The only reason that Louis DeJoy still has a job is that Ron Bloom is still the chairman of the Postal Service Governing Board - but that is about to change.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/biden-ron-bloom-replacing-postal-service/2021/11/19/id/1045372/

President Biden is expected to announce Friday that he will not renominate Ron Bloom, the chair the U.S. Postal Service board and a key ally of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, when his term expires next month, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, The Washington Post reported.

Bloom bypassed the recommendations of two separate search firms when Meghan Brennan retired. Allegedly, he offered DeJoy the job after a lunch meeting. In addition, DeJoy has invested roughly $300,000 in Bloom's investment company.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/13/dejoy-usps-bloom-bonds-brookfield/

Biden has been able to add 4 people to the Board of Governors this year. With Bloom out of the picture, it's likely that DeJoy will be fired in the near future. Although Biden does not have the power to fire DeJoy, the Board of Governors does.

The longest serving Postmaster General lasted 13 years, but there are a number of them who served less that a year. DeJoy has managed to keep his position for more than a year, but he will be gone long before his second anniversary.

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/list-of-postmasters-general.htm

The government is FINALLY taking action about the Indian boarding school practice that was used from the 1880's until the 1960's.

A number of Catholic groups and Protestant denominations are calling for the United States to establish a Truth and Healing Commission to reckon with the country’s history of boarding schools that separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and cultures during the 19 and 20 centuries.

On September 30, Senator Elizabeth Warren and two other people reintroduced the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding Policies in the United States.

Warren initially introduced the idea with then Representative Deb Haaland. Now that Haaland is the Secretary of the Interior, she had introduced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/catholic-protestant-groups-support-commission-us-indian-boarding-school-policy

Using reconciliation, Biden's Build Back Better program can be passed with 50 votes.

Right now, he has 48

The only holdouts are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

I don't know what he has to do to get this passed, but he needs to have a "coming to Jesus" talk with them to get them to change their minds. Following that, he needs to convince them to either modify or eliminate the filibuster in order to thwart the obstructionist tactics that "the turtle" is going to continue to use.

Some of my fellow Arizona citizens chased followed Sinema into a bathroom at ASU the other day. Maybe getting "up close and personal" will persuade her to become more reasonable.

If the filibuster remains in place, the For the People Act (or whatever the new name is) , which both Manchin and Sinema support, is not going to get passed either.

Braham's cartoon (in today's New York Daily News) shows what will happen to the Dems if Joe and Kyrsten don't come around:

https://www.nydailynews.com/resizer/gPDbfVqNk7m2GB650iZMIQSr0-I=/415x311/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/L7OTAU7OMZG63L3LXW34N2MBHY.jpg

Just before the 2016 presidential election, the Access Hollywood tape was released, on which Trump bragged about how he treated women. Under normal circumstances, that should have killed his run for office. Almost immediately, though, the Republican Party (through Wikileaks) had been stolen from the Democratic Party by the Russians, and Trump's crude comments were relegated to second burner status.

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/7/13205842/trump-secret-recording-women

While he was in office, past allegations of sexual misconduct could not be brought against him, but that is no longer the case.

One of the women that Trump kissed and gropes was Summer Zervos, who sought career advise from Trump two years after she had been on "The Apprentice".

A New York state judge on Monday gave former U.S. President Donald Trump a Dec. 23 deadline to undergo questioning in a defamation lawsuit filed by a former contestant on "The Apprentice" after he denied her sexual assault accusations.

Justice Jennifer Schecter of the New York state court in Manhattan said Trump must submit to a deposition, after his lawyer said Trump planned to counter-sue his accuser, Summer Zervos, under a state law designed to encourage free speech.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/judge-says-trump-can-be-deposed-former-apprentice-contestants-lawsuit-2021-10-04/

Also still pending is the case involving the woman who Trump raped (E. Jean Carroll ) inside a Manhattan clothing store.

She still has his DNA on the dress she was wearing at the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/nyregion/e-jean-carroll-trump-dna.html

In January 2020, Carroll's attorneys served a request for a DNA sample from Trump to compare against the unidentified male DNA on the black dress she was wearing when she alleged he attacked her. [42]

In September 2020, citing the Federal Tort Claims Act, DOJ lawyers argued that Trump, in responding to Carroll's accusation, had acted in his official capacity. In addition to replacing Trump's personal lawyers, the right to move the proceedings from state to federal court was asserted. Carroll's lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan issued a statement that in part read: "Trump's effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent."[43]

In October, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected the government's motion. In November, the DOJ filed an appeal with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.[44]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll

The Forbes 400 or 400 Richest Americans is a list published by Forbes magazine of the wealthiest 400 American citizens who own assets in the U.S., ranked by net worth. The 400 was started by Malcolm Forbes in 1982 and the list is published annually around September.[2] Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan describe the Forbes 400 as capturing "a period of extraordinary individual and entrepreneurial energy, a time unlike the extended postwar years, from 1945 to 1982, when American society emphasized the power of corporations." Bernstein and Swan also describe it as representing "a powerful argument – and sometimes a dream – about the social value of wealth in contemporary America."[3]

Inherited wealth may help explain why many Americans who have become rich may have had a "substantial head start".[4][5] In September 2012, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, "over 60 percent" of the Forbes richest 400 Americans "grew up in substantial privilege".[6]

In April 2018, an ex-Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg alleged that Donald Trump had inflated his actual wealth in order to be included on the Forbes 400 listing. Greenberg provided original audio recordings of his 1984 exchange with "John Barron", one of the pseudonyms of Donald Trump, and eventually included Trump at the end of the Forbes 400 list at $100 million, one fifth of the $500 million which "Barron" was claiming as Donald Trump's net worth. This figure was later corrected and, following civil proceedings years later, Trump admitted the name was fabricated

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_400

Trump was subsequently removed from the list, but eventually got back on.

When Trump filed his financial disclosure information as he started his run for president, he listed his net worth as $10 billion, which was roughly twice what his net worth was at that point in time.

Forbes just released their most recent list. For the first time since 1996, Trump's name is not on the list. Since he started his term in office, his net worth has shrunk by $600 million, due to the fact that the bulk of his properties are hospitality-related, a category that was his especially hard by the pandemic. His new net worth of $2.5 billion is $400 million short of the amount that is needed to be included on the list. According to Forbes, he had a chance to sell his properties when he started his term in office, but did no do so. As a result, he has no one to blame except himself for his diminished status.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tumbles-off-forbes-rich-list-after-covid-pandemic-slashes-his-fortune

Today, the Biden administration just reversed another one of Trump's bad ideas.

The Biden administration on Monday revoked a Trump-era rule that became a flash point in the abortion wars by forbidding clinics that receive federal family planning aid from advising people about ending their pregnancies.

The new rule for the half-century-old family planning program known as Title X will allow health centers to receive the federal funds even if they refer patients for abortions. It takes effect Nov. 8.

The rule reverses a move initiated in 2018 by former president Donald Trump to appeal to the social conservatives crucial to his political base, siding with them in a long-running battle with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and other family planning groups.

Rather than heeding the restrictions, affiliates of Planned Parenthood, which serve about four in 10 of the program’s patients, as well as other health centers, forfeited the Title X funds that had been a main support of their work.

An estimated 981 clinics — about one in four that received Title X money — dropped out in 2019, and a half-dozen states no longer had any health centers in the program, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization.

Title X has been an ideological lightning rod since shortly after it was created in 1970 under former president Richard Nixon as part of federal public health law. It is intended mainly to help poor or uninsured women.

Biden also said at the time his administration’s policies would “support women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States as well as globally.” As part of the memo, the president lifted what is known as the “Mexico City Policy,” which has seesawed back and forth for nearly three decades, depending on whether Republicans or Democrats have been in the White House.

Texas has been sued over their "heartbeat" bill. Although the Supreme Court did not act to prevent it, it's still possible that another strategy can be used to reverse it. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is scheduled to review a bill a restrictive bill in Mississippi.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/biden-administration-title-x-abortion/2021/10/04/33451c1a-223c-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html

When our son was a teenage, he shared a Guns 'N Roses cassette that one of his friends had been listening to. I listened to it long enough to have my hair curl, and I refused to give it back to him unless his parents picked it up.

Rap music, in particular, can be especially crude and violent, but should it be banned?

In the 1970's, a group called Parents Music Resource Center tried to get warning labels put on cassettes. The group asked John Denver to testify in Congress, since he was the most wholesome singer they could think of.

It did not go well.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/2/2055719/-Let-s-just-take-a-moment-to-honor-John-Denver?detail=emaildkre

Charlton Heston also was not a fan of "racy" lyrics.

At a Time Warner shareholder meeting in July of 1992, he read the lyrics to ICE-T's "Body Count" album to a stunned audience. To hear those lyrics being spoken in his rich melodious voice had to be quite an experience.

https://apnews.com/article/1f1e03326ae8e8cd2cc55e64d6af8caa

In the end, free speech still won out.

Trump is not the only one who is crazy.

The Daily Kos reminded us this morning that Rudy Giuliani is a few tacos short of a combination plate.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/2/2055717/-Giuliani-Deposition-The-Madness-Continues?detail=emaildkre

The classic example of a snake oil salesmen are the televangelist preachers who milk money from their supporters.

It was on this day in 1988 that one of them "went down in flames".

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jim-bakker-is-indicted-on-federal-charges

Jim Bakker was indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and of conspiring to defraud the public. The indictment also helped to shine a spotlight on the fact that Bakker had had sex with a former church secretary named Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room. Just like Trump did with Stormy Daniels, he paid Ms. Hahn a large sum of money to keep silent about the affair.

The scandal put an end to Praise the Lord Ministries, and Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced to 8 years.

"Make up queen" Tammy Fay Bakker divorced him when he was in prison,

Not surprisingly, his fellow snake oil salesmen" were quick to condemn him.

One of those was Jimmy Swaggart, However, after Swaggart got caught with prostitutes on two separate occasions, the Assemblies of God church defrocked him. His ministry is still active today, but in a much reduced state.

One piece of trivia that you might find interesting is that he is a cousin to Jerry Lee Lewis, who also has had many scandals in his life. Both men are now 86 years old.

Great balls of fire!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_FAqr6rP4w

Dutch:

Speaking of camel dung ...

Birth control and abortion are well documented in Ancient Egypt. The Ebers Papyrus from 1550 BC and the Kahun Papyrus from 1850 BC have within them some of the earliest documented descriptions of birth control, the use of honey, acacia leaves and lint to be placed in the vagina to block sperm.[5][6] Another early document explicitly referring to birth control methods is the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus from about 1850 BC. It describes various contraceptive pessaries, including acacia gum, which recent research has confirmed to have spermatocidal qualities and is still used in contraceptive jellies. Other birth control methods mentioned in the papyrus include the application of gummy substances to cover the "mouth of the womb" (i.e. the cervix), a mixture of honey and sodium carbonate applied to the inside of the vagina, and a pessary made from crocodile dung. Lactation (breast-feeding) of up to three years was also used for birth control purposes in ancient Egypt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control