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 (usually Saturday night with a Sunday date). 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 is HERE!
– Page Two of Comments is HERE!
It was 65 at dawn – still 69 – heading for 90. Hoping the heat index stays under 100 but I’m not betting on it. I’ll close the house back up in a bit and we shall see how long we can keep the A/C from kicking on. (It was 4:30 pm yesterday when it kicked on – but the humidity was such/heat index was still so high that while I did turn off the A/C when I went to bed, I only opened the window to the porch for the cats and not the rest of the house until this morning when I got up.) We got 17.3 KWHs yesterday bringing the m-t-d to 186.6 – 500 is still possible but getting less likely by the day. Over 400 is still looking good. We’re on track for that.
Americans, including and maybe especially our team, have been very well trained. All this focus on twitler as if he were the beginning and would be the end of our slide into fascism. We are nearing the end of a plan that was started in 1958 when the John Birch Society formed and bought their first AM talk show radio licences – in every market base. They failed their first try at the White House when Goldwater was stomped but they were successfully working all the down-ballot races. They’ve been very successful with their WH candidates since – they only lose when their candidates and policies cause a recession before the election – but they’ve been even more successful at taking over state and local governments. Even more successful at taking over the media and turning it into a RW propaganda machine. As for their latest installation of a president, he’s just the head thug of the Brown Shirts/Magats – very useful right now helping the Cabal get complete power but will be squashed like bugs if they don’t toe the line once that Cabal has complete power (Night of the Long Knives – history rhymes). I’ve watched this my life long although I didn’t even start to realize what I was seeing until Reagan and didn’t put all the pieces together until Clinton was in office. This is probably our last chance to stop this and change course. But we didn’t during our previous wins because apparently nobody but me sees the whole thing. Presupposing we win WH and Congress in this cycle, if we do not secure our election system and break up the RW propaganda machine…well, we’re in for a couple of generations of duly-elected despots (more like U.S.S.R. than Nazi Germany). Complete with genocide and irreversible environmental destruction.
OK – coffee. Internet. Run a few errands. Do what my hands find to do in acts of loving kindness. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Bfitz, you’ve put your finger on one of the biggest problems of the Democratic party: we lack the fanatic’s ability to take the long view—the very long view.
After that smashing loss to LBJ, the Rethugs regrouped and said, “Okay. It’ll take a generation, but we’ll start at the local level, running for school board and dog catcher to get ourselves known. Then we’ll run for state legislative offices. Then statewide offices. Then we’ll go for Congress and the presidency. At the same time we’ll train lawyers at Liberty University to take over the judiciary.”
Democrats, on the other hand, argue about marijuana smoking, email servers, purity, and all kinds of things. We’ve apparently lacked the vision to work for this long-term takeover, to our very great detriment.
{{{Diana}}} – that’s why I get so depressed with everybody focused on Twitler right now. – and tired when folks get OMGHOF he’s not gonna leave – he didn’t start this & isn’t doing most of what he’s being given “credit” for. He was starting to run his daddy’s business into the ground when this round started. The John Birch Society formed in 1958 by about 12 men (including the Kochs) – and among other things, they started buying radio stations. They started with a plan that was practically founded on taking over the media so they’d have a propaganda machine. They took a lot of cues from Hitler but even more from the U.S.S.R. And at practically every point we could have stopped them, we assisted them instead. Taking down Twitler just means they don’t have to once they’ve got the Courts & complete control of the voting procedures. sigh.
Good morning meese, 72 with high of 104 today. I’m going to a concert this evening so will be leaving work early to drive down to the Bay Area.
I’m still giggling at DoReMI’s reaction to being called stately. ????????
{{{basket}}} – drive carefully and enjoy your concert. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Some words just never belong in the same sentence. Me and stately are prime examples.
Good morning, 62 and mostly sunny in Bellingham. Thanks to team work the ivy fences are finally all pruned and another truck load was taken to the dump. Ryan will work with our son today, and tomorrow we’ll amend the soil in the salal bed and hopefully with deep watering digging the new plants in will be easier. We also moved furniture and turned the area rugs in the living room and dining room so yesterday was busy! When we moved the library sofa we found legos and tinker toy pieces. How can that be? Time is zipping by and my grand kids are growing up to fast.
I’ve scanned the news, but I’m going to try to be news lite today. Best wishes to all.
Good morning, Meesefolk. 66 when I got up and going up to 77. It sprinkled a tiny bit this morning (3 swipes of the wipers worth), but it looks like that errant cloud may be all we get. Curmudgeon Hubby is hoping for much, much more so that the evening fair activities are rained out, but I don’t think he’s going to get his wish. So yes, tonight we’ll be listening to the Figure 8 races and the blaring loudspeaker. I’d still rather have to listen to that than the tractor pull that’s coming up Saturday night.
I continued my deep cleaning last night, but I didn’t get everything done that I’d planned. I got distracted when I realized that the mini-blinds in our bedroom needed to be taken down and washed; by the time I finished that, I’d run out of oomph to keep going. I did get up early enough this morning to do a thorough cleaning of all of the bathroom mirrors (our main bathroom has a wall of mirrors, so this is a bit more time-consuming than one would think). Tonight is supposed to be kitchen time, but I’ll be happy if I can just get the kitchen table cleaned off. About the only good thing about all of this belated spring cleaning is that it’s keeping me too busy to pay close attention to the news; I’m pretty sure there’s been a significant drop in my BP this week!
Good day to and for all!
Good morning, meese! Friday …
It is 64 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 75. Showers and thunderstorms are in the forecast, clear skies this evening.
I think that there are too many unserious news outlets when the top story is “Trump wants to buy Greenland”. We are heading into a recession being caused directly by mismanagement of our tariff rules and terrible Republican policies that are shrinking the actual wages of working people and raising the cost of housing and health care. The social safety net is being shredded, people are being terrorized by white supremacists – who have the blessing of the Republican Party – and kids are starting the school year by choosing seats in classrooms “where the bad guys can’t shoot them.”
I am going to make one pass through the news, Pocket a few stories, and then hunker down to get projects set for the weekend.
See all y’all later!
Yesterday was our 24th 100 degree day this year, and they stretch into the 2 week extended forecast. Sigh. The news is terrible, work is exhausting….. I have got to go to the gym this evening & just listen to some music while I do the elliptical. My friends December have a new single out: I Was The Lion. (strobe warning) Inspired by CS Lewis.
Friday Meese
Got up in the middle of the night – to write a story – after my husband talked to a family member in Newark – about the water crisis there.
Went to sleep – got up to publish the story and the whole thing got erased. Argh. Re-did it the best i could – it is now posted
rec’d & shared
And Kamala introduced the “Water Justice Act” last month – and plans to do even more as president. She gets it. And is being pretty much ignored by the privileged folks who don’t.
Good morning, Moosekind, and a gray, gloomy-looking Friday it is. Currently it’s 73 F. in Ashburn, going up to 84 F. later. We may have more showers and thunderstorms. Yesterday we were treated to a humdinger of a storm, with very noisy, protracted thunder, lightning, heavy downpours, the lot. Monty Beagle, convinced we were all going to die, had to be reassured with many pats and strokes of the head that we were going to be fine.
Still feeling absolutely awful, so more cold meds are in the offing. Poor old Dearly will have to pick up his own birthday cake. Elder Son and family are coming over for dinner tonight at the Pub, and we’ll celebrate with cake afterwards. They’ll drop Miss Pink Cheeks off at her house tonight because Younger Son and family are going to Busch Gardens tomorrow.
Skipped the CC meeting yesterday owing to feeling so ill. Hope to get some work done this weekend. Next week will be my last week of child care because school will start the week after that. How quickly the summer has fled!
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond. Message to The Occupant: No, Greenland is not for sale, you big ugly lummox!
It was 70 at dawn in Fay., AR – 72 now and heading for mid 90s (heat index triple digits) and sunny at the moment. Yesterday we got a mid-afternoon very dark system-in-night-mode “storm” that dropped a whole .1″ of rain, which we need badly, and kept generation down to 15 KWHs. The -m-t-d is 201. Fortunately I didn’t need the A/C yesterday although I doubt I’ll be as lucky today. We have entered the season of lessening generation – at this point not because of shorter daylength. It’s the changing angle of the sun. In Spring the oak tree hasn’t leafed out so the panels aren’t shaded when the sun is lower on the horizon. In Fall the oak tree is fully and very densely leafed out. It’s a beautiful tree but I seriously wish it had been the scrub oak I thought it was when I transplanted the sapling from under my eaves (max. height 15′) instead of whatever kind of oak it is (topped out at 50′). Of course at the time I didn’t know I was going to be able to have solar panels. (Now the mansplainin’ contractor who convinced me to put the original system at the east end of the house instead of the west end where I wanted it…effen men – take your money & do you wrong maybe not every time but damn close.)
There’s a reason I watch very little of the news. Aside from it making me sick. I watched this happen. I watched it from the beginning – didn’t know what I was seeing back then, just knew it was wrong – and nothing I have done or said has made any difference. People have read my LTEs and praised me for them – and paid no attention to the meaning. People have heard my litany about who owns the media, agree, and go right back to railing about “complicity”. People focus on who is doing the atrocities and not even looking for who ordered the atrocities. It’s 60 years since they started. The cabal has almost reached full control – because every time we had the power to stop them, we just cleaned up the mess maybe somehow expecting we’d have time after we cleaned up the mess, and they picked up where they left off as soon as the got Congress back. We’ve one last chance to stop them and truth to tell I thing we’re gonna blow that one, too. Not that we aren’t gonna win in 2020 – I think we are. But I doubt we’re gonna address the cabal, the propaganda machine, and the underlying money laundering that will let them start where they left off after we’ve cleaned up their economic mess again. I certainly would love to be surprised in this.
So. Do what my hands & brain find to do – to help somebody somewhere. Hope those ripples spread out and actually do make things better even if good seems to be out of reach. Coffee and go read Dee’s post. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 62 and mostly cloudy in Bellingham. We enjoyed time with our grand kids yesterday, but it’s an adjustment this summer. Emma and Ryan are driving, Ava knows every step of the patio dinner routine, and I went to bed before the movie was over. But they know where to find me, and they did. Our Oregon family arrives tonight, and they will probably find me in bed too!
The kids are going to the county fair today, tomorrow we’ll shop for school clothes because it’s a tradition. Sunday is Ava’s 12 birthday party so we’ll have a family party at her house and Monday is TBD, whew! I’m weary but so grateful.
Time for coffee and to see if I can win the Daily Solitaire Challenge. Best wishes to all.
Good morning meese, 72 with a high of 101+ today. Yesterday was very warm even in San Jose, where it was 102. Yikes! I think bfitz would have appreciated the dry heat though, and at least the venue (someone’s house) wasn’t too cold.
Off to work shortly and will catch up later!
{{{basket}}} – I definitely would appreciate dry heat. It’ s not hot enough here to be a steam bath like it is in Austin, but it’s just as sticky. Not too cold is good. moar {{{HUGS}}}
I put up an orange diary – got only ablut an hour’s notice, there’s a big ($10,000) match this afternoon:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/16/1879453/-AIDS-Walk-Austin-10-000-match-this-afternoon?_=2019-08-16T09:10:47.044-07:00#comment_74704864
I don’t have any place else to put this – too long for twitter & well, I don’t have any other place. My searches for Kamala Harris and her stance on Natives/Indigenous continues – slowly. Well, worse than slowly – no matter how I phrase it I mostly get the same half dozen articles most of which are based on a single report in 2014 of her opposing 15 Native applications for securing/getting back stolen treaty lands and representing the non-Native side on a reservation border dispute that was being challenged in court. I also get the Congressional record telling me which Native-associated bills she’s cosponsored (she hasn’t sponsored any herself). But I recently got this one as well. This is directly copied off what comes up with the google search and reading it, it looks like she’s anti-sovereignty. You have to actually go into the cite and read what she was saying at the Judiciary Meeting to see that she was protesting judicial nominees and anti-sovereignty is one of the reasons given for protesting them. This is so very “Hillary rules” from way back – this kind of reporting is why I started looking into & supporting Hillary in the first place back in the 1980s – but I don’t know what to do about it. & haven’t been able to find anything I can boost on twitter or tag onto a #KHive thread. (I wish I were better at searching. I can’t even find the Native roundtable or the single report of it that I posted links to in a previous weekly welcoming post when I do the google search.)
does your local public library have a reference desk? Can you e-mail them a question, tell them what you’ve already found, and ask them to find more? If you can’t, maybe one of the Khive does live in a city where they can? I know the Austin library does research like that, but I’m an auxiliary member – still have 3 or 4 1st place people, so I’m not really the right one to write a diary for any of them.
I might try that. Our research librarians are very good. Thanks for the suggestion. Research librarians always used to be my first “go to” but I’m not as active as I was and not physically at the library on a regular basis any longer. I keep forgetting about emailing them. LOL.
Actually I’m not sure it’s safe for anyone to put up a diary at DK indicating Kamala actually is a “friend to Native Americans” since someone wrote a diary back in February saying she isn’t. (Based on the same single report of 15 land trust applications and a reservation boundary dispute all the “no friend to Native Americans” reports, newspaper articles, & twitter slams tag back to.) So even if I could I probably wouldn’t. But I’d report in the comments so the #KHive folks would have the facts to fight with. I have seen a clip – which of course I can’t find again – of Kamala firmly stating that she supports Native sovereignty. Evidence of that is kinda of a piece and a piece there. For example she’s not messing with sovereignty by putting Natives in the M4A plan, she’s fully funding the healthcare provisions in the treaties. Or that piece above where she specifically says an appointed judge is a “no” because he rules anti-sovereignty. But that sort of thing doesn’t make for good tweets – needs too much background. sigh.
Saturday Meese
72 going up to 88 with rain here in Saugerties NY.
Was glad to see this
Puerto Rico
Good for Cuomo! I saw that Rep. Adam Schiff introduced a bill in the House to create a domestic terrorism crime. I have the story about it up in a tab but haven’t read it yet. Until it becomes a crime to target people because of who they are, white nationalists will be treated gently. It will not go anywhere because it attacks the Republican Party’s deplorable base but it puts down an important marker. And he can reintroduce it in the 117th Congress and we will get it signed into law when President Harris takes office.
Good morning, meeses! Saturday …
It is 63 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 81. Mostly sunny but chance of thunderstorms later in the evening.
The headlines seem to suggest that Israel will regret being Donald Trump’s poodle. I am pretty sure that is faux anger and that the majority of pro-Israeli politicians are just fine with an ally punishing someone who they also disagree with. Rep. Tlaib pointed out that the last time a House member was denied entry to a country was a black representative – from Michigan – blocked from apartheid South Africa. Nice company you are keeping, Bibi!
I am going to pass on doing a Fighting Back post this week. The House is in recess and the Senate Democrats are in charge of the Weekly Democratic Party address and have put forward Senator Bob Casey pounding his tiny fists saying that “thoughts and prayers are not enough, it is time for action” related to gun violence. Well, saying that “thoughts and prayers are not enough” is also not enough and I am not going to post another weak call to action. I know we have a minority in the Senate and I know that there is a Republican president* in the White House but can’t we do something other than bloviate? One silver lining – Susan “Coathanger” Collins’ Senate race has been changed from Leans Republican to Toss-up. And Joni Ernst is going to have to defend her president, who is becoming very unpopular in the state of Iowa, in order to hold her seat. Collins, Ernst, Gardner, Tillis, McSally, maybe Cornyn. Anyway, if something strikes me as important or if I get over my peeve at Senate Democrats I might post something tomorrow. But not today.
See all y’all later!
Kamala2020 up from DigitusImpudicus
Up & watching the news. Today: my usual Saturday plan of groceries & the gym. Got so many contributions yesterday that I met my goal — will raise it now. I’m currently the top fundraiser & the one with the most unique contributors. WooHoo! Today’s agenda: buy groceries & go to the gym.
{{{another}}} – glad you made your goal! Top fundraiser with most unique (?) contributors is good. moar {{{HUGS}}}
It was 70 at dawn but already almost 80 and the house is closed up. We’re heading for somewhere in the 90s again with heat index just over 100 towards the end of the day. sigh. We’ve been having an unusual-for-us monsoonal pattern of afternoon clouds threatening (but mostly not delivering) rain which is not helping my electricity generation at all. We got 13 KWHs yesterday (m-t-d is 215) so it’s good the A/C didn’t kick on at all. I don’t think I’m gonna be that lucky today so I hope we get at least 18. More would be nice, of course.
I’m trying not to let things weigh on me. I’m doing what I can think of (& can afford). It will have to do. Gonna tour the internets and get coffee. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}