Last year was an enormous moment in our history: we had elections.
For today’s Past Squares, going back to those thrilling days in November:
Past Squares 12: Newspaper Headlines
October 19, 2021 at 12:50 pm (Links, postaday, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: elections, Events, Joe Biden, life of B, news, photo challenge, politics, US history
Kyrsten Sinema, Martyr?
October 16, 2021 at 12:42 am (Wall Street Journal)
Tags: causes, Fridays, news, politics
Kimberley A. Strassel, Potomac Watch, Wall Street Journal, Friday, 16 October 2021
Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children. And like clockwork, the progressive mob has set on Kyrsten Sinema. Next time the left lectures on unity, women’s rights or Joe Biden’s decency, lock your door.
The Arizona senator continues to infuriate her fellow Democrats, who are frenzied to impose their $3.5 trillion social revolution. Ms. Sinema reportedly has issues with the cost of the package as well as its tax proposals and some programs. She’s conducted dozens of meetings with the White House and key players, though has also made clear she won’t be jammed and won’t negotiate with the public. Her refusal to bow to the left’s price tag and timeline has incensed colleagues and activists alike.
“Progressive mob” — cute, really cute. Is Strassel drawing or trying to draw parallels between the protesters who followed Sinema into a restroom to the Jan. 6 rioters? Try harder, Strassel. There were only three people in that bathroom, as opposed to 1000+ in DC on Jan. 6
Strassel is an apologist for Sinema. Doesn’t fly with self. Self loathes this woman, right? Loathes her. She is no champion of Middle America, as anyone can see from her fantastically twee outfits that only get more tacky the longer the senator stays in Congress.
Strassel’s main complaint is that “the left” (someone please tell self what she means by “the left”) have no manners: they confront Sinema any old place, such as in airplanes. Tough! That’s what she signed up for. It’s not all press appearances and meetings with Big Pharma.
Listen up, Sinema: if you’re so bothered by protesters, suggest you don full-body armor. Or Hazmat suit. Or maybe go full-on ‘Congressional’ and wear a suit. If you did the latter, you’d be unrecognizable. That would be a pretty good disguise!
Stay tuned.
The Horror of Florida
October 15, 2021 at 2:06 pm (Places, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: causes, Fridays, medicine, news, politics
Florida County Fined for Mandate
(Wall Street Journal, Thursday, 14 October 2021, p. A6)
The Florida Department of Health fined Leon County $3.57 million for requiring county staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
The northwest Florida county, which includes the state capital of Tallahassee, in late July required its employees to show verification of vaccination by Oct. 1, and shortly after that deadline fired 14 workers for not following the mandate, according to the state health department.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May signed legislation banning vaccine passports in the state, saying lawmakers were protecting residents’ personal choice. There is a $5,000 fine for every violation.
The Reading Year (So Far, 2021)
April 26, 2021 at 2:25 am (Books, Explorers, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Women Writers)
Tags: book lists, Grimdark, mysteries, novel, Obama, Paris, reading lists, science fiction, urban fantasy
From wsj’s Best Books of 2020/Science Fiction:
- The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal – So far, one of the best novels she’s read in 2021
- Ballistic Kiss, by Richard Kadrey – wildly inventive, self wasn’t so taken with the he/she/they gender politics of a major character
In a category by itself:
- Dark, Salt, Clear, by Lamorna Ash — A first book by a 22-year-old, E.S.A.D.
Kick-Ass Discovery of the Year:
- Eddie’s Boy, by Thomas Perry, the sequel to a 1982 novel, The Butcher’s Boy – That’s chutzpah, coming up with a sequel 40 years later. Kudos! Self added The Butcher’s Boy to her reading list.
from wsj’s Best Books of 2020/Mysteries:
- All the Devils Are Here, by Louise Penny — Self adored Jean-Guy Beauvoir and of course Paris.
- One Fatal Flaw, by Anne Perry — All hail the May-December almost-romance between 25-year-old Daniel Pitt and 40-year-old Miriam Crofft, daughter of his employer.
from The Economist’s Books of the Year 2020/Memoir
- A Promised Land, by Barack Obama — Beautifully written, can’t believe 45 was succeeded by Drumpf.
from The Economist’s Books of the Year 2020/Fiction
- SHUGGIE BAIN, by Douglas Stuart — an absolutely immersive experience, though her favorite character was not the title character but his unheralded older brother, Leek
from The Economist’s Books of the Year 2020/Business and Economics
- No Rules Rules — This one was a disappointment.
from wsj’s Books of the Year 2020/Travels in the New North
- Ice Walker, by James Raffan — another absolutely immersive experience, the ending almost broke self.
from Jonathan Strahan’s Notes from a Year Spent Indoors (Locus Magazine)
- the first two books in Joe Abercrombie’s (smashing) Age of Madness trilogy and her first Grimdark: A Little Hatred and The Trouble with Peace
Headline of the Day: Wall Street Journal
January 30, 2021 at 1:27 am (Surprises, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: Facebook, Fridays, humor, news
p. B4, Thursday, 28 January 2021
SAMSUNG PROFIT GETS LIFT FROM PANDEMIC
Challenges include imprisonment of leader . . .
Beyond the pandemic, the company is contending with its de facto leader Lee Jae-yong back behind bars.
“Imprisonment of leader” is really a big challenge. I mean, it’s probably the biggest.
In smaller type on the same page:
FACEBOOK REVENUE HITS RECORD.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
It Was Close: Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, 13 January 2021
January 14, 2021 at 11:55 pm (Surprises, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: complaints, COVID Reading, news, politics, Wordpress
With rioters ransacking the Capitol, Rep. Jim Himes hunkered in the visitors’ gallery overlooking the House chamber. He watched colleagues below rush to exit the floor, heard the reverberation of a single shot from somewhere close and waited his turn to evacuate.
A trio of Capitol police officers with guns drawn then led Mr. Himes and about two dozen colleagues — the last lawmakers in the chamber — across the long gallery, maneuvering through narrow rows of seats and over brass handrails. The officers were agitated and shouting at one another, he said, because they didn’t know which of the doors leading to the hallway to pick.
“They had no idea which door didn’t have a mob behind it,” he said.
— written by Ted Mann, Dustin Volz, Lindsay Wise and Chad Day, Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, 13 January 2021, p. A4
Despite this, 197 GOP House members voted against impeachment. Unbelievable.
So sick of the WordPress Block System, what a huge waste of time, not everyone wants to fiddle with layout, some people just want to type. Self had to write this entire post twice because those damn blocks kept floating to places on her screen where she didn’t want them to be, and dealing with blocks so unstable is worse than — trying to walk on the surface of the moon?
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
Sentence of the Day, 2nd Wednesday of 2021
January 14, 2021 at 4:09 am (Surprises, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: news, politics, Trump, Twitter
Silicon Valley’s moves to eject President Trump from social media represent a display of power the companies have avoided making for nearly four years.
— “Big Tech Firms Flex Muscle With Bans” by Sarah E. Needleman and Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal, 11 January 2021
2020: The Sea Inside
December 19, 2020 at 9:24 pm (Books, Movies, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, television, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: elections, nonfiction, politics, Protests, The Expanse, US history
No commentary, just pictures that moved self as she looks back on the year ending. Most of the pictures are ones self took, except for: the still from Tenet; the still from The Expanse; the still from Black Panther; the ballet dancers in front of a Confederate monument (which she thinks is from AP)
Post-Election Analysis: wsj (Saturday/Sunday, Nov. 21-22, 2020)
December 3, 2020 at 5:13 pm (Surprises, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: elections, politics, Twitter
Self is fascinated by Joe Biden and how he pulled out the biggest GOTCHA moment of his political career. So of course she loves reading post-election analysis.
- “Hilary Clinton was supposed to be the safer choice.” After 2016, “Democrats were fed up with moderation.” Democrats wanted “an uncompromising leftist who would take the fight to Donald Trump . . . the vast field of Democratic contenders endorsed single-payer health care and vowed to decriminalize the crossing of the southern border by undocumented immigrants.” — Yascha Mounk:
Self endorsed Elizabeth Warren and stumped for her in the San Francisco Bay Area in January 2020.
Her closest rival at the time: Bernie Sanders.
Great was self’s amazement when Joe Biden (who didn’t even have a table at the San Mateo Farmers Market, lol) won the California primary. Without hardly even campaigning in the state. At the time, self told friends: OBAMA FOR THE WIN.
But then Biden just kept rolling on and on, taking state after state. So self started thinking that Joe had a really ace campaign staff. In response to anything Clown had to throw at him, they just stuck to the game without getting distracted.
“Most pundits” wrote “the septuagenarian off as a walking anachronism, a throwback politican too old to see the way the wind was blowing. But it turned out that Mr. Biden understood the Democratic electorate much better than his rivals.
Yascha Mounk, wsj Saturday/Sunday, November 21-22, 2020
On the Republican side, Donald Trump found an opening: the wooing of “older, non-college-educated voters living in less-diverse small towns.” (How he found them is, to self, a big mystery. The biggest. Because he never went to less-diverse small towns unless it had potential for a Trump resort. Oh wait, it’s not a mystery: he found them on Twitter)
Capitalizing on that demographic, he ran “to the right on immigration to win the GOP nomination and then, in the general election,” he rejected “conservative orthodoxy on Social Security, Medicare and free trade.” So he zigged and he zagged with the adroitness of a slippery con artist.
He was very good, it turned out, on thinking up campaign slogans (not so good on the follow-through). Who cares? He was President.
Can you believe half the American electorate in 2016 voted FOR TRUMP as the “lesser of two evils”?
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
Sea of Images 2020
November 13, 2020 at 4:43 pm (The Economist, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: causes, elections, Fridays, heroes, Joe Biden, memories, politics, Protests
