Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Nov. 8th through Nov. 14th

November 8, 2015 JanF Community 152

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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60 Comments

  1. Good morning, Motley Meese! The week begins …

    It is 33 degrees in Madison WI, on its way up to 55. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

  2. Up for ungodly hour workout. Then church, then the Walk. I’ll be back after, to tell y’all how it went.

  3. Good morning! It’s a sunny, blue-skied day here in NoVa, 44 F. now, heading for a high of 58 F.

    Just had a look at the new version of GOS and all I can say is, “Ugh.” As for the rest of the news, can’t tell yet, having only just got up. Hope it’s less bad than usual. No one came to see the house yesterday, which is hardly surprising, considering the day-long rain. Elder son and Baby did come over, though, so that was nice.

    Ironically, we received our Acceptance letter from Ashby Ponds yesterday, telling us when to pay the 10 percent down payment on our new flat and to stop by the office on Nov. 23. LOL! Not gonna happen. This whole experience has been very educational. It never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t like our house, nor did it occur to me that the floors would be an issue. Well, enough of that. Time to prepare Sunday breakfast for Dearly and me. See you later!

    • My curiousity got the better of me and I peeked at the live GOS 5.0 (I had seen the beta already). Yikes! From the looks of the rec list posts, people seem very unhappy!! When I went in through my old JanF stream it did not look any different but the front page is like being crash landed on another planet. Just like DK 4.0, I am sure it will take people time to adjust to it; some will adapt and some will leave. My first impression: too busy, too many icons, too much stuff unrelated to actually reading a post. I suspect that people said “where’s my blahblahblah link?” and they gave in and put a cutesy icon on the post for it or added some other customization that kind of wrecked the original Theme.

      I am glad for the calm of the Moose Pond.

      The news today is pretty much like the news yesterday. I did not click on a single link related to Trump’s SNL appearance. I did read this entertaining article about Jeb!’s very bad social media week: The Internet Vs. Jeb Bush. One was his diss of the French work week:

      A conservative mocking the French is usually a win, but Jeb is a very unlucky man right now, so his comments set off French Twitter. […] Jeb apologized Tuesday to France–- though it’s not certain if he was serious. Either way, it was not a good look for the Republican presidential candidate – apologizing to the French, of all people, before he’s even elected.

      Ha! The article suggests that social media is like a virtual bumpersticker and one that we can apply to our online selves without having to peel it off and leave a mess when our notions change. It is worth a read.

      I will be leaving shortly for a too-long-delayed work trip so you are in charge. Stay out of trouble!!

      • I poked around the new and improved (?) version of dkos this morning too. Since I’m now an occasional reader it works for me and it doesn’t look any brighter than other sites I read. And reading around made me realize how much I’ve learned about internet ways. If I can find my way anyone can!

        Amen to this…..

        I am glad for the calm of the Moose Pond.

        Thanks everyone!

    • Are you going to keep your house on the market for a while longer Diana? I wish I could do a focused editing of our belongings like you just did. If you decided to stay in your house you’ll have new look.

      • Princesspat, it’s probably going to go off-market until March after this weekend, so we can relax and enjoy life. I must say we are becoming enamored of the uncluttered look; on the other hand, it’s a real nuisance not being able to find anything, and not having a wall calendar. We’re too old and clueless to enter all our dates on our iPhone calendars. So much easier and faster to scribble it in the appropriate block on the wall calendar!

        • Now that you have done the heavy edit unpacking what you want and putting your calendar back on the wall will make you feel at home again.

          I’ve got to finish the repairs we started, then switch to holiday prep mode. I’ll use downsizing as therapy to help me survive the 2016 elections! To my relief I’ve found that hiring some help with the garden and the house is making me feel it’s possible for us to live here for a few more years.

    • You’ve got a lot of emotional and spiritual energy invested in that house. Maybe it was just time to “clean out” and not move out.

  4. Morning all! STILL too warm down here, where is the cooler weather we were promised! Just looked at the NOAA page, and I guess this front will pass through today and bring us heavy rain and lower temps for this week. at last.

    Just took a look at DK5, and I suppose I’ll get used to the busyness of the FP now – I guess that’s the way of modern media, all the links for twitter, etc. I have a Twitter and a Facebook account, but I never use them, although sometimes I check in for news on my games on various Twitter feeds. But I don’t much care for the new font for DKos, althought perhaps the brighter white background will make it easier for folks to read, or something. That’s about as far into it as I got – I just don’t spend much time there any more, outside of reading Denise’s diaries.

    I glanced at the news, and what drew my attention was the announcement (via Twitter, where else) from 30 African-American football players at the University of Missouri that they would not play or otherwise participate in team activities until the university president is fired for failure to take action in the wake of a string of racist incidents on campus. I had not read or hear anything about this terrible racist harrassment, but it’s good to see these young men standing up to be heard – it’s a huge risk for them, I’m sure their athletic scholarships are at risk here (as is the team, this must be at least half the team if not more). I hope there’s some followup. Here’s a link

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2015/11/08/missouri-football-boycott-president/75410254/

    Have a great day everyone!

    • I heard that on the radio in my car this morning. I wonder what their options really are – what kind of contract they signed to get their scholarships.

      I also hope it works out for them.

    • It looks like navigating the comments and comment replies will be the biggest challenge. RonK has a post in draft form so it will be interesting to see how publishing it goes.

  6. Good morning…..43 and partly cloudy in Bellingham today. This article in my local paper makes me smile….elections have consequences!

    Election: Whatcom charter votes could land county in court

    To hear political activists tell it, voters had a clear choice with the charter amendments on the Nov. 3 Whatcom County ballot. The 10 propositions were a lot to digest, but conservatives and progressives tried to boil it down for their supporters.

    Conservatives said to vote “yes” on propositions 1, 2 and 3; vote “no” on propositions 9 and 10.

    Progressives recommended the opposite.

    Taken as a whole, Whatcom voters didn’t take either side’s advice. They voted “yes” on all five, and as a result the county could be headed to court.

    So much for letting the voters decide. I don’t like the attempt to limit voting to district only so I hope the courts do intervene.

    • Most referenda are worded horribly either by accident or design (we had a few here that the Republicans intentionally made complicated).

      I hope the good guys win!

      • Yes, one more reason to get Dems back in charge – the Rs are geniuses at making bad sound good and good sound like OMG they’re coming to get us. It’s part of how they get people to vote against their own interests.

        • We need to be careful how we discuss people “voting against their own interests”. Bernie Sanders used that same phrase in the Democratic Party forum last week and I cringed. What that really says is our own perception of their best interests.

          People don’t vote against their own interests … they vote in the way that they believe supports their best interests. Sometimes it is reflexively voting Republican because of their belief that Democrats will take their guns and shut down their coal mines and arrest them for praying and take their money and give it to the blah people. Sometimes it is voting for the single issue of anti-abortion.

          We need to find better words to talk about this; I know that I would be insulted if someone told me that I was voting against my own interests when I vote to increase my taxes to support a school referendum simply because in their minds the worst thing in the world is a tax increase, not uneducated children.

          We need to get people to understand the choices better and to want, like I do, educated children and protection from gun violence and freedom to express my own religious beliefs and air that I can breathe, clean drinking water and food safety and all the other things that only a functioning government can provide.

          /steps off high horse

          Seriously, people will shut down and stop listening if we tell them that WE know what is best for them. They have to come to that conclusion themselves; many won’t and that is fine, we have enough votes without theirs. Some people think that the way to change people’s minds is to make life so miserable that they have to see the light. But like the fable of the North Wind and the Sun, I personally think that the way to change minds is to win elections and continue to demonstrate what happens when government serves the people. It is not impossible: good government programs like Social Security and Medicare have changed hearts and minds – no one but the most diehard 1%ers want those programs ended. Now we have to make supporting the other good government programs also no brainers.

          We are winning the long war but because we are losing a few important battles right now it is discouraging . Here is a hopeful piece from Stan Greeburg I’ve seen America’s future – and it’s not Republican:

          This Republican race to the political bottom is happening because America’s conservatives are losing the culture wars. The US is now beyond the electoral tipping point, driven by a new progressive majority in the electorate: racial minorities (black and Hispanic) plus single women, millennials (born between 1982 and 2000) and secular voters together formed 51% of the electorate in 2012; and will reach a politically critical 63% next year.

          And each of these groups is giving Clinton, or whoever emerges as the Democratic candidate for the 2016 White House race, at least a two-to-one advantage over a Republican party whose brand has been badly tarnished. […]
          America is emerging as racially blended, immigrant, multinational, multicultural and multilingual – a diversity that is ever more central to its political identity. We are not talking here about trends, but profound demographic changes accompanied by a dramatic shift in values. They have produced a country where racial minorities form 38% of the population, and 15% of new marriages are interracial. One in five global migrants end up in the US, and thus nearly 40% of the populations of New York and Los Angeles are foreign born, as are 50% of Silicon Valley’s engineers and more than half of US Nobel laureates. […]

          … the culture war ignited by Rove is a fire that requires ever more toxic fuel – it only works by raising fears of the moral and social Armageddon that would follow a Democratic victory. … [the] intensifying battle for values has also left the Republicans with the oldest, most rural, most religiously observant, and most likely to be married white voters in the country.

          Those people represent about 25% (and dropping) of the population and soon no one will be able to run, even in the states, on stopping that “moral and social Armageddon” – because the economic stability and personal freedom that actually follows Democratic victories will be appealing to those who are left.

          • Jan, I think you’re right when you say it turns people off to tell them they’re voting against their own best interests. You make very good points here. Going to keep those in mind from now on.

          • I didn’t mean to come off all sanctimonious about this but it is something that troubles me because the words we use matter. We can feel sympathy for their plight and wish that they would see things more clearly and understand a little better about the possible outcomes of their choices but they really think that they are voting for their best interests.

            I expanded on my (already oversized!) comment because it is a BHD for me. One of my early political blogging mentors helped me to understand why that construct was wrong. I sometimes find myself falling into that trap and it is good to revisit it to remind my own self.

            The myth of “they are voting against their own best interests”

            It is okay to say “I wish they could see what I see: that voting for Matt Bevin might actually kill their sick kid” or “Perhaps all the options were not clear and that led to overlooking a consequence of that person being elected”. But the bare “voting against one’s best interest” is a myth.

          • You are correct about that phrase and I never use it when talking to someone I think is doing that. I try to go where their head/heart is – frequently quoting “scripture” right back at them and sometimes telling them of my family’s issues with one thing or another. Sometimes just a fact they hadn’t thought of (like more than 50% of people on food assistance are little kids). Sometimes it works, mostly it doesn’t, but I don’t start off trying to antagonize them. :)

          • Thank you for sharing that Jan.

            This is so key:

            The US is now beyond the electoral tipping point, driven by a new progressive majority in the electorate: racial minorities (black and Hispanic) plus single women, millennials (born between 1982 and 2000) and secular voters together formed 51% of the electorate in 2012; and will reach a politically critical 63% next year.

          • It is important to remember that it is not just people of color and second generation Americans having no place in the Republican Utopia … women, secular progressives, millenials who are marrying who they love regardless of race, color, creed, or gender (!). We are the 63%. That is a huge number and gives me great hope.

  7. High today was supposed to be 57 but it’s 60 right now – sunny which is nice for electricity generation – on the downhill slide to an overnight low of 33. That’s the closest to freezing we’ll have gotten so far this year. In the “old normal” we’d get our first hard frost sometime in October. Not so much in the “new normal” – which I guess is good since there’s now a 6- to 8-week chunk out of the middle of the growing season for drought and heat. Girding my loins here in the quiet of the Moose Pond before heading over to see if I can find anything a the new and improved GOS :)

    Hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the weekend. {{{HUGS}}}

  8. The walk was nice. I posted 2 pictures at the orange place, and on Facebook. I’m really tired, going to bed soon – 2 days in a row of walking 5 miles. Oh, and insomnia.

  9. Good Monday morning Meese

    32 here in Saugerties going up to 59.

    Having my coffee, scanning the news, preparing for school.

    Am showing Jesus Camp to discuss fundamentalism in my first class. In the second class we are watching “La Operacion” (the Operation) which documents the sterilization of one third of Puerto Rican women.

    Pretty heavy day.

    Coach is standing behind Missouri players:

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/sec/2015/11/09/missouri-coach-gary-pinkel-concerned-student-1950-football-protest/75438840/

    • This is an amazing story and I am still reading the details. I heard on my drive yesterday about the terrible conditions on campus for black students. Hey, it’s Missouri, home of Ferguson and whites-only justice in St. Louis County … hardly a shock that their 93% white campus would harbor a lot of racists.

      I have always thought that athletes, because of their unique position in American culture, would also be uniquely positioned to make a strong statement. I still shake my head that the black players on the Washington DC NFL team are just fine playing for a team whose name is a racial slur. From that article:

      Missouri’s players are showing a great amount of pride and courage to draw the line at using their athletic talents to promote a school whose leadership, they believe, has failed their fellow students.

      My concern about this is that Missouri racists get even more unhinged and target black students even more and now the players. I guess we will find out how solid the protest is next Saturday when BYU visits for a Mizzou home game to be played at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City (instead of on campus).

      • Writing about the local and campus history of racism for BKos tomorrow – I don’t know if I can cut and paste it to here though.

        • Most of it will crosspost fine: just not images and videos. If you want to post what you have, I will go Over There and scrape the rest of it off the page and update the post. if that is okay with you. The only way to crosspost now is to compose the original post using a non-DK tool like Microsoft Word and copy it from there in both places … once it is pasted in the DK5 composing screen, it loses many of its features. :(

          You could also compose it here and copy it there. That works (I tested it) but you would not have access to the DK image library, you would have to use Flickr or Photobucket.

          Let me know what you do … I would really like to see it here!!

          • I am actually looking at some fascinating history – which popped up when I started researching MU.

            I have the images in photobucket already so can transfer them .

            Will post it here. with a few minor changes – if I need help will email you.

        • You might have to do a quick addendum. Quickest time from “protest” to “action”. Either the president knew he was in the wrong and didn’t want to have to defend himself and his actions or some sports-minded alumni got ahold of the curators and forced the issue.

  10. Good morning, meese! Monday …

    It is 31 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 56. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    I am fascinated by the Ben Carson phenomenon. He basically has been embellishing his personal history to make a more attractive narrative for his books. Kevin Drum nails it:

    [The psychology test story] seemed like a strange story for Carson to invent, and it turns out he didn’t. He took a story he recalled from his Yale days and then added a bunch of bells and whistles to make it into a proper testimonial [to the power of God].

    That works fine for a book written as an autobiography/inspirational but people (should!) expect their political candidates to have a closer relationship to the truth. That the front runner in the GOP primary considers truth optional should come as no surprise.

    Good lord! I have been trying to not make this personal but JHC on a popsicle stick, does Bernie Sanders have no mirror??? From a Meet the Press appearance:

    “I think it might be a better idea, I know it’s a crazy idea, maybe we focus on the issues impacting the American people and what candidates are saying rather than just spending so much time exploring their lives of 30 or 40 years ago. And I think the reason that so many people are turned off to the political process has a lot to do with the fact that we’re not talking about the real issues impacting real people.”

    Yes, the real issues like who was first to be against the Keystone XL and who was first to support marriage equality and the awfulness of a vote taken a dozen years ago, since repudiated, and maybe who was a Republican 40 years ago? Meh.

    See all y’all later!

  11. Good frosty Monday, Moosekind! It’s 32F. here in NoVa under partly cloudy skies, going up to 57F. today. The top of Dearly’s red pickup truck is white with frost and even the mulch bed in front is iced with white. I’m wearing a sweater over my jersey.

    Appalled by the weekend’s news, both domestic and foreign. It’s chilling that airport security was infiltrated by Daesh in Sharm El-Sheikh to plant a bomb on that plane. When I think of the people on that doomed plane, I feel sick of the world. In fact, when I think of the refugees everywhere and the racism here at home, I feel sick of the world. I suppose all we can do is tend our own patch and try to volunteer here, vote there, and contribute financially to alleviate the misery if we can.

    Still repelled by the new look of GOS. Speaking of Web sites, Jan, may I ask you a question? I hate my Web site. The comment section, which I naively thought might be used by people to say what they thought of that month’s story, has been horrifically spammed. I want to create a new Web site with Wix or Weebly without a comment section. Problem is, I like the name of my current Web site, which is goddessfiction.com. It expresses the nature of what I write. Can I use the same name for the new one?

    Wishing a good day to all!

    • You can’t just turn off the comment section? That’s too bad. Here we have something called Akismet that protects our site against spam but we can also turn off comments on a per-post basis.

      There are two pieces to a web site: the domain name and the hosting.

      You own the domain name goddessfiction.com and you can point that anywhere you want. Right now, your domain is pointing to the hosting for your code for your current web site. So if you point it to a different host or a different platform on the same host, you will not lose anything.

      Have you considered WordPress? Most hosting comes with multiple free WordPress implementations. So with our hosting, we got motleymoose.net and also a WordPress database for our archives, archive.motleymoose.net. We also have another domain name motleymoose.com that points to our motleymoose.net site. So you could have a bunch of different domains pointing at your words!

      Is Wix or Weebly something you would do yourself or would you have your web guy do it for you?

      • Thanks, Jan, I’m so relieved to know that! GoDaddy owns the something. Is it the Web host?

        Wix and Weebly are do-it-yourself sites. I think I’d rather try it myself rather than pay him to do it. Money is very tight after all the upgrades we’ve done to the house. My current site looks very peculiar to me and I haven’t been happy with it from day 1.

        As for WordPress, um, I’d rather not. It puts me so through so much misery. Just now I had to log in again. Frequently I have to clear all my Web data in order to log in here and comment, and of course that affects all the other sites I use.

        There are about 300 comments, all spam, on my site and I can’t see any way to get rid of them except by tediously deleting them one by one. I don’t have time to do that. I’ve tried putting checkmarks against the comments and then doing “Bulk Action, Delete,” and then “Apply,” but it never works. On my next site I’m going to have NO comment facility enabled at all.

        • GoDaddy can be both the domain registrar (the place that keeps track of your ownership of the name) and your hosting (where your web site code resides). Sometimes people use the same place, sometimes they use different places. They do NOT have to be together.

          Do-it-yourself sounds perfect for your situation. You do not have eCommerce needs (all your sales are done at Amazon) and you don’t have a lot of moving parts. Maybe GoDaddy provides free tutorials for using those tools that will get you started. I agree with you that you don’t need the power of WordPress because in many cases it has too many options.

          Good luck! Feel free to ask me any questions you may have as you proceed. I am always glad to help my moosekin.

  12. About DK5: There can’t have been anyone over 50 on the design team. The tiny, pale font is…annoying.

    The walk was fun. It was only 2-ish miles, maybe because of all the other stuff going on in town. Loved seeing the best congressman ever, Lloyd Doggett & getting my picture. You’d think with 2 exercise sessions yesterday, I’d have slept last night. And you would be wrong. Sigh.

    My brother doesn’t want to get together for Thanksgiving, doesn’t want to be on the road with all the traffic. But he does want to either hand me down a Mac or buy me one. I can’t blame him on the travel thing — there were 2 fatal accidents overnight in Austin & we’re heading for a record year in that regard. But I’d rather have Thanksgiving with him than a shiny new computer.

    Eating breakfast & wondering if I’ll ever sleep again.

    • THIS!! “There can’t have been anyone over 50 on the design team”. It is the same thing that happened when DK3 gave way to DK4. One of these days they will have to, by virtue of aging, have people on the team who have old eyes. Until then, I feel for your pain although I will not actually feel it because I don’t read there!

      Someone also said that the sans serif font made it difficult to read and that there is too much spacing between each letter. You can increase the font size on your browser but you can’t make it darker or change the proportions or add serifs.

      One of the reasons we chose a serif font for the moose is because it is easier to read … there is less ambiguity and our brains discern the words more readily.

      • You can make your own comments darker by bolding them, but you can’t do a dang thing about reading other people’s comments. And of course you can’t do anything about the font. It’s just serious eyestrain.

        • I figured out that it is based on something called Calibri which is the default Word font. But it is lighter and the spacing is not the same … there is less spacing between the words which does not help readability.

          Our font here is called Droid Serif at 14pt.

      • Jan, you are absolutely right that a serif font is easier to read than sans serif. It’s how we learn to read as children. Reading sans serif text causes serious eyestrain. When I did resumes, I used a serif font (Times New Roman) for the text and a sans serif font (Arial) for the headings, and it looked fine.

        • It used to be that courts required Times New Roman for all briefs. I think it was for readability as well as consistency (can you imagine having to read a brief in Comic Sans and taking it seriously??). I think that changed a few years ago because I see some of my clients use different fonts now. Now I am curious and will go dig up the rules.

          We use sans serif here at the Moose for the headings. It makes them stand out and they function not so much “text” as borders and markers.

  13. omg, y’all have to check out the google doodle about Hedy Lamarr — to shows her scientific contributions and well as the Hollywood stuff, it is sooooooo cool!

  14. 32 at dawn in Fay., AR – already 47 and heading for 62. Sunny so far. I gave up and turned on the furnace before I went to bed (although it didn’t actually kick on until 0345, yes, it woke me up). One of these days I may also give up on manually dealing with it and get a programmable thermostat. Maybe they even make one these days I can figure out how to program. :)

    I hear ya Diana about being sick of the world – and yes, all we can do is tend our own stuff, do what we can in community locally and online (the main reason I stay at DK is community), and vote. And I don’t like DK5 either although I did spend some time yesterday figuring out how to navigate in it. Hurts my eyes. sigh. The rest is just getting used to it, like we did with DK2, DK3, and DK4.

    Hope everyone has a lovely day. {{{HUGS}}}

  15. Good morning, 41 and cloudy in Bellingham this morning, and I’ve got to get busy moving all the books and decorative stuff so the carpet guys can go to work. I’ll be happy when it’s done, but I’m dreading the process!

    We went to the new Spielberg movie, Bridge of Spies, yesterday and then enjoyed a crock pot dinner when we got home. I’m glad RonK is expanding his cooking skills :)

    http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/bridge-of-spies-2015

  16. The Mizzou president resigned:

    University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe resigned today amid protests on campus.

    Wolfe made the announcement at a Board of Curators meeting at the Columbia, Missouri, university.

  17. Morning all! Biggest news – the Missouri president has resigned in the wake of all the criticism from students, faculty and staff over his handling of this terrible racist harrassment at the University. Let’s hope it leads to some real change there.

    I read about Hedy Lamarr just now after wondering about the Google doodle – that is so unbelievably cool, that she co-invented “frequency hopping”. And so typical that the US military in WWII dismissed it as an idea – I hope some of those men were around still 20 years later when the idea finally did get adopted. Looking at pictures of her, her beauty is astounding to me – but it probably kept men from taking her ideas seriously at all, except for her partner in the invention.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2015/11/09/actor-inventor-hedy-lamarr-is-todays-stunning-animation-the-greatest-google-doodle-yet/

    Have a great day everyone!

  18. Good morning, meese! Tuesday …

    It is 31 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 56. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a pimple on the buttcheeks of the federal court system, ruled not only against President Obama’s DACA/DAPA executive order but against the district court judge who freed Albert Woodfox. The good news on the DACA/DAPA case is that now the Obama Administration can appeal to the Supreme Court and have time to get into the queue for this court term. There is no good news on the Woodfox ruling: he will remain incarcerated until another trial determines his fate.

    GOP circus rolls into Milwaukee tonight with an 8 person debate field. I wonder if the Carson v Trump death match that has been predicted will finally play out. Carson showed more animation over his serial exaggeration (it affects book sales!!) than he has over any other aspect of his “candidacy”.

    See all y’alls later!!

      • She was speaking Swahilit – apparently that offended the woman who attacked her.

        Asma Jama sat chatting with her family in a booth at the Coon Rapids Applebee’s, a glass of cranberry juice just set before her. A few minutes later, she was in an ambulance and bleeding, her lower lip split in two.

        That was a week ago. As Jama waited for her pasta Alfredo, a woman at a nearby booth smashed a beer mug in her face.

        The reason? Jama had been speaking Swahili with her family.

        “I [can’t] believe after all these years somebody hit me because I’m different,” Jama said. “Somebody hit me because I was speaking a different language.”

        The attack left cuts on Jama’s face and a deep gash on her lip.

        Jodie Burchard-Risch, 43, and her husband had been sitting in the booth next to Jama, who was with her cousins and nieces. The couple became upset when they heard Jama and her family conversing in a foreign language, according to a criminal complaint.

        Jama said the couple told them to “go home.” They said that “when you’re in America you should speak English.”

        Jama, an ethnic Somali, came to Minnesota in 2000 from Kenya. She speaks three languages: English, Swahili and Somali.

        “I’m home,” she told Burchard-Risch at the Applebee’s. “I can speak English, but we choose to speak whatever language we want.”

        http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/11/06/applebees-attack-victim

        • I am going to lay blame for this at the feet of those who have given people permission to let their freak flags fly. The Republican Party with its birthism and racism and nativism … their current candidates who incite anger against people who are Not Like Them. The woman who hit her probably has a GoFundMe account set up to pay her legal bills and a million defenders on Twitter and the right wing blogs.

  20. Good morning, Meese! It’s 49 F. on a rainy gray morning here, going up to 58 F. later on. Woodstove weather! I want to make Mediterranean Seafood Stew for dinner tonight if I can but find the tinned tomatoes, which have been packed away somewhere.

    Said I wasn’t going to watch another Rethug debate but I don’t know, I might watch the first hour. After that I’ll be asleep. Wonder who’s going to be the last man standing—Trump or Carson?

    Must get dressed and ready to drive my neighbor to school. Can’t have her getting soaked by walking in the rain. She and Miss Pink Cheeks were here for tea yesterday and had a great time telling silly jokes. Today I’ll make oatmeal cookies for tea as the cake is now gone. Wishing all at the Pond and Beyond a good day!

    • I think it will be Trump left standing out of those two. Carson is really only in it for book sales … no one can convince me otherwise. But Trump wants to be king of the world. Here is an interesting article from James Wolcott at Vanity Fair: How Donald Trump Became America’s Insult Comic in Chief

      Donald Trump’s quest to become president of the United States as a stepping-stone to emperorship and eventual godhood is clearly a new viral strain of performance art, a vanity production with innovative, popular appeal, so let’s examine its tooth marks. It feeds off too many swamp-brain paranoias and bigotries to qualify as a lightweight satirical put-on. […]

      Can Donald Trump, running on a platform of free-floating hostility, possibly win the nomination and then usher in the End of Days by taking the presidency? Reason and precedent would argue no, but we are in uncharted postmodern territory now.

      I think he can win the nomination but it is unlikely that a guy with as high of unfavorables as he has can win the presidency. Republican primary voters want the craziest person in the race. The remaining people in the country have better taste.

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