Yesterday, I learned that Deb Haaland who was Interior Secretary under Biden is running for Governor of New Mexico. Katie Porter has already endorsed her. Now I have too (for what that’s worth.)
I’m an unpaying subscriber to Andy Borowitz, and that means that, at least on Sundays, I don’t get the whole story. Last Sunday, his post was a letter from Richard Nixon to Elon Musk from hell. I was able to read his introduction, but nothing of the letter. I thought at the time, “I’ll bet that’s priceless.” Well, Robert Reich certainly thought so. He shared the whole thing. It’s NSFW, as you’d expect from Nixon. Enjoy it.
This is John Pavlovitz at his most powerful. Giving us permission to hold individual voters accountable. Not that we need it from him – unless we are not yetgiving it to ourselves. Sometimes good people are held back by also being nice people. We can stop that now. (Healso dais, in a separate post, that it’s OK to be exhausted.)
The F* News also had a lot to say, in this case mostly about litigation and the ways in which both very different sides are reacting an responding to it. Given that in the current administration, and the makeup of the House and Senate, any halfway decent national news is more likely to come from the courts than from anywhere else, concentrating on the courts is probably a good idea. I mean, you’ll get the poisonous news that way too,but with a potential antidote as well
Yesterday was the first day this year that the sun waited until 5:30 to set. So I stayed with Virgil till closing. I checked out there at 3:26 and made it home before 5 pm (20 minutes before, to be precise.) That does include putting the wheelchair into the back of the car, putting my car key back on its keychain, grabbing something for dry mouth, putting the driver’s license away, starting the usb sound player, switching glasses and grabbing sunglasses, etc., before leaving the parking lot, as well as stoplights and fire trucks along the way, and changing glasses again at home. Yes, I know trifocals exist, but I loathe them almost as much as I loathe contacts. We had an unusual day with cribbage today – all the best hands were in the cribs. That started with Virgil getting two double runs of three in the crib on the first hand he dealt, and just continued. It wasn’t every deal, but often enough to defy the odds, and pretty evenly distributed between us. Virgil’s pretty good but was having some back pain. He plans to see a medical person about it when that is possible. He says hi to all. I forgot to take out my home-frozen meal from the freezer yesterday or even this morning, so I had to thaw it in the microwave before I could heat it in the microwave. (When people get older, they start thinking more about the hereafter. I often go into a room and ask myself “Now, what am I here after?”) Also I should mention that I saw some advice for all of us to freeze our credit with all three bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) unless we are currently applying for any kind of a loan, secured (mortgage or car loan) or unsecured. It is free at all three, but Equifax is the easiest one to do it with – the other two tend to route you to paid subscription signups when you are looking for the free one – so Experian is the only one I have completed. I may need to use a different browser on the others, but I will get it done.
The Contrarian is already so much of a brain trust that I seldom know whether a given post is written by someone who is a staff member or by a guest expert. Regardless, Michael Podhorzer has a great point here. Labor unions – “civilian” (i.e. non-government workers) labor unions in particular, but also the ones for government employees and for people who are somewhat in between, such as public school teachers and nurses. He goes into detail which I won’t, but I do want to say, let’s not cross any picket lines – including virtual ones. Let’s punish Amazon for firing duly elected union leaders. Let’s penalize Starbucks for their egregious anti-union pushing (they ought to change their name to Ahabs – since that’s who they are more acting like.) King Soopers (which is Kroger) in Colorado has actual picket lines right now. I was willing to cut them some slack because Albertson’s frivolously sued them for deal breaking when the proposed merger failed – I say frivolously because it was the courts which really stopped the merger, as well they should have. But I’m not about to cross a picket line for them. If anyone knows of some I didn’t mention (I know they exist), please share in a comment.
I apologize for this being a video. I first saw it quoted, with a link to BlueSky, which I saved, but which now does not have the transcript of the letter. YouTube at least has that. And the video is not quite three minutes.
Yesterday, I had more than 100 emails come in, so I was overwhelmed even though I started the day with no new emails. I hope this doesn’t keep up. I also lost 3 hours waiting for a grocery delivery (at least when it came it had no substitutions and nothing missing, which helps.) Tomorrow I go to see Virgil. No snow or other potentially dangerous weather is expected. It should be cold, but that’s not a problem. The visiting room is kept so cold I always bundle up anyway. But of course I will check in upon return.
I’m squeezing this Joyce Vance article in today so it won’t spoil Sunday or have to wait for Monday. I hop eit will be helpful (and I hope the same for the next link.)
I previously shared Robert Reich‘s “What You Can Do,” so now that he has a “Revised and Expanded” version up, I thought I should share that as well. If he’s changed his mind about anything, there’s probably a reason, and we should know it.
Wonkette’s Doktor Zoom speaks about things schools are doing or trying to do to protect children from the horrors of the current Administration. Some things are easier to protect kids from than others, of course – somethings are harder that\n others to protect anyone from. But kudos to those who are doing their best.
Yesterday, I got the results of my bone density test and was disappointed but not terrible surprised to learn I have osteoporosis. I have no symptoms, but I do have the early signs, such as loss of height. I’ve taken calcium religiously all of my adult life, which may have slowed it down some. I’m sure my new PCP and I can come up with something which will help. Off topic – the reason I had to so the blood draw at a place which was so hard for me to find was not that the place near me was booked up – it was because the place near me was closed for repairs. That lab expects to reopen well before the next blood draw I’m going to need in early April. (I already made the appointment for that one. Apparently hypo- and hyperthyroidism are related to osteoporosis. Who knew? Probably Nameless and possibly Dave, but anyone else would surprise me.)
From The 19th from Monday, but we have a whole month to reflect. And this is real stories from real people, which IMO is always refreshing even if not always victorious.
The link to Brennan Center should work. After I copied it, I tried it and it worked for me. But since it looks like a blanket link to the site, I’ll mention thet the name of the srticle I had in mind is “Breaking the Law” and that it’s in the category “Checks & Balances.”
I’ve been sitting a few days on proposing a new word to describe the government this administration is doing its best to impose. It isn’t meritocracy – no one involved has the least bit of merit. Oligarchy is closer, but isn’t specific enough. I propose we call it leucandrocracy – rule by white males. Both racism and misogyny are openly vital elements of it, and this term reflects both. Sure, it’s the oligarchs who are being given official government roles. But without the support of white men with grievances, white men terrified of people of color and people of any gender identity other than theirs – whose fear has been transformed into rage, and the rage into hatred, the oligarchs would not be where they are. Perhaps Black History Month – for those of us who celebrate it, could be an opportunity to push this.
Robyn with Wonkette‘s headline asks one heck of a good question here. Another question might be, with ideas like theirs, are they actually even human, or are they demons in human form? She provides a trigger warning for one paragraph and rightly so.
In 1944, the CIA created a written guide for, among others, civilians in occupied territory whose sympathies were with our side – a manual on how to use little sabotages to weaken the Nazis (or other axis powers). This manual has recently gone viral. I checked three sites from which anyone who wants a copy can download it. It’s not very long, especially for a government publication. The one direct from the CIA is a 12-page pdf but most “pages” contain 2 pages of text. The one at Internet Archive is the same. Project Gutenberg is the one which gives you choices on how you want it to look, including Kindle. I generally go for plaintext to a “Notepad” file and then, if I want to keep it, into Word and play with the font and font sizes until I like the way it looks, but you do you.
As much as I would prefer to focus on Black History this month, this from Joyce Vance (and other sources) cannot be ignored. Not the actions of the Apricot Antichrist himself so much as the lack of outrage in response. I realize decent people are exhausted – I am too – but this is no time to sit on our hands. It was only huge public outrage which caused the rescission of the OMB freeze memo, and even then, it was only the memo, not the executive order behind it. I hope that by the time you read this there will have been more outrage. Heather Cox Richardson does too.
As Nameless pointed out, I was raised by cats. Well, Katie Porter was raised by basset hounds. I know that because I’m on her mailing list and on Monday, she sent me puppy pix of Poppy, her (and her kids’) new basset hound. Sorry, you can’t see them unless I forward the email. And yesterday – y’all know that Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post because Bezes would not print her cartoon of all the CEOS handing money bags to The Mango Mandarin. If he thought that was bad … I wonder what he would say to the new one at the bottom of this post (It’s very tall – scroll all the way down.)
Wonkette follows up on the Friday night purge (attempted) of Inspectors General. The letter is a pleasure to read.
This from Robert Hubbell aims to calm and to motivate at the same time. To do so, he quotes two experts with slightly different takes on what to do and where we go from where we are. No reason a person couldn’t pick and choose from both. (After these, he also has some news which may be old news now.) His “daily dose of perspective” photo is IMO the most beautiful one yet. But that may be just me.
Yesterday, I had not only yesterday’s email to deal with, but also Sunday’s and about half of Saturdays still. So what did I do? I attempted to get my sewing machine working, of course. This took most of the day. I had not used it for so many years that I had forgotten how to thread it, both upper and lower. So I went to DuckDuckGo and at least has a stroke of luck with the results. My model number is 3577, and it wasn’t a very popular machine, so no search results showed it. One result showed 3537, and I thought, well, that’s close, maybe they’ll work alike, so I went to that page, by golly, the manual was written for both 3537 and 3577. So I now have a manual. But it then took some time to clean it up – and I didn’t stop to oil it, which I clearly should have. I was able to get two urgent repairs done, but not without breaking a needle, and all the rest will have to wait. And I still need to oil it – but at least this time I covered it. Also most of the email will have to wait. I’ll do my best to at least
I don’t think Robert Reich says anything here that y’all don’t already know. It does provide evidence that we are not overreacting or imagining the horrors of this administration. They really are doing what the Apricot Antichrist said they would. And yet black people, women, Latinx people voted for him. Oh, and seniors too. And the price of insulin for one senior on Medicare had the price of a month’s supply of insulin go up by $772 from December to January (from DU)
As Heather Cox Richardson says, we have all earned a break from last week. Sadly, it’s a break we are not going to get, or not today. This is why I decided to do good-news-only Sundays – it’s the only way I can think of to give us all a tiny break. But this is Tuesday – so that’s over for this week. Instead, here’s news you’re going to need a break from.
Yesterday, the radio opers was Verdi’s Aida, which may be the most performed opera which exists. Certainly it is at the Met, which means it’s had more performances than La Boheme or Carmen. This may be the first time in my life – I don’t remember any other – when I have heard the tenor sang his opening aria the way Verdi wanted it sung – the high note ending on a pianissimo floating away. From the time of Caruso (which is pretty close to the beginning of recorded sound), few tenors have been able to resist the temptation to hit it an hold it forte to show off the high note. The soprano, Angel Blue, reminded me of Leontyne Price in the role. The only other I’ve heard who was as good as those two in the role was Latonia Moore. I believe there is exactly one race of humans and that is homo sapiens, so I don’t believe in radial memory. But it is interesting that all three of those divas are African American
I think I have all good news today – Well, Belle’s may not be exactly good, but it is funny.
A few days old, but it is good news. Besides the speed of getting this into court, there’s a short preview of other court action to come. I’m also linking to Joyce Vance, who has some additional details on what actually happened in the courtroom.
This happened on Tuesday, but was published Wednesday. I just received the link yesterday from JL. As y’all know, I got a very late start yesterday – and had email left over from Friday -and had not found any other good news yet, so I’m using this. I do subscribe to Huff Post, but not to everything, just the “Fringe.”
