Much of the world seems to be suffering from post-Maggie depression. I really wasn’t terribly interested in hearing about her, but of course I had NPR on all day yesterday and was forced to listen. One person – it may have be British PM David Cameron – said people would be talking about her achievements for “hundreds of years.” Really? I realize she was every Konservative’s wet dream of union busting and “privatization,” but I think she’ll be pretty quickly forgotten. Hell, she already was mostly forgotten before she croaked and brought lots of attention to herself. Of course, the consequences of what she and her contemporaries around the world (and her political progeny in the UK) will, unfortunately, live on for quite some time. As for her? A footnote in the history of Britain: Margaret Thatcher, first female PM. Bubble cut hairdo.
I’m sure everybody has seen that Mitch McConnell is going to filibuster gun control legislation in the Senate. I’m not really sure what’s left in the bill, anyway, except for a proposal for background checks for all gun sales. I think something like 90% of the people are down with that, but the NRA says no, so it’s no. Oh well, just be sure to keep your head down, and don’t be a hero.
Otherwise there’s not much going on/ It’s a rainy start to the day, but it’s supposed to get sunny. It’s my late day today, so I’m trying to kill time before I have to trudge in to work. I really would have liked to stay in bed longer, but the damn cat kept jumping on me. I guess I’ll have to start sleeping with a baseball bat.
I heard a lot of Thatcher criticism, yesterday. All of it well deserved. Unfortunately, when Reagan died, all I heard was nostalgic praise, most of it fawning and wildly skewed. I remember Reagan. It is not a good memory.
Clifford is the cat who has been chosen, by the other cats, to wake me up if breakfast is not on time. He does it mostly by walking on me but, if I’m really resistant, he bites by toes. It never fails.
I was surprised by the sick feelings I had just hearing her name again.
Reagan was the lipstick on the pig but thatcher was the pig of selfishness and
utter indifference to human suffering.
Martin Bashir talked yesterday about how her policies degraded the quality of life for his brother who had MS and depended upon help from the government.
50 degree temperature drop and 50 mph wind gusts 💨 :billcat:
I think that must have rolled through here. Not so much the cold but the wind. Weather is changing every few days and so does the attack of allergins, so much so that the affects from a cold a few weeks ago linger on. Yesterday I ended up at the ER with a nose bleed it probably caused after attending a Giants game Monday night. I blame the Orange loss for being there in the first place. That was a first. (You shudda seed the other guy!)
:slap: :fist:
Well, at least somebody from Syracuse won a national championship.
All roads lead to S….
Hope your schnoz is better Vern. 👃 That game was not fun to watch.
Actually, OK, that game was good enough that we one. Last night, too. Today I went with a friend who has about the best seats I have ever sat in (row 6 behind the plate) and a lawyer-friend of ours had seats three rows in front of that so we upgraded when his lunch break was over. It was warm and sitting out in a mid-70s afternoon did the nose some good. Giants swept the Rockies!
😡 :rant1: :fu:
:bow: :banana:
Yipes, It’s Congress on the Move
By GAIL COLLINS
Wow, there’s a lot going on in Washington! Budgets are flying all over the place. The Senate might actually start voting on a gun bill Thursday. And immigration reform has now gotten so far that the House of Representatives has a bipartisan Gang of Eight working on it.
Personally, I think they just wanted to have a gang.
“It’s a good day for guns and immigration, and who knows what tomorrow may bring,†said Senator Chuck Schumer, a member of the Senate bipartisan Gang of Eight on immigration reform. It’s like a little legislative West Side Story in Congress these days, minus the dancing.
But the point is that there’s movement. It was only days ago that things were so slow that we were forced to devote our serious thinking time to the reports from South America that overgrown white ferrets are being sold to people as toy poodles. This is something I believe we can rally against in a bipartisan manner.
First off the block came a gun agreement, announced Wednesday by two conservative senators who mentioned repeatedly that they were themselves proud weapons owners. This is, of course, the rule for these kinds of events. If they really do have a full-fledged debate, somebody is for sure going to leap up and yell: “I have four bazookas!â€
Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican of Pennsylvania, held a press conference to describe their plan to close loopholes in gun purchase background checks. The negotiations actually involved a slightly larger number of people, including Schumer. But, according to a report in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, Toomey refused to speak on the same podium with the National Rifle Association nemesis.
“Toomey and Manchin did great work on this. They belonged out front. My job was to work behind the scenes. I’m perfectly happy,†said Schumer, who has been laboring on this issue for about nine million years. It isn’t every day you see the senator from New York leap out of the way of a major televised press conference. Kudos.
If the agreement as described actually passes, it would mean a real improvement — expanding background checks so people who buy guns on the Internet or at gun shows are screened for criminal records and serious mental illness.
You may remember Manchin as the guy who seemed, after the Newtown massacre, to be calling for an assault weapons ban, then scurried away. Also, he was the one who ran a campaign ad showing him plugging a bullet through the heart of a piece of climate change legislation. Also, he still won’t say whether he voted for Barack Obama last year. But now we ought to give him a hand — quickly, before he breaks our hearts.
Which might happen any moment. During their press conference, Manchin and Toomey said their bill could be a step toward new rules on carrying concealed weapons, in which a permit from the state with the most lax gun laws trumps the stricter laws in, say, Times Square. If an amendment like that gets stuck on the bill in the Senate, Schumer acknowledged, “the bad it would do would equalize the good.â€
But that’s several endless stretches of procedural confusion away. First, there’s got to be a vote on whether to take up gun legislation in the Senate at all. Miraculously, a bunch of Republican senators have announced they do not want to simply squash any consideration of the matter by staging a filibuster.
“No one really expected that we wouldn’t get to a vote on this. There’s going to be a debate on this. Which is a good thing,†said James Risch of Idaho on CBS. He was actually one of the senators vowing to stop a debate, but he’s apparently sort of evolving.
Did I mention that Risch is from Idaho? The governor of Idaho is Butch Otter. He has nothing to do with this discussion. I just like writing “Gov. Butch Otter†as often as possible.
This is going to be crunchtime, citizens. Do you root for the bipartisan gun bill or worry about the National Rifle Association turning it into something that makes the situation worse? Also, would you feel more confident about immigration reform’s chances if the House had a Gang of 12?
As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, this week’s Times Magazine has a story by Jonathan Van Meter announcing that former Representative Anthony Weiner is seriously thinking about running for mayor of New York City. This year!
That one I’m pretty confident we can handle. The citizens of New York just have to decide whether to forgive an elected official who tweeted pictures of his crotch to women he had never actually met. We’ve had bigger challenges. Maybe we can form a committee.
Vern, a couple of years ago Mike had a nose bleed he couldn’t stop, so we went to the emergency room in Brooklyn. Nice hospital. A TV for every ER bed. 4 hours after we arrived, a doctor came in and examined Mike and told him to pinch his nostrils together right below the cartilage and to hold it 5 minutes. That stopped the bleeding.
Hope you’re feeling better.
Thanks. I will know to do that next time. I even have the high tech tool that they clamped my nose with in the ER, two tongue depressors taped together. I have tricked mine out with some gauze for comfort. They told be 10 minutes. I do believe that my incident was pretty robust so I am not sure I could have stopped it on my own.
Ah, polution brain, that explains it.
(Replied in the wrong spot, oops. TGIF )
PS I thought at first that your nose problems occured after the Cardinal game where we lost miserably. Do wish we had a picture of you with tongue depressor splint.
What happens in the ER stays in the ER. I do wish someone had taken a pic before I cleaned up. It might have been useful someday.
Just saw this idiot for brains tweet:
@ReElectStockman: Our campaign bumper sticker: If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted. http://t.co/dr3Nt9Can7 #gosnell #tcot http://t.co/CVaYrQAeK9
Don’t know where he lives but hope it’s not here.
I think he’s down there around Houston.
Rest in pleasure…
Jonathan Winters, Comedian, Dies at 87
:rofl2: :bow: 🙁 :gate:
MARC MARON ON THE GENIUS OF JONATHAN WINTERS AND HIS “POSSESSION OF A COMIC MUSE PERPETUALLY AT WAR WITH THE DARKNESS IN HIS MIND”
Marc Maron remembers one of the most extraordinary “WTF” experiences of his life.
Warning, this is like a half an hour long, so don’t click on it unless you have time.
Made the time. Excellent! Thanks.
We all knew (or were?) a Lumpy.
🙁 :gate:
It’s Clarence!
🙁 :gate: