Wondering on Wednesday (v116)

Oh MY, what a Wednesday for wondering! Let's get to it!

Why, I wonder, have we (and by 'we' I mean everyone I know and most of the anchors on TV and radio) never heard of a 'bomb cyclone' before?  What a cool term for a really messed up situation, right? Here's how one writer at Popular Science talked about it:

Bomb cyclone: it sounds really cool, it's actually kind of scary, and it's headed your way. On Wednesday and Thursday, the intimidatingly-named winter storm is set to hit the East Coast with icy precipitation from Florida up into New England. But a name as apocalyptic as bomb cyclone begs explanation. How bad will this storm be, exactly? I mean, "bomb" is generally a qualifier you want attached to something like "frostings," not "cyclone."

Hear, hear. Apparently it has to do with low pressure falling a whole lot in a 24 hour period, and cold air, and circular winds or stuff. To be honest, they had me at "frostings." And, by the way, the storm's name is Grayson.

Or, maybe the storm's name is Bannon, I'm not sure. Seems the former special friend to the president, the guy who helped him win, yadda yadda yadda, was really just a nothingburger after all this time. ICYMI, Bannon has turned on the president, it seems. Or maybe he's trying to save him, I don't know.  In a new book coming out next week, Bannon had this to say about that pivotal meeting in June 2016 with some Russians (just one of many of his contributions to the book):

The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor with no lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.

But we certainly don't need to wonder how the president feels about him now, do we?

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me, after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party. 

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I made it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country... 

It goes on in a similar vein, and it seems pretty clear it wasn't written by the president, but rather by his handlers. Who knows, maybe it was written by Anthony Scaramucci, he says he's still close to the president. And who am I to wonder about that?

There one other thing we will be left to wonder about, maybe for ever - or maybe, not at all. For it seems that the White House has shut down its vaunted Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. You remember what the president told us when the group met for the first time, don't you?

No? That's OK - here's an excerpt:

I'm pleased that more than 30 states have already agreed to share the information with the commission and the other states...If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they're worried about. And I asked the Vice President, I asked the commission: What are they worried about? There's something There always is.

This issue is very important to me because, throughout the campaign and even after it, people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities, which they saw.. In some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.... if we want to Make America Great Again, we have to protect the integrity of the vote and our voters.

Alas, Sarah Sanders told us,

Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today president Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action.

We are reminded, in the same article linked above that a Loyola Law School study found 31 known cases of impersonation fraud, out of a billion votes cast, in all American elections from 2000 - 2014, so maybe the Commission was just a way for Trump to prove his own tale of 3,000,000 illegals voted against him?  And, I wonder who those 31 folks were, anyway? And who they voted for?

And finally, tonight marked the premiere of season 11 of The X-Files.  As they say on the show, "the truth is out there."

I wonder...