Alabama

Expanded upon from elsewhere, because, as Tamara likes to say, why waste it at an away game?

I'm laughing at all the people acting like Roy Moore was the GOP-anointed candidate for Alabama's Senator.

They clearly paid no attention to this race until last week.

I have spent little time in Alabama, too little to parse these events from the POV of a resident of The Heart of Dixie, but I have some thoughts on what this means, (some supplied or inspired by others):

• The US Senate is now 51 (R) 49 (D). 
• Since Harry Reid introduced "The Nuclear Option", this means less than it might.
• Long will be a two-year Senator. Alabama is still the reddest of states
• The Ds cannot, now, accuse the Rs of harboring a pedophile. (Whether you believe those claims about Moore or not.) I expect Franken will be out in the coming days, not weeks.
• Steve Bannon's influence is much diminished, if not completely eliminated. He owns this.
• I've been seeing items to the effect that Mike Pence, not Donald Trump, is the head of the GOP. 
• Normally, the sitting president is considered the head of the party, but Obama had little or no interest (or was an even bigger SCOAMF than we thought) and Trump has little or no influence over the GOP, being an outsider. (Arguably, being an outsider is what got him elected.) 
• So the question is, can Mike Pence take the bull by the horns elephant by the tusks and force them into a coherent, effective strategy?
• The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution should be repealed. 
• Ironically, it was implemented in Alabama before it became national...
• Any suggestion that the mainstream media is even remotely impartial and unbiased should be met with derision and howls of laughter, followed by "...oh, wait. You're serious. Maybe you should get that looked at." 
• (Addendum)  Part of the objection to Roy Moore seems to be that he was removed from the bench for allowing his religious convictions to interfere with his judicial decisions.
• If Judicial activism is wrong for Conservative Christians, it is wrong for Progressive... Progressives. 
• Granted if it wasn't for double standards the left would have no standards at all.
• Time for a revival of A Man For All Seasons, perhaps. (I prefer the Charlton Heston version, for esthetic reasons. The Scoville version is probably more likely to get a hearing these days, though...)

I have no great love for Trump, but he is still a vast improvement over either Sanders or (shudder!) Clinton.

I have even less love for Roy Moore. His emails go directly to my spam folder, where they belong.

I don't know if his personal politics go over well in Alabama these days, but I do know they do not play well on the national stage. (FWIW, I noted that while in Alabama this past September on my way to Florida for a date with Irma, I saw only one sign for Judge Moore, and that was handmade.)

I'm not sure the fact that he has (or had) a habit of dating women young enough to be his daughters matters; I note that the "evidence" of his one alleged relationship with an underage woman is, to say the least, dubious. (And is now admitted to have been altered. Anyone who actually used the term "pedophile" should probably be leery of lawsuits, just sayin'...)

I do know that this election in and of itself is not a great victory for the left, and hardly spells the death knell for the right. There are aspects of this election, however, that could be symptoms of just what is wrong with politics in the USA.

I am glad I live in a country where we can hash these things out in public without resorting to wholesale violence.

So far.