Storm is coming.

Since I started the last entry with an embedded tweet, let’s do it again, hey what?

When I trained to be a poll worker, we were instructed in all the most likely scenarios we’d see in the course of an election day: Average voter, voter without ID, voter whose absentee ballot was requested and didn’t arrive, voter whose absentee ballot arrived but not returned in time, all that stuff. Of course, one of the bottomest of the bottom feeders took the training, secretly recorded it, selectively edited it and tried to make it sound like we were being instructed in how to cheat.

Now here’s an actual video, not manipulated beyond taking two clips from a longer piece — which you can watch in its entirety (follow the thread for the link) — that directly instructs people to break the law and bring weapons to polling places/boards of elections.

Whoever said everything is projection with these people sure got that one right.

So. Another cold weekend. I kept busy. We did stuff. Watched the Criterion Channel (“The Killing,” “The Vanishing”). Made soup. Made some progress in a couple of books. Narrowly escaped dying of boredom, as you are probably suspecting. January, this year, has 295 days, 294 of them cold. (Still to come this week: A major snowstorm, followed by another cold snap: -1 on Saturday morning. The joy, oh the joy!)

And there was actually more why-aren’t-we-screaming-in-the-streets news this weekend. Trump says that if he’s reelected, he’ll consider pardoning the January 6 defendants.

When it happens, we’ll wonder why we didn’t see it coming. Maybe because we were playing Wordle. (I was, anyway.)

And so the week begins!

Posted at 9:25 pm in Current events |
 

25 responses to “Storm is coming.”

  1. diane said on January 30, 2022 at 9:54 pm

    If only there was enough Wordle to play long enough to avoid the news.

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  2. Deborah said on January 30, 2022 at 10:40 pm

    Isn’t that the truth. I’m up to day 35 or 36 of the wordle archives. I’ve been playing 7 or 8 a day lately. Better than doom scrolling I say. When I start making stupid mistakes like repeating a letter that has already been bonged or using a yellow letter in the same place, I know it’s time to quit. It’s not as cold here but it was cloudy all day so I was colder than I should have been.

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  3. Dexter Friend said on January 30, 2022 at 11:37 pm

    Trump’s outrageous “promise” or whatever it was to pardon the ones who formed that coup to kill Pence by hanging and Pelosi by some other grotesque manner and destroying the electoral college vote count is the mark of a criminally insane maniac who must be silenced by his party, not worshipped like a god of some weird deity. I wish I could believe Trump will be in orange soon, but I can’t. Lawyers are dragging the whole thing out. Trump will run again. What kind of nation will we be if he succeeds? People want this? It seems impossible. But it ain’t.

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  4. ROGirl said on January 31, 2022 at 5:03 am

    When I watched The Last Duel this weekend I nodded off a few times during the battles and didn’t miss much. It’s 2 1/2 hours long and my thoughts went to both Medieval Times (I went to one many years ago in Orlando) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“It’s just a flesh wound”). I had to look up the actor who was playing the count, because I didn’t recognize that it was Ben Affleck in a blond page boy wig, and Matt Damon sported a hideous frizzy medieval mullet.

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  5. jim said on January 31, 2022 at 5:59 am

    “ We need to be prepared to lock & load,” he says. “Show up armed so we can do in Democrat voters” .

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  6. David C said on January 31, 2022 at 6:06 am

    The gun nuts don’t seem to realize that as soon as they shoot their way to the fascist state they dream of, the fascists are going to take their guns. The Kochs, Devoses, and the Uihleins aren’t going to buy a revolution only to see it trashed by a bunch of gun toting rubes.

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  7. Jeff Borden said on January 31, 2022 at 9:38 am

    We need to stop voting for any Republican who doesn’t denounce the orange cancer. The richest man in Illinois, Ken Griffin, is pouring $150 million into a slate of GOP candidates running on a “law and order” platform. He’s backing a black Republican who is mayor of Aurora, the second-largest city in Illinois, for governor along with every other state office. I hate one-party rule, but I’ll be damned if I’ll support anyone affiliated with a party that refuses to call out a traitorous thug like tRump. The QOP needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.

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  8. Julie Robinson said on January 31, 2022 at 11:17 am

    Anyone with an R next to their name has lost my vote. If they had any integrity they would change parties.

    Just read yet another story about a man turning down a kidney transplant rather than getting vaccinated, even though he knows he’ll die. He’s already lost both legs to diabetes. Live free or die, I guess. Of course I’d like to know if he will leave family behind who will be relying on Social Security paid for by our tax dollars, and the story didn’t say. Not very nice of me, is it.

    After a few chilly days and nights Orlando is getting back to normal and the sun is shining and the butterflies are outside the window. I had a little PTSD watching storm footage over the weekend while the knee I damaged in an ice fall throbbed in recognition.

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  9. David C said on January 31, 2022 at 11:53 am

    Rick Perry was more right than we though when he was campaigning in New Hampshire and said their state motto was “Live Free and Die”.

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  10. Jeff Borden said on January 31, 2022 at 12:01 pm

    Page One of the NYT today details all the ways the MAGAts are worming their way into the machinery of the secretaries of state who oversee and tabulate election results. It’s quite scary.

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  11. jcburns said on January 31, 2022 at 3:50 pm

    Jeff, I think you could have stopped with “We need to stop voting for any Republican” and been a little more on the mark.

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  12. Jeff Borden said on January 31, 2022 at 4:01 pm

    JC,

    These days that is good advice. I hedged my bets because I did vote for Republican for governor twice because he was so superior to the Dems running against him. Also, he was a moderate and pro-choice. Needless to say, he plays no part in the party he once represented. The GOP here has largely rolled over for the MAGAts downstate.

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  13. Deborah said on January 31, 2022 at 5:42 pm

    Snow and single digit temps are coming to NM on Weds and Thurs. Tomorrow I pick up LB at the Albuquerque airport, she’s returning from her CA trip that unexpectedly lasted 3 weeks. She’s been enjoying the weather and spending quite a few early evenings at the beach when her friend gets off of work. Her friend is one of those healthcare workers that contracts with various hospitals all over the place, she will be at Cedar Sinai in Beverly Hills until the end of April, they keep extending her contract.

    Friday LB hopefully gets her hip ablation if they don’t cancel it again.

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  14. Sherri said on January 31, 2022 at 5:55 pm

    I just got off the phone with a friend who lost her mother to Covid. Most of the people I know who have lost people to this pandemic are people of color, and I’m just so angry at all these white people who won’t get vaccinated or wear masks and keep this pandemic going, because they don’t care that the worst of it falls on others.

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  15. Deborah said on January 31, 2022 at 5:58 pm

    Well damn, the New York Times bought Wordle. It’s going to still be free for a while but eventually you’ll have to have a subscription. We have a subscription but LB likes to play too and when I’m back in Chicago only one or the other of us gets to play daily, at least I think that will be the case. Shoot.

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  16. Julie Robinson said on January 31, 2022 at 6:13 pm

    Deborah, from time to time I get offers to gift a subscription for $10/year. It’s usually on a story I’ve clicked on, up at the top.

    Just saw the Fort Wayne snow forecast is 10-15 inches. Whoa.

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  17. beb said on January 31, 2022 at 8:38 pm

    Wednesday I had a doctor appointment to change the cast on my foot. With the snow forecast sounding so dire I’m going to see if I can reschedule for a later date.The one time we are going to get a serious amount of snow is the one day I need to go out!

    It’s amazing how outraged Republicans get over Biden’s promise to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court. They’re called the asyet unnamed appointee an “affirmative Action” hire, and “Not the best and brightest” and so on. What WATB.

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  18. Dexter Friend said on February 1, 2022 at 2:54 am

    Trump wants Americans to demonstrate like never before if the elections of 2022 and 2024 don’t tilt to the red. This non-veiled rant openly indicates he wants armed crazies to storm polling places and stop vote counts if exit polls show blue-leaning possibilities, and in Michigan, it’s nuttier. MSNBC plays the clip nance posted about 24 times a day, “show up armed”. Constitution this, Founding Fathers that, lock and load, use armed force…Banana Republic boilerplate. Crazed gerrymandering does not get it, they want more, all of it. Trump admits now he is proud of 1-6 shenanigans and wants to see it intensify; he should be cuffed and in chains right now for inciting a riot and for sedition for his priors such as being a Russian agent in Putin’s pocket. Somebody throw a net over this monster!
    Yeah, panic buying started quickly as the forecasts are being more intensely broadcast, and we are to get 13 to 15 inches of snow and close to 0F temperatures in 48 hours.
    Panic buying: Local Dollar General was out of many things so I drove to Stryker, just 10 miles over, and got the last bottle of milk . No bread, no eggs,no English muffins like I like. I buy hamburger for Pogo and they had a few frozen cylinders of hamburger so I snagged those.

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  19. Julie Robinson said on February 1, 2022 at 10:47 am

    From the Washington Post October 15, 1980:
    “Ronald Reagan, striving to refute charges that he is insensitive to women’s rights, said today he would name a woman to “one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration.”

    “It is time for a woman to sit among our highest jurists,” Reagan said in a prepared statement to a news conference here. “I will also seek out women to appoint to other federal courts in an effort to bring about a better balance on the federal bench.”

    I’m quoting this to everyone who whines about Biden saying he’ll appoint a black woman.

    Anyone here with school kids? According to a teacher I talked with on Sunday, her school has less than 50% in attendance. She worries about how much time students are missing, because 10th grade is such a critical year. Bless her, doesn’t every teacher think they are teaching at the most crucial level? I worry too.

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  20. alex said on February 1, 2022 at 10:54 am

    Did my last-minute Krogering last night. Today taking my work computer home anticipating a big snow-in.

    Don’t know who’s serving as Donald Trump’s legal counsel these days but they must be having a freakout over the fact that not only is he endorsing the January 6 insurrection and promising pardons but trying to incite future violence as well. Assuming our justice system still works, he’s dug himself quite a hole.

    It has been over two weeks now since my mother has eaten. The hospice nurse calls her “the Energizer Bunny” for her otherwise normal vital signs. And life goes on.

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  21. David C said on February 1, 2022 at 12:59 pm

    It feels like the shit is starting to hit the fan for TFG. I hope that means we get to see the frog march soon. The Wisconsin GQP is cracking up and at each other’s throats too. You would think that would mean good things for the Wis Dems but between the gerrymander and no matter how much the Rs hate each other, they hate Dems more. The last couple of cycles the WOW counties (white flight from Milwaukee counties) have seemed to be swinging in a more sensible direction. So I hope we at least hold onto the four executive offices. We’ll see.

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  22. diane said on February 1, 2022 at 1:40 pm

    Julie,
    I saw that about Reagan too. Putting aside that Reagan was an R and Biden is a D, gee, I wonder just what could be the difference between the two statements so that Reagan’s was forward thinking and Biden’s so appalling?

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  23. Deborah said on February 1, 2022 at 5:08 pm

    Oh no, Senator Lujan of NM has had a stroke. The Dems in the senate need him obviously. I don’t know how serious it is yet. I’m at the airport picking up LB and just glanced at the news. Yikes.

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  24. David C said on February 1, 2022 at 5:40 pm

    It looks Senator Lujan’s prognosis is good. I wouldn’t be surprised if it delays a SC nomination though.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senator-ben-ray-lujan-hospitalized-after-stroke/

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  25. Deborah said on February 2, 2022 at 7:08 am

    Thanks for the link David C. I’m glad that Lujan is expected to make a full recovery. Lujan is a big name around these parts. The Governor of NM, Michelle Lujan Grisham is a distant cousin of the senator. LB’s primary care physician, a young woman, is also part of the family. Mabel Dodge Lujan was a famous woman who invited and became a patron of many artists and writers back in the day, including Georgia OKeefe, Ansel Adams, DH Lawrence etc. Mabel had married the chief of the Pueblo in Taos.

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