Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: April 3rd through April 9th

April 3, 2016 JanF Community 112

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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28 Comments

  1. Good morning, meese! Friday …

    It’s cold and won’t warm up until May. I am not going to look at the news until later because I need a break.

    Yesterday afternoon I watched President Obama host a town hall at the University of Chicago Law School. The main thing he wanted to talk about was the SCOTUS nomination and how Republicans are destroying our democracy (to paraphrase). As usual, he was brilliant. When the transcript is released, I will post it on the FP but here is the video if you have time to watch:

    See all y’all later!

  2. Good morning, Meese, happy Freya’s day! It’s partly cloudy here in NoVa, with a pale blue sky, white clouds, and pale sunshine. Current temperature is 42 F., going up to 55 F. later today.

    Finished reviewing the proof of Long, Long Way to Run, so that will be out of the way. Today I hope to work some more on the May Fiction Cafe story. Granddaughter called yesterday from Seattle to thank me for the birthday story, which she termed “very educational.” She hadn’t known about the “Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest” mnemonic before reading the story. We had a wonderful chat—wish I could go to Seattle and see her in person.

    Yesterday I went into an eye-bulging fury because of Charles Lane’s and E. J. Dionne’s mansplaining in their WaPo op-eds that Hillary is “unloved” and needs to be “very concerned” because St. Bernard is making inroads on her path to the nomination. Nearly wrote a stinging letter, thought better of it. When I’ve written letters before they were ignored, so why should I waste my time? Instead, I’ll try to volunteer for Hillary’s campaign after Labor Day, if they set up an office in my area. I am NOT driving through horrendous traffic for an hour and a half every day to get to Alexandria, where her campaign HQ has been set up.

    Will check in later to see how everyone’s doing. Have a good day, all!

    • It is not worth getting livid over. The mainstream media has one goal: to keep the horserace going to sell more papers. WaPo started the sh*tstorm over Qualifications because of their headline which did not match the actual reporting. Lots of clicks, money in the bank.

      People don’t like Hillary because she is not exciting. She is competent (and qualified) but she will never EVER be Barack Obama. She will always suffer in comparison to him … and she knows it. But we don’t need exciting, we need competent and clear headed and rooted in Democratic Party values.

      Here is a Paul Krugman column as a palate cleanser:

      … going on about big banks is pretty much all Mr. Sanders has done. On the rare occasions on which he was asked for more detail, he didn’t seem to have anything more to offer. And this absence of substance beyond the slogans seems to be true of his positions across the board.

      You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.

      This morning my local newspaper had a story about the current dustup. It included an absolutely awful photo of Hillary Clinton looking like she was screaming … bulging eyes and all. Then a photo of Bernie Sanders looking professorial as he explained something (I am not sure how they got that photo … I only see him yelling!). Screaming harridan versus kindly old man. It will only get worse so steel yourself for it.

      I will try to find something that I can do for the campaign but it can’t involve phone calls. What ever happened to the old envelope stuffing jobs?

      • It’s pretty much a given that you can tell the “slant” of an article about Hillary by the picture at the top. If it’s a “negative” picture, don’t bother to read the article.

        • Bfitz, I was trying to remember which Town Hall Hillary spoke at where she said that she admired both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton for their speaking styles and said something about how she was not going to be exciting but was doing a job interview (or something like that). It was a really good reply and I wanted to find it because it sums up her style.

          The photos were chosen by our HatesHillary right-wing rag (is that redundant?) and was not part of the AP story. I didn’t read the story because I already knew what had happened but if I skip all stories that have particularly unflattering photos of Hillary on them, I won’t read much.. :)

  3. Gray but no rain. If we’re not going to have gorgeous blue skies, the least it could do is rain.

    Can’t stop watching the SW: Rogue One trailer. o.m.g. Another female-led story. And Forrest Whitaker should be in everything.

    Ok, I’m going to ride my bike tomorrow. No, really.

    • Rogue One looks great! I love the idea of a story set in the timeline of the original 3 movies (I guess this is just before the original one or something) – can’t wait!

  4. TGessIF Meeses. It was 35 at dawn (when I woke up, 15 minutes late), is 43 now and heading for upper 60s although I’ll bet on lower 70s as my reporting “station” has consistently underpredicted our highs. And sunny, which is good. Soloing today so will be busy even if I don’t manage to clear anything else off my desk. Only really good thing about soloing is I can have music in the office. The other office person is also an honest-to-goodness “classical” musician (plays concert harp – on the rare occasions the local symphony does things that include it she plays in the symphony, otherwise it’s weddings and such) and cannot stand the sound of much of anything coming through the computer speakers. I’m not so picky :) Anyway, need to get to it. Have a lovely day/weekend folks. {{{HUGS}}}

  5. Morning all! It’s a lovely crisp spring morning here, heading to the high 70’s I think. My two class week is over, next week is my last teaching week, hurrah! I still have to write and grade the exam, but the student services people will proctor it, I’ll just have to go by and pick them up for grading.

    It’s been very interesting reading various black twitter posters’ perspective on the 94 crime bill that Bill Clinton got into a kerfuffle about with a BLM protestor. While I wish he could have dealt with the protestor more in dialogue, I can imagine seeing that person with a sign calling your wife a murderer (when she didn’t even vote for the bill!) may have pushed him off of civility a bit. And there’s something of a generation gap in the black community about the bill, I guess, from what I’m reading – older people who were there remember the terrible crime rates and drug problems and the calls for action, which younger people really don’t know about. On the other hand, the bill’s sentencing provisions (which were pushed by Republicans as I recall) have had terrible consequence for young black men in those communities, so the negatives are a lot clearer than the positives seen back then. As always, complex legislation addressing complex issues doesn’t make for accurate campaign fodder most of the time.

    Hillary’s interview with Matt Lauer that I just watched was great, and apparently, as the great Propane Jane said on twitter, Bernie must have had that restorative nap as he’s finally said he will support her in the general election if she’s the nominee. He’s a short tempered old fool, a narcissist who shares Trump’s shallow understanding of policy generally. I can’t wait for him to exit the stage.

    Have a great day everyone!

    • I saw Bill’s “kerfuffle” and thought he handled it very well. He didn’t shout her down, say nasty things about her, deny that there is a problem, or have her forcefully removed. He even calmed the crowd when they were starting to get a little P.O.’d at the protester. What he did do was give history lessons and bring up the facts, not so much for the protester who was refusing to listen, but for everyone in the crowd and who would later watch the event who might not know them. He didn’t let the “assumption of guilt” stand. And he took the Black Lives Matter meme further out – he addressed Hillary’s work exposing “white flight” schools, getting kids out of adult prisons, health care for kids, then took it ever further out to Africa where she’s worked on, among many other things, getting affordable HIV-AIDs drugs to the communities so stricken by AIDs. (I’ve seen some “pushback” on that I disagree with – some folks saying he was deflecting from the point. If Black Lives Matter, then they matter all around and not solely reflecting an admittedly very racist criminal justice system that incarcerates and kills way too many Black people. However, I’m willing to listen to those more “on the ground” who disagree with me.)

    • Ed Kilgore wonders why Bill Clinton is trying to justify a law that he really does not need to own: it was, as Ed called it, a “bipartisan legislative Christmas tree” and not reflective of Clinton’s worldview:

      Most accounts of yesterday’s incident and of the broader controversy over the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 refer to that law as “Clinton’s crime bill.” It was not viewed that way at the time. The “Crime Bill,” as everyone called it, was the ultimate bipartisan legislative Christmas tree, driven by a decades-long rise in violent crime that reached its peak in the early 1990s. If there was any one “father” of the bill, it wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Joe Biden, who maneuvered the unwieldy mess through the Senate. And by the time the final votes were cast, the Crime Bill wasn’t “about” mandatory sentencing or prison construction or any of the other provisions we’re talking about today; it was a gun-control bill that threw federal dollars at liberal social programs like “midnight basketball” along with Clinton’s pet COPS initiative to put 100,000 more police officers on the street.

      Yes, some really bad things came from it. Law making is an ugly thing and to get some things, you give up others. But defending every aspect of it 20 years later is both unnecessary and unhelpful. Bill Clinton needs to remember that the purpose of Hillary’s campaign is not to defend his own presidency but to make the case for hers. We are not re-electing Bill Clinton (as least, I’m not) – we are electing Hillary Rodham Clinton, a woman formed by her life experiences, one of which is being married to a former president. That does not define her and who she is and he needs to not give them grist for their mill.

  6. Good morning, 48 and sunny in Bellingham. I’ve got another fun day with the grand kids ahead….the girls will be here for lunch, a visit to the Mod Socks store, and then an afternoon of playing Monopoly. My creaky knees have had a workout this week!

    It’s so nice to be with our grandson and know that he’s finally recovering from his injury. He’s very relieved to be able to start rebuilding the strength in his leg and is starting to feel like his life will be normal again.

  7. It’s 6:10 a.m. this Saturday morning and completely dark here in NoVa. I think it rained, but I don’t see any of the snow they were bragging about. Woke up an hour and a half ago, can’t sleep. (Yawn.) Think I’ll make a cup of tea and get the newspaper.

    Later, all!

  8. Good morning, meese! Saturday …

    It is 19 degrees in Madison on its way up to 39. Partly cloudy skies are in the forecast. Yesterday it was cold and snowy … still waiting for spring.

    There was some good news yesterday from Wisconsin. First, a Dane County judge ruled that the Right to Work law passed and signed by Scott Walker is unconstitutional:

    Three unions filed the lawsuit last year shortly after Walker signed the bill into law. Right-to-work laws prohibit businesses and unions from reaching agreements that require all workers, not just union members, to pay union dues. Twenty-four other states have such laws.

    The unions argued that Wisconsin’s law was an unconstitutional seizure of union property since unions now must extend benefits to workers who don’t pay dues. Dane County Circuit Judge William Foust agreed.

    He said the law amounts to an unconstitutional governmental taking of union funds without compensation since under the law unions must represent people who don’t pay dues. That presents an existential threat to unions, Foust wrote.

    “While (union) losses today could be characterized by some as minor, they are not isolated and the impact of (the law) over time is threatening to the unions’ very economic viability,” he wrote.

    It will ultimately be reversed because the state Supreme Court is simply an extension of the Republican legislature and Scott Walker’s administration. But in the meantime, it is a victory – and possibly sets the stage for a federal lawsuit where the judges are not a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

    The second good news comes from that federal judiciary: the 7th Circuit appears ready to rule that the Wisconsin voter id law may indeed be an illegal poll tax and will send it back to the district court for further action. Whether the law could be altered in time for the fall election is still unknown but it starts there. What the ACLU wants is the same override available in some other states – that the voter, in lieu of an id, can sign an affidavit citing an inability to get an id and attest to the fact that they are who they say they are and live where they say they live. Such a law exists in New Hampshire, Idaho, and Texas. That seems sensible. Voter fraud is a felony and signing that affidavit would not be done lightly. But for people who don’t have hundreds of dollars for supporting documentation or the time or wherewithal to get an id (some county’s DMV offices are only open 1 day a month) it may be the only way they can exercise their right to vote.

    See all y’all later!

    • Great news about the right to work law – hope it does end up in the Federal courts and on to either a divided 4-4 Supreme Court or a new liberal majority! As for the voter ID one – I went to college with Frank Easterbrook (nickname Frank Easterbunny), and if he gets this one right, it will be one of the rare opinions of his that has, imo. But hope spring eternal.

      • He is quite taken with himself, isn’t he? I have read a number of his opinions because the 7th Circuit is the place where Wisconsin laws are appealed.

        That panel had Easterbrook and also Diane Sykes, the ex-wife of Milwaukee talk radio bigot Charlie Sykes. She had been a Wisconsin Supreme Court “justice” and was appointed by George W. Bush to the 7th Circuit. I would be shocked if she ruled in favor of allowing Those People to vote but Rick Hasen (the author of that article) thinks the facts can’t be ignored. Ha!! Facts are ignored all the time by partisan judges! Anyway, better for the case to still be alive than completely dead.

      • Here is another one that I forgot to include: Wisconsin’s partisan gerrymandering scheme will get its day in court:

        A three-judge district court, made up of Democratic and Republican appointed judges, in a 36-page unanimous opinion, rejected Wisconsin’s attempt to get the case decided in its favor on summary judgment and instead set the case for a trial in late May.

        This would be a big deal even if Justice Scalia were still alive, because the development of the partisan symmetry/efficiency gap in this way could be just what Justice Kennedy wants to see. (Who knows? It may depend upon whether he had wheaties or a croissant for breakfast).

        But now there’s this: if Merrick Garland gets confirmed, or a President Clinton gets a nominee through, it is possible there would be five Justices to embrace a partisan gerrymandering standard even without Justice Kennedy’s vote.

  9. Good Saturday morning, Moosekind! Well, now that daylight has come, the weather seems to have cleared up a little. It’s 35 F. under partly cloudy skies in NoVa, going up to 44 F. later, with another band of snow and rain predicted for tonight.

    Read an article about doing a “Friday afternoon dump” in which you write down absolutely every one of the tasks that you’ve been putting off for ages. In fact, you can start this list Friday morning and keep coming back to it. The person who wrote the article swears it’s a great idea, and that he spends Saturday doing it all and feels wonderful the next day. We’ll see what happens!

    Meanwhile, everyone have a great weekend!

    • Ha!! If I could do all the things on my to-do list in one day, then it would not be a burden. My to-do list grows rather than shrinks.

      A friend once suggested that you start the day choosing 3 things from your massive completely impossible to-do list that you will get done and ignore the rest of it. It does not always work but it usually insures that at least one and sometimes two things will come off your list. Sometimes zero things come off – on Monday I sat down with my short list, poured a cup of coffee and the phone rang with a crisis. The crisis required travel and I am still working through getting the issues generated from it resolved.

      Today, I have my 3 thing to-do list and it is doable but I need to drape something over the stack of projects and problems by my computer so that I am not overwhelmed. :)

  10. Slept in, fairly successfully. Watching local news — we had a lot happen here lately, including sadly, the 1st murder on the UT campus since the Tower shootings. The suspect is a homeless teen, so just sad all around.

    Got to clean house & get on my bike. Don’t need to cook, I have enough breakfast & lunch for next week.

  11. Morning all! It’s a glorious day here in north Florida – a real spring day, cool, clear and bright!

    I was highly amused yesterday about the whole “Bernie Goes to the Vatican” kerfuffle – in case you haven’t read about this, he proclaimed that the Pope had invited him to come to the Vatican next week. Turns out, not so much. I believe this is terrible staff work, not really Bernie’s fault, but man oh man. Here is the best summary I’ve seen of the whole thing – very bad look for his campaign – the NYDaily News headline this morning sums it up – “He Said, See Said” lol

    https://storify.com/Cajsa/sanders-and-the-vatican-story

    New poll out yesterday showing Hillary up by double digits over Bernie in NY, but they’re not that reliable apparently, so hopefully her troops will be getting out the vote up there.

    Opera today is Simon Boccanegra, Verdi and not really a favorite of mine, but the Met broadcast today features the incomparable Placido Domingo, my favorite opera singer, who is in his 70’s but has still got his singing chops in selected roles. You never know when it might be his last time on stage, so I don’t miss an opportunity to hear him now.

    Have a great day everyone!

  12. Good morning, 48 and clear in Bellingham. Our grandson will go home today so our house will be quiet. We enjoy our spring break time with the grand kids, but I suspect we’ll both have a recovery nap this afternoon!

    Ron has been oiling the teak outdoor furniture and tending to the vegetable garden. It’s still to chilly to plant my flower containers, but I’m starting to think about the plant combinations I want to use this year. The biggest challenge will be finding replacements for the plants the deer won’t stop eating. I love the contrast the leaves of Heuchera give to mixed plantings, but the deer just won’t let them grow anymore.

    • Princesspat, when you find out the flowers that deer don’t like, please let us know! My poor English friend, who delights in her garden, has quite given up because of the deer.

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