While I'm beating this dead horse....

The news makes it perfectly clear I'm pissing into the wind on this, because we have to get rid of Al Franken to prove we have "zero tolerance" for sexual harassment (not the legal workplace kind, but the social boorish kind) so we can continue to complain about Roy Moore because politics.

But we can't complain about Roy Moore because of this:

“Thank God for Mississippi” is the old joke: No matter how bad things were in Alabama, there always was a state right next door where things were often worse. Alabama is the third “hungriest” state in the nation, with 18 percent of its population food insecure, behind Louisiana and, yes, Mississippi. It’s the sixth-poorest state, with some 18.5 percent living in poverty, and the third-highest state when it comes both to murders and the number of citizens behind bars per 100,000 members of population. According to the Centers for Disease Control, opioids are prescribed in Alabama more than in any other state, and a Center for Health Statistics report notes that Alabama’s rate of overdose deaths from opioids has doubled since 2011.

But no, instead of campaigning about how to get the federal government to help his state pull itself from the clutches of such poverty, hunger and addiction, [which, you know, used to be the province of Democrats--yr. humble host] Roy Moore acts like a crackpot false prophet, preaching Islamophobia, homophobia and the dominance of “God’s law” over the Constitution; denying the allegations of the many women who say he assaulted or harassed or stalked them when they were teenagers (on Tuesday, a Moore spokesperson described the accusers as “criminals”) and all the time hammering away at his Democratic opponent Doug Jones on abortion.

Moore wants all abortion to be illegal and supports the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Jones has declared he is against “anything that is going to infringe on a woman’s right and her freedom to choose,” but also has said that he supports “current law” that restricts abortion after 20 weeks unless pregnancy threatens the health of the mother.

Moore’s wife has attacked Jones for supporting “full-term” abortion, which is wildly and deliberately misleading. What’s more, the website AL.com reports, “An examination of statistics compiled by the Alabama Department of Public Health shows that late-term procedures are almost nonexistent in the state. Three out of 6,642 abortions performed in Alabama in 2016 occurred after 20 weeks, according to the agency.”

One position might actually help Alabama (and Mississippi, and Louisiana); it might even be the historic position of Democrats since FDR.  The other only makes Democrats in the Senate feel pure and zero-tolerant.  We can't do anything for Alabama, but at least in D.C. we can be pure of heart.

Well, I suppose that's something.

Needless to say, I want this to mean something (because how many Democrats in the Senate pinned Jeff Sessions' ears back so far we got a decent investigation out of it?):

Not accurate, @mpr @Stowydad. No final decision has been made and the Senator is still talking with his family. Please update your story.

— Sen. Al Franken (@SenFranken) December 6, 2017

But I am not optimistic.