There is no such thing as a moderate Republican and pundits, reporters and professional consultants still trying to make the rest of us believe that such folks are there are pushing a line of (excrement).

I admit that I am not a true-blue diaper Democrat. My family leaned Republican, but it was the sort of Republicanism common nearly half a century ago. I have argued with several posters here and there whether such Republicans were really moderate back then and we still disagree.

However, I think whatever the controlling beliefs and politics of Club Pachyderm might or might have been half a century ago, it is very clear to folks here as well as other folks making efforts to stay in the reality-based community that that sort of Republican Party NO LONGER EXISTS. It has been subsumed by right-wing extremism since the 1990s and the folks who once had the numbers to bring the Republicans back to sanity have aged out, forced out, or sold out. The only choices in today’s Republican Party are between hyper-extremist and slightly less extremist. The moderate Republican Party that (clueless) senior editors and the executive suits still believe in is as dead and gone as the giant ground sloth and the Sabre-tooth tiger.

The argument for privatizing infrastructure was that (supposedly) the private sector could run these utilities more cheaply and efficiently than a state-owned enterprise. While I have yet to become a red banner-waving socialist, it’s become clearer that while such MIGHT be possible if the enterprise was overseen by an unfriendly, activist regulatory body that saw to it that client safety and environmental protections overrode higher profits to the stock holders and debtors, it is increasingly clear that in practice, increased payouts to stockholders and debt-holders come before any responsibilities towards clients and the folks who live downstream from these outfits. In short, the idea of privatized utilities seems to be failing as badly in practice as state-ownedMarcist-Leninist socialism.

If the idea is a dud, the people and their representatives should throw it out. Sewer socialism seems to work better in practice, and real-life practice ought to trump tweety-bird blue-sky theory.

This was along US 183 and US 84 northwest and west of Cedar Park in Texas’ Williamson County. Not so many as there were last year or even this spring. I suspect that the discovery of Agent Orange’s federal document stashes at Mar a Lago was enough to frazzle some of the Orange One’s faith in their idol. Finding out that Donnie was hanging on to top secret documents relating to national security might have been one donut too many for some of his followers. They might still hate the libs, they might still pitch fits on cue at the Three G prompts (God, Guns, and Gays), but their faith in the Trumpster has seriously corroded.

I doubt we’ll make progressives or sane centrists out of these people, but their love affair with the Donald is over.

Let the Republican Party die. Leave the extremists, the loudmouths, the ivory-tower ideologues, the sectarian fanatics, and the wanna-be fascists out in the wilderness. Let’s not repeat the errors of our forebears and let them into our ranks.

For that matter, let’s not let any (allegedly) repentant Dixiecrats rejoin the Democratic Party. They showed who and what they were when they joined the GOP. We don’t want them back.

Many of us who remember the Cold War not only remember reactionaries and other right-wingers hammering anyone to the left of John C. Calhoun as tools of the Kremlin but also those Republicans who erred on the side of decency and bipartisanship. Many of us also remember the incredulity and disgust many of us centrists and progressives had for the real-deal left-wing shameless apologists for the Soviet Union.

We thought it was wrong then and we still think that being a willing tool of Purim’s Kremlin is still a Very Bad Thing.

Here’s looking at you, Tucker.

Glenn is a big boy now and is old enough to know better. If the virus messes up his lungs or he leaves the health care facility in a body bag, it’s on him.

What sympathy I do have is for his caregivers and anyone he might have infected. They didn’t ask for it.

Some guys are playing “ can you top this?” games to see what outrageous falsehoods Qanons and American reactionaries can be scammed into believing next. Considering the numbers of All-American idjits more than willing to believe in pee, viagra, and horse dewormer, I’d say that the trolls are still on a roll.

I would have thought that if somebody mucks up as badly as DeSantis and Rubio have while in office, the voters would have fired them. DeSantis allowed thousands of people to die from COVID while Rubio showed the same sort of epic cowardice at Trump’s impeachment that craven Cuban politicians showed when Fulgencio Batista overthrew the last freely-elected Cuban government back in 1952. A sane electorate would fire both of them.

That the press-titutes working for Faux Noise would claim that people buffaloed by BS and peer pressure into refusing the vaccine are “free thinkers” is irony of epic proportions. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, back when I was in knee britches, one of the Republican Party’s selling points was that they were the party of clear-eyed realists, the people willing to modify their theories and policies when reality proved those theories wrong, the party of realism and reason. (Please don’t laugh, dear readers, this was a major faction of the Republican Party of over half a century ago). And there were just enough Republican politicians of that stripe to make such claims look realistic.

As we have seen, such claims began to lose credence with the rise of Reagan and turned into make-believe bunkum with the rise of people like Grover Morquist and Newt Gingrich.

Free thinking is a trait that hasn’t been encouraged in the Republican Party for over thirty years. The RINO hunters have seen to that.

There may be a handful of free-thinking Republican Party activists who know how to govern competently. At this point, I am forced to believe that the ones who remain are in their mid-nineties and older.

Their successors in the GQP are neither free thinkers or competent.

Let me be up front. I don’t like wearing masks. They’re hot and uncomfortable and even when I speak with my best diction I sound like I’m mumbling. But I wear them anyway.

I don’t know what caused me to change my attitude, that I would comply, even grudgingly. Then I remembered. Several years I took a diving trip to Sipidan. I won’t relate the details about the diving, but it was a long flight back. But what I remembered was that the passenger sitting next to me coughed and sneezed the whole darn flight (Of course I’d forgotten to pack facial tissues or a spare hanky). As a result, I caught the gift that keeps on giving. I came home sick with a cold and feeling ticked off about it. I still blame my seat mate for giving it to me.

I haven’t flown since just after the Pandemic really got going last year. I think I wore a bandana, at least after I took my seat. But for some reason or other, wearing a mask doesn’t bother me too much.