I don't believe that whole thing about Jesus dying for our sins came about until 400 years after the crucifixion when Augustine thought up the whole thing. Augustine by the way, led a rather libertine life with wives and mistresses and a taste of the grape, before he settled into his sinless life. I believe he even recommended temptation as a way to test yourself. Salvation is hardly free if you have to sell your soul to Jesus to get it. What, wait a minute, you only have to forgive your trespassers if they repent (to you or Jesus?), that sounds like an awfully big loophole that the bible doesn't even mention.
You all know what a sick political pup I am. I spent most of yesterday waiting for the polls to close down in Alabama. At the crack of seven I tuned into CNN. Politico had a nice little webpage, with a running total and a map of Alabama where you could click on a county and see how many precincts were in and what the vote was. In the middle of the state was the black belt, which the commentators hastened to inform was so-called because of the rich dark earth, although they added it was also true that a lot of Black people lived there. The top and the bottom of the state was mostly ruby except for Birmingham in Jefferson County and Montgomery in Montgomery county, and Mobile was expected to be a tossup.
With like 0.03 percent in Jones took a pretty good lead, one disturbing thing though was that write-ins were right around 1.0 percent. It had been expected that there would be more reps writing in someone else. So without a lot of info in the pundits got to jawing, like baseball announcers in the middle innings when not much scoring is going on. There had been some talk that maybe the reps would be better off losing because then the dems wouldn't have Roy Moore to hang around their necks. Santorum, the token Trumpist on the panel, seemed to think it would be ok because the reps could bring him before that committee and toss him out and have the rep gov appoint some relatively sane guy. I didn't see that happening because Trump, who had originally been talked into backing Moore's opponent in the primary, had come to be rather fond of the guy, another nutty old white guy with sexual harassment problems, and I didn't see the reps bucking their prez by ousting his buddy.
So I didn't buy that the reps would be better off winning, I wanted a regular dem who would cut the red margin in the senate to one thin vote, and I wanted to see a punch to Trump's ample gut. But halfway through it wasn't looking so hot. Moore went about ten points ahead and was holding it steadily as the precincts reached 50%, 60%. I switched over to Fox and they were pretty merry. But they were as merry about beating McConnell and the regular reps as they were about beating the dems. When they spoke the word establishment, contempt was heavy on their lips. Damn hippies.
But I had that nifty Politico map and as I moved the cursor across Jefferson and Montgomery counties I noticed that hardly any precincts were in, whereas those red counties had already counted most of their precincts so no Moore votes would be coming from them. Sure enough as soon as the blue county votes started coming in, the lead narrowed. I opened the imperial IPA that had remained untouched in my fridge since the Cubs failed to get into the world series. Because imperial IPAs have so much alcohol they are almost syrupy, and sweet it was as Jones took and held a one point lead. Fox called it first and almost immediately lost interest and started talking about Hilary. CNN followed about half an hour later as I was finishing off my IPA and trundling off to slumberland.
And now I am typing out my post and waiting on the morning tweets.
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