Sexy What? and the Trial in the Senate

I’m writing this on the first day of Donald Trump’s second impeachment hearing and on the day after QAnon conspiracy nuts were busy spreading their newest work of fiction---that Trump is going to be sworn back into office on March 4^th. And how did they come up with that idea? It was sparked by the fact that the Trump Hotel in D.C. jacked up their room rates to $1,331 for that day which is more than double their regular rates…kind of like they did for January 6^th only that number was higher than double. Grab your MAGA hats and ammo there’s going to be another “big party” at the Capital. Or not. Meanwhile, the first day of the hearing settled the question on whether or not it was constitutional to impeach a president who is out of office. Why, yes, yes it is according to the senate vote and a bunch of constitutional scholars. Tomorrow the evidence part begins where case managers try to prove that Mr. Trump broke his oath of office to protect the constitution for his part in trying to stop the election certification, for the insurrection that he orchestrated. 

I saw the impeachment manger’s opening presentation before I had to leave to take the dog for his haircut. It was a timeline with a thirteen minute video from outside and inside the Capital during the insurrection on January 6^th. Even though I saw it in real time on the 6^th seeing that video gave me chills and I couldn’t help thinking that a lot of those senators sitting there probably hadn’t seen the full level of violence that they could only hear on the 6^th that caused them to run for their lives and hide out in the tunnels below the Capital. Did it give them chills to hear the insurrectionists planned to seal both ends of the tunnel and "gas them"? From what I’ve heard there will be fourteen hours more of videos to be presented in the coming days. Will the video tape evidence finally penetrate through to the senators who still support or are afraid to denounce Trump for his part in whipping up the fever pitch among QAnon, the Proud Boys and others fringe groups who came to D.C. to do his bidding? I’d like to think the majority of the senators will put the country and the constitution first but I’m not counting on enough of them finding their backbones before the final vote.

In the meantime when I dropped the dog off for his haircut the groomer said, “Where are you going with that sexy hair?” That made me laugh to having anything about me referred to as sexy, let alone my pandemic induced hair style. I answered, “To get a haircut of my own.” Eleven months ago my hair was an inch long and after my hair trim today the top measures five inches. My hairdresser took pictures of my hair to show the hairdresser who cut my hair for three years before she quit to be a full-time mom, just before the shop was shut down for the pandemic for three months. Next month all my layers should be grown out and I’ll bring my phone to my next hair appointment to get some photos of my own that I might post here. Or not. My hairdresser is quite proud of herself for getting me through all the awkwardness of growing out a short hairdo. I still don’t know if I’ll keep the long hair---it’s a lot of trouble---and I don’t recognize myself in the mirror which isn’t a good thing at my age. Gosh, I’ve even gotten up in the middle of the night to pee and ended up brushing my hair. More than once. Bed head freaks me out after fifty some years of having easy-pleasy hair that I could have gone days without brushing if I had wanted to and no one would have noticed.

In between Levi’s and my appointments I took advantage of the sunny, mood-lifting day after a string of dark, stormy days. I did some banking and I picked up lunch at Starbucks drive-through. I’ve missed that place during the pandemic. I’ve either been stuck at home for weeks on end or whenever I’d go by the place it would have a line of twenty-some cars and I don’t have that much patience. I also stopped at my second favorite grocery store hoping to pick up a few things that have been scarce since the pandemic. At least toilet paper is no longer one of them.

At the store I bought mostly milk and comfort foods---chocolate brownies and vanilla ice cream which I ate while watching the senators vote at the end of today’s impeachment procedure. The trial won’t be long, they say---it may even be over on Saturday, the first day this blog entry is live. Even so I won’t have enough comfort foods to outlast It. But on my schedule for the next few days is thinning the dishes in my kitchen cabinets so I’ll being doing that while watching the senate hearings. I was going to say it will be like watching a soap opera where we know which actor is going to walk around without his shirt on, but that's would be making light of a dark and serious juncture in the history of our country. Right or wrong, good for me or not, I am and probably always will be a political junkie so the idea of not watching this impeachment hearing is not in my DNA. And as a blogger it's another one of those elephant-in-the-room situations where we each have to decide if we ignore the elephant or put on our big girl and boy pants and try to ride the elephant through the circus tent. ©

 

 This video was shown to close the first day's hearing.

 

 

After the vote, Mitch making it clear what Trump did. 

Freebies, Dogs and Politics

I’m so cold and I don’t see that changing until next July. The only time I’ve been warm since last summer was when I went to the orphan train lecture at a near-by continuum care campus a couple of weeks ago. That particular campus costs $3,000 a month to live in two rooms and a bathroom (half the size that I’ll be getting for $2,000 a month) so they should be generous with the heat! Part of their marketing plan is to invite the public in for their daily happy hours---yes, with free drinks, a piano bar and sing-alongs---and their monthly entertainment programs like the lecture. This was my third time going there but even if I could afford to live there, the location and the fact that it’s not dog friendly took it off my list of possibilities. Two ladies I know from the senior hall live there and they love it and I can attest to the fact that the food is as good as you'd get in any better restaurant in town. Giving free luncheons to groups of people with gray hair is also part of their marketing plan, been invited and went twice.

It’s twenty degrees outside and I’m typing with fingerless gloves on my hands, leg warmers under my sweat pants, and an undershirt under my sweat shirt. My thermostat is set at 70 degrees but I have so many windows it’s hard to keep the house warm and still be able to pay the gas bills. At least the dog is warm now. I felt sorry for him having to do guard duty laying on the cold, kitchen floor so I bought him a second dog bed. Lately he’s been getting clingy, wanting to be near me when I’m working on the computer thus he’s been laying where I can’t escape without him noticing. The bed killed two birds with one stone. I put it just off to the side so I can still pass by him if I want to get a cup of coffee or a reference book out of my dwindling library. I hated feeling trapped!

In January Levi will be twelve and I’m seeing signs that he’s getting older and the clinginess is starting to worry me. It’s totally out of character for him not to be kick-ass independent and fearless. I don’t know if he’s developing a health issue or if all the moving stuff out of and around inside the house is making him uneasy. Other than when I was away at college, I’ve never lived without a dog or two in the house and even then I could come home on the weekends and catch up on canine companionship. I dread Levi dying more than any other dog I’ve had, knowing he might be my last. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. No sense worrying about what’s on the other side just yet but color me blue when I look at him sleeping in his new bed.

Spoiler alert for Trump fans: You may want to quit reading here. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything political which I limit to doing at least ten posts apart. The last time I did I ticked of another blogger so much that she said she was taking me off her blog roll and demanded that I take her out of mine. Heaven forbid a flaming liberal, who had never made a single political comment on her blog, should lay eyes on her very public blog. Do you detect a little sarcasm in that statement? Why, yes you do. I don’t believe in closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears and singing, “La, la, la” at the top of your lungs just because others don’t agree with your political leanings. But that’s a liberal for you.

I watched all the impeachment inquiry witnesses who testified this week. It's no surprise that during and afterward right wingers were closing their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears and singing, “La, la, la” and besmirching impeccable, career patriots like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and William Taylor Jr and George Kent, the diplomats to Ukraine, mostly without even listening to a word that they testified to under oath. Well, one Republican was watching. Trump live-tweeted insults about Yovanovitch while she testified: "Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?" President Bone Spurs, she took hardship posts in very dangerous countries. You obviously don't understand what that means. She didn't CAUSE their decades of civil unrest, she was sent there by Reagan because of it. Her response to that nasty tweet? "Where I served over the years, I and others have demonstrably made things better, for the U.S. as well as for the countries I’ve served in.” Classy reply to a classless man.

Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about getting a consensual blowjob in the Oval Office. That almost seems quaint compared to what is going on now. Two of the most vocal players during that impeachment hearing---Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell---seem to have left their sense of standards and ethics for presidential behavior back in the last century. It’s becoming perfectly clear that Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, yet these two senators and other Trump fan boys want us all to ignore the facts. Trump has become a willing (or clueless) pawn of Russia's, helping them in their war/aggression toward Ukraine to expand their borders. "And that," quoting Forrest Gump, "is all I’ve got to say about that" except to say that the impeachment inquiry is so much bigger than about one infamous phone call. ©

Paranoid Me and Politics

I just set one of my posts to revert back to a draft because it was annoying me every time it appeared in my side bar as one of the most read posts last week or last month. If it had been a topic someone would find in a Google search on a widowhood issue, I’d understand its popularity. But this blog post was a review of the movie, The Post. For a long time I thought maybe someone bookmarked that post as their way into my blog but doing the math on how many views it gets beyond the norm that would mean one person would have to be coming here to read six times a day. Finally, I dug a little deeper and figured out that most of its 3,357 views were coming from Russia. And paranoid me got the idea that maybe that post is being used somehow to teach Russian disinformation specialists something about the American mindset, of how some of us ordinary citizens feel about our freedom of the press. The movie, if you’ll remember was about The Post Newspaper winning a Supreme Court ruling when they exposed a three decades long cover-up commonly known as the Pentagon Papers. The next two paragraphs are from the blog post that I removed from public viewing:

“Near the end of the movie they quoted Justice Hugo Black’s argument for ruling in favor of the two newspaper’s right to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers and against Nixon’s attempt to control the press and I was able to google his words. They’re important words, words that matter today every bit as much as they did in 1971 when the court ruled 6 to 3. Black wrote, ‘In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.’ 

“And that’s why Trump’s attempt to erode the credibility of the press is so dangerous. It’s why we need to remain vigilant against his corrosive, dictatorship-inspired tactic of calling any news he doesn’t like ‘fake’ news. It’s why we all need to put on our dissidents hats and stand up for this basic building block of our democracy.” 

Well, what do you think? Why would so many Russians be interesting in reading that blog post? And why are so many Americans so willing to be complacent to Trump’s attempts to destroy our freedom of the press? Some of my in-law relatives are like little parrots, repeating Trump's hate-filled tweets on Facebook and raging about “fake” news this and “fake” news. They love him to his rotten core. The fake news has been out to get him from the start! they say. Maybe so. We've never had a more corrupt and dishonest person in the White House. What is the Press supposed to do, look the other way when he metaphorically wipes his nose on the White House drapery? Poor mistreated Trump!

I honestly feel numb right now to the impeachment inquiry going on. When are the good people in the House and Senate going to start supporting the rule of law that keeps our democracy solvent? They have a legal duty to investigate and hear any evidence that may point to wrong-doing and decide if it’s valid or not. Trying to obstruct people from testifying before Congress is taking a page right out of Nixon’s play book but there were enough Republicans, back then, who left their partisan hats in the cloakroom and placed the country first. I don’t know if we can count on the current crop of lawmakers to do that. 

I’ve heard it said that they are afraid of Trump, that he can destroy their careers with one nasty tweet. What have we come to if that could possibility be true? Does Mr. Trump really have that much power over the voters (or donators) in any given district? Maybe he does. Trump-the-sociopath seems to have a way of dealing out corruption and cronyism, and de-constructing American values in plain sight that makes his fans believe that it isn’t corrupt or illegal or immoral at all. In their heads, it’s all just the press and the democrats trying to make mountains out of mole hills.

Some people think we should put all our energy into getting Trump voted out of office and not bother trying to censure him though the impeachment process, but what message does that send out to the world, not to mention the next president to come along? And with an administration that isn’t bothering to beef up our cyber security to protect our next election from outside interference does it even matter if we vote our brains out in 2020? With a little help from his Russian friends, he could still ‘win’ even if he actually losses. Trump has even found a way to mess with our Federal Election Commission's ability to operate in a meaningful way by not filling empty seats. And why not? That tactic has worked well with the EPA. ©

Note from the management of this blog. Polly Anna will be back next week.