Heaven is in vogue these days

I have written before about the TV comedy The Good Place and now there is apparently another one called Miracle Workers. I have not seen the latter show because it is on a network that I don’t get but it is based on a novel of the same name by Simon Rich that I read recently. Both shows take an irreverent attitude to the idea of an afterlife but while the The Good Place takes this as an opportunity to examine the question of what ethics and morality consists of and leaves gods out of the picture entirely, Miracle Workers focuses on the life of god and the people who work for him, mainly those who work in the Department of Answered Prayers.
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The alliance between anti-vaxxers and white nationalists

The anti-vaccination groups in the US seem to be not fazed at all by the outbreaks of measles in parts of the US and elsewhere in the world. They seem to have developed a deep-rooted belief in the rightness of their cause and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary is going to change their minds, unless perhaps their own children fall sick. They think that those who believe in the safety of vaccines are part of a deep conspiracy to harm them and their children. In this, they are not unlike the right wing climate change deniers and Trump cultists who refuse to hear anything bad about their hero and so it should not be a surprise that there seems to be a burgeoning alliance between the two groups, as Kelly Weill reports.
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Katherine Helmond (1929-2019)

The actress has died at the age of 89. In a long career as a stage and screen and TV actor and director, she may be best remembered as part of a terrific ensemble cast in the prime time parody of daytime soap operas called, appropriately enough Soap, that ran from 1977 through 1981. It was utterly hilarious must-see TV until its last season when it succumbed to the disease of shows that run too long when the plots become increasingly absurd even for a parody and the quality of the writing weakens.
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The viral video of the Feinstein meeting had a big impact

The meeting of senator Diane Feinstein where she spoke dismissively and condescendingly to a group of children and their parents who were urging her to sign on to the Green New Deal has reverberated widely, having been viewed more than nine million times. As Aida Chavez and Ryan Grim report, the exchange has had a big impact, forcing Feinstein to change her mind.
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Medicare For All takes shape

The idea of Medicare For All as a way of creating a pathway to a single-payer universal health care system, that was deemed to be wildly socialistic and unrealistic when first proposed by Bernie Sanders, has now become a platform that any Democratic candidate for president has to pay at least lip service to, because the idea has been embraced by majorities of people.

Now the next step has been reached because actual legislation has been proposed to implement it and this will force people to take an actual stand on it. The crafting of the legislation is led by new congresswoman Premila Jayapal, part of the new breed of progressives who was elected to congress in the 2016 elections. She is a Seattle-based activist no stranger to advancing progressive causes, having served on the Mayoral Advisory Committee that negotiated Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. That measure was harshly attacked by conservatives and the business industry as the death of business in the city, as they would pack up and leave and would thus increase unemployment. That did not happen, even though conservatives seized upon a single flawed study that seemed to support their case before it was repudiated.
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The Michael Cohen hearings

I do not follow carefully all the stories about Donald Trump and the Mueller investigation and its many ramifications because the ratio of mindless speculation to facts is way too high. I tend to wait for the comedy shows to give me some idea of what transpired during those events. Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah oblige with these synopses of the nine hours of the Michael Cohen testimony before Congress.