Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Jan. 24th through Jan. 30th

January 24, 2016 JanF Community 179

Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings posts give the Moose, old and new, a place to visit and share words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.

Welcomings will be posted at the start of each week (every Sunday morning). To find the posts, just bookmark this link and Voila! (which is Moose for “I found everyone!!”).

The format is simple: each day, the first moose to arrive on-line will post a comment welcoming the new day and complaining (or bragging!) about their weather. Or mentioning an interesting or thought provoking news item. Or simply checking in.

So … what’s going on in your part of Moosylvania?

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NOTE: The comments page will now split off after 20 or so left margin comments with the most recent comments on the current page. To see the older comments, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the link.

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37 Comments

  1. Good morning, Motley Meese! The week begins …

    It is 24 degrees in Madison WI, on its way up to 34. Cloudy skies are in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

  2. Good Sunday morning Meese

    Diana – hope you are okay – looking at blizzard pics of Northern VA.

    • Folks were saying 32 inches. That’s a lot of snow for that part of the country (typical for Buffalo NY).

  3. Eating breakfast, watching the news. Bummed there’s no Up & I’m going to assume no Melissa Harris-Perry. I still have food from last week, so I’m not cooking today. May walk this afternoon to make up for cutting yesterday’s walk short. Still hearing Everlasting Love in my head.

  4. Good morning, all! The sun is shining on our 32 inches of snow; temperature is 21 F. now, going up to 30 F. later. The sunlight is already melting the icicles on the back windows. A couple of them looked so lethal I wondered whether anyone had ever stabbed anyone with an icicle. (That comes from reading too many murder mysteries, sorry.) Thank Goddess, we never lost power. We usually do in weather like this but the Weather Wench claimed it was a “light, fluffy snow” that did naught to distress the power lines.

    Very few thoughts in my head. Naturally there was no newspaper delivery yesterday nor this morning. Might try to read something online since the WaPo has suspended its paywall for the weekend. I plan to go nowhere today or tomorrow. Today seems an awfully good day to get started on the income tax return, even though I haven’t received all the required information yet.

    • Looking at the photos of all the snow makes me shiver. I’m glad you are warm and safe Diana.

    • Glad to see you stayed on the grid. I was reading sad accounts of barn roofs collapsing in Virginia from the weight of the snow and injuring horses. :(

      How long will it take before they plow you out? Do they even have plows there???

        • In Milwaukee they used to put plows on the garbage trucks and send them out to help the regular snow plows after a particularly dramatic snow storm. It meant no trash pickup but cleared streets. I have no idea if they still do that, probably not because all that stuff is outsourced now and they probably have different companies doing trash and doing plowing.

          I recall years ago when I lived in Kansas City they would simply wait for the sun to warm things up and melt the snow. Global warming has shifted the snow south and I believe that they now have to purchase snow removal equipment! :)

  5. Good morning, 39 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. The full moon is shinning behind my old maple trees, and with the reflection on the water ad a few wispy clouds it is a lovely view outside my window. I’m sipping coffee and enjoying the peaceful moment.

    Yesterday’s impromptu lunch was very fun. Ryan was as comfortable as he could be on the sofa, the girls were so glad to see him, and Finn was relaxed and happy to see everyone. I made a bouquet of white tulips, salal, ivy, rosemary, and red dogwood twigs so the table looked like spring. And the food was even good…..french dip sandwiches, garlic and rosemary potatoes, fresh fruit and veggies, and cookies for dessert. After everyone left Ron and I needed a nap though!

  6. Morning all! Diana, glad you guys are safe and warm in NoVa! I kept seeing the snow totals from National Airport (I refuse to call it That President’s name) yesterday and thought they looked too low compared to what other locations were getting, and apparently they were not being taken correctly. According to the story I read, they’re supposed to use a “snow board” against which a total is measured every few hours, then wiped clean to prevent the snow from compacting down, and the new total is measured from there. Seems they didn’t do that, so the official total for DC may be way too low. Seems unlikely DC had 10 inches less than Baltimore, for sure. But, whatever the measurement, it’s finally stopped snowing and now the digout can begin – staying inside for the time being sounds like a good plan!

    We had snowflakes down here early yesterday morning! So this storm’s reach was prodigious, indeed! In the 20’s last night, but it’s bright and sunny and will be back up into the 50’s today, higher over the week. Still, I’m glad I made my crockpot oatmeal Friday night – steel cut oats, milk mixed in with the water, a bit of maple syrup and apple pie spice for flavor, and I have breakfast for a week!

    I wish I could do my taxes – but my tax fraud situation doesn’t seem to have gotten straightened out yet, as I’ve heard nothing from the IRS and still don’t have my refund from last year. My colleague’s accountant (remember he got a notice from the IRS addressed to him and me at his house, as if we were spouses which we definitely aren’t, which is what made us realize we’d been victims of a fraudster in some way) said the IRS would issue me a PIN, probably, with which to file this year, but I haven’t heard from them. I may go down to the IRS district office this week to see if I can get one so I can file – waiting till the last minute of an extension was part of what allowed this fraud to happen last year, I don’t want to make the same mistake this year.

    Everyone have a great day!

    • Good luck with the IRS! I know that they have a way to fix your problem but it must be maddening to have your last year’s refund still in suspense. I rarely have refunds so my account is probably not very attractive to identity thieves.

      The Des Moines Register endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Iowa caucuses yesterday and they expressed one of the concerns you have with her:

      Over the course of two meetings, Clinton spent more than three hours with the editorial board, answering questions in a direct and forthright manner. She exhibited an impressive command of the issues, though we’d have liked to hear more from her on the debt and the future of Social Security.

      As far as the endorsement, well, she got it in 2008 also, lost the caucus and the nomination so it merely points out how meaningless newspaper endorsements are. Also, the Register endorsed Marco Rubio for the Republican caucuses creating a little cognitive dissonance on their editorial page where they touted Secretary Clinton’s experience as “critical” but seemed to overlook that Rubio is an often-missing-from-the-Senate one-term Senator who seems to be running on charm, his bogus biography and his Hispanic name. I must have missed something in his resume.

    • OMG, Geordie, how awful! Hope you can get it straightened out. What a horrible thing to happen!

      I’m organizing my material to see whether I can fill in sections out of order. I hate taking a whole weekend to do taxes. They say refunds will take longer this year, so the sooner I can file, the better.

  7. Another in-depth story on the Flint water crisis, from the New Yorker:

    By October, 2014, General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water, because it was corroding its equipment. It was also—and this should have been entirely predictable—eating into the lead pipes that delivered the water to people’s homes, causing them to crumble into the water. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and perhaps permanently destroy it.

    Still, the memos from the governor’s office continued to dismiss “the rusty factor” as aesthetic. It might not be good enough for G.M.’s machines, but it was fine for people. The water, as the governor’s office told the public, was still, passing the tests—except in the case of one known carcinogen, TTHM, which was produced by the interaction of chlorine and that “organic matter.” The water wasn’t passing those tests, but it was close enough, and, anyway, since TTHM caused cancer after long exposure, but not within the few years people in Flint were being asked to drink it. The TTHM regulations, a memo to the governor noted, were only estimated to prevent two hundred and eighty bladder-cancer cases each year, “out of more than 330 million people,” and so “it’s not like an imminent threat to public health.”

    JHC! The hubris is stunning. I hope this government malfeasance does not get swept under the carpet. Apparently Congress is planning hearings, but based on the other hearings out of the partisan House of Representatives, it will probably focus entirely on the EPA and not on the criminals who wrote those emails and decided to experiment with the lives of an entire city’s population.

  8. Hi Meeses – 51 and overcast at the moment in Fay., AR. Maybe should say “overcast-ish” as I can see shadows, just not very well defined ones. It was clear pre-dawn and I could see the lovely 99% full moon and some of the brighter stars/planets at 6:30. Mostly checking in to see how the East Coast folks, especially Diana (glad you didn’t lose power and yes staying inside is a good idea when the snow is up to your middle or more), were fairing. We’ve doing a “heading towards Spring” rollercoaster of 50s-to-40s-to-60s for the highs over the next week although the lows will still be under 32. I don’t trust February though and expect another spate of “yep, it’s still Winter” weather before we get out of this season. Hope everyone has a lovely rest of Sunday. {{{HUGS}}}

  9. How Iowa Hijacked Our Democracy

    “When Monday night finally arrives, this first test of the candidates will be treated as an immeasurably consequential event, honored by column-miles of type and pixels, and uncountable hours of analysis—almost all of which will conceal the cold, hard reality: The Iowa caucuses have become a blight on American politics.”

    “Iowa is not really a representative state. The most obvious is demographic: It is 94 percent white, 2.8 percent black, and 5.5 percent Hispanic, making it one of the five whitest states in the nation. It’s also the fourth oldest state in the union. This is one reason why a victory by Bernie Sanders in Iowa and then in New Hampshire—another very, very white state—may signal much less about the state of the Democratic Party race than first appears. As longtime Democratic operative Joe Trippi notes, “After Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic Primary race the rest of the way is an electorate that is 54 percent white and 46 percent minority.” Thus, a victory in Iowa (and New Hampshire) is about as unreflective a measure of Democratic sentiment as imaginable.”

    http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/how-iowa-hijacked-our-democracy-213557

    • There was a story from my news feed this morning that has an interesting view of Iowa. It is from the “purple” town of Wyoming on the eastern side of the state. The Republicans top issue is terrorism and the Democrats top issue is the economy. I was struck by that because terrorism does not even make my top 5 issues. Is the focus on terrorism due to a more comfortable existence for the Republicans or is it because they want to distract themselves from worries about the economy? Anyway, it made me less unsympathetic towards Iowans … but I still think it is a terrible waste of energy and resources to have Democratic candidates spend time there. I want to know who can build a coalition to win the general election, not who can win old white people’s votes.

        • Ha! I am, too. But sadly, bfitz, our generation is mostly watching Fox News and worrying about the gubmint giving free stuff to those who are undeserving (the blah people and the “illegals”, specifically).

          That article was an interesting view into the Iowa mind. Lots of those folks will vote for a Democrat in the general election but I really don’t want their state choosing a candidate for the rest of us.

          • A scary amount of it is certainly – but they’re the same RW jerks who used to spit at those of us marching against the Vietnam War and voted for Nixon. Those of us who actually marched or otherwise supported peace, equal rights for a) PoC and b) women, and stuff like that are still working for peace, equal rights, and stuff like that. But yeah, I don’t really want Iowa choosing my president. Of course I don’t want Arkansas or Texas doing it either. :)

  10. Good morning, meese! Monday …

    It is 25 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 36. Evening showers are in the forecast. The weather widget says we might see 40 degree temperatures by the weekend! Spring is in the air!!

    Gak!! Jeb! hearts Rick Snyder and says the problem in Flint is that government regulation is “too complex”. No, the problem is that it is politically acceptable in the Republican Party to spend all of a government’s resources getting around commonsense regulations instead of fixing the problems that the regulatory agencies have exposed. When money rules, people suffer. You bring in emergency managers told to cut costs, they look at the balance sheets and income and expense summary and deal with the numbers not the people. I want someone to total up all the money the teaparty governors have spent suing the federal government and rejecting government funds over ideological differences with the Obama administration and, really, all federal government. I know in Wisconsin the cost is in the millions and still rising (last week the legislature voted to defund Planned Parenthood which will cause them to lose federal dollars).

    In Iowhy, the Republicans versus Trump and the other Republicans versus Cruz is setting up an interesting storyline. Will this finally be the year that the duped Republican base refuses to get in line behind who their elite says they must? Rubio, Christie, Bush, and Kasich are all hoping that the two factions fight it out and they pick up the pieces. But the base is digging in their heels this time. And there are no authority figures in the RNC; their autopsy of the 2012 election was largely ignored and the nominee they end up with will be one despised by the other 2/3rds of the party. Can those folks hold their noses and vote for their eventual nominee? THAT will be the big question of 2016.

    Busy week again. See all y’all later!

  11. A full week of work ahead — this is going to feel long. I don’t think I’ve done a full 40 hour week since November. Warm here — I didn’t even need a sweater this morning & the high today is supposed to be 70.

    Earworm has switched around some the last few days. Yesterday was Bullet the Blue Sky because my pastor talked about wrestling with scripture like Jacob wrestled with the angel. But today it’s the last song I heard in the car, Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses, which has a really beautiful, soaring guitar part

  12. Good morning, it’s 12 F. degrees in NoVa, going up to 35 F. today. It’s sunny, though, with a pale blue sky. Younger Son reported that his office would be closed today as would the federal government, where DIL works. Glad to hear it as I don’t feel like looking after little children today. Yesterday my throat tickle became a full-fledged cold. Ugh.

    Today I intend to go nowhere at all, although Dearly plans to do his airport job. Didn’t make much progress on anything yesterday, felt too lousy. Hope to get something accomplished today.

    Wishing a good Moon Day to all!

  13. Good morning, 35 and cloudy in Bellingham. I had a lazy day yesterday, stayed awake to watch Downton Abbey, and then went to bed. I’ll go to the pool this morning and then I’ll try to do something productive. Maybe I’ll re write the lists….

    Happy Monday everyone!

  14. Morning all – brilliantly sunny here this morning, still cool but not as cold as over the weekend. I’m glad they kept the govt workers home today in the DC area – it’s going to take a LOT of work to dig out the roads and it will be a lot easier with no traffic on them. Feel better, Diana.

    Jeb Bush disgusts me more every day – good god, siding with that heartless git Snyder who clearly has no conscience, even now, about what he did to poison little children. But they’re all of a piece, Republicans these days – I truly don’t think it used to be quite this bad with that party, but this race to the bottom they’ve done since Reagan has produced a generation of monsters as candidates and public officials.

    Have a great day everyone and stay warm!

  15. 50 when I left for work, 53 now and heading for 55 in Fay., AR. Very windy which means cloudy-clear-cloudy-clear so far this morning and projected through the rest of the day. Had urgents if not quite emergencies when I walked in the door this morning (why I’m late checking in) but I’ve done everything I can for the moment, so checking in here and heading for HNV at Orange. Hope everybody is doing well (or getting better). {{{HUGS}}}

  16. Good afternoon

    Got sidetracked this morning – but just took a break from writing – and waatted to say hi all!

    • Hi back!! Did you see the latest from Flint? Militia want to help Flint residents rise up against the government and Ted Cruz would like to give Flintonians free water but only if they go to a crisis pregnancy center sponsored by right-to-life Michigan.

      Meh.

      In better reproductive rights news, SCOTUS rejected the North Dakota fetal heartbeat law that would have stopped abortions after 6 weeks. Just a reminder that It’s The Supreme Court, all y’all.

  17. Turns out Gov. Snyder lied. Flint could have used Detroit water pretty cheaply.

    … an email obtained by the Bill Johnson group and first reported by Motor City Muckraker suggests that the move might not have been necessary to reduce Flint’s water costs. Then-Detroit Water and Sewerage Department Director Sue McCormick proposed to continue providing water to Flint at a savings of $800 million over 30 years, or 20 percent less than the switch. In other words, Flint could have kept the Detroit water and still saved more money than it did.

  19. Good morning, meese! Tuesday …

    It is 27 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 29. Snow showers from last night are lingering into the morning, should end shortly, but it will be cloudy all day. We probably got about 3 inches or so … a dusting!

    The big overnight news is that Planned Parenthood was cleared by a Texas grand jury – which then turned around and indicted the makers of the faux video being used to call for defunding PP nationwide:

    A Texas grand jury has indicted two anti-abortion activists in a case involving covert videos on fetal tissue procurement talks with Planned Parenthood and found there was no wrongdoing on the part of the health group, a district attorney said Monday.

    The grand jury decision was a result of a probe launched last year under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, who accused Planned Parenthood of the “gruesome harvesting of baby body parts.” No evidence was provided by Texas to back the claim.

    I am sure that Congress will immediately have hearings looking into that felonious activity! :::crickets:::

    On Flint, the law firm of a big time donor to Gov. Snyder, and also the firm that will defend him against the class action lawsuits, has been assigned to investigate the water crisis. They aren’t even trying anymore, are they?

    Finally, President Obama has issued an executive order banning solitary confinement for juvenile (and some low-level offenders) on the same day that the Supreme Court banned mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles. It was a good day for reforms to our criminal justice system. We will have to rely on the president and the courts because Congress, led by Treasonous Tom Cotton, is now backing out of their pledge to reform it. Charlie Pierce:

    Remember how something called “criminal justice reform” was going to be the thing that saved bipartisan government from being torn apart by the wild beasts of the two parties and their respective bases? […]

    “GOP tensions over a bill that would effectively loosen some mandatory minimum sentences spilled over during a party lunch last week, when Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the outspoken Senate freshman, lobbied his colleagues heavily against the legislation, according to people familiar with the closed-door conversation. The measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall with bipartisan support. “It would be very dangerous and unwise to proceed with the Senate Judiciary bill, which would lead to the release of thousands of violent felons,” Cotton said.”

    Ah, the call of the bobble-throated Arkansas warbler, heretofore famous for creating its own foreign policy with regard to Iran. With Ted Cruz busy out there wooing the rubes away from He, Trump, the Senate had an opening for an obstructionist pain in the ass, and Tom Cotton’s resume always is at the top of the pile when that position comes open. Not that Cotton is alone in his efforts to make sure that the Republican Party’s marriage to the remnants of the old Wallace campaigns remains inviolable:

    “Other Senate Republicans, including Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and David Perdue of Georgia, also registered their strong opposition during the lunch, even as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) vigorously defended the bill, which he helped negotiate. Risch stressed this message, according to one Republican source: Shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?”

    Cotton is the guy being groomed as the next presidential candidate for whatever is left of the Republican Party after the 2016 election. He will make sure that they stay on the wrong side of every reform that government contemplates between now and then.

    See all y’all later!!

  20. Good morning Meese!

    Yawn…had to get up in the middle of the night to try to get some writing done – then lost internet service for a few hours. Am leaving tomorrow morning early to head to PA – to a forum at Dickinson College.
    http://www.dickinson.edu/events/event/2398/the_legacy_of_the_young_lords_a_conversation

    Will be back on Thursday afternoon.

    In the news:

    A New 50-State Report Card on Reproductive Health and Rights Has Been Released — and It’s Alarming

    Nineteen states received a failing grade and the U.S. grade fell from a “C” to a “D+”. Attacks on Planned Parenthood, both physical and political, are jeopardizing the ability of women to access contraception and other reproductive health care services. At the same time, political assaults on sex education programs are gaining momentum and threatening the progress that we have made in reducing teen pregnancies. It all adds up to a bad report card for 2015, and it could get worse in 2016 as Congress inches ever closer to cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, slashing support for comprehensive sex education programs in the schools, and eliminating funding for Title X, the federal program of assistance to family planning clinics serving low-income households.

    • Gods, how depressing. Time to start growing contraceptive herbs in our Victory Gardens. I’ve already got rue growing in mine. Will have to plant pennyroyal and the others.

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