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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– Page One of Comments can be found here.
– Page Two of Comments can be found here.
Good morning, meese! Friday …
It is 64 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 77. The forecast calls for sunny skies this morning with a few scattered clouds this afternoon.
I am afraid to click on my Twitter link. After yesterday’s bad news (no one likes the shitgibbon and Senators from his own party are calling him unstable) I am sure we are in for an epic Twitter bowel movement.
Instead, I will reserve my anger for the Wisconsin Assembly which voted to shovel $3 billion into a plan that MAY but most likely won’t yield 3,000 jobs over the next 10 years. The project won’t produce a return for 25 years, even generously assuming that the partisan math used to generate that analysis is correct. The jobs will mostly be $10 an hour jobs – watching robots build stuff – with a few family supporting jobs in tech which they can’t fill because Governor TrickleDown defunded K-12 and higher education and there are not enough educated workers here now. And the $3 billion will be “found” by taking more from education and delaying construction projects for our crumbling infrastructure. The Assembly minority leader, a Democrat in whose district the mythical plant would be built, voted for this future destroying tax giveaway saying he “hoped it could be improved before it is signed into law”. NO NO NO, a thousand times NO!! You do not vote for a bill “hoping” it can be fixed by some magical unicorn before it lands on the desk of Governor DestroyerOfAllThatIsGood. You vote against it. Period. This is why Democrats lose elections. They vote like Republicans and then wonder why people want to replace them with Republicans.
See all y’all later!
Jan, it sounds as if your Nazi governor-for-life wants Wisconsin to surpass Kansas in loserdom! Hope you can get out of there and go somewhere sane. Virginia seems to be getting a bit more sane—Arlington and Fairfax counties are solidly blue as well as being extremely populous, so if we go blue, we carry the state. Hoping for the best in November.
I will probably be here for at least 5 more years – enough time to see my daughter take advantage of the in-state college tuition rates. If we move now, the clock starts ticking on residency and it would delay her education.
But as soon as she has that diploma in her hand – or if I win the lottery and we can afford to pay out–of-state tuition somewhere – we are out of here. I will only move to a reliably Blue state, though. I am still leaning towards Massachusetts.
Massachusetts is a funny-shaped state, but great for vacations! How I loved attending the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference there many years ago. Hyannis, Buzzard’s Bay, Provincetown, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket—all of them shine in my memory.
I have a friend who walked through that square in Barcelona an hour before the attack. So sad & angry. And I’ll admit that every day when I wake up, I’m disappointed not to hear that DJT has had a health crisis. 25th Amendment-ing him won’t do any good — he’d just be a martyr to his fanboys. And if he quit, that would be even worse, because he’s a pouty 7 year old. Ok, must stop with the doom & gloom. Here’s some, loud, happy U2.
All the stolen voices will someday be returned
The most beautiful sound I’d ever heard
Your voices will be heard
Your voices will be heard
If he quit, it would have to be set up in a way that made it appear that it was his idea so the 25th Amendment won’t work unless it is a health crisis. If he is pushed out he will continue to be a thorn in our sides. If he takes the Republican Party down with him, fine. But I don’t want to see him or his dangerous fans in any position to harm the rest of us.
Good gray Friday morning, Meese! We’re expecting storms between 3 and 8 p.m. Right now in NoVa it’s so hot and humid it’s like a steambath. Current temp. is 76 F., going up to 89 F. later today.
Nothing intelligent to say this morning, too stunned by the events in Barcelona and Charlottesville. Hope nothing awful happens today. I miss the time when Fridays were considered dull!
Need to get dressed and pick raspberries for Miss Pink Cheeks’ breakfast. She’ll probably want scrambled eggs and bacon too. Will pop in later to see what everyone’s up to.
Sitting here in the bus reading about Trump tweeting hoax story about Pershing using bullets dipped in pigs blood against Muslims.
There are no words for how horrible he us.
That Pershing story was debunked last year when he first started using it in his rallies. He is doing so much damage to our efforts on winning hearts and minds. He can’t be gone soon enough to suit me.
His Art of the Deal ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, thinks he will resign this fall, probably by October. I think he won’t resign until he is sure he has the complete list of people under investigation by Mueller so he can issue pardons. Pence might pardon Trump but he won’t pardon his demon spawn, his campaign workers, or his current White House staff enablers.
But…(sob!)…I want Pence to go down too! The Trumpet will have to be pardoned by (shudder) Lyin’ Ryan!
Unless he goes down as well.
No words at all.
upper 60s overcast goddess only knows whether it will clear off and we’ll get sunshine – or how high it will go or much of anything else. Got just over 15 KWHs yesterday bringing my average back to 10/day – m-t-d is 171 at the moment. At least in my part of the world even the weather is reflecting our national condition – lots of clouds, some noisy but not as dangerous as it sounds weather events, and power production lower than it’s ever been since I installed a PV system.
Politically I’m still of the same mind. The Rs are evil. When they are fighting each other they aren’t eating us. Keep them fighting each other wherever possible until we can get Congress (and some state legislatures, please) back in our hands. I’ll make my phone calls, then I’ll concentrate on my community needs folks. And of course as we get closer to the end of the month, the more of them who are moving from “important” to “urgent”. sigh.
Soloing this morning and at an off-campus meeting most of the afternoon so I’d best get to work after I’ve checked in on the Villages. Bright the day, meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
bfitz, it sounds as if your weather year has been permanently cloudy! Very strange. We, on the other hand, have had the rainiest summer I can remember for years. In fact, we’re five inches over normal! Unprecedented in recent memory.
{{{Diana}}} – pretty danged close. And of course most of those 15 days my PV system was down were the sunny ones. This region has had a lot more rain than has been normal – we had to open Beaver Lake flood gates in April – but most of the rain goes around Fayettevile proper. So we get clouds, drought as far as our yards and gardens are concerned, but the rain is going into the White River/Beaver Lake watershed so the lake levels are higher than they’ve been in years.
Here is a good idea:
66 and cloudy in Bellingham today. The family is hiking at Mt Baker today and I’ve had my hands full with Finn and Heide, who are now barricaded in the kitchen. One has diarrhea and the other is anxious so they can’t have the run of the house.
So Bannon is out, but tRump is the one who needs to go.
I have opinions about Bannon “going”. While a gross and disgusting person leaving the White House is always a reason to cheer – and especially one who appears to hold some pretty heinous views – he will probably be more effective in promoting Trumpism from the outside. I have serious concerns about Stephen Miller because he is a literal nazi and is the one who writes the speeches and has the orange cretin’s ear. We can’t let him push the Overton Window any further to the right.
I wondered a bit about the “Bannon must go” focus from our side – as if that would solve anything. It isn’t really a victory insofar as we did not “force” this to happen – the injuries to tRump’s fragile ego finally reached peak pain and a new book that just came out lauding Bannon as the architect of the Trump election victory pushed him over the edge. When Bannon lost his guy in the NSA, post-Kelly, the writing was on the wall and it was just a matter of time. Trashing the White House and the institutions of government is not as much fun when a stern schoolmarm is giving you the skank eye! Much easier for him to take Mercer money, go back to Brietbart – or build a new alt-truth media outlet – and lob grenades from the outside. The commentary I read suggests that he will not go after Trump but will go after the establishment Republican Party. He still hates Ryan and McConnell and believes now more than ever that they are the ones holding up the Trump populist agenda. Literal Trumpism will begin to emerge, not just the Republican Party’s bill-signer and judge-maker model that Ryan and McConnell promised their caucuses. Bannon knows where the bodies are buried and he will make good use of his ability to propagate the narrative without constraints.
Anyway, we need to be careful about identifying one person as the boogieman because when that boogieman is gone, we look a little silly then saying “now, we have to get rid of this other guy!”.
Pretty much my take on it, too. pvl45 just turned an anchored cannon loose.
A Daniel Dale tweet that reports more on Bannon’s new role:
Good morning, meeses! Saturday …
It is 57 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 79. Sunny skies are in the forecast.
People and groups are backing away from the shitgibbon – resigning from his councils and cancelling their events at Trump-branded properties. Now that the Angry Apricot has shown that he has no capacity to govern, they see their agenda circling the drain and it is no longer worth the effort to hold up the fig leaf. The one group that will not back away is his evangelical council. Yes, one guy resigned but he actually resigned weeks ago and just now announced it. There will be no more defections. The religious right first fell in love with Republicanism when they saw that they could use segregation to keep their schools pure. They are not going to abandon it simply because the racism is no longer behind a curtain.
The State of Texas filed a request for a stay of the court order requiring them to redraw their racially gerrymandered districts. Court watchers think the request will be rejected but that it will get to the Supreme Court where anything could happen. If the stay is eventually rejected there – and the state refuses to call the legislature back into session to redraw the districts, the court has ruled that they will draw the new lines. Every race counts in 2018 and if those districts are made more fair, we may be able to pick up a seat. A seat here, a seat there – pretty soon we have Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House! Resistance has to be at the ballot box and protecting the right to fair elections has to be the goal of ever Democrat.
See all y’all later!
Good morning. Headed out of the hotel here in Philly for second day of the conference. Glad to see Trump flee from Kennedy Center awards.
It allows decent people to take part in it!
Over at LGM, a media anthropologist posted this article: The Enduring Legacy Of “Strange Fruit”.
It included videos of the song. The two favorites (from the comments) were Billie Holliday’s and Nina Simone’s.
Here is a write-up on the history as told in a documentary. It includes the lyrics:
Slept in, hit snooze over & over…. There’s an anti racism rally, but I’m not going. Groceries, cooking & the gym. I’m making a sweet potato, mango & black bean lunch. Lentil & artichoke dinner. Right now I’m just waiting for Joy Reid’s show to come on.
Damp and chilly early this morning, sunny 80 and heat index 95 now – totally blew up from nowhere bad storm yesterday evening took my power down and I only got it back about an hour ago. PV system is down again. I’ve reported it. We shall see what we shall see but I think the only thing left is to replace the inverter itself. sigh. I’m hoping my food is OK – the fridge/freezer hasn’t stopped running since the power came back on so I’m not confident. Think I’ll make soup out of all the meat and veggies – that’ll cover lunches and dinners for the next week or so. Really hoping the 6 gallons of blueberries are OK. If they thawed enough to start leaking juice they are going to refreeze in a block. If that happens, when I get around to wanting them along about January, I’ll take a gallon at a time, cook it into “berry filling” and make some form of dessert. Put I prefer them straight from the bag, 1 cup at a time. Oh well.
We’re not at war so I’ll ignore the political news. Need to get my fundraiser diary updated and ready to roll – it posts at 1 central time. Good news-bad news, as usual. We’ll try to keep focused on the good news – that does a bit more to clear out the debris from the Channel of Good so it flows better and stronger. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
There will not be a Fighting Back post today.
It should shock no one that Senate Democrats are leakers – no one in Chuck Schumer’s office posts the Weekly Democratic Party Address on an official site. CSPAN will post a video this afternoon when I will be offline. Nancy Pelosi posts her member’s speeches (every other week) on her excellent web site early Saturday morning.
I will put something up tomorrow. Have a great day!