Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: December 18th

December 17, 2022 JanF Community 68

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 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 (right before “Leave A Reply”) and use the Pages Tool to view previous pages, shown here with 3 pages of comments available and Page 2 circled.

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14 Comments

  1. Good morning, 26m snow and freezing rain outside my window today. The streets are solid ice so we are not going anywhere today. I was going to set up the house for our Christmas eve party but now I’m on wait and see re what happens with the weather. I’ll bake the desserts anyway and freeze them if we have to reschedule. Best wishes to all.

    • {{{princesspat}}} I hope the streets will be safe for your family to have your party tomorrow. Have a lovely time no matter when it happens. Healing Energy and moar {{{HUGS}}}

  2. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 41 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 64. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    The Omnibus bill passed the House with bipartisan support and government shutdowns will be averted at least until September 2023 – which is also when we hit the debt ceiling limit. Fingers crossed that there is enough Republican attrition between now and then that the House flips back to Democratic control. At least 10 Republican members were in on the January 6th coup plot and three of them were in deep enough to ask tRump for pardons. Fabulist George Santos, the poster child for the lie-to-win Republican Party, may end up charged if some of his lies turn out to be crimes. One wonders if the Republican “moderates” get sick of being in the Party of Hunter Biden’s Laptop and choose to become independents. Lots of different things can happen so I am going to set it aside and concentrate on the Senate confirming good judges.

    Speaking of good judges, what in the heck is NY doing? The governor is given a list of approved judicial candidates and chooses the one most to the right and one who has anti-union and anti-woman rulings. From Mark David Stern at Slate:

    When Chief Judge Janet DiFiore abruptly resigned from New York’s highest court in July, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul got the opportunity to reshape the bench, and to finally end the reign of the conservative majority. Hochul declared that she would seek a nominee who would transform the court into a progressive counterweight to the far-right U.S. Supreme Court.

    On Thursday, however, she did the exact opposite, selecting Judge Hector LaSalle to serve as New York’s top judge. LaSalle is a former prosecutor with a conservative record against abortion, unions, and criminal defendants. If confirmed by the state Senate, he would entrench a reactionary majority that would fight tooth and nail against the priorities of New York progressives.

    Right now, the state’s highest court—which is called the New York Court of Appeals—is sharply divided. DiFiore, the former chief judge, led a bloc of four conservatives that gained notoriety after invalidating Democrats’ congressional map and replacing it with a map favorable to Republicans. (This decision helped Republicans clinch their narrow majority in the House of Representatives.) When DiFiore stepped down due to an ethics scandal, she left the court split between three conservatives, two liberals, and one moderate. So the new chief judge could have either restored the court’s right-wing majority, sat at its ideological center, or led its left flank.

    The Commission on Judicial Nomination gave Hochul seven options across the ideological spectrum, including several liberals. Yet she picked LaSalle, touting the fact that he’d be the first Latino chief judge while ignoring his alarming record. If confirmed, he is all but guaranteed to shore up the right-wing majority. His record as an intermediate appeals court judge demonstrates a deep hostility to the very values that Hochul claimed she wanted to uphold with this appointment.

    Given Democratic governors’ records for playing footsie with Republicans – Cuomo famously championed State Senate Republicans to keep the majority so he would not have to sign progressive legislation – this is not a shock except that Hochul won her own term with the help of the people she is turning her back on. The New York court gave us the Republican House majority and she wants to put them in the position to do more damage. I hope the nomination will be rejected – the country needs New York and California to show that large blue states won’t give an inch to the Republican deadenders. I hope I am missing some nuance, some 12th dimensional chess, but it certainly looks like a bad move.

    In any event, I am done with the news until calendar change day. Then I will grab a box of popcorn to watch the Kevin McCarthy flameout and the ascension of Steve Scalise, a card carrying member of the KKK, to Speaker of the House as the perfect symbol of what the Republican Party has become.

    See all y’all later!

  3. Saturday Meese – spent the whole day in bed yesterday, knocked out with a bad cold. Will head back to bed in a few.

    Puerto Rico

  4. Still insanely cold here — 19 degrees this morning. Planning how many layers for going to Christmas Eve service later. Can’t miss it, the singing and bells and candle light. Made risotto yesterday, will have that for dinner today & tomorrow (and most of next week). Watching the news, got laundry on, not sure what else I’m doing until time to leave for church.

  5. Good Saturday morning, Meese! It’s 9 F. and sunny in Ashbored, after a truly horrible day yesterday. The winds were so high that a tree fell upon a motorist and killed him. Gaia is furious! Poor man.

    Not much wind today. Here’s the un-good news: Back here at the ranch, Dearly drove himself to the hospital because his COPD was so bad he could hardly breathe. Once in the ER, the docs conducted all kinds of tests. The Doc in charge of his case said he wanted to keep Dearly for a couple of nights for the cough and wheezing to clear up.

    Apparently Dearly has tubes stuck all over his arms. He has his cellphone with him and appears quite cheerful. He just texted me to say don’t visit him (he took our only car, but I could get an Uber). He’s going to doze and watch TV. The Washington Commies are playing today.

    So I’ll just stay home, although I may go to the gym (walking through the buildings, not outside). There’s a Christmas Eve dinner from 3 to 5 so I suppose I’ll get dressed up and go to that.

    Wishing everyone a good day at the Pond and I hope no one has to go out today. We’ll have to get our bikinis out of storage by Friday, apparently.

  6. It’s 8 and the windchill is still below 0 but it’s sunny. Yesterday we generated just over 7 KWHs and we’re at 105.64 for the m-t-d. If it stays sunny, we’ll get to/over 110 by end of day.

    Moose wouldn’t let me in when I first logged on so I just read everything & headed for twitter, did a bit and tried again. Obviously it let me in this time. My hands are cold and stiff. Typing is not easy. sigh. But back to twitter. If typing is not easy, that means it takes longer to get stuff done. So. . .

    Merry Christmas to everybody, being y’all will mostly be online – if online at all – before I am tomorrow. Enjoy the Eve thereof. One doesn’t have to be Xtian to enjoy the music, lights, food, and smaltzy movies. ???? Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  7. Good morning, 47 degrees with wind and rain melting the snow and ice, yay! The sound of ice chunks sliding off the roof woke me up this morning, so if the melting continues our Christmas eve party is going to happen. Busy day, so time to put on my festive elf clothes and start prepping food for dinner. Best holiday wishes to all.

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