Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Feb. 19th through Feb. 25th

February 18, 2017 JanF Community 221

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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65 Comments

  1. Oh, y’all – Rachel Maddow’s opening segment tonight – on the Ukraine/Russia stuff with Paul Manafort & money laundering…..

  2. Good morning, meese! Tuesday …

    It is 54 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 61. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.

    It is Spring Primary election day in Wisconsin. When more than 2 candidates are vying for “non-partisan” seats, they meet in a February primary to winnow the field to to two for the election in April. I put non-partisan in quotes because there is really no statewide office that is non-partisan any longer. We have a Department of Public Instruction that is independent of the governors office and the superintendent is elected by the people every 4 years. Walker has been trying to kill the agency or at least change it to be an appointed position – he picks! So every 4 years there is a surrogate battle over who sets policy for our K-12 education – a person who values public education and school children or a Walker minion who wants to create a generation of welders (nothing wrong with welders but we might need engineers too). This year two right-wingers got into the race so we have to make a point of voting for our guy so that he advances.

    In other news, it sounds like they found a National Security Advisor who is both respected and qualified. The only question is if he minds working for a nazi as it is unlikely that Bannon will be cut out of the NatSec loop. I don’t really want the vulgar talking yam to have any success but I am not too keen on the planet being incinerated in an impulsive nuclear war so “Flynn, out” and “McMaster, in” is a good thing.

    I saw on my Twitter that the orange shitgibbon will be visiting the National African-American History Museum today. I hope some priestesses stand ready to smudge it after he departs. It makes me sad to see a man elected with the help of white nationalists and a hoped-for return to Jim Crow doing a photo-op at a museum dedicated to honoring the work of those who spent, and sometimes gave, their lives fighting against exactly him and his followers. I will try to picture the 4 girls killed in the Birmingham bombing today to ward away the image of a pig rooting around in the museums we built to honor our history. Maybe he will also take a swing through the Holocaust Memorial to show that nazis supporting him – and his refusal to call out anti-Semitism – means nothing because “look! he is in a museum!!”

    See all y’all later!

    • Jesus God, is Walker going to be the governor of Wisconsin forever and ever, world without end? How long has he been governor? More than long enough to ruin the state, of course, but doesn’t he have to leave office at some point?

      • No, we have no term limits and because he runs in low turnout mid-term years, he could be governor for life. Tommy Thompson was governor for 14 years and only left when he was appointed HHS secretary under George W. Bush. His lackluster Lt. Governor became governor and lost to a Democrat on the next go around.

        Walker was first elected in 2010 but he radically changed everything about Wisconsin government: gerrymandered Republican majorities, disbanded the election commission, gutted ethics rules, stacked the courts, and removed all limits on soft money. So there are no checks and balances. He is making murmurings about wanted to find more money for Wisconsin schools but the money comes with a poison pill – school districts will have to adhere completely to Act 10 and no longer give any extra benefits to teachers. Some school districts had refused to do so because they wanted to retain qualified teachers and continued to pay for health insurance and other perks. The only thing Walker has not killed is the DPI – but it is not from lack of trying.

    • I’m a little worried that because the idiots in charge decided we don’t need clean springs and rivers, that the whole country will end up being like Flint.

  4. Good morning. Chicago, like Wisconsin continues with spring in February. 64 and sunny this afternoon, although it’s gloomy now. If we don’t start getting cold weather the bugs are going to be horrendous this summer.

    I hoping the idiot is playing golf again. At least it stops him from doing stupid things, and keeps his little hands off of twitter. Speaking of twitter, off to see what’s going on.

  5. Black History Birthdays today

    Nina Simone and Barbara Jordan.

    Nina Simone, entertainer known as the “High Priestess of Soul,” was born in Tryon, NC, on this date in 1933. Simone recorded the highly acclaimed “I Love You Porgy” in 1959.

    Barbara Jordan, lawyer, educator, Congresswoman, and the first black person to give the keynote address at a national political convention, was born in Houston, TX, on this date in 1936.

    • I loved Barbara so much — it was great to live in Austin when she & Ann & Molly were all active around town. He voice…. we called her the Voice of God, because wow. There’s a statue on the UT campus, and it’s great because the expression on her face, it’s so her

    • Love Barbara Jordan – she was born almost exactly 15-1/2 years before I was and in the same town. From teenager on I watched her rise in politics and cursed the disease that cut that career way too short. Back in the day she was my dream of first woman president. And that voice. The Voice of God, yes indeed. I hold to her words – my “faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total” partly because of her. And that faith is what gives me hope in these evil times that evil may sometimes cover the Constitution with crap, but it cannot stain it much less destroy it. Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for those words of strength. And thank you, Denise, for reminding me of them. (And thank you, anotherdemocrat, for the picture of the statue. Yes, that’s her. But I’d long left Austin by the time it was created.)

  6. Wow that alarm was early. Eating oatmeal, drinking nice, strong tea. I hope everyone caught Rachel Maddow’s show last night — she is killing it on this corruption/Russia stuff. Though it is maybe better for daytime viewing, because it can be hard to sleep when you’re enraged. I’ve been playing Discotheque on repeat in the car the last few days. Yes, seriously poppy but deeper than you’d think a song by that title would be (ok, and yes my cutie Adam is cute in the video):

    It’s not a trick, you can’t learn it
    It’s the way that you don’t pay that’s okay
    ‘Cause you can’t earn it – love

  7. Good morning, Meese!

    Weather forecast for MPLS/St Paul 60 freakin’ degrees. Not to worry though, there’s mutterings of snow storms in our near future.

  8. Alarming bit of news from the Yaministration on their deportation plan – an end to “sensitive locations” protections:

    If all previous Obama DHS memos are rescinded, this would theoretically include another Obama-era memo, one that protects undocumented immigrants in places such as schools and churches. That memo is known as the “sensitive locations memo,” and it establishes that enforcement actions will not take place in “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals and places of worship, without express consent from agency supervisors, and must be exercised with excessive care. It was most recently affirmed under Obama in a 2016 version, and advocates say this is necessary to ensure a fundamental humanitarian commitment: that undocumented immigrants can attend school or places of worship or seek needed medical care.

    “The new memo raises the question of whether DHS will abandon or narrow the sensitive locations policy,” Joanne Lin, senior legislative counsel with the ACLU, tells me. “For decades, immigration enforcement has refrained from conducting actions at certain community sites, recognizing that they are sacrosanct and must be kept open to all people.”

    “A rollback of this policy would make immigrants think twice about seeking medical care and make parents doubt whether they should send their kids to school,” adds Kamal Essaheb, director of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center. “It would destabilize day-to-day life for communities.”

    But “Wall Street!” and “Goldman Sachs speeches!” Sigh.

    • Evil – it’s not exactly comforting to the rest of the students, worshipers, or patients to have Storm Troopers burst in and grab somebody. You want to scare people, you want to rule by fear as fascists do, it works right well. As an immigration or any other official policy, it’s evil.

  9. 55 heading for 65 in Fay, AR – still overcast. Got only 3.5 KWHs electricity yesterday but only .1″ rain. Not a good trade as far as I’m concerned (not that Nature cares). Hope it clears off today and I get more electricity and the lift to my spirits that always comes with sunshine.

    The R administration is so bad I’m beginning to think we should get into the habit of making whatever ward-off-evil sign/symbol our faith may offer every time we see one of them. That and the “Blessing for the Czar” – should anyone figure out how to implement it.

    Soloing this morning. Need to check into both Villages then get to work. Bright the day and wind to thy wings, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • By the way, I checked your draft posts and you still have an ITaV TEMPLATE ready to be cloned from. I am not quite sure what you did but it looks like you simply cloned it and Published it. When you make changes, it autosaves so it was not an issue where you made changes and forgot to save. It shall forever be a mystery! We can just leave that post as it is because it does have comments and deleting a post deletes the comments. It does not harm the “flow” of the web site. :)

      • That’s pretty much what I did. Being the techno-idiot that I am, I couldn’t tell by looking at the draft what was linked to something that would show up in the published post (like the picture at the top) and what was instructions as to what should go where. I didn’t even realize that what I changed for the title wasn’t the actual title. :)

        • Ha! Your foray into posting was very benign, bfitz. I managed to blow to smithereens an internal website for a multinational corporation that I worked for. One reason you don’t see me volunteering to post; some people shouldn’t handle loaded weapons (websites).

          • It is really difficult to completely blow up a WordPress site but you can make a pretty big mess. WordPress is open source and is really a lot of little pieces of code written by a lot of different people, some more skilled than others.

            I remember once, on a different web site I was managing, an author used some html that caused all the posts on the front page to render as italicized!

            Even sites that using custom code are susceptible to user-generated unintended consequences. Back in the early DK4 days, we discovered the “big” html tag which we used to create big then bigger and biggest fun in our comments. Someone used copy/paste to generate the biggest thing evah and it was so big that the rest of the comments on the page were blocked out! (Kind of like the old George Carlin question – “can god create a rock so big even he can’t lift it???”) And of course that happened in one of my posts because those are the kind of people I hung out with – and overnight because that is when people misbehave. ;) Fortunately, I always viewed posts with comments collapsed so it didn’t impact me when I opened the post the next morning but it just goes to show the precarious nature of all web sites.

        • If you are editing in Text, you see the raw html. If you click to View, you will see the content in a visual way (see the FAQ: How to Compose a Post in WordPress for pictures). But if you want to see what it will look like when you publish, you have to click on Preview. That is where you would have seen that the Title was unchanged.

          By the way, it appears that you changed something called the “Headline” (further down on the page) which creates a little sub-heading but does not impact the title. For what it is worth, you can change the title after you publish – WordPress will keep track of it for you. The permanent link to the page will reflect the original but it at least looks nicer when you are in the post!

          You should probably experiment with using the template so that you are ready the next time you need to fill the breach. Remember: Preview is Your Friend!

          • Thanks – Presupposing I ever manage to have time and energy at the same time I will do so. I prefer a supportive to a leadership role in most things, but I do need to have the skills to be supportive. :)

  11. Good morning, 42 and cloudy in Bellingham. I’m later than usual today, so just quick hello to all. I’m going to see if finding some primroses to plant will ease my worried mind.

  12. Good afternoon, Moosekind! Really late to the party today. Mostly cloudy here in NoVa, current temp 52 F., going up to 54 F. later.

    This morning I had to cook my loathsome egg and bacon breakfast (because I’m back on the Grapefruit Diet for three days), then get ready to greet Darling Niece when she came for coffee. We had tremendous fun chatting and making Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes. They’re supposed to be lightly dusted with confectioner’s sugar and decorated with a slice of fresh strawberry, and we did some of that. The others we iced with chocolate frosting because Dearly Beloved does not care for unfrosted cake. Anyway, Niece departed with some of each kind to see whether the males in her house will like them. She’s always trying to get them to eat more healthfully and they resist her 24/7.

    Feeling positively ill this morning about (1) the deportations and (2) the antivaxxers. The WaPo carried a story this morning about how the now discredited report linking vaccines to autism is endangering American children. In California four newborns have died because they were too young to be vaccinated when an epidemic of whooping cough swept through. Some people simply do not care to be confronted with facts.

    The idea of ICE and Customs dragging people out of churches and schools reminds me of (dare I say it?) the SS dragging Jewish people out of synagogues and schools in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s.

    Crazy, nasty, wasteful Thing! “I’m not going to take vacations,” said he who has now fled to Florida for a golfing vacation every weekend. Apparently he doesn’t dare visit Melania and Barron at Thing Tower because his fellow New Yorkers screech like parrots when he hoves into view.

    Hope everyone will have a good rest of the day!

    • Diana, I saw that story about the anti-vaxxers. It is incredible to me how Republicans manage to be on the wrong side of every single issue. I wish there were a way that their hard-headed anti-science “don’t tread on me”ism would only harm them (Darwin!) and not the rest of us but when our population is unvaccinated, it puts everyone at risk.

      The mass deportations fulfill a campaign promise to those so filled with hate that they are willing to destroy everything that made America great in an effort to Make America White Again. It won’t happen – the only thing they will do is destroy any pretense that they are decent human beings. I read an essay by John Stoehr yesterday suggesting that the damage done to the “religious” right, by signing on with the Republicans and embracing the inhumane immigration and refugee policies of tRump, may finally do them in. Young evangelicals are horrified. When you make your single litmus test “zygote protection”, you cede a lot of moral ground.

  13. Good morning, meese! Wednesday …

    It is 45 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 64 degrees. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Our pro-public-schools Superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction advanced in the primary, overwhelming his closest opponent with 70% of the vote. They will face off in April. I was proud to see that Dane County voted for him by 88.7%. We like public schools and our teachers. Several Madison school board races repudiated the Betsy DeVos inspired candidates as well. Leave our schools aloooooone!

    See all y’all later!

  14. Good Wednesday Morning Meese
    36 here going up to 56.

    Voting and organizing matters.

    The hard work being done in NC by the Moral Mondays coalition has made a difference and they have never given up – and won’t.

    I’m coming up for air – was up most of the night doing Sunday writing and I feel wrung out. Writing about lynching (racial terrorism) to close out black history month.
    I think I’ll take a long break today and play WoW – need to release anger.

    I’m wondering if I will have a teaching job next year – our campus has lost $4 million in enrollments – due to international students declining to attend – because of Trump’s anti-immigrant stance.
    So now there will be cutbacks – and adjuncts are the first to be slashed.
    :(

    • Congratulations to Rev. Barber and North Carolina. Elections have consequences!

      I don’t blame those international students one bit – America’s beacon of freedom was extinguished.

      The damage that is being done by the haters who were put in charge of our federal government is still unfolding. Money is drying up for all sorts of things – analysts are saying that we will take a $1.7 trillion hit to the economy from the new deportation plan. And those international students – maybe one of them would have developed a life-saving treatment or engineered a way to improve people’s lives – tough, we don’t want your brilliance or your contributions. :(

      I saw a few tweets yesterday coming out of the yam’s visit to the NMAAH and his claim to be anti-Semitic. I will be shutting down news feeds today as well – I have reached overload. Rural white people wanted their hate porn on a continuous loop on Fox News and, by golly, they got it.

        • My bosses are trying to work something out. We’ll see.
          If not – I guess I may have to join a speakers bureau and take my teaching on the road :)

      • My biggest concern is my health coverage. My husband is still working – but his coverage is not as good as what I have.
        Sigh.
        Anyway – for now I am okay.

    • {{{Denise}}} – Healing Energy and whatever Energy you need to help you channel the anger. I apologize in advance that I probably will not read it because I know it will make me sick. I know enough already to periodically give me nightmares. And i’m a coward.

      Wish people who are negatively impacted financially by this ban would send the bill to the White House – very publicly. The Haters won’t care, but there are an awful lot of really gormless people who don’t think it matters – they would care. Holding the Good Thought for you having a job (hey – I’ll go big – and a raise) next year. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  15. Good morning, dear Meese.

    Weather forecast for MPLS/St Paul: High of 57, then tomorrow we begin the swing back to normal temps, with a winter storm warning for Friday. “The biggest storm of the winter!”

      • Minnesotans are very fatalistic about the weather (and always prepared for the worst) because it always makes us pay for the nice days one way or the other :)

    • I am already afraid!!! Weather forecasters are never wrong!!! ;)

      I think we will get some rain and maybe a flurry. It will definitely be colder.

  16. Good morning.

    It’s another day of spring in Chicago. 64 and sunny later. We need to go back to winter, there’s bugs flying around already. Some of them need to disappear.

    I saw where there was major damage to a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, and some Muslim folks started a page to collect money to repair the damage. They had asked for $20,000.00, and when I got there a few hours later it was up to $42,000.00. If nothing else “it” and his merry band of haters have brought many U.S. Jews and Muslims closer, and that’s a good thing.

    • Oh hai, broths. This does give me hope. Good people, doing good things are springing up all over the place!

  17. I hope everyone saw Rachel last night — or find it online today. She is on it with the Russian corruption thing. And she had 2 people on who have resigned from positions in the government — the CIA guy and a woman who was on the Election Commission.

    I had U2 playing in my head till I opened a tab for youtube to pick out a video & saw Disappear. Michael was a really gorgeous guy, INXS were great pop/rock music.

  18. Good morning, Moosekind! We have a cloud-covered sky this morning, but it’s “bright” clouds, if you can visualize that. Current temp. is 45 F, going up to 65 F. in NoVa.

    Nothing much to say this morning. I have to get to the gym and buy a few groceries. I also need to work on the Brownie Quest meeting I’m supposed to lead in March. The troop leader is out of town, so I’m not sure how to proceed. Think I’ll Google it.

    I smell delicious coffee in the air, so will follow my nose downstairs. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and Beyond!

  19. 55 at what passed for dawn in Fay., AR – we were socked in by fog which is only now starting to clear off. A bright fog though – already starting to generate a trickle of electricity. Hoping for some serious generation the rest of the month but not going to bank on it.

    The Rs are evil. They have been, actively or passively, for a couple of decades, but now they are overt about it and basically rubbing our noses in it. They have to be stopped, of course. And we will stop them, of course. But since it is so very hard for us (white folks) to acknowledge just how many and how bad they are, it’s gonna take time to gather our forces and resources to do it. We have started with the Resistance. We will persist.

    I’ve got work type work to do and I’ve got community needs work to do – Street Prophets diary today but I may need to toss out an emergency diary for gtghawaii – only $25 donated since we made her Feb. rent and only a week until the March rent is due. i’m tired. doesn’t matter, needs to be done. Bright the day and wind to thy wings, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  20. Howard Dean is endorsing South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg for DNC Chair. I listened to an interview with Pete conducted by Brian Beutler at the New Republic and he sound very intelligent – and had a plan!

    Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean early Wednesday endorsed South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg to lead the DNC, saying that the party’s leadership is “old and creaky.”

    “He’s the outside the Beltway candidate,” Dean said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This party is in trouble.

    “Our strongest age group that votes for us is under 35 and they don’t consider themselves Democrats. They elected Barack Obama twice, they didn’t elect Hillary Clinton but voted 58 percent for her. They don’t come out during the midterms; they don’t come out for down ballot voters,” he added.

    “Our leadership is old and creaky, including me. We’ve got to have this guy, 36 years old, running this party.”

    Buttigieg said in a tweet he was “honored” by the endorsement.

    “Gov. Dean is calling for not just a 50-state but a 50-year strategy. That’s what I will work to establish as DNC chair – time for a change,” he tweeted.

    I like this idea because the Perez versus Ellison DNC Chair race is now a knock down drag out fight to relitigate the 2016 primary. We have state parties to rebuild and elections to win in 2017 and 2018. We can’t be stuck in 2016 OR choose someone who will tick off large groups of Democrats.

    Here is a link to the PodCast: Who Should Run the Democratic Party?

    • I made some notes when I listened to the podcast yesterday. I am not an Ellison fan because in my mind he took the Sanders surrogacy too far – he should have given in well before the convention.

      From Pete:

      “There is a temptation to treating this like it is a policy position instead of a management position.”

      Exactly. The ideology does not matter and based on what Bernie Sanders has said Ellison will make it all about the ideology. I do not want us to become the party of “hates Wall Street can’t be bothered with women and people of color”.

      I got the sense listening to Tom Perez that he thinks the party needs to keep running against tRump. I disagree. We lost against tRump … we need to reconnect to what it means to be a Democrat and run on our vision of the future. Sure, the yam will come up but he cannot be the focus again.

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