In Case You Missed It (v12)

It was a busy week, I know, what with the impeachment hearings, and the debate, and a spending bill being worked out, and so on - but don't worry, here's our week in review to get you up to day on this week's posts. 

In Sunday School, we focused on the Republicans, including Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who chatted with Chuck Todd on MTP. In that conversation, Johnson suggested that there was a better way to have handled the aid to Ukraine - to have kept all of it out of the public eye. 

You know, when I was in Ukraine with Senator Murphy, one of the points I was trying to make is, as we left that meeting, let's try and minimize this. Let's talk about this is a timing difference in terms of funding. Senator Murphy's on the Appropriations Committee. We will restore the funding. I came back and I talked to Senator Durbin. He offered an amendment. That same day, the funding was released. So, this would have been far better off if we would have just taken care of this behind the scenes. We have two branches of government.

Our Sunday School Extra Credit post covered conversation with some of the Dems, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, talking about the 'weight' of the president's words with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation.  Speaking in reference to the president's tweet about former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as she was testifying, Pelosi said that the president and perhaps others at the White House "have to know the words of the president weigh a ton," and that "he should not frivolously throw out insults."  She thinks she knows why Trump does that, too, noting

I think part of it is his own insecurity as an imposter. I think he knows full well that he's in that office way over his head. And so, he has to diminish everyone. 

I suggested that she, too, should be careful about what she says.

I'd say that, while the House Speaker's words may not weigh a ton, they have more weight than say, mine - and as such, the speaker should not frivolously throw out insults.  Unless of course, she didn't think she was being either frivolous or insulting.

In the first of two posts from the Update Desk,  I circled around on the change in Syracuse, NY on redistricting, with updates from an interview with Helen Hudson,the president of the Common Council. 

She also pointed out one of the things that drives people crazy about how districts are drawn: that there are places where multiple councilors represent portions of the same street, making it hard for residents to figure out who represents them - and, I'd add, potentially make it harder for neighborhoods like this have cohesive representation.

Hudson said that the next step is "to engage citizens in public hearings," with the goal of getting input on how the independent commission should be created.

As a disenrolled moderate Democrat, I'm willing to consider center-ish policies from any political party. Except Republicans in New York State, it seems, because they simply cannot get out of their own way, as illustrated in the post outlining My Middle-aged White Lady Perspective on a proposed post-election move suggested, but eventually dropped, by the Republican-majority Monroe County Legislature.

On Election Day, the voters did elect a Democrat county executive. They also returned a Republican majority to the Legislature to serve as the checks and balances for county government. 

In response to the election outcome, the Rs (who have had the majority for years, and the County Executive for nearly 30 years) thought that urgent legislation to limit the new Executive's power before the end of the year. If this makes you think of Wisconsin, and Michigan, and North Carolina, you're in the right place.

This is exactly the kind of thing New York Republicans need to stay away from, if they want to get any of the purple voters, moderates like me, to pay any attention to what they say.

Because of the debate, we didn't have a Wondering on Wednesday post, but I did offer some takeaways from the debate in this post on Thursday. Among my noodling on this?

• I don't understand what -or who - is keeping Tulsi Gabbard on the stage. And no, don't tell me it's Russian bots. 

• For the first time, I felt like paying attention to Tom Steyer, and I'm not sure how that makes me feel. I actually sat up straighter when he mentioned term limits, but then he said something after that which I can't remember now, that made me wonder why I sat up straighter.

And, sticking with the Dems for a bit longer,  the second post from The Update Desk, I made a preemptive strike:

I'm switching things up again this week with my social experiment with the 2020 Dems and their campaign emails.

Going forward, I'm going to limit who I track - and as of this week, I'm dropping Joe Biden and Julian Castro. They have consistently been the most desperate of the candidates, and their email subject lines, especially Castro but more and more Biden, too, sound like bad country songs.

And, wrapping up the week, in TGIF, I put Lindsey Graham on the 'bad week' list. Not for starting an investigation into the Bidens, per se - deserving as that is - but for this particular aspect of what he's looking into.

Graham's letter to Pompeo inexplicably notes that (emphasis added)

...on February 4, 2016, Hunter Biden began "following" then-Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, on Twitter, indicating that the two may have initiated conversations regarding Prosecutor General Shokin's investigation into Burisma...

Um, I just added Graham to the group of people I follow on Twitter. I'm pretty sure he doesn't think that he and I have "initiated conversations" about anything...

So, there you have it: another week in the books, another handful-and-a-half of posts, and more to come starting tomorrow with my weekly stroll through the classrooms.

Thanks for sticking around.