Doodles

Current day Republicans are an odd breed.  Their chief characteristic would be hypocritical.  I'm trying to practice charity here.

The second impeachment trial of the "former guy," as the current president refers to him as because he is a charitable man, was a foregone conclusion.  That seven GOPers found him guilty was staggering, like a vote of No Confidence in a parliamentarian system that will topple the government and force a new election within six weeks as in England, but our constitution created an impossible burden to remove a president of a two thirds vote of the senate so it is unworkable.  A violent insurrectionist went free.

Some day the dictionary will include a picture of the first guy in this toon next to the word liar.  It will include a picture of the second guy next to the word traitor.  And it will include a picture of the third guy next to the word idiot.

Then shall he answer them, saying: Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.  And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.  Matthew 25:45-46.

The State of Texas

Texas. Big, bold, brash. Because of their choices, they had a life-costing week of bitter cold that subjected them to no power, no heat, no clean water, bursting pipes and no water pressure (think--fire). Their governor, Republican Greg Abbott, fallaciously said it was the fault of the non-existent "deadly Green Deal."

These unusual weather patterns come through Texas about once a decade (last one was in 2011) so it was not unheard of nor never before experienced. Texans installed leadership and voted for an independent power grid so that they could dispense with federal oversight and build a semi-private system as cheaply as possible, eschewing normal built-in safeguards like insulation. Damn Feds! Well, okay, their systems froze solid and everything went down. The expected resulting damage will cost $17-20B or more.

Federal and outside and local help is on the way! FEMA is rushing generators, water and blankets to the state. New York City Congresswoman AOC raised $1M to be used in disaster relief. Local politicians and prominent persons such as Beto O'Rourke manned phone banks, distributed supplies and personally fixed things like malfunctioning generators at water plants.

Texas Republican Senator Senator Ted Cruz is a traitor who helped orchestrate the violent, deadly insurrection at the Capitol last month by sponsoring other Republican traitors in the House in contesting the validation of certification of the electoral college presidential election in which President Biden was elected overwhelmingly last November to the presidency by over seven million votes. Biden effected a landslide which Cruz knowingly denied and tried to overthrow. He also voted against providing federal disaster relief to the Northeast following Superstorm Sandy less than a decade ago. Also, as soon as his house in Houston got cold, knowing he had already received two coronavirus shots and was thereby personally impervious to the deadly pandemic unlike the vat majority of his constituents and most Americans, he decamped ASAP to CanCun in Mexico to ride out the week in a warm luxury hotel there. When he was caught on camera and publicly shamed (hard to do with this compassionless--sound familiar?--dissembling or worse phony populist and self-proclaimed con-law expert) he blamed his two minor daughters for his elite, craven conduct and returned to where he had abandoned his at-peril constituents who could have used his advocacy at the national level to secure quicker and more state relief.

El Paso did not suffer the deadly travails of of the rest of Texas, because that city undertook hardening of its power-grid during the intervening decade after the debilitating 2011 storm. They set an example that could have greatly ameliorated the current situation in the rest of the state which ignored warnings, disdained federal regulations and actively went its own way to "prove" Texians' ruggedness and ballyhooed independence.

Disaster relief during the pendency of the duress is appropriate. Federal relief thereafter to clean up and pay for the long-lasting damages, outside of longstanding paid-for applicable insurance coverage, is inappropriate given the choices Texans made to leave the national power grids in order to escape federal safety regulations and go on the cheap, which we should not pay for.

They should pay for the damage cost by their shortsightedness themselves, billions at the back end and people in misery and dying so they could save millions at the front end. Their duty going forward is to acknowledge climate change and pay for the adequate protection of their assets, and their remedy for their current dire situation is to replace the statewide leadership, all Republicans, which left them so tragically  

COVID Blues

 Except for driving over to the Lost Dog on Monday, Presidents Day, to have a pizza for lunch, I haven't left my property since the previous Friday, when I went for a three mile walk with a friend who drove over from the District.  She's already had a shot and so she is mere weeks away from soon getting her second shot and then after a short waiting period being able to be out and about without fearing catching one of those monster new variants and being laid low and maybe dying.  

For me, after all the hype about the dangerousness of the mutant viruses, after eleven months of successfully hunkering in place, I'm now intimidated by the new coronavirus battleground and left feeling vulnerable and insecure.  And jealous of all my eligible friends who have already wrangled a shot while I sit at home like tweedle dumb.  

They all had a much younger person perform some magic on the Internet, sometimes from a thousand miles away, to break through the wasting Refresh-Refresh-Refresh humiliating logjam to get an appointment for them, and you know what?  This system we have for the distribution of the vaccination sucks and is illuminating how far we've fallen as a nation, especially in the last four years, and it's somebody's great joke on the elderly to make it so old folks can't figure out how to break into their spot on the line to get inoculated without devoted children doing it for them and it shows us who are lonely enough living alone exactly how useless the rest of society regards us as.

The last two days have been an ice storm around here and I had a hard time chipping the frozen snow glaze off my back cement steps so I could descend them to leave the house and run a snow shovel down the sidewalk.  I have been feeling like prey waiting to be caught in some fashion lately as the nameless, faceless days go by.

Inoculation Blues

Inoculation woes. I'm eligible for the COVID vaccination but unfortunately I live in a 3d world country (the USA--specifically Virginia) after 4 years of Trump and I am sucking wind currently in my effort to get a COVID-19 vaccination. In early January I called up my health care provider, Kaiser (they get $1,000 a month in premiums from me and I haven't been to the doctor in a year and a half, so what am I paying for?) and they put me down on the appointment list to get a vaccination "when shots became available" and said they would text, call or mail me when I could schedule a shot. That was six weeks ago, with nothing. Their website always says, Supplies are inadequate, when adequate supplies are received we'll contact you. That's the last I heard back from Kaiser, which I am deeply disappointed by

On January 24th a friend told me that in Virginia each county was registering eligible persons to receive shots so I registered on that date with Fairfax County, the state's largest county by far. I don't live in Fairfax County, rather I live in the city of Falls Church, which is an autonomous city under the state constitution but similar to the like-situated Alexandria, another city without a county, I am in the greater Fairfax County "medical district." These autonomous cities are holdovers from the state's racist past when towns became autonomous so they wouldn't have to integrate their schools after Brown v. Board, a practice that no longer adheres but the hybrid jurisdiction still is in place. Falls Church offers no shots.

The Fairfax website has for the last 3 weeks offered no clues as to when I might be contacted to schedule an appointment except to always say, Appointments are being made for persons who registered on 1/18, you registered on 1/24 and you will be notified when appointments will become available for your date of registration. It seems to be stuck in amber. I registered six days after everybody else in the county apparently because there was no public advertising that I saw saying to register with your county.

Next, recently the state decided to contract with CVS to administer shots to eligible persons. I registered that very day about two weeks ago, a relatively easy process but it's really a phony site. EVERY single time I go to its website it gives me the same list of about thirty Virginia towns where I can click into to make an appointment for a shot and all of them ALWAYS say, "Full." My girlfriend, who lives in the District and has received her first shot already, has more patience and more Internet dexterity than me, sporadically each day sits holding her I-phone on this website hitting Refresh every twenty seconds or so for an hour or more (for me, I think she feels guilty she has received a shot weeks ago and I haven't, which is another way of saying the chaotic registration "system" in this country, a holdover piece of typical incompetence left to us by the Trump administration, is fostering guilt on the part of lucky shot recipients and feelings of jealousy or even resentment on the part of those feeling left behind, another holdover example of Trumpian divisiveness) and the screen NEVER says anything but Full. As an experiment yesterday, we clicked into Iowa, Arkansas, Texas and North Carolina and every listed town in each of those states said, Full. CVS, a phony website that wastes our time.

Then this week, Virginia said it was taking over all county registrations upon its state website the next day and eligible persons were supposed to register there yesterday. It also confusingly that those persons already registered with their counties would be incorporated into the state's website. So, register or not register? Would you lose your earlier date of registration by registering again on the state site, and lose your former place in line? Who the heck knows? To re-register or not? Hmm.

Then Fairfax County opted out of the state registration system, declaring it would continue as it had! Does that include the autonomous cities of Alexandria and Falls Church, which formerly were, or maybe still are, in its "medical district?" Can, or should, those affected persons now register with the state? Will such a registration wipe out their registration with Fairfax County? Can they also register with the state as well? Will it affect their earlier date of registration with the county, sending them to the back of the line? Who in the world knows? I am not registering with the state, for now. I argue with my girlfriend about this but I don't know what the unintended consequences might be and I don't care to find out later to my detriment.

Finally, my girlfriend directed me to the Howard University Hospital COVID website, the esteemed medical center in the District associated with Howard University, an historical black college. In the District, in addition to using pharmacies, shots are distributed through its hospital system, using their records of former patients, a logical procedure that I don't think has occurred to Virginia although the Virginia governor, in addition to famously being a former blackfacer, is a medicaI doctor. (That's why I thought Kaiser would be tasked with delivering shots, both to its patients and the general population as well, as it is an efficient, well regarded dispenser of all services through its ubiquitous facilities including walk-in flu shots and performing scheduled operations, but Virginia didn't see any beauty in this.)

Howard's website stated that any District resident who was over 65 or a first responder should register on the website for an appointment for a shot, because the next day the eligibility pool to register for an appointment would open up to anyone in any category. So she, with her Stanford law degree, and me, with my UVA law degree (I didn't get into Stanford), argued over whether the above phrasing on the Howard website meant that anybody anywhere (in the world maybe), or DISTRICT residents, could register for an appointment the next day for an appointment for ac shot. It was inelegant wording, that can be parsed out either way (that's what lawyers do), but I ain't registering in the District to take shots away from anyone. But dammit to hell, it sucks out here waiting for Godot.

Children & Disappointments

 My dad used to joke that children are an expensive and gut wrenching form of constant entertainment.  As for me, I paid for child support for my three children for more than a decade at a rate that far exceeded my ability to pay given my liquidity and astounding legal bills at the time and expressed my love for them by physically presenting myself at their mother's curb for my court-ordered visitation every other Friday and every holiday only to suffer the humiliation of being met with an unanswered cell phone call during those moments and the regret that my covert narcissist (in my opinion) ex-wife was teaching them as juveniles to be as consumist scofflaws as herself in adhering to judges' orders and the societal norms of humanity in the four of them's disdain and contempt for mandated visitation.

However, love persists.  I had hoped that one or more of the three of them would have showed up to begin the first day of the rest of our lives after all these years of silence and unjustifiable estrangement for lunch today on this Presidents Day holiday, but being under the domineering and destructive thrall, still, of their deeply flawed mother is still too great for these three strapping men in their thirties to have exercised any decency yet towards their other parent and his family.

It was a nice day for being a February day in Virginia in the midst of an historic pandemic and I parked by the front door of the Lost Dog Cafe and at noon entered the premises, looked around but didn't recognize anybody there and ordered an Italian Pie and returned to my vehicle to await its preparation, watching the ingress and egress into and out of the restaurant the whole time.  Around 12:35 the establishment called to report that the pizza was ready and I picked it up, brought it to my car and enjoyed a lunch of a slice of pizza while I listened to the radio and watched the door.

The meal was delicious, marinara sauce and cheese slathered over sliced onion, pepperoni, ham and salami, and at the end of the hour I left three uneaten slices in the box as a talisman for Better Luck Next Time and drove away, disappointed a hundred or more times over.  Two of my boys have birthdays in the upcoming weeks and I'll be there then, again.

Hearts and Presidents

 Tomorrow is Valentines Day. Be mine sweeties, JJ&D, xxoo.

 It's been awhile, about a decade and a half since I last saw or heard from you but I love you and wish you all the best even though I can't wrap my head around the way you are as fully mature adults, totally eschewing one parent and his entire family for all that time and longer, without just cause and in total deference to the other parent who is, I'm sorry to say, is in my opinion fully as flawed a person or even worse than our last president of the United States.  Today is the last day of that wreck of a human being's impeachment trial, and he has been proven to have tried to throw, murderously so, his own Vice President to the howling violent mob roaming the halls, along with the Speaker of the House, the Senate Pro Tempore, and the Vice President-elect, thus decapitating the national leadership in one fell swoop on the afternoon of January 6th.

My role in my family was successfully and extrajudicially decapitated.through the brainwashing of juvenile minds during the divorce.  It happens, unimaginably so, see immediately above.

Monday is the Presidents Day holiday.  A good day for a pizza for lunch with the family at the Lost Dog, don't you think, JJ&D;  and in any case, maybe I'll catch up with you there on your birthdays, eh J&D?

Doodling

 The Chief Seditionist did leave the White House and he even participated in an hoary tradition of leaving behind a personal note to his successor.  It was his sharpie scrawl signature across a White House card and said in a postscript that the president could sell it on eBay and make a lot of money.  The transactional president to the end.

The outgoing president left under a cloud for engaging in traitorous acts in trying to decapitate the legislative branch on January 6th so he could stay in power in a violent coup attempted by his Proud Boy mob at the Capitol after he incited them at a rally he called on the Ellipse.  The insurrection failed and he was impeached for a second time in a single term, quite a record!  He had a seemingly foolproof defense though in that he had brainwashed the GOP which was already exhibiting unsettling signs of being powermad this entire century, making them susceptible to being okay with treason.

Reprehensible senators Josh Hawley (Q-MO), Yale Law, and Ted Cruz (Q-TX), Harvard Law led the Stop the Steal fiction on the Hill which so entranced the murderously cultish Trump base and facilitated the violent insurrection that day.  Yale and Harvard Law schools ought to do some serious soul-searching of their curriculums based upon the graduates they are sending out to tear down our democracy.  Maybe teach a little Con Law and, especially, ETHICS.

The impeachment trial in the senate is coming up during which the inmates will be in charge of the asylum.  An acquittal for the Seditionist-In-Chief is all but assured because, I predict, only one member of the QANON party will vote to convict, the honorable Senator Mitt Rommney, almost the only true patriot on that side of the chamber.  So the former president will not be bared from holding a federal office in the future and he can return with his frenzied madness and bold corruption to run again in 2024, perhaps with the batty delusional Marjorie Taylor Green as his VP pick.