Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: May 8th through May 14th

May 8, 2016 JanF Community 117

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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33 Comments

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

    It is 41 degrees in Madison WI, on its way up to 72. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

    • I listened to it live. It will be considered one of his best speeches ever. His words on voting were strong and I have seen parts of that in other speeches. I sense it will be how he wades into the 2016 election season.

      By the way, the Unicorn Wing of the Democratic Party will not be happy with it. But they probably didn’t watch because they can’t get past how President Obama is a corporate sellout baby-killer JustLikeBush.

      This is the part that was meant (in my opinion) to scorch their butts:

      democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.

      I am going to post the full text of the transcript here when the White House releases it.

  3. By the way, for the Republicans deluding themselves that Trump will have no impact on their downticket races, here is an ad from Arkansas. My guess is that Sen. John Boozman is not endangered in blood red Arkansas, but if this ad finds its way to TV, it will help every Democrat up and down the ticket:

    From George Will, who has made vilifying people who agree to vote for Trump a personal crusade:

    Although Romney won 53­ percent of married women, he received just 44 percent of the total female vote. Today, Trump trails Hillary Clinton among women by 19 points (35 percent to 54 percent), and most women probably do not yet know that he testifies to the excellence of his penis. (“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body.”) Or that his idea of masculinity is to boast about conquests of women “often seemingly very happily married” and that “I have been able to date (screw).” Or that he says “it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” […]

    His metabolic urge to be scabrous guarantees that Republican candidates everywhere will be badgered by questions about what they think about what he says. What they say will determine how many of them lose with him, and how many deserve to.

    You would think that his comments about women would turn men off as well.

      • I hope it works. And that Hillary has long, strong coattails. We lost this seat in the 2010 Obamascare backlash. (And lost our other one to Tom Cotton, goddess help us, in 2012.)

  4. Slept in, had weird dreams but I don’t remember the details. It’s supposed to rain today. Which is fine, I’ll cook & clear out the dvr. Watching the news — the vote yesterday went against the ridesharing companies. They spent $8.6 million and lost big. Their campaign did the opposite — I’m not the only one who had no opinion of them before the campaign & now I hate them. They say since they lost, they’re leaving Monday morning, even though the ordinance isn’t kicking them out, it’s just requiring fingerprint background checks. Anyway, that’s the news in Austin. I’ve got to have some caffeine, I’m about to fall back asleep.

  5. Good morning, 51 and cloudy in Bellingham. We enjoyed a mom’s day dinner with the grand girls and their parents last night. The restaurant features a wood fired pizza oven and has a safe and tasty gluten free crust so it was a real treat for me. It was fun to see the girls and relax and visit together.

    Today will be easy….some time in the garden, a few loads of laundry, and this evening salmon tacos and GOT with our son. My daughters and I will share moments of the day via the magic of phones, photos and texts.

    Best wishes to all for a restful and pleasant Sunday!

  6. Happy Mom’s Day to all you mothers here! It’s a beautiful day here in N. Florida, hope all the local moms celebrating their day can enjoy it.

    I’m so tired of the Sanders people, can’t it just stop with them? I got into it Friday night over at GOS over those despicable demonstrators outside a Hillary campaign rally in California who seemed to delight in screaming at families and making small children cry. I can’t believe the delusional responses from some there – well, it’s First Amendment free speech! Well, those weren’t really Bernie supporters! Denial and delusion.

    I am not looking forward to the next months of Trump, either – the media just doesn’t seem to want to challenge him on his nonsense, which is dangerous. He said to Chuck Todd on MTP that the US is the highest tax country in the world – that’s nonsense, we’re a tax haven compared to most European countries, but Todd didn’t challenge him at all. And Trump hasn’t wasted any time bringing up Bill Clinton’s infidelity as if that had anything to do with anything – but I’m sure the press will leave Trump’s own well-documented (on video tape, by his own boasting) sexual escapades unaddressed. It’s going to be ugly, depressing and awful – and I fear the press will only prop up the Donald for the entire period because he’s better ratings than Hillary Clinton. Ugh.

    Denise, that is an excellent diary, as usual, at GOS today, thank you so much for giving us such wonderful food (and music!) for thought every week!

    Have a great day everyone!

  7. The day started 60 and sunny but clouds moved in and we got some sprinkles starting about 11:30 – I managed to get my clothes off the line/inside before they got wet – only the fitted sheet needed to be hung up inside to finish drying. Not raining at the moment but still very overcast and windy. Doubt that I’ll get 10 KWHs today, but I have topped 150 for the month to date so not too bad.

    President Obama’s (still love typing that!) speech at Howard was excellent. (I’m sure the Berners at GOS are having hissy fits about it but I’m not going into their diaries to see. By that simple expedient I have stayed flag-free over there. Also use the 3x rule – 3rd response to a troll/sea lion is the last – when they come into a Hillary-friendly diary to cause trouble.) Lovely to see the man take the opportunity to get out a couple of very important messages – always vote and compromise is how we move forward – to a bunch of very intelligent people who are going to heed his words. Let them who have ears hear in very deed.

    Bright the day – and Happy Mothers’ Day – to the Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  8. Good morning, meese! Monday …

    It is 47 degrees in Madison on its way up to 63. Showers are in the forecast.

    Mercury crosses in front of the sun today. Please DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN! You can’t see it with the naked eye and it will blind you. NASA will have it on NASA TV starting at 6am Eastern.

    I am really enjoying the Republicans in Disarray stories from the past few days. It will be extremely interesting to see what replaces the party after Trump crashes and burns. Will it be Trump II? Will the nascent third-party of movement conservatives become the defacto party? Will the Cruz wing take it over? Trump was only the symptom of the rot that is causing the party to fall apart. I just hope whatever they replace it with is called the Party of Reagan, not the Party of Lincoln. Time to retire that for all time.

    Today is the day that North Carolina must respond to the Justice Department’s letter telling them that their anti-LGBT bathroom ordinance is illegal. The legislative leaders and the governor said that the deadline to respond is “unrealistic”. HAHAHAHA! They called a special session where they debated, passed, and signed the bill in less than 24 hours and somehow 5 days to respond to a letter from the federal government is “unrealistic”? Puh-leese.

    Still no transcript of the president speech so no post yet. They must give their web site interns the weekend off! :)

    See all y’all later!

  9. Good morning, Moosekind, missed you all when I was away. (Aside: How is it that the nice password Jan gave me last year works on this site but will not work on the phone or tablet?)

    It’s 45 F. on a partly overcast morning, going up to 64 F. with rain later. Yesterday, when we arrived at IAD, it was beautiful. We could see the Blue Ridge mountains clearly. We left Austin just ahead of the rain but enjoyed great weather while we were there. Daughter, SIL, and I went for a walk through a park filled with wildflowers and creeks full of rushing water. Was very pleased to see that and to hear that Lake Travis is full!

    After all that travel—here to Austin Friday, Austin to Waco and back (4-hour round trip) on Saturday)—I’m exhausted! Plan to do NOTHING today.

    Sitting uncomfortably on a yoga ball (per my trainer’s instructions) so will stop here. Back later to see RonK’s post and catch up with the other posts.

    Wishing all at good day at the Pond and Beyond!

    • Welcome home! We missed you!! I am glad you do not have to do anything today except veg out … I love those kind of days.

  11. 64 at dawn 68 now and expected to stay there for the rest of the day. Mostly overcast and expecting rain, but it’s a little lighter at the moment. We are awash in pollen and dust right now so I hope we do get the rain. It’s hard to function when your system is under non-stop attack by billions of microscopic combat maces. sigh.

    Heard from both my sons over the weekend, was taken to coffee by a friend and dinner by another friend, and got that super deal on the dishwasher. I’ll call that a good weekend. :) Made cocoa-almond butter muffins for breakfasts and coffee breaks – add 2 Tbsp cocoa to the flour at the 2nd sifting on the basic nutbutter muffin recipe – welcome home Diana. :) – and grilled pork sirloin for dinners after I grilled my breakfast sausages. Don’t need to make soup again until next weekend.

    Got a bunch of end of academic year/end of fiscal year/start of summer school/start of fiscal year stuff to work on. sigh. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  12. Here is one of the articles I read over the weekend that I found interesting: a Vox interview with Norm Ornstein who predicted the rise of Trump back in May 2015 and now gets to take an “I Told You So” bow:

    ORNSTEIN: I had focused for so long on the growing dysfunction inside the Republican Party, and I believed that its leaders had generated an awful lot of the anger out there. And eventually, I combined that with the set of polls that we began to see that showed 60 to 70 percent support for outsiders and insurgents. […]

    [As to] explaining what’s happened, I would say this is a self-inflicted wound by Republican leaders.

    Over many years, they’ve adopted strategies that have trivialized and delegitimized government. They were willing to play to a nativist element. And they tried to use, instead of stand up to, the apocalyptic visions and extremism of some cable television, talk radio, and other media outlets on the right. […]

    … if you delegitimize government, and make every victory that occurs partisan and ugly, and then refuse to implement the policies to make things work as much as you can but instead try to undermine them, and you cut government funding, and you freeze the salaries of people in government — well, then eventually you’re gonna have a public out there that basically says, “Anything would be better than these idiots.”

    So when you get a Donald Trump, who is contentless, and knows less about policy, domestic or international, I would say, than any candidate in the last 50 years — including Pat Paulsen, the comedian — you have a large share of the public who say, “You know, the people who know about policy were the ones who f*cked all of this up! And how could Trump do worse?”

    There is more. And to the extent that Professor Ornstein is a Nostradamus, be aware that he says there is a 20% chance that Americans could elect Donald Trump as the president of the United States. We can’t become complacent just because Trump seems so unsuited … in our eyes. There are a lot of people who think he would be just fine.

    On the aftermath:

    ORNSTEIN: And for the Republicans, in the aftermath of this election we’re gonna see a pitched battle across these different boundaries — the anti-leadership populist base, the radical conservatives, and the establishment leadership. At the moment, I don’t see anyone who can stitch them together. And I think it’ll be a while before that happens.

  13. Good morning, 50 and sunny in Bellingham today. It’s a pool morning for me, and then I’ve got a few plants to get into their garden homes. I’ll do the rest of the seasonal planting in June, when we will be here to to the watering.

    Paul Krugman, at the NYT…….

    The Making of an Ignoramus

    The important thing to realize, then, is that when Mr. Trump talks nonsense, he’s usually just offering a bombastic version of a position that’s widespread in his party. In fact, it’s remarkable how many ridiculous Trumpisms were previously espoused by Mitt Romney in 2012, from his claim that the true unemployment rate vastly exceeds official figures to his claim that he can bring prosperity by starting a trade war with China.

    None of this should be taken as an excuse for Mr. Trump. He really is frighteningly uninformed; worse, he doesn’t appear to know what he doesn’t know. The point, instead, is that his blithe lack of knowledge largely follows from the know-nothing attitudes of the party he now leads.

  14. North Carolina is suing the federal government to quit enforcing that pesky Civil Rights Act!!!

    Matt Pearce @mattdpearce

    Here’s North Carolina’s governor suing the feds over the bathroom law.

  15. Morning all – well, just barely morning. It’s gorgeous here today, and I’m trying to enjoy every bit of warmth without the stultifying humidity we’ll start getting soon. The jasmine is flowering all over my backyard, and the fragrance is just wonderful!

    Krugman really said it best about Trump – “frighteningly uninformed” – can people really want this guy in the White House?

    OK, bills to pay, and into school this afternoon to collect my exams – grades are due the 18th, I have lots of time, but it slips away before you know it, so I want to get them done by Friday so I can really feel retired again. Have a great day everyone!

  16. Good Tuesday morning Meese
    A nippy 37 here in the Catskills but going up to 70

    Headed off to school for first final exam – then have to start grading.
    Haven’t looked at the news yet – need coffee

  17. Good morning, meese! Tuesday …

    It is 50 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 56 degrees. Rain is in the forecast.

    The Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit against the state of North Carolina and its smirky soon-to-be-former governor. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s statement and press conference, along with a copy of the lawsuit, are available on the Moose News Network:

    Attorney General Loretta Lynch: “This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens”

    It was a powerful statement. I watched it three times!

    Paul Ryan is begging The Donald to fire him from his position as the chair of the RNC convention. No one, really, no one, wants to be the guy who says “I am proud to introduce our nominee Donald Trump” in Cleveland this summer. Sorry, Paul. You built this party on the bodies of those who fell through the social safety net you shredded. Own it … and go down with the sinking ship.

    Today is the West Virginia primary. Sen. Sanders will win in a landslide, taking pride in the fact that in states that hate our black president, he does well. Meh. There are 29 delegates at stake and Hillary stays “on track” if she picks up 12.

    Speaking of President Obama’s popularity, his Gallup tracking numbers have leaped 3 points, to 53%, since Donald Trump was declared the pukative, er, putative nominee. Running against the “third term of Barack Obama” might not be the best strategy for Republicans. :)

    See all y’all later!!

  18. Good morning, Meese, and may I say this will be a lousy week for collecting solar energy here in NoVa. A grey, gloomy, cold pattern has settled over us and refuses to leave. Current temp. is 55 F., going for a high of 61 F., with rain expected. An “oatmeal for breakfast” morning, for sure.

    Sitting here again with my bottom sliding around uncomfortably on that yoga ball. Yesterday I was comatose. Today I’m starting to think of the emails I owe, the blogs knocking around in my brain, and the stories I need to write. It’s interesting that Paul (“Push Granny over the cliff”) Ryan wants to distance himself from the Trumpet.

    Was dismayed to see the female half of the couple who owns the gym I attend on TV yesterday. She was being interviewed after the coffee shop meeting Hillary held in Virginia. When the reporter asked whether Hillary had her vote, the young woman said she was “leaning toward the other side.” I am dumbfounded that a seemingly intelligent, likable person could prefer Trump over Hillary. I can only think her politics has something to do with lower taxes, because the gym’s clients certainly aren’t all white. The handsomest guy there looks like a young Denzel Washington.

    Wishing a good day to all!

    • I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when they find out that their friends, neighbors, and family members are Trumpeters. But I am not sure die-hard Rs can count on Trump to have a coherent policy or a policy in line with Republican Party “Values” like taxes. It will be interesting to see how things sort out. Utah is in play now. Ha!

  19. It is so warm this morning — and headed to the 90s this afternoon. So much for our blissful weather. I’ve got to do some stuff today preparing to host at Dining for Life next week. I got a nice neighborhood restaurant. Need to put some things out on FB, contact the restaurant, etc. It’s been low-key in past years, they’re kind of amping it up now. So — caffeine is my friend, need to wake the brain cells up.

  20. Our low was 63 at midnight, slowly warming to 85 today – got sunshine at the moment but there are clouds floating around out there so while not a bad day for solar generation it’s not likely to be a great day either. This is my first “apples to apples” comparison – I upgraded to the 4K system the end of April 2015 – so any difference in production from year to year here on out (unless I do another upgrade – heh) will be caused by weather or gunk somehow getting onto the panels and blocking the light. May 2015 I generated 474.788 KWHs. So far this May I’ve done 163.27 with 3 weeks to go.

    Need to start processing what I can for summer, starting with ending employment on 6 of the graduating graduate assistants. (The other two will be graduating out of Summer and have assistantships for the summer so I’ll end employment for them in August.) I hope to start entering summer payroll today – need information from one more professor and also waiting to see if all the summer classes make but hopefully I’ll get that today. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

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