Few institutions exist that don’t show the markings of the long ascendancy of right wing extremism. I doubt if the architects of this noxious political bloc/coalition were familiar with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and others of similar mind on the left, but their “long march” through the institutional life of the country to the apex of political power — war of position to a war of movement — would almost make you think that they did.

What makes it worse is that much of the left during this time was trapped in the disabling intellectual grip of the notion that the two parties were essentially the same … tweedledee, tweedledum. Thankfully, in recent years this has begun to change, albeit unevenly and inconsistently.

Here I am retired and doing my daily exercises in the middle of a pandemic, while singing “I can’t help myself” by the Four Tops to my dog sprawled out on the top of the couch. Oh well! Beats a date with the sadness of the moment.

Great story of a great artist, who dared to push all kind of boundaries. In the late 1950s, if you were into rock and roll, living in a small town, feeling a little bit out of joint and strangled by the prohibitions of the Catholic Church, as I was, you loved Little Richard. He, and he wasn’t alone, shattered the cultural, social, and musical norms that felt, for me anyway, like a straight jacket. And, in doing so, he gave me license to live and think outside the suffocating weight of official society, and not feel too bad about it.

I won’t attempt to summarize this NYT look at the stock market, other than to say its nature and dynamics in the middle of a pandemic can’t be fathomed without accounting for the billionaire class and the massive concentration of capital in the hands of new corporate behemoths.

I heard on Morning Joe that we should have prepared for the pandemic like we prepare for a hurricane. But Trump did the opposite. First, he said the pandemic isn’t going to hit landfall, but dissipate and go out to sea.

Then when it didn’t, he, unlike in a hurricane where a responsible leader throws the full weight of the federal government’s capacity to minimize deaths and destruction, while keeping people informed of the hurricanes path based on scientific models, he continued to minimize the danger and refused to coordinate a national effort to flatten and crush the pandemic’s trajectory. And now, as the pandemic tracks across the country, Trump is telling people to return to work prematurely, which to continue the hurricane metaphor, is akin to instructing people to return to their homes before the eye of the storm has passed.

This is madness. And to make it worse, Republicans, with barely an exception, echo and reinforce this message in their words and legislative actions.