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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Happy 1st Friday in February – we started the day at 28, are currently at 35, and heading for 52. We also started cloudy but the sun is coming out now. Didn’t watch the debate – am about to head for HNV at GOS to see what happened. Charles Blow is absolutely right. But then heroine addiction didn’t become a health problem rather than a criminal problem until white folks started getting addicted in noticeable numbers. And for that matter breast cancer didn’t get attention until men started having the problem in noticeable numbers. I’m seeing a pattern here. sigh. Have a good day and a lovely weekend. {{{HUGS}}}
Morning all – yesterday slipped past me, forgot to check in. I’m just sick to death of the primary campaign, I can’t wait for it to be over. It’s reached the point where learning that a friend is supporting Sanders makes me not want to talk to her until after the nomination is decided. I was playing my game last night (raiding, a team endeavour) so did not watch the debate, although I wouldn’t have in any event – I can’t stand the arguing either! I kept up with it thru the twitter feed of a Dkos Sanders supporter, Armando, that Dee turned me onto, and it still seems to me that while Hillary is clearly the most qualified and prepared, she can’t win for losin’ with the media people like Bob Woodward who tell her to stop shouting. Still. It’s just driving me crazy.
And I read about young people ‘flocking” to Bernie, in the NYT, which I completely understand – he’s telling them he’ll give them a future with debt free education, gives them a clear bad guy (the banks) that’s the source of their problems, and looks nothing like other politicians. Hillary, on the other hand, sounds and looks too much like their mothers and grandmothers and like a sensible adult, about whom all they’ve heard is negative lies and innuendos, pretty much since they were born. I’m not sure how she wins them over. OTOH, I’m not sure how many of them will actually show up to vote when all is said and done.
Ok, some personal stories/news to change the depressing subject. I was playing my game Tuesday night, back in my study with my little terrier (who can’t be anywhere near my big rescue rottie mix Max or they’ll kill each other.) I came out into the hallway that leads into the family room and kitchen area, where Max greeted me with a surprisingly urgent request to go out – he kept herding me toward the kitchen door into the back yard. So I complied, and when I turned around to look at the family room, I could see why – there was a broad patch of white on the family room rug. Apparently, when I brought groceries in that day, I had left one bag on the floor of the laundry room – turns out the allure of a 2 lb bag of flour was too much for Max to resist. I wish I had a video of him carrying that bag carefully into the family room and then having his way with it lol. He had not eaten much of it, but he did have a good time spreading it around – I believe he might have rolled in it even lol. It wasn’t too bad, just had to vacuum it all up, and he wasn’t sick or anything. He does still have some clumps of flour stuck in the feathering hair on his legs though lol.
Then yesterday, I broke my microwave – the catch on the door just…collapsed or something, naturally while I had something in there on a dish I like. So I pryed open the door with a screwdrive and managed to retrieve my dish – ordered a new one from Amazon which will get here tomorrow, so I will have to live without anything to reheat my coffee for a day and a half! Yes, I know, as the kids say “First World Problem”. The old oven was at least 15 years old – my mother gave it to me when she moved down here to a house with a built in mw over, and I’m not sure how long she’d had it before that. Parts of it were rusting out, so I got good service out of it – but now I’m wondering which appliance is going to go next, first the refrigerator, now the MW. We’ll see.
It’s sunny and cool here, hope it’s nice where everyone else is, have a great day all!
Here’s a really good editorial in the Boston Globe by Madeleine Kunin, former Governor of Vermont, against whom Bernie ran back in 1986 (still trying to figure out how he comes across as a “fresh face” btw).
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/02/04/when-bernie-sanders-ran-against-vermont/kNP6xUupbQ3Qbg9UUelvVM/story.html?s_campaign=8315
I thought Secretary Clinton had a good rebuttal to the “not progressive enough” attack:
On this, Geordie: “It’s reached the point where learning that a friend is supporting Sanders makes me not want to talk to her until after the nomination is decided. ” I am there. I tried really hard to be “we can agree to disagree” with friends but now I really truly wonder about the type of person who thinks that misogynistic, racist, anti-Obama attacks are okay. Bernie is not a Democrat and I am starting to think he is not a very nice person either for allowing his campaign to drag him in that direction. I told one group of friends that I will visit again after March 15th, when it will all be over, or if I can re-find the part of me that can set aside how awful a Sanders nomination would be for our party and our country. We would lose, period, and I cannot live in the country that Ted Cruz plans to lead.
I had held off on Tweeting my support of Secretary Clinton, and my disgust at the BernBros (which is apparently a pejorative that can now get you banned on lefty sites) but I am now Tweeting my feelings about the primary race. I intend to keep it civil (I am, after all, a Motley Moose!) but I am not going to watch lies be promoted as truth.
The Democratic Party that I belong to does not have purity tests.
Geordie, thank you for that Globe link. Besides being a reminder about Sanders’ disdain for the Democratic Party and the people that the party traditionally goes to bat for, it was a wonderful endorsement of Secretary Clinton – I recommend it to everyone. There were quite a few excellent points:
This from the ALL CAPS rant has really stayed with me:
That is so unfair. And any woman who buys into that should be ashamed of themselves. It is about ideas, not gender, but until the gender filter is no longer a part of our society’s political decision making, we need to make it about gender. I am sick of fighting this battle and we need to set the stage for the next generation of Democratic politicians, many of whom are women, to run for president … because that last barrier has been taken down and Yes She Can.
Good morning, 51 and cloudy in Bellingham. The plumber will be here soon so that’s what I’ll be doing today. I’m crossing my fingers we won’t have to big of a bill and mess to manage in order to fix whatever has happened under the concrete floor.
I did watch last nights debate, and followed along on twitter…..then tossed and turned in the night worrying about the election. So between plumbing and politics I’m feeling tired and stressed this morning.
tweet series of the day:
Andrea Grimes @andreagrimes
The Coen Brothers have all-lives-mattered themselves into ensuring I will prolly not watch any more of their movies http://thebea.st/1SPY211
Andrea Grimes @andreagrimes
And hey, I like a Coen Brothers movie quite a bit. But this interview might be the single most patronizing thing I have ever read
Andrea Grimes @andreagrimes
and I went to grad school for anthropology
I saw what they said about diversity casting on IMDB, and frankly it just confirmed my dislike of them, so no loss to me, not seeing any more of their movies.
Good morning, meese! Saturday …
It is 26 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 36. The forecast is for morning clouds giving way to afternoon sun.
Tonight the Republicans have their final pre-New Hampshire debate. There will be no undercard – it was only going to be Fiorina and Gilmore, anyway – and these men on the main stage: John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Chris Christie. Analysts are saying that this is the last opportunity for Bush, Kasich, and Christie to make the case for their candidacy in the “Establishment” lane. Rubio is a given after his Iowa showing and I think that one of the other candidates gets enough to stay in, maybe Kasich but not Bush and definitely not Christie. What I found interesting is that analysts are saying that Cruz is fading, and actually was fading on his way to second place last week, and that Iowa may have been Peak Cruz. That is good news because having him as the nominee would be terrifying … one misstep by our side and the result would be a catastrophe.
The Iowa Democratic Party vote “scandal” simply shows that Iowa has an idiotic way of assigning delegates. This is not breaking news, folks. The harbinger was Romney’s non-win win in 2012. I think that the Sanders campaign is foolish to expend so much energy on getting the vote in Iowa “right”. Iowa is perceptions … the “winner” usually only picks up one or two more delegates than the “loser”; wise campaigns have always spun the result in the best way possible and then simply moved on to New Hampshire. To make a big stink about Iowa to make a point (yes, we know that Bernie hates the DNC and hates the Democratic Party – message already received) is not the wisest use of resources. But it is exactly what you expect from BernieBros, looking for the eye-poke.
The president’s address is on clean energy funding. I will go see if it is ready to copy and post and then get my Saturday morning work done.
See all y’all later!
Only 2 more weeks of ungodly hour workouts. Of course, the bad thing is that I’ll have to get myself out to workout. But at least I won’t be up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays. Back later.
Good morning, Meese, 24 F. here in NoVa on a sunny morning, going up to 44 F. today. The primary campaign is really getting to me—the way the media NEVER cut Hillary any slack, the way they jump on national polls (the latest showing HRC only 2 points ahead of Bernie). I might have to leave GOS altogether, I can’t believe how poisonous it’s become.
Received a message from TurboTax urging me to finish doing my taxes fer Gawd’s sake, so I think I’ll do that. I’ll watch an hour of the Rethug debate tonight to see whether it’s funny, then go to bed. The latest buzz seems to indicate the Cruz is Cruzin’ to a finish and Rubio is on the upswing. Rubio, the political lightweight who doesn’t even show up for his day job in the Senate.
Have a great Saturday, everyone!
I ran my preliminary tax return and got to the point where I could print it out and mail it after one last review. That is close enough for now.
Pay no attention to the national polls – they are meaningless at this point. First, we don’t choose delegates (or electoral college votes) based on national voting, we choose them state by state. Second, if you look a little closer at that Ipsos poll you realize that the people polled don’t know much about Sen. Sanders. I think when they look a little closer, they may become concerned with his electability.
Here is an interesting read from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:
When people are confronted with the possibility of a Republican president, they will have a come-to-Hillary moment. We can’t lose this election.
By the way, that 24% is pretty much the lions share of the GOS. It is why pragmatic progressives, or at least the wimpie ones like me, had to leave. Jeff Lieber posted a diary a week or so ago about how there is no one … NO ONE … available to be shifted from their primary position. It is locked in and the only thing left is to throw bricks at each other and poke each other in the eye. Not my idea of fun.
I’m waiting on my tax documents from Cref to do my taxes. Hopefully I’ll get back what I think I’ll get back because that’s my NN trip money. :) (I’ll go anyway, but let’s say savings rather than credit is my preferred funding source.) Lysis has an HNV diary up at GOS (normally doesn’t do weekends) so dropping by just to rec would be nice. I was over there checking messages and saw it.
Good Morning Meese.
Well – some folks are looking at Super Tuesday – the announcement of new polling in GA – with Hillary leading 63 to 21 has had some interesting responses at orange…including “end Dem primaries in those red states” cause why should we allow red state blacks and latinos on our bus.
ARGH!
These idjits are serious.
Good lord! It is like the “let the south secede” front page diaries that they ran right before the 2012 election (nice timing, bros!).
Too many of the folks who post there are bi-coastal snobs and that simply underscores their lack of seriousness. They are no more based in reality than the tenthers who want to take those same states into a New Confederacy.
Disenfranchising and disrespecting people of color and people who by the circumstances of their birth are stuck in red states is ignorant and short sighted. We need to hold out our hands, tell them that the Democratic Party will not abandon them and that we will fight to keep protections at the federal level until they can take back their states.
These idjits are scary. I know some of the “new” people at Orange are RW plants – the strategy was outed close to a year ago – but the old-timers I used to respect… I’m not looking forward to meeting them at NN. I won’t say anything, but it will feel slimy.
Good morning, 43 and cloudy in Bellingham. Last night’s windy rainstorm is over, the dead branch in one of the maple trees blew down on the lawn with no damage done, and the pipes are flowing again….yay! The plumbers were here all afternoon so all the lines are clear and the camera they put through the pipe system didn’t reveal any breaks, just a few roots. So part of the water problems we’ve had this year might be from a change in ground water levels. We live on a hill, springs are part of nature, the old concrete floor in the basement has cracks, and water may be finding it’s way to them.
The good news is we don’t have to do a major repair right now. If we do have to replace the sewer line from the house to the street the route is now marked and is mainly under grass. Some walk ways will have to come up and the old maple trees will be disturbed but the project is more doable than I feared.
So I’ll rest today, and we’ll get more serious about getting new shelving in the basement so fewer things are stored on the floor. Then ground water can just run to the drain when nature decides it’s time to do so!
Morning all! Chilly and grey here today, good day to stay inside, play WOW, get some cooking done and maybe listen to opera, although it’s “Cav and Pag” today, the two one act operas by Puccini that are not my favorites, even though Pagliacci features possibly the best known tenor aria, ‘Ridi Pagliaccio”. Eh, I”ll see.
GOS has just become unbearable, except for Lysis’ daily roundup and the Hillary Writer’s Circle, so that’s really all I look at any more (except for Black Kos on Tuesdays and Dee’s diaries on Sunday). I sincerely hope people wake up in time to the nightmare that would be a Sanders nomination, followed almost certainly by a Republican winning the White House and proceeding to destroy all the hard fought gains of the last 8 years, particularly health insurance, and to move on to destroy Social Security and Medicare, roll back civil rights to the greatest extent possible, eliminate any gun regulation, and, oh, I don’t know, probably get us into another troops on the ground war in the Middle East/Asia.
The Rethugs would caricature Bernie into a laughing stock, with his well recorded years of unemployed leftist activism before running for mayor (and I don’t laugh at that myself, I was on that end of the spectrum at the time, and I have no problem with his efforts to work for change), and his wildly expensive promises that would have to raise taxes on middle class people. Of course, the theme both Bernie and the Rethugs would have in common is disdain for what President Obama has accomplished over the last 8 years. It just infuriates me that a man running for the Democratic nomination is so disrespectful of the head of the party who has done so much with his 8 years in office. grrrrr!
I saw on Dee’s twitter that she posted a link to the story in the NYT 26 years ago profiling the “First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review” – of course, Barack Obama! I was friends in college with Chris Edley, who I think was the first black staff member of the Harvard Law Review, back 15 years earlier that that, I think 1974 or 1975. Very slow progress in elite academia, for sure – took them 15 more years after Chris broke that barrier on the staff to finally have a black EIC! I think Chris also taught BO as a faculty member at Harvard Law. So there’s my 3 degrees of separation from the President! Woot! lol
Have a great day everyone!
ack, how did I say Puccini wrote Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci! Leoncavallo wrote them, of course – sorry!
Hi Folks – Happy 1st Saturday in February. 28 at dawn, 50 now, and sunny. I’m online because Trish is still having problems and I want to keep an eye on my email. I haven’t gone down yet so hoping it’s a good internet-connection day. :) I devoutly hope Kos is going to clean up the Orange after the primaries. He’s always done so before but… Be that as it may, I will keep going over there for the pooties diaries and the Peeps I consider friends even if I don’t do a single other thing (and of course I will – I usually lurk in Denise’s diaries, but I read them, and I also check out the Kossack in Need diaries and some of the community diaries). But I am so glad the Moose Pond is here. (I’ve put the link to the home page here in a couple of HNV diaries when folks ask for someplace safer to get their political news.) Hope the weekend treats you all well. {{{HUGS}}}
Here is a new Twitter “post” by @docrocktex26. If you click on the link and then choose to see the Conversation, I think you get the whole thing.
https://mobile.twitter.com/docrocktex26/status/696026026871107584
Essentially she is questioning whether Sen. Sanders is running against the Republicans or the Democratic Party.