Wondering on Wednesday 3/10/21

Ready... Set... Wonder!

Well, well, well. The House passed the American Rescue Plan (the Biden Stimulus) with zero Republican support, just like the Senate did. And while the Rs continue to complain that "the bill wasn't targeted enough" I haven't seen anything specific that's supposed to get me all up in arms about this bill. Why is that, I wonder? And who has that information - Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? 

I worked pretty hard today to get myself a COVID vaccine appointment, something I was able to do because I'm retired and not picky about where I go for the darn thing. As I was going through the process - two times, on different websites, trying to find the best timeslot -  I was shut out of three available time slots that were available when I started entering my info, but gone by the time I was done. And that makes me wonder why they didn't talk to the Ticketmaster/Live Nation people to see how they coded their "your transaction must be completed within 10 minutes to hold your seats" stuff - boy, what a game-changer that would be with the vaccine appointments!

The Pentagon approved having the National Guard protecting the Capitol until May 23rd, at the request of the acting leadership of the Capitol police. I'm on the side of legislators who work there in wondering why the need continues and how the date was chosen. I also have to wonder why they're not getting any intelligence briefings on why the need remains. Unless, of course, there are senators and representatives who have some bad stuff that got swept up in the cell phone data, and they can't be trusted with the intelligence?  Could that be it, I wonder?

I wonder what the roll call vote would be to have Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene disallowed from requesting roll call votes on stuff for the sole reason of trying to maintain her relevancy?

There's more, but there's also tomorrow.

TGIF 9/6/19

Time for our weekly look at the good week/bad week ledger.

Let's start with Debra Messing, who had a bad week, if you ask me. Aside from her retweeting a racist post, something she clearly should have known better than to do, there was the whole kerfuffle about political donors.

Messing suggested (with others piling on in agreement) that the list of donors to the president's upcoming Hollywood fundraiser should be made public. But here's the thing: when she called for a list of Trump's donors, she didn't simultaneously release a list of the political contributions that she's made, nor did she demand that Democratic donors are similarly publicized. Shame on her - let's be all about transparency and equality and publish all of them. Or conversely.

Moving on to the great state of Alabama, rarely have so many been talking about a state - people who have about as much intention of visiting Alabama as, well, as Dorian did. I'd guess that more folks can now find Alabama on a map than at any other time in recent memory, maybe no.

The president is making a bad week worse by doubling down, having his Cabinet members double down, and literally making an ass of himself. He's acting like the proverbial four-year-old who picks up his toys and goes home when he doesn't get his way.  On the plus side, though, his Sharpie-doctored map has spawned a whole lot of creativity in the Twitterverse, with loads of drawings of all kinds of Trump-related stuff being hilariously marked up. Search the #SharpiePresident hash tag for some fun. FYI, there's some NSFW content there, so be careful.

We also learned which projects the Pentagon was going to ignore, instead misappropriating the money for Trump's Mexican-funded border wall, leading all of us to try once again to understand exactly how Mexico is paying for the darn thing. We're paying for it, of course - the military, and FEMA, so far, are having a bad week as money is pulled to help make sure that Trump gets 500 miles of wall built by the 2020 election. Because a political promise is more important than our three branches of government, dontcha know. Mexico is having a good week, I think.

James Comey had a mixed week. On the one hand, he's not being charged with any crimes, but on the other, he violated FBI policies in a couple of ways, we were told, including sharing his memos with a friend who shared them with the press. Rabid Trump fans are demanding he be jailed for life or longer, maybe jailed for life AND stoned in the public square and stuff, as if any company would to that to an employee. Heck, in some circles, he'd be considered a protected whistle blower.

Boris Johnson had a bad week, suffering embarrassing losses in his first couple of votes as the UK's Prime Minister. Worse than that, though, the 'British Donald Trump' lost the confidence of his little brother Jo, who resigned as a member of parliament and as a minister in his brother's government. In a tweet, he pointed to an "unresolvable tension" between loyalty to the family and the national interest.  Which leads me to declare that Ivanka Trump also had a bad week. Now that she knows it can be done, she can stop being complicit in her father's nonsense, and the longer it takes for her to do it, the worse her weeks become.

And finally, on a sadder note, the number of people suffering from serious lung illnesses stemming, it seems, from their vaping habits continues to grow, as does the number of deaths, with five reported. Some are calling for Ned Sharpless, the acting head of the FDA, to do something or resign.

I'm not sure there's anything he can do - or should do - to solve this problem, other than offer thoughts and prayers. You know, like we do with mass shootings. Good for the goose, and all.

Wondering on Wednesday (v158)

So, what's on our collective minds this week, the last Wonderful Wednesday before Christmas?

Some might be wondering why the president decided to declare victory in Syria and announce - via  a tweet - that he was going to bring the troops home. Among the people wondering about this are folks at the Pentagon, who (again) were uninformed about one of the president's policy statements until it social media, catching them off guard. The very first thing I wondered when I heard this is whether anyone had checked the tapes to see what they've been talking about on any of the Fox shows, since that's where those "many people" the president often references work.  (I honestly don't have the energy to check this myself.)

Don't get me wrong - wiping out ISIS, or 99% of ISIS as some suggest, is a good thing. But is tweeting that we're going to be walking away, without a whole lot of detail for our friends and allies (or our own people) really a smart way to do it? I've wondered about this whole 'announcing our military intentions' thing for a long time, well before the current administration took office - I mean, that would be like Apple announcing their new technology via tweet well before the Chinese even had a chance to try and steal it, or something.

I saw on the news tonight that the stock market is down some 5.8% on the year, and that got me wondering if it wouldn't be more honest and transparent if we reported the market results not relative to the immediate past prior trading day, but to where we started at the beginning of the year. So, for example, instead of saying the Dow was down 351.98 (today's close compared to yesterday's close), we would report it as being down 1,500.35 (today's close compared to the close on January 2, 2018).
I think this would go a long way toward helping people understand that winning thing we're supposed to be getting so tired of by now.  And it would might help people make better judgments of the truthfulness of  presidential pronouncements on the market (which, of course, he only makes when things are going well).

We may be avoiding a government shutdown, a proud moment for a president shutdown, a border security shutdown, after all.  There's activity on a number of fronts here, apparently, which changed the president's mind on the shutdown (he loves that word, shutdown):

• his own people immediately started walking back the pride aspect of his comments the other day with Chuck and Nancy;
• the Republicans in the Senate let him know it was an asinine thing to be proud of;
• he ordered his cabinet of only the best people to find money in their budgets to help come up with the $5B he said was needed to prevent the shutdown;
• he said he didn't need $5B after all, $1.5B was all he really needed
• he recalculated his "and Mexico is going to build the wall pay for the wall" statement, again,  instead saying that they will indirectly pay for it because of all the new pesos flooding into the country because of the renegotiated NAFTA deal

We can wonder about which of those things might have been the one to break the camel's back, as it were, but the real wondering about all of this shutdown stuff has to be reserved for Mitch McConnell, who today let us know that

... Republicans will continue to fulfill our duty to govern. That's why we will soon take up a simple measure that will continue government funding into February. So we can continue this vital debate after the new Congress has convened. Because, make no mistake - there will be important unfinished business left in front of us. And we'll owe it to the American people to tackle it.

Yes, the Senate Majority Leader has now officially understood that the Senate has a responsibility to the American people. And I wonder, did he get struck by lightning or something, to come to this revelation? "We'll owe it to the American people?"  You already owe it to us, Senator Obstructionist. You ALREADY owe it to us.

And finally, in the spirit of Christmas, let's talk about music. For it seems lots of people are still wondering why people ever wondered about 'Baby, it's Cold Outside' (a Christmas song having nothing at all to do with Christmas), and those same people are also wondering why people who wondered about 'Baby, it's Cold Outside' aren't instead wondering how cold it must be for a homeless, drug addicted, PTSD-suffering veteran, single mother, domestic violence victim who doesn't have two pennies to rub together and they need to start doing something about it.

Now, this is not about wondering about people who are wondering about a song, it's wondering about people who have so much time on their hands that they can not only tell other people to stop wondering about one thing, but also tell them to start wondering about other specific things.

I have to wonder about all of that...

Sunday School 3/4/18

Kinda of in a funk today, so my attention span was limited and I only visited one classroom, CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper at the helm.

The first guest was Peter Navarro, who is the White House Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. Navarro's goal today was to convince us that president Trump's surprise announcement of tariffs - 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum -- was a great idea, good for the president, good for our steel and aluminum workers, and #MAGA.

Navarro said the tariffs would go into effect next week, maybe the week after, once the White House lawyers get all their ducks in a row. Tapper played some video of the president blaming China for overproduction and saying that needed to be addressed, and then he reminded Navarro that China doesn't make the top ten steel importers into the US. Here's how Navarro responded:

So, the bigger picture is that China has tremendous overcapacity in both aluminum and steel. And so what they do is, they flood the world market with this product. And that ripples down to our shores and to other countries. So China is, in many ways, the root of the problem in both aluminum and steel for all countries of the world.

But let's be clear here about what the president's doing. Let's lay this on the table. This is an action, basically, to protect our national security and economic security. And the president was quite clear. We can't have a country that can defend itself and prosper without an aluminum and steel industry.

Silly me - I thought we couldn't be a country without a border wall, and without getting rid of chain migration and stuff. I was wrong, I guess.

Tapper reminded Navarro, speaking of national security, that the Pentagon was not in favor of what Trump did.

The Pentagon wrote a memo about the tariff, saying, indeed the unfair steel practices do create a national security problem. But the Pentagon also said that the US should use targeted tariffs and avoid angering allies who are needed for other diplomatic national security reasons, such as Canada, such as South Korea. If you are invoking the national security exemption, should you not also be listening to the Pentagon on how to apply these tariffs?

Navarro's answer was reminiscent of Trump's "I alone can fix it" comment.

What I love about this president is, he listens to all points of view, both within his government and outside, and then he makes the tough decisions. 

Which includes ignoring the Pentagon.

Also on the show was Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is considered a potential challenger to Trump in 2020. Tapper talked to him about the president's trade tariffs (Kasich is not a fan) and the president's 'gun control without due process' plan; Kasich is again not a fan. Rather, what he's trying in Ohio is a restraining order, which comes with due process.

In terms of our gun retraining order, it means, if you have somebody in the family who sees trouble in the family, they have an ability, either go to law enforcement or the court in order to get those guns out of that person who's having a very difficult time, get the guns away from them. If you're a neighbor or somebody outside, you can go to a police officer who can investigate and then go to the judge. There's got to be speed in this, because we don't want people who are emotionally - you know, emotionally in upheaval, who could pose a threat either to themselves or to somebody else, to be in a position where they can have a gun.

Kasich also noted that the agenda changes, quickly.

And by the way, have we forgotten the Dreamers, the DACA, the young people who came here? They're not even in the news anymore. And I don't - I can't believe Congress is -- Congress has got to do something on guns. 

And you know what? I think the president will sign something. If he doesn't, send it to him anyway. I mean, the deal is that you don't ask permission. You legislate; you get it to the president, you see what he does.

 I believe he will sign some really good, strong, common sense gun legislation. Send him the Dreamers. We can't be taking these kids that have been -- or young people who have been here, some of them for 20 years, and ship them out of the country for political reasons. 

Tapper also asked Kasich about 2020, and whether someone should challenge Trump, even if it's not Kasich who does it. .

Well, come on Jake. We don't know what's going to happen next week. That's not -- you know, all I'm doing is making sure that, both now and when I'm out, that I can have a voice that can help the country, that can bring it together. That's all I'm particularly interested in at this point. And if I go any further than that, Jake, I won't be able to get in my house tonight. My wife will have it barricaded. 

So, I'm not going there.... 

And, listening to the entire exchange  between Kasich and Tapper, I was reminded why I liked Kasich more than any of the rest of the Republicans. First, he's reasonable, and second, he has a great sense of humor and hes not afraid to use it - which is something we could use a whole lot more of in DC.

See you around campus.