Cat 5 Catpocalypse!

Cecily and I have been on vacation in the mountains of North Carolina since August 19, so we have endured the runup to Irma mostly as an emotional cyclone!  Inevitably we needed to head back to civilization, and Irma only delayed our need to return.  However when it became clear that Irma was going to be a nasty bitch who ate trees and houses, we decided to go only as far as Atlanta and hideout at my brother-in-law's house until Irma did her thing.

The most trying part of the experience was extracting my sister-in-law, Tracy from Naples, and daughter, Shaune in Tampa, from the disaster zones so they wouldn't be killed. Neither one of them really wanted to leave, but after the media scared them to death enough they reluctantly headed out......toting Tucker and our two cats.  So here is THAT story which is the real horror show!

For those of you who know Noose, Meese and Tucker, you know that they are independent and....how shall I put it....vocal when they are unhappy.

We asked Nick Romary, one of our LDM team to help Tracy stuff each cat into a cat carrier that was two sizes too small.  Meese, the monk, was submissive, but Noose, was having none of it.  I got a frantic call from Nick that they couldn't get Noose in the 'box', so what should they do.  The terror and hesitancy in his voice conjured up a scene of biting and scratching that I had only experienced a few times with Noose, but was glad that I was dealing with this from a distance of 600 miles!  I told them to put him in a pillow case and then lower the pillow case into the cat carrier, which apparently they did without major injury!

So then Tracy, her cat, Tucker and our two cats headed up I-75 for Atlanta where we were waiting for them.  They got as far as Ellenton (just north of Sarasota) when Tracy's car crapped out, so the menagerie had to find a motel to spend the night.  The next morning, we managed to guide them to Caitlin's house in Tampa where they camped with Caitlin's roommate and her cat....get the picture?  Catpocalypse!  It was truly a "Cat 5" situation!

As the warnings about Irma became more dire, we persuaded Shaune to collect our animals and head to Atlanta while Tracy decided she preferred a local shelter.  More on that nightmare another time.

So Shaune drove all night with the newly reconstituted menagerie of Tucker, our two cats in their '2Xnothing' boxes, and Shaune's two dogs, Anabelle and Stella.  They drove from 1am all night long and arrived early Friday morning. 

The cats were in 'bad humor' after being in the boxes for 10 hours and had urinated in the cat carriers and on themselves, so Shaune's car was literally a 'shit show'.  Cecily and I grabbed the two cats and made a bee-line for the tub and gave the cats a bath.  For both cats, that was the final indignity!  Here they had endured confinement, noise, strange people, strange hotel rooms and houses, and now finally the people who are supposed to love them.....were trying to drown them!!  Meese has no claws so he was manageable, but Noose was having a hissy!  He bit the crap out of my thumb and was a nightmare to clean off and dry.

So we all spent the next three days nursing our wounds... and pride... with the cats in the bathroom and the dogs running free.  Fortunately Ed has a fenced in yard which they loved.  Shaune and her dogs left on Monday morning and Cecily and I left on Wednesday morning.

We are now back in Naples and lordy its a mess!  Trees uprooted everywhere, signs damaged, street signs ripped out of the ground, flooded areas, etc.  Our neighborhood is pretty nasty, although our place came through the storm with relatively little damage.  Lots of tree branches down and all kinds of detritus everywhere.  But it will all clean up in a few weeks.  More problematic is the lack of gas, power, internet, banking services, etc.  This is a resilient community though and people here know what a wonderful place it is, so I am sure the shell shock will be short-lived.

So for all of you who wondered if we survived, the answer is yes.  We will live to be threatened by another monster storm on another day.....hopefully not for a while though!

OK, Congress, Make it Happen!

I am SO impressed that Trump loves all the DACA kids.  Ending the DACA protection is perhaps one of his most cruel actions of all, but what could we expect from a man who is more concerned with keeping his warped promises to satisfy his deplorable base than looking out for 800,000 kids who did nothing more than breathe while their parents aspired to a life of freedom in the US?

Trump's action is really so predictable in its absence of compassion, and we see the strategy behind his offloading this responsibility to Congress.  He wants to play on all our emotions for these youngsters to force through his ridiculous compulsion to spend our money on his wall.  The result is that we now must rely on our constipated Congress to fix this.

I have a simple solution.  Those in Congress who are passionate about this issue and can mobilize as many of the supposed supporters to get behind a basic piece of legislation, and draft a simple instrument that deals only with the DACA Dreamers.  Pass it in both houses---fast--- and then when Trump vetoes it because it doesn't provide for his wall or anything else he wants, send it back to him in an overide vote.  It will then become law without his signature.

If there are any Republicans who can strap on their balls and do the right thing, then this can happen. With all the people who support these Dreamers, it should be a slam dunk to draft a simple piece of legislation to accomplish the goal of protecting the Dreamers status permanently....we are led to believe......However,  I wouldn't count on it!

No Exit

Another week of disorientation and madness is coming to an end, however I would like to comment on perhaps the only part of the story this week that has real relevance and import and direct effect on the loss of lives....the "new" Afghanistan policy.

In spite of the tumbler effect of everything emanating from the mouth of President Jabberwocky (thank you Bret Stephens!), there was the speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday which laid out the forward-looking strategy for America's longest war.  After a weekend of what may have been actual analysis by the administration of where we go from here, they presented what the critics have called the only real solution for moving forward....no solution at all.  Basically, we continue onward with the vacuuming of our money and our young American's lives into the bottomless void of an un-endable war. 

My question is why?

Well, the answers might seem logically apparent when you study the history of the thing and analyze the forces at work--a resurgent Taliban that we simply cannot eradicate because of continued support from the Pakistanis and now the Russians; the seemingly endless corruption of the government in Kabul that sucks down our treasure; our effort to create a reliable defense force from the ranks of the citizens which is rife with continuing desertions, while turning on us and killing our soldiers from time to time; surging Opium production; failed diplomacy with the Taliban; surges in troop strength which are ineffective; etc.

So, our "President" has decided to change his mind (such that it is) and embrace what we have been doing for the past 16 years as his 'new' policy.  Good Luck with that!  In the meantime, we continue to suffer losses that devastate families, ruin young lives, and drain our treasury in the hopes of .....what?  That maybe we can forestall further encroachment by the forces of evil and terrorism?  Really the only benefit of all this is that Afghanistan will not re-become a base for launching terrorist attacks against us again.  But the problem with this is that it is open ended and will not end anytime soon.

However I want to add one additional reason that this will not end soon.....too many people are making too much money on this war.  Eisenhower was right all those years ago when he warned us about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex.  Think of it...our 43rd President (GWB) pushed hard for the Congress to pass legislation called the Authorization for the Use of Military Force of 2017 (AUMF) that gave him virtually unlimited power to use military power against those forces responsible for the attacks of 9/11 or any 'associated forces'.  That associated forces clause was the opening for development of all kinds of additional actions and weapons.  The AUMF was used to justify the Iraq War, all our actions in Libya and Syria, etc.  It is still in force today, and the corporate war machine loves the opportunity to continue to squeeze tax money from the government---our tax money---while supporting the misery of all the results of never ending warfare. 

In 2001 when the AUMF was passed by the House, there was one lone vote against the resolution from a newly elected representative, one who is still in Congress today, Barbara Lee (D-California).  She wasn't against the action, but was against the wording of the resolution which has resulted in a 16 year war.  She instinctively knew that we were headed for this scenario.  

 Well, the good news is that Barbara Lee has not given up.  She proposed an amendment to the upcoming Appropriations Bill in the House that would revoke the AUMF.  Her committee approved the amendment and actually applauded when they took the vote, overwhelmingly approving it.  Whether it passes the full House is uncertain, but there are those who understand where the pressure to continue this madness is still coming from and are doing their best to stop it.  If it were to pass, there still is no solution for the morass that we are experiencing in Afghanistan, but it will at least temper the instinct of our leaders and the corporate military machine to drag us into more wars.....well, maybe...!

Back to Reality, Such That It Is.......

Ah,where to begin?  I have been 'offline' for about two or three weeks now for some R and R.  I spent a week with some buddies on a 38-foot sailboat flitting around Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay and having some modest adventures as only a 69 year-old man can do.  It was fun even though there was hardly any wind.  Thank God for 'motoring'.  I successfully put my back out while twisting in many unusual ways to help docking, mooring and placing bumpers so we wouldn't scratch the 'rental'.  I am still trying to recover from THAT!

Now I am in the NC mountains at a family cabin for the next two weeks.  Sweet tranquility and time for my jangled sciatica nerve to quiet down.  Today is the 'bucket list' experience of a lifetime, watching a total solar eclipse from my deck which is in the path of totality....looking forward to that today!

I suppose the best news is that for the past two weeks or so, I have not felt compelled to comment on the disintegration of our government.  What a horror show!  It was very easy during the sailing trip to disengage from the daily spiral of bad news.  I confess I did squeeze in an hour of MSNBC a day to feed my need for some awareness of what was happening, but overall it was truly liberating to only be thinking about wind, and how to keep from falling off a pitching deck.

But now I am back in range of the television and grimly watch the unearthing of the most fetid of human ideologies' reappearance in a place where it was never supposed to be.  The image of Nazis parading in our streets while our President suggests there are some really fine people in this group is almost too much to bear....marching and intimidating the congregants at a local synagogue no less!  Would all the veterans of WWII who gave their lives to extinguish this cancerous plague on humanity be a bit upset by this?  Apparently 'our leader', who has not one whit of brain cells to retain any history-- except of course the ridiculous bubba meisah that General Pershing stopped terrorism by killing Turks with pig blood coated bullets, thinks these are some fine people.  True colors emerge, don't they?

I must admit that it has been refreshing to see hints of actual concern on the part of our Congressional Republicans, although I wonder if it is too little too late.  This whole Charlotteville incident does seem rather like a 'tipping point' of sorts.  Whatever fantasy people might have had that Trump is a salvageable human being has been perhaps irretrievably lost.  Let's hope that some adults will now take the helm and figure out how to right this ship before it hits the iceberg and sustains an unfixable tear in its hull.  At the very least maybe they will figure out how to minimize the damage until next year when we have an opportunity to send some adults to Washington and regain control of our country.

However,  let's not forget for a minute that every moment Trump and his minions retain the governmental controls over our society, they are changing things for the worse, polluting our environment, denying our most vulnerable citizens constitutional guarantees, removing safeguards instituted to protect us from greedy and despicable humans.

The mass fleeing of major segments of our society from further support for the 'disease called Trump' is a hopeful indicator that sanity, the Constitution and separation of powers may actually be the salvation of our teetering democracy.

If We Last That Long......

Well, some good news for a change….America is waking up.  There are some patriots after all.  Murkowski, Collins, and McCain apparently have not lost their grip on reality.  I thought Lindsay Graham would have been the fourth of that quartet, but alas, after spitting fire over the prospective firing of Jeff Sessions and Bob Meuller, he caved and voted yes to a ‘Skinny’ measure that would hurt millions.  I ....almost loved him.

I am dumbfounded by the inability of what should be rational men and women to sit together and forge some repairs to the Affordable Care Act!  What is wrong with these people?  Are they hell bent on cutting off their noses to spite their faces??  Why can’t they stop being children and sit down with the opposition and craft something that will help people.  ACA is the law of the land.  It is treasonous to not administer the law, which is what the Executive Branch is threatening. 

Congressional Republicans, alas, seem to be single minded about destroying something that is actually working….flawed, but working!  In fact, the actual architecture of the ACA was created once upon a time by Conservative Republicans of the Heritage Foundation.  Mitt Romney actually passed a version of it in Massachusetts once upon a time and it worked pretty well..Somehow because ACA has the name Obama attached to it, it is suddenly poison.

Ah well, there is no explaining irrationality.  It simply is, and it is our responsibility to weed it out in 2018….if we last that long. 

On a positive note, here is a chart courtesy of MSNBC that shows an interesting and hopeful statistic:

This chart tracks the historical number of potential candidates who have filed as challengers to House seats and raised $5000 for the next years election.  This is encouraging.  Note that in 2009 the Republicans hit a high point in the number of challengers.  The 2010 election resulted in the Republicans gaining control of the House after Obama’s election in 2008.  What do you think this means for 2018?

So maybe there will be a return to reality next year…..if we last that long.

My clarion call has always been to engage our next generation in a call to public service.  It is the only way we can have a progressive vision for the future.  The ancient concretized Republican gerrymanderers must be rooted out to see any appreciable change.

And finally, it should give all of us some comfort that the separation of powers and inherent checks and balances that our genius founders implanted in the Constitution actually seem to work.  A bit creaky with age, but nonetheless effective.  As McCain aptly pointed out in the Senate a few days ago, the Congress is not ‘less than’ the Executive branch, it is ‘equal to’.  And slowly, some Republican Senators are actually realizing they have no fealty to an incompetent maniac.  We should all nourish their emerging awareness….if we last that long.