, and, as he said, he believes that “God is sovereign over our government, over our law. When we exclude 'Him' from our lives, exclude 'Him' from our courts, then they will fail We've forgotten that God is intimately connected with this nation. Without God there would be no freedom to believe what you want."
To conclude, this from The Washington Post:

“There is no such thing as evolution,” he said at one point as he waited for his lunch. Species might adapt to their environment, he continued, but that has nothing to do with the origins of life described in the Bible. “That we came from a snake?” he asked rhetorically. “No, I don’t believe that.”

Any report about Roy Moore that doesn’t specifically refer to him as a right-wing extremist is not worth your time. No more “firebrand”. No more impotent yap about his “controversial views”. Roy Moore is an extremist, or the word no longer has meaning. If, as appears likely, he gets elected to the Senate from Alabama, then a majority of Alabama voters are extremists, too. If he gets elected, then the Republican Party ever more must be referred to as an extremist party. That, of course, is if we’re being honest about what’s really going on in this country in 2017.
And, no, when it comes to the people who voted for Moore, I don’t have to “respect their beliefs. I don’t have to “understand where they’re coming from. I don’t have to see it from their side." These people are preparing to make a lawless theocratic lunatic one of a hundred Senators, and that means these people are about to inflict him and his medievalism on me, too. If you think that Roy Moore belongs in the Senate, then you are a half-bright goober whose understanding of American government and basic civics probably stops at the left side of your AM radio dial. You have no concept of the national interest and very little concept of your own, unless, as I suspect, you’ve made your own fears, and hating people and hawking loogies in all directions, the sum total of your involvement in self-government. You are killing democracy and you don’t know it or care. If you had any real Christian charity in your hearts, you’d keep Roy Moore in the locked ward of your local politics and not loose him on a nation that deserves so much better than him.
Why do I not have to “respect their beliefs”, besides the fact that most of those beliefs belong in a cage? I don’t have to “respect their beliefs” because the US Senate to which they are preparing to send him is in the process of screwing them with their pants on and they could care less.
The Senate’s tax plan emerged full-grown from the forehead of Mania on Tuesday. As is customary for some documents, it is vague in almost all its major details. But we do know that it eliminates the estate tax entirely, a plutocratic goodie that probably caused a postmortem emission from the grave of John D. Rockefeller that looked like the gusher from his first oil well, and it gives to the middle class with one hand while taking it away from the other, thereby robbing Peter to bribe Paul. Ultimately, the estimates are that it will cost the Federal treasury over a trillion dollars over the next decade, and the people pushing it decline to say how they’re going to make that cut pay for itself, proving that the Republicans at least continue to adhere to the first half of the blog’s First Law of Economics, to wit: Fuck The Deficit. The only details that are clear about the plan are the ones that benefit the country’s real owners.
What I do know is that the people who elected Roy Moore elected him to join the Senate majority that will pass this thing, if and when it ever comes to a vote. Then, come some April morn, they will be stunned to discover that they can’t deduct what they pay in state taxes anymore, and that their charitable contributions don’t count any more either. How could ol’ Judge Roy let this happen? Because he’s a lawless theocratic lunatic, that’s how. Because you voted for him specifically because he was a lawless theocratic lunatic. It was the basis of his campaign, no matter how many times Steve Bannon tells you you’re part of a bold populist crusade. He very likely doesn’t know enough about tax policy to throw at the cat, so he’ll go along on that as long as they let him make his floor speeches about how Cecile Richards is an imp from hell. And you’ll cheer him so loudly that you won’t even notice that your pocket’s being picked again by someone with a solid-gold Rolex on his wrist.
I’m out of empathy for this stuff. I’m out of pity. I’m out of patience. Not for nothing, but Moore’s opponent is a guy named Douglas Jones. In 2001, Jones convicted two men for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, one of the iconic white supremacist terrorist acts of that period. One of those bastards already died in prison and the other keeps getting denied parole. If you’d rather be represented in the Senate by a lawless theocratic lunatic, rather than a guy that finally got justice for four murdered little girls, well, you deserve anything that happens to you.

Rico says the stop sign has the operative word here...

Arecibo still operable

Space.com has an article by Hanneke Weitering about the radio telescope in Puerto Rico:

Nearly a week after Hurricane Maria pulverized Puerto Rico, staff members at the island's Arecibo Observatory are remaining optimistic as they continue to survey the damage to their enormous radio telescope (photo).
The Arecibo Observatory contains the second-largest radio telescope in the world, and that telescope has been out of service ever since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on 20 September. Maria hit the island as a Category 4 hurricane, leaving behind a swath of downed trees, battered buildings and gushing rivers running through the streets.
While Puerto Rico suffered catastrophic damage across the island, the Arecibo Observatory suffered "relatively minor damage," Francisco Córdova, the director of the observatory, said in a Facebook post on Sunday, 24September.
Last week, officials reported that a hundred-foot line-feed antenna that was suspended from a platform above the telescope's dish had broken off and punctured some of the mesh panels that make up the thousand-foot dish.
A smaller, secondary dish located nearby on the premises was reported "lost" on Friday, 22 September, by officials with the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), which helps to run the observatory.  However, officials are now saying that the damage to this secondary dish wasn't quite as serious as they thought. "There was some damage to it, but not a lot," Nicholas White, a senior vice president with USRA, told NPR. "So far, the only damage that's confirmed is that one of the line feeds on the antenna for one of the radar systems was lost," he added.
Along with the aforementioned Facebook post, Córdova shared a photo of two Arecibo employees standing in front of the damaged telescope dish and holding up the flag of Puerto Rico. "Still standing after Hurricane Maria!" Córdova wrote in the post.

Rico says it's a great piece of technology; glad it's working.

Pluto, weird as ever

Space.com has an article about Pluto (the planet, not the dog):

Pluto's surface hosts blades of ice that soar to the height of skyscrapers, and researchers have narrowed down exactly how the dramatic features form.
According to new research, the blades are made mostly of methane ice, and form similarly to (much shorter) spikes of snow and ice on Earth.
When the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto in July of 2015, researchers observed an astonishing variety of terrains across the dwarf planet. Flat and cratered areas on the dwarf planet's surface point to its varied geological activity, composition and evolution over time. 

Rico says the universe continues to amaze...

Not happening

Rico says he's thought about it, but he'd probably just fuck it up and find himself in the hospital for his fianceé to take care of again, so he won't even try...

Renaming the Bible

Rico's friend (and fellow unbeliever) Kelley forwards this:

A YouTube comedian referred to the Bible as:

Hefner is dead, and the Bunnies are wailing

Hugh Hefner, the founder of the Playboy empire, has died at the age of 91:

Hugh Marston Hefner (9 April 1926 to 27 September 2017) was an American publisher and playboy. He was best known as the editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, which he founded in 1953, and as chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, the publishing group that operates the magazine. An advocate of sexual liberation and freedom of expression, Hefner was a political activist and philanthropist in several other causes and public issues.

Rico says there are many feminists out there who will not lament his passing, but the Bunnies are wailing:

Trump does something right for a change

Reuters has a Yahoo article about his latest:

President Donald Trump waived shipping restrictions on Thursday to help get fuel and supplies to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, the White House said.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a Twitter post that Trump, at the request of Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rossello, "has authorized the Jones Act be waived for Puerto Rico. It will go into effect immediately." The Jones Act limits shipping between coasts to US-flagged vessels.

Rico says, for once, he made a smart move....

More dummheit

Mike Wall has a Space.com article about yet another idiot:

B.o.B may be about to blow the lid off the "round-Earth conspiracy."
Unlike the rest of us, the Atlanta, Georgia-based rapper has not been "tricked" into believing our planet is spherical by thousands of satellite photos, the shape of Earth's shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses, the circumnavigation of the globe, the physics of planet formation or any evidence.
Rather, B.o.B, whose real name is Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. , trusts his eyes. And his eyes tell him that Earth's horizon tends to look pretty flat in photos taken from the surface. Indeed, B.o.B posted a bunch of such pictures on Twitter last year via his @bobatl account, along with commentary such as "I'm going up against the greatest liars in history; you've been tremendously deceived." (The little episode sparked a memorable rap battle with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.)
All that being said, however, B.o.B appears to be keeping an open mind. In fact, he wants to gather some crucial evidence about Earth's shape himself, with the aid of a million dollars, which he's trying to raise via the crowdfunding site gofundme.com.
"What's up guys! Help support B.o.B purchase and launch one, if not multiple, satellites into space," the project description states. "He's donated a thousand dollars to the cause to get it going, and will be keeping you updated with step-by-step documentation of the process! Help B.o.B find the curve!"
As of Wednesday, 27 September, five days into the campaign, B.o.B had raised about $1,700 on top of his initial $1,000 contribution. But he had to know this would be a long and difficult road; the round-Earth conspiracy runs deep, going all the way back to the observations and deductions of the ancient Greeks. 

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook, or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Rico says some people shouldn't be allowed to say stupid things...

More Firesign Theatre

Rico says it was the Sixties...

The new Bladerunner movie

Rebecca Kegan has an article in Vanity Fair about Bladerunner 2049:

It’s Wednesday, and I’m looking for fashion-forward, hard-soled, closed-toe shoes to wear to the Academy Museum construction site. More on that tomorrow.
Hello from Los Angeles, California, where we’re whispering about Blade Runner, preparing for the return of Empire, and overbooking Leonardo DiCaprio.
Warner Bros. has begun screening Blade Runner 2049 for journalists; a passel of us piled into the Dolby screening room in Burbank, California on Tuesday, and many others saw the more than two-and-a-half-hour film in New York City. The review embargo for Denis Villeneuve’s anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction neo-noir doesn’t lift until Monday, ahead of its opening on 6 October 2017, but the studio is obviously confident about the film’s quality, and is already allowing the press to blurt out review-adjacent reactions on social media. Let’s just say the “M” words (as in “masterpiece” and “mind-blowing”) are coming up a lot, as are calls for its thirteen-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer, Roger Deakins, to finally collect a little gold statue. Deakins was most recently nominated for his previous two collaborations with Villeneuve, Prisoners and Sicario, as well as his work on Unbroken. As The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Fritz points out in a comprehensive piece about the making of the movie: “Perhaps more than any big budget movie this year, the success or failure of Blade Runner 2049 will depend on what critics and early viewers think. Given the incredibly high regard in which fans hold the original, word-of-mouth could be vicious if the follow-up falls short.” Like the rest of the Hollywood press corps, I have sworn to surrender my firstborn, a charming lab-Doberman mix, rather than say anything that could be construed as a review; Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson will deliver that for us next week. Instead I’ll just point out that, in an era where studios are grappling with how to peel audiences away from their Netflix queues and entice them to see movies on the biggest screen possible, Blade Runner 2049 does the most. If I hear any Academy members say they’re waiting for a screener for this one, I’ll introduce them to my charming lab-Doberman mix.

Rico says he's looking forward to seeing it.

Apple for the day

Patrick Lucas Austin has a LifeHacker article about iOS11:

In iOS 11, you might find yourself tapping and touching apps to find out what new features lay hidden just beneath the force-sensitive surface. If you’re one who likes to start fresh whenever you get a new OS upgrade on your device, you’re probably going to spend some time arranging apps on the homescreen to your liking. On earlier versions of iOS, organizing apps was a slow and time-consuming process. iOS 11, however, brings with it a simple and welcome change that makes rearranging your apps a little easier.
In the past, you were able to organize and rearrange the apps on your iOS device using two methods: the device itself, and iTunes. iTunes offered more control in terms of app organizing, and let you select multiple apps at a time to drag and drop at your leisure, whereas previous versions of iOS only allowed for app arrangement one at a time. Needless to say, it took a while.
Now, since iTunes’ removal of both the iOS App Store and its more granular app rearrangement feature, your only way to move those tiny squares around is on the iOS device itself. Dragging them one by one isn’t a great way to deal with pages and pages of apps, and only makes it more likely for me to throw my hands in the air and resign to swiping right every time I want to open Facebook Messenger. iOS 11’s new method of handling apps finally takes advantage of the multitouch display and lets you manipulate multiple apps at once with two fingers, an idea that should’ve been in place since the day they added folders (and frankly, it should’ve been a feature in the first iPhone but whatever, at least it’s here now). 

Here’s how to do it:Long-press your app of choice until you enter app edit mode, where you can move or delete apps by pressing the X icon.
With your finger still on the first app, move it around until its X icon disappears.
With your finger still on the first app, use another finger to select other apps you’d like to move, automatically stacking them.
To create a folder, drag the stack of apps over another app icon until it creates a new folder.
Yeah, it’s a bit awkward (especially the whole “keeping your finger on the screen” part) but don’t knock it until you try it. Dragging and releasing your cadre of icons on an empty section of your screen will arrange them from last selected to first selected, meaning the last app you pick will nab the first open spot.
If you’re aiming to put your new stack of apps into a folder, it helps to create one beforehand. You can drag the stack of apps over another app so iOS creates a folder, but if you decide to move your finger at all the new folder will disappear, and you’ll be left with the same stack of apps, no doubt thanks to some bug in the newly released operating system.

Rico says he'll reserve judgement until he's tried it.

Pitino fired

Yahoo has an article by Pat Forde about another shakeup in college basketball:

In a stunning fall from grace, Rick Pitino has “effectively” been fired as head basketball coach at the University of Louisville, following the earlier firing of athletic director Tom Jurich, meaning the two greatest architects of Louisville’s twenty-first century athletic success are gone.
Interim University President Gregory Postel said on Wednesday that both Pitino and Jurich have been placed on “unpaid administrative leave” pending further review. But sources tell Yahoo Sports that both men interpreted their meetings today with university officials as a de facto termination and do not expect to be retained at the resolution of the situation.
Postel also stated an unnamed student athlete has been withheld from “all NCAA activity.” It’s presumed that athlete is five-star prospect Brian Bowen, who unexpectedly committed to Louisville late last spring.
Postel said he hopes to identify an interim basketball coach and athletic director within 48 hours.
Board of Trustees chairman David Grissom said the board “unanimously” supported the actions taken against Pitino and Jurich. Grissom said he went home last night and told his wife that “you can’t make this up.”
When asked why “administrative leave” and not outright dismissal, Postel said that “this is a typical way that universities deal with a situation where there is an ongoing criminal investigation. The criminal investigation is not complete and individuals at this institution have not been formally charged.” He added that the university is following its “personnel policies and the individual’s contracts.”
Pitino, the Hall of Fame basketball coach who guided the Cardinals to the 2013 national championship and two other Final Fours, has been effectively forced out after the second major scandal of the past two years enveloped his program. In June of 2017, an NCAA investigation culminated in a ruling that forced Louisville to vacate that national title as punishment for a stripper scandal funded by a staffer on behalf of players and recruits. On Tuesday, an announcement of a Dederal investigation into massive college basketball corruption ensnared Louisville basketball in a web of potential broken laws and broken NCAA rules.
Jurich, the athletic director who hired Pitino in 2001 as part of a sweeping department upgrade that ultimately earned the school membership in the prestigious Atlantic Coast Conference, was also dismissed. The twenty-year Louisville AD had backed Pitino through the previous scandal and a personal drama that implicated the coach publicly in an affair with a woman who was sentenced to prison for trying to blackmail Pitino. Jurich also further stretched the program’s ethical credibility by rehiring football coach Bobby Petrino in 2014 after a scandal cost him his job at Arkansas.
Separately, Pitino and Jurich were seen entering the university administration building Wednesday morning. Both left without comment after only a few minutes inside.
The cumulative weight of that baggage became too much for the university to bear.
The latest news revelation comes at a time of increased tension between the university board of trustees and the athletic program. In addition to the stripper scandal, trustees have been critical of athletic spending and the general oversight of Jurich, among the most critical being Papa John’s Pizza magnate John Schnatter. The school also was coerced by the city into agreeing to a new lease in July on its debt-saddled downtown basketball arena, the KFC Yum! Center. University officials were sharply criticized for the terms of the original lease, which shifted much of the financial burden to the city and left the arena in danger of defaulting on its huge loans.

Rico says he couldn't care less about basketball, but many will... (The above is a whole list of idiots who thought they were above the law.)

Trump for the day

Yahoo has an Associated Press article by Kim Chandler and Bill Barrow about the latest by Trump:

Firebrand jurist Roy Moore (photo, left) won the Alabama Republican primary runoff for the Senate on Tuesday, defeating an appointed incumbent backed by both President Donald Trump and deep-pocketed allies of Senator Mitch McConnell.
In an upset certain to rock the GOP establishment, Moore clinched a nine-point victory over Senator Luther Strange to take the GOP nomination for the seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Moore will face Democrat Doug Jones in a 12 December  2017 special election.
It was a political resurrection for the seventy-year-old former Alabama chief justice, who was twice removed from those duties after taking stands for public display of the Ten Commandments and against gay marriage. Moore, in his victory speech, returned to themes of God and government, saying that he had "never prayed to win this campaign" but only that's "God's will be done. We have to return the knowledge of God and the Constitution of the United States to Congress," Moore told a cheering crowd in his victory party in Montgomery, Alabama.
Moore predicted the race could be a bellwether for the 2018 midterms, saying the victory tells the establishment in Washington, DC "that their wall has been cracked and will now fall."
The race has pitted Trump against his former strategist Steve Bannon, who had argued Moore was a better fit for the "populist" movement. Introducing Moore, Bannon told a frenzied crowd that the victory was a repudiation of the "fat cats" of Washington who pumped millions into the Alabama race to boost Strange.
Bannon declared Moore's win a victory for Trump, despite the president's support for Strange. Moore said he supports the president and his agenda.
After the race, Trump tweeted his congratulations to Moore, noting that "Luther Strange started way back & ran a good race." Trump and Moore spoke by telephone later on Tuesday. The Senate Leadership Fund, a group with ties to McConnell, had spent an estimated nine million dollars trying to secure the nomination for Strange.
SLF President and CEO Steven Law said on Tuesday that Moore won the nomination "fair and square" and the group will now back him. Law says Moore "has our support, as it is vital that we keep this seat in Republican hands." In a statement, McConnell congratulated Moore and said that Senate Republicans are committed to keeping the seat in GOP hands.
Even though Alabama has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in two decades, Democrats are hopeful they have an opening in the December election against Moore.
Jones is a former US attorney, best known for prosecuting the Klansmen who killed four girls in a 1963 church bombing. He said that he wanted to focus the race on the "kitchen table issues" that matter to all Alabamians, "health care, education for our kids, jobs, and a living wage."
Strange supporters were at least somewhat divided on how they will approach the election in December. "It will be closer than if Luther had won" the nomination, said Perry Hooper, a former state lawmaker who predicted some Republicans will stay home in December or even vote for Jones. But Hooper, who served as Trump's Alabama campaign chief, said he's all in for Moore. "Ultimately, this is about helping the president," Hooper said. "This is a Republican state, and Roy will help the president."
Moore was twice elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and twice removed from those duties. In 2003, he was removed from office for disobeying a federal judge's order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse lobby. Last year, he was permanently suspended after a disciplinary panel ruled he had urged probate judges to defy Federal court decisions on gay marriage and deny wedding licenses to same-sex couples. He denied that accusation.
Strange told his supporters that "we wish Moore well going forward." But he quickly shifted to his own bewilderment at the race he just finished. "We're dealing with a political environment that I've never had any experience with," Strange said.
Strange also thanked Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for backing him. Trump, Strange said, may "be criticized" for coming to Alabama on his behalf. "Sometimes it's just about friendship; a common goal to make the country better," he said.
Moore, propelled by evangelical voters, consolidated support from a number of anti-establishment forces, including the pro-Trump Great America Alliance and Bannon.
Moore led Strange by about 25,000 votes in the crowded August primary, which went to a runoff between the two because neither topped fifty percent in the voting. The low-turnout election gave an advantage to Moore, as his loyal supporters flooded the polls.
Strange, the state's former attorney general, was appointed to Sessions' seat in February by then-Governor Robert Bentley, who resigned two months later as lawmakers opened impeachment hearings against him. Throughout the Senate race, Strange had been dogged by criticisms of accepting the appointment from a scandal-battered governor when his office was in charge of corruption investigations.
On the outskirts of Montgomery, 76-year-old Air Force retiree John Lauer said Trump's endorsement swayed him to vote for Strange on Tuesday.
"I voted for Strange. I'm a Trump voter. Either one is going to basically do the Trump agenda, but since Trump came out for Luther, I voted for Luther," said Lauer said.
Many at Moore's victory party had supported the former chief justice through the years in his stands over the Ten Commandments and other issues.
"I'm so happy. I prayed and God answered my prayers," Patricia Riley Jones of Abbeville said as she outstretched her arms to hold a Moore sign and American flags above her head. "He's a great Christian man. He stood up for God."

Rico says it's Looney Tunes time again... (But it's just as well Strange didn't win; we have enough strange in the Senate now...)

Catching up with the rest of the world

Yahoo has an article by Harriet Alexander from The Telegraph about the Saudis:

P

Women in Saudi Arabia will be allowed to drive, the government announced on Tuesday, ending their reign as the only nation in the world where women were forbidden from getting behind the wheel of a car.
The news was announced on state television and in a simultaneous media event in Washington, highlighting the damage that the policy has done to the kingdom’s international reputation and its hopes for a public relations benefit from the reform.
While there is no formal law banning women from driving, the government refuses to issue them permits. That will now change under the royal decree, which ordered the formation of a ministerial body to give advice within thirty days and then implement the order by June 2018.
The milestone was greeted with jubilation on social media, with the hashtag “Saudi women can drive” being used in a flood of tweets.
Amena Bakr, a Saudi energy analyst, said it was a “massive victory for women in the kingdom.” “Really about time,” she added.
In Washington, the state department celebrated the news, describing it as “a great step in the right direction”.
Campaigners have for many years argued that women should be allowed to drive, saying that it makes virtual prisoners out of women who do not have a male family member or chauffeur to drive them around.
In June 2011, about 40 women got behind the wheel and drove in several cities in a protest sparked when Manal Sharif, one of the founders of the movement, was arrested and detained for 24 hours after posting a video of herself driving.
 Follow

منال مسعود الشريف ✔@manal_alsharif
You want a statement here is one: "Saudi Arabia will never be the same again. The rain begins with a single drop" #Women2Drive ❤️

Another was arrested and sentenced to ten lashes, a sentence later overturned by the King, and the rest were told to sign statements guaranteeing they would not drive again.
In October of 2013, shortly after a prominent cleric claimed that medical studies showed driving damaged a woman's ovaries, sixty women took part in a protest, driving in spite of warnings from the authorities. In response, a hundred and fifty clerics staged a demonstration outside the royal palace. The ministry warned against marches or gatherings under the pretext of the driving campaign. It said those “disturbing public peace” will be dealt with firmly.
Last year Human Rights Watch produced a report highlighting the range of restrictions that Saudi women face:

Adult women must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel, marry, or exit prison.  They may be required to provide guardian consent in order to work or access healthcare.  Women regularly face difficulty conducting a range of transactions without a male relative, from renting an apartment to filing legal claims.
“We all have to live in the borders of the boxes our dads or husbands draw for us,” said Zahra, a 25-year-old Saudi woman.

Progress has, however, been made.
In 2013, then-King Abdullah appointed thirty women to the Shura Council, his highest advisory body, and two years later women were allowed to both vote in and run for office in municipal council elections for the first time in the country’s history.
In May of 2017, his successor, King Salman, ordered that government agencies publish lists of services that women can access without a male guardian present, and ordered that employers provide women with transport.
According to the Saudi Ministry of Education, women in Saudi Arabia attend college at higher rates than men.  Yet it is still difficult for women to succeed, in part because of barriers placed by the Saudi system, something Tuesday's ruling hopes to address.
The movement for women to drive has gained prominence with the rise in power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a 32-year-old son of the King, who has laid out a far-reaching plan to reform the kingdom’s economy and society.
Furthermore, Saudi Arabia, hit by the fall of oil prices, is aware of the economic contribution that women could make.
Ensaf Haidar, wife of Saudi dissident Raif Badawi, tweeted a victory sign in response to the announcement.
Loujain Hathloul, a Saudi women's rights activist who has been at forefront of movement, and spent 73 days in detention for driving in 2014, simply responded: “Praise God.”

Rico says that Allah has very little to do with this...

The new face of Pantene

Rico says they used to say of Mick Jagger that 'he's got lips', but Priyanka Chopra takes the prize:

Weiner goes down

Yahoo has an Associated Press article about the fate of Anthony Weiner:

The Latest on Anthony Weiner's sentencing (all times local):

10:55 a.m: Weiner must report to prison by 6 November 2017 to begin serving his twenty-one-month sentence for sexting with a fifteen-year-old girl. As his sentence was announced Monday, the former Democratic congressman from New York dropped his head into his hand and wept, then stared straight ahead. After the hearing ended and Judge Denise Cote left the bench, he sat in his seat for several minutes, continuing to cry.
Weiner was also fined ten thousand dollars. After his sentence is served, he must undergo internet monitoring and must have no contact with his victim. He must also enroll in a sex-offender treatment program.
Before announcing the sentence, Cote said there was "no evidence of deviant interest in teenagers or minors" on Weiner's part. She also said he is finally receiving effective treatment for what she said has been described as "sexual hyperactivity." 

10:40 a.m: Weiner has been sentenced to twenty-one months in prison for sexting with a fifteen-year-old girl in a case that may have cost Hillary Clinton the presidency.
The former Democratic congressman from New York had faced up to 27 months in prison on Monday after his guilty plea to one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor. Prosecutors say he broke the law by having illicit contact with a fifteen-year-old girl using Skype and Snapchat.
Weiner's sexting habit destroyed his career in Congress, his campaign for mayor, and his marriage to Huma Abedin, a former aide to Clinton.
It also became an issue in the closing days of 2016 presidential election when then-FBI Director James Comey cited emails discovered on a laptop used by Weiner to justify reopening the probe of Clinton's private computer server.
___
10:30 a.m: Weiner called his crime his "rock bottom" as he spoke just before a judge in New York City sentenced him for his sexting crime.
Weiner fought back tears and occasionally cried Monday as he read from a written statement on a page he held in front of him in a Manhattan Federal court. He said he was "a very sick man for a very long time." He asked to be spared from prison.
The Democrat's lawyer, Arlo Devlin-Brown, had asked that Weiner serve no prison time. A prosecutor recommended he serve between 21 months and 27 months in prison.
___
10:15 a.m.
A prosecutor has urged a judge in New York City to sentence Anthony Weiner to a significant prison sentence to end his "tragic cycle" of sexting.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Kramer told a Manhattan Federal court judge on Tuesday that Weiner on three occasions in 2016 asked a fifteen-year-old girl to display her naked body online and to perform for him.
The prosecutor noted that sexting had already ruined Weiner's congressional career and spoiled his run for mayor of New York City before he began interacting with the teenager.
Kramer said Weiner should go to prison for between 21 months and 27 months.
___
10:05 a.m.
The sentencing hearing for Anthony Weiner has begun in a New York City courtroom, where he will learn his fate in a sexting scandal that influenced last year's presidential campaign.
The Democrat, wearing his wedding ring, seemed pensive just before the hearing before Federal Judge Denise Cote began. He wore a blue suit and green tie. His parents were in the courtroom but not his wife, Huma Abedin. They are currently going through divorce proceedings.
The former New York congressman faces up to 27 months in prison on Monday after he pleaded guilty to one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor. Prosecutors say he broke the law by having illicit contact with a 15-year-old girl using Skype and Snapchat. 

___
9:30 a.m.
Anthony Weiner is at a New York City courthouse where he is to be sentenced in a sexting scandal that some blame for Hillary Clinton's presidential loss.
The former New York congressman faces up to 27 months in prison on Monday after he pleaded guilty to one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor. Prosecutors say he broke the law by having illicit contact with a 15-year-old girl using Skype and Snapchat.
The Democrat's sexting habit destroyed his career in Congress. It also doomed his campaign for mayor and his marriage to Huma Abedin, a former aide to Hillary Clinton.
It also became an issue in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election when then-FBI Director James Comey cited emails discovered on a laptop used by Weiner to justify reopening the earlier probe of Clinton's private computer server.
___
1 a.m.
Anthony Weiner is scheduled to be sentenced in a sexting scandal that some blame for Hillary Clinton's presidential loss.
The former New York congressman faces up to 27 months in prison on Monday after he pleaded guilty to one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor. Prosecutors say he broke the law by having illicit contact with a 15-year-old girl using Skype and Snapchat.
The Democrat's sexting habit destroyed his career in Congress. It also doomed his campaign for mayor and his marriage to Huma Abedin, a former aide to Hillary Clinton.
It also became an issue in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election when then-FBI Director James Comey cited emails discovered on a laptop used by Weiner to justify reopening the earlier probe of Clinton's private computer server.

Rico says the pun 'whiner' comes (alas) to mind...