Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Feb. 21st through Feb. 27th

February 21, 2016 JanF Community 140

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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8 Comments

  2. Watching local news. Not having Up or the MHP show will get me out the door. Will clean house, take out trash & recycling…. and I should go lift some weights. Reading the tweets about #nerdland. That’s depressing.

  3. Morning all – I’ve been over at Lysis’s HNV this morning, and I see there are TWO diaries for Hillary supporters to track South Carolina happenings. Guess I’ll ping pon between the two.

    I succumbed to temptation last night and wrote a response to a very reasonable person on a Hillary diary saying he liked both Hillary and Bernie, but thought Bernie might be the better general election candidate (this was in response to my comment saying I thought Bernie would be a disastrous candidate and a worse President). He wondered why I thought that about Bernie – so I wrote what I’ve pasted below. I checked in this morning worried that I might have been flagged into timeoutness, but I don’t think anyone read it lol.

    Here’s what I wrote:

    As for why I don’t care for him — well, I think he’s unprincipled, for starters. He started out, as I did to some degree myself in college and graduate school, as a committed leftist, and I respected him for walking the walk — he wrote pieces for lefty publications, and was a pretty straight up socialist worker’s party type. And when he got into politics, he compromised but at least he kept his independence. He started trashing Democrats, most notably Madeleine Kunin, a revered and strong Vermont liberal Democrat, a trait he has kept up for 30 years, and at least that’s consistent with being an independent. But when he decided to run for President, that principled independence was out the window and he decided to call himself a Democrat, just so he could free ride on the Democratic Party primary mechanism. That does not sit well with me at all.

    And his lack of connection to an actual functioning political party for almost all of his political career is another big reason why I think a Sanders administration would be a catastrophe. He doesn’t know how to operate within a party, and he has no connections with or loyalty to Democrats down the ticket from Congress down to the state and local level. His trashing of President Obama over the last 4 years will not be forgotten, even though he seems to think he doesn’t need any Democrats in his corner. But any president NEEDS the people in his or her own party to actually help govern — he would be at a total loss, and would have to deal with a largely hostile group of elected Dems who managed to get into office despite him, not because of him.

    His protection of the gun industry is not exactly unusual for a Vermont politician — they all do it. What I can’t stand is his holier than thou attitude toward Hillary about banks and Wall Street. We can point to votes he’s taken over and over to protect guns and the gun industry — yet his supporters utter nary a peep of dismay about it, while he and they decry Hillary’s representation of her constituents as a New York Senator. It’s completely hypocrytical.

    Finally, his proposals are not only pie in the sky, unaffordable, and unworkable — many of them are just plain bad (free college, for example — I don’t see why my taxes should pay for Bill Gates’ kid to go to college, seriously.) Moreover, he is seriously deficient in understanding international affairs — his debate performances on those questions were terrible, and just recently, he claimed his experience as mayor of Burlington had prepared him to deal with foreign leaders. Please. I worked in Burlington — it’s a small town near the Canadian border and last I checked, the Canadians were the least of our international problems.

    Despite all these misgivings, I will vote for Bernie if he wins the nomination, because the Supreme Court is too important to risk. But I don’t think he’s going to win the nomination, and I do think he’s a stand up enough guy that he will relatively quickly endorse Hillary and encourage his supporters to vote for her.

    have a great day everyone and here’s hoping it will be enough of a blowout in SC that even the media will have to concede it’s a victory for Hillary!

    • Thanks Geordie……I’ve been scanning a few posts every day at dkos, but avoiding the comments.

    • Ha! I suspect no one read it. That would certainly be bashable from what I understand. ;)

      It is a good summary of what is wrong. I think that many of those things are becoming apparent (see the Gallup poll graph I posted in my check-in). As much as we may want a candidate unsullied by politics, the political process is how we vet our leaders and representatives. I can look at the D behind someone’s name and get an idea of their bent, the basic principles that govern their decision making. I would not expect a Democrat, for example, to want people to die of hunger or to suffer an injustice. A Democrat who has been part of the establishment (horrors!) knows how the institutions work and how to leverage them, who to call on for help, where to look for cabinet members, judicial nominees. In return, they owe allegiance to the party and won’t stray off the party line – they benefit from the coalition and we benefit from knowing that there is a predictability in their actions.

      An independent running under the aegis of the Democratic Party owes no allegiance to the party, no allegiance to the party’s principles and no allegiance to the goals of the party which is electing more Democrats up and down the ticket. You just have to witness what is going on in the GOP right now to realize how ill advised that is. Trump is more like Sanders in that he is an independent who leans right but who is using the Republican Party nominating process. That will NOT end well for their party.

  5. Good morning, 45 and cloudy in Bellingham. I’m so grateful Ryan is finally getting the help he needs. It’s been a long week for all of us, and especially for him. The physical therapist he’s seeing is very experienced so Ryan is feeling more reassured about his recovery.

    So will this country recover from Trump fascination soon enough to prevent an electoral catastrophe? It’s depressing and alarming.

    Timothy Egan, at the NYT wonders if sleep deprivation explains some of Trump’s behavior…..

    A Unified Theory of Trump

    Danny Westneat, at the Seattle Times, writes about Trump’s childlike appeal……

    Donald Trump connects at a new level — a fourth-grade level

    And this article re Trump’s dangerous use of social media needs to be widely read…..

    To Fight Critics, Donald Trump Aims to Instill Fear in 140- Character Doses

  6. 37 at dawn, 60 now and heading for 70 – we got sunshine again! And hit 15.9 KWHs yesterday – W00T! – I think that’s the best single day since last September. With Trish back in the hospital I’m trying to stay online even from home. Not always easy – my computer keeps hitting “run-time error” and shutting down. Done it once already today. Sigh. But thought I’d drop in here and in the HNV diary at GOS as long as I’m up. Here’s holding the good thought for strong double-digits (starting at least with a ‘3’) for Hillary in SC. Take care everybody. {{{HUGS}}}

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