To everyone else, “refuse to lose” is a sales-motivational cliche. To Republicans, it’s an operating system. So even if you’re Roy Moore, and you lost not just the election but a referendum on your entire ethos — the Bible-fundie practice of selecting a “pure” virgin for marriage, and test-driving her by feeling her up in the church parking lot — you simply … refuse to lose! To that end, Mr. McFeely has filed a lawsuit alleging — get this — that because several of his victims prospective brides came forward just before the election, they must have been acting in concert for the purpose of costing him the election. The cruelest irony of that lame legal argument is that this limp-brained ephebophile was once a judge.
Speaking of people who refuse to lose, another pundit has joined the “Shut the fuck up, Hillary” chorus. Michelle Cottle in the Atlantic argues that it’s not that she’s speaking but what she’s saying — even when she’s right about Trump, it comes off as sour grapes, and makes it easier for the GOP to continue using her as a motivational boogeyman. I agree with the first point but the second, while true, is not her problem. They’ll still be running against Hillary after she’s dead. George Soros and Nancy Pelosi, too. They’re still railing against Saul Alinsky, and they never even heard of him until after he was dead.
Quickly buried under Washington gossip was what should have been the biggest sotry of the day: The Guardian got hold of some internal FDA emails about testing foods for glyphosate, better known as Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer. Testing for it started two years ago, and no results have been released, but one chemist wrote his colleagues, ‘“I have brought wheat crackers, granola cereal and corn meal from home and there’s a fair amount in all of them,” wrote FDA chemist Richard Thompson, who is based in an FDA regional laboratory in Arkansas. Broccoli was the only food he had “on hand” that he found to be glyphosate-free. Given the leeway Monsanto gets from regulators, this bears watching.
Your Schadenfreude pick of the day: Republicans in the House are demonstrating why theocracy is a bad idea: You have a constant fight over which version of the One True God is the One True God. The fight to replace the chaplain who got the sack for talking like Jesus has set fundamentalist “Christians” against Catholics, because the former see the latter as agents of the Whore of Babylon. The only thing they can all agree on is that the new guy should lay off all that crap Jesus said about the least of his brothers.
The Green Party sure did pick a winner with Jill Stein, who sounded like Donald Trump in a CNN interview, refusing to condemn Russian election interference by pointing out that America does it, too. I used to vote Green back when they cared about the environment — ever notice how much oil Russia pumps, Jill?
Finally, this one was too delicious to leave out: A museum in a small town in southern France went on a buying spree of paintings by a native son, a pal of Matisse who stayed local but had a respected career. Unfortunately, they didn’t hire a professional to help out. When a local art historian noticed that one of the paintings of a local scene included a building finished in the 1950s, 30 years after the artist’s death, they had the pros come in for a look. The verdict: 82 of the museum’s 140 works, almost 60%, were judged fakes by a panel of experts.