This Ain’t No CNN.

Ah, Texas. It’s been just a week or two since my husband and I drove across the panhandle as we made our way from Chicago to Tucson. It was fairly early in the morning when we crossed the Oklahoma State Line along I-40 into Texas. The temperature was well below freezing and the roads were covered with ice. The bridges were particularly fun to navigate. We made our way to Amarillo at a crawl as it seemed that whatever state agency maintains the roads and bridges along Interstate 40 had absolutely no interest in doing anything about the slick roadways. There were at least a dozen tractor trailers off the road in various spots. To be fair, your neighbors in Oklahoma had the same approach. Now I understand why you guys freak out when Mother Nature decides to take the temperatures to the low side. You act surprised (though it happens every year) and you don’t do a damn thing about it.

Apparently that was just a glimpse into the way Texans feel about winter weather.

For most of the state, the Texas power grid is independent from the rest of the continental United States. I’ve known this for a while but I didn’t know why. This week I learned it was to escape federal regulations and oversight on power grid maintenance. By maintaining power independence, Texas doesn’t have to do things like winterize power generators or build in costly redundancies, both required along the rest of the United States power grid. After all, Texas doesn’t see that kind of weather.

Except it does.

Our friends in the Houston area have been without power for tens of hours. Like 30-40 hours. No power. No heat. And probably no running water. In the freezing cold. This is not uncommon for The Lone Star State this week, millions of Texans have been in the same situation since this cold snap began. The Texas power companies have been instituting rolling blackouts to keep up with high demands, except the blackouts don’t roll, they just black out and not come back up. Our friends slept in sub-freezing temperatures in their house Monday night. They honestly didn’t know if they would survive.

What was it Trump said about “third-world shit hole countries”?

There is nothing great about the “greatest nation on Earth” when its citizens, no matter what state they live in, are freezing to death in their homes, especially when the powers that be have willfully decided to privatize and rely on good ol’ American capitalism for essential services such as electricity, water, and heat.

I will never understand why Texans elect representatives who put them in this situation. I feel terrible for the Texans that are having to live through this ordeal, regardless of who they elected. I just pray the folks down there will remember this catastrophic event come Election Day and start voting sensibly and start taking care of one another.

By the way, the power outages are not due to “windmills freezing up”. That’s a lie being propagated by the usual conservative “news” outlets and idiots on social media. All forms of power generation in Texas are freezing up due to a lack of preparedness for this type of weather. Only 5-10% of the wind turbines in The Lone Star State are having an issue right now. So please, let’s put all of that to rest and deal with the real situation.

Texas needs to get its act together.

My husband started to tell me the results of the Senate vote on Trump’s impeachment and I politely asked him to stop the conversation. We already knew the answer, the Senate would not do the right thing; all of sudden they were more concerned about going on recess so they slammed through a solution as quickly as possible and after all, the folks at the Capitol that died are dead and not coming back so why worry about it now.

During the Trump Reign of Terror I kept an eye on the news because I wanted to know if my marriage was going to be invalidated or if Martial Law was going to be declared and I wanted to look my best for either occasion. Since President Biden has taken office I have calmed down on following the news. Yes, the Democrats have the majority across the board right now but they’ll be weak and worry about optics more than results and not do much with it and probably lose the majority somewhere come 2022. Biden is signing Executive Orders like hall passes and fixing a lot of things that the Orange Moron did. I’m OK with undoing stupid stuff, I’m not really on board with using Executive Orders to do everything else. The branches of government should be working together to make this a better country for all of us. Unfortunately, it appears those days are long gone.

I sound cynical. I’m actually disengaged. Things are getting better but we shouldn’t be digging ourselves out of this hole to begin with.

I’m not surprised at the Senate’s acquittal. I expected it. Few in government are actually in it for the right reasons and I just don’t have the energy to follow their script anymore.

We can breathe again. We made it. The four year nightmare has come to an end.

Welcome aboard, President Biden and Vice-President Harris. Let’s get to work, together.

13 hours from this moment. 13 hours. That’s all we need to get through.

Photo courtesy of CNN.

So last night, after watching hours of news coverage of the insurrection going on at the Capitol Building and then watching the Senate and House proceedings on certifying the vote, I wrote a quick blog entry that was vague. I talked about failure, and shock, and success.

I am very angry.

My mind has been blown since Trump took office four years ago. My mind was actually blown long before he won the Republican Primary. Anyone with any sense or moral foundation knew that a Trump Presidential Administration was going to be an absolute disaster. Yesterday was just the icing on the a feces laden cake we’ve been forced to deal with since this idiot took office.

But thing that blows me away is how rabid his supporters have become. Members residing on my branch of the family tree are so whacked out in love with the guy, and this leaves me stupefied. Four years later, after seeing praise and piety and whatever other word that means “what the fuck” that begins with a “p” heaped onto this guy from the strongest “Christians” on the family tree has me baffled. I thought I was related to stable people. There are too many lunatics in my bloody relations.

However, I like to think that those few around me are not nearly as nuts as the complete and utter idiots that stormed the Capitol Building yesterday. There’s a video of some chick named Elizabeth talking about a revolution but crying because she got some mace in the eyes. I’m surprised the Capitol Police found the time to mace this woman. They didn’t seem very interested in protecting the place; there’s too many video clips and photos of police officers taking selfies with these criminals or opening gates to let them have access to the building. The entire Capitol Police Force needs to be stripped from the top all the way to the bottom. The chief resigned. It’s a start.

Folks are frustrated. I get that. But in no way was Donald Trump ever the answer to this problem. The man has been a television punch line for decades. The man has bankrupted casinos. And not only did millions of Americans find him worthy of the Oval Office in 2016, 70 million American still think he’s doing well enough to get another chance to burn the entire country down to the ground over the next four years.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are your lives so miserable that you want everyone else to suffer to make you feel better over your stupefied, miserable, unsuccessful lives?

I’ve been too quiet for too long about politics, especially here on my blog. Yes, I love talking about all aspects of life here, but for life to be pleasant we have to have a strong foundation. Am I thrilled about Joe Biden as President? Meh, I think he’ll do fine. I find Kamala a refreshing breath of Gen-X in a decidedly Baby Boomer game. The thing I’m most excited about is Georgia swinging blue in the Senate yesterday. This is going to be interesting. And ironically, we have Trump’s asshattery to thank for that. But more importantly, I feel like the country may have turned a corner. I think yesterday’s abomination and blight on our history may have pushed enough people in the right direction to get things swung back over towards something that resembles sanity.

I’ll be following politics closely. I want to know what’s going on. And I want to do everything I can as Joe Citizen to help push the country finally into the 21st century. We’re already 21 years into the 21st century and we ain’t got squat to show for it.

Let’s do this.

So many feelings today. So many shocks. So many insanities. So many failures. So many words.

So many successes.

It’s not often that I agree with Paul Ryan, but I agree with Paul Ryan. The lunatics in the GOP need to get themselves under control and out of the Twilight Zone.

Many of the news media are known for calling Trump “the worst President in modern U.S. history”. Why do they say that? There’s only been 45 people to hold this office of the presidency; who in the 45 of them has been actual worse at the job than Trump?

Can any president claim that over 300K Americans have been killed by a pandemic that could have been mitigated to result in a much lower death count?

Andrew Jackson was pretty awful with his “Indian Relocation Act”. Herbert Hoover didn’t do us many favors with his prelude to the Depression. I guess it’s all relative, but I really don’t think any president has been as reckless, self-serving, or dangerous as Trump. Ever. In the history of the country.

The death count of 9/11 is being reached or frightfully exceeded on a DAILY basis right now during this raging pandemic. Trump is off to Mar-A-Lago with his whore in toe and he’s vowing to veto a stimulus package. Yes, the country should be giving us more money but he couldn’t be bothered to address the issue when Congress was debating how the next stimulus should be handled. Our technological infrastructure was attacked by Russia but he’s cutting federal funds for the military and he won’t even address the issue.

Worst president ever? Absolutely. No doubt. Stop dancing around the colossal failure this guy has been.

I am so very tired. This is why I don’t write about politics or the state of the country like I used to. I am just so exhausted. One more month.

I’m tired of people rationalizing Trump’s ridiculous behavior. I’m tired of politicians with absolutely no sense of moral responsibility or even evidence of some shred of a foundation of decency. I’m tired of the outrage. I’m tired of the outrageous. And I’m really tired of having to tolerate all of this extremely idiotic behavior from entirely too many people.

What the hell happened to this country?

I’m reading dialogues from people in my educational past that didn’t understand that the Underground Railroad didn’t involve tokens or exact change lecture the world on the nuances of the U.S. Constitution. I’m listening to endless, monotonous commentary from paid pundits trying to speak with authority on the next moves of a man who is insane, has no clear agenda outside of sheer destruction, and has no sense of moral obligation to do anything other than serve himself. And my Christian contemporaries telling me this idiot has been sent by a God? Give me a break. I’m embarrassed for them.

One saving grace in all this is at my age I figure the country might outlast me by a decade. Tops. I know the world will go on; I’m doubtful the U.S.A. will endure in its present form beyond the next 50 years. There’s too much thirst for blood in too many of its citizens. Too many Americans revel in and profit from their fellow citizens suffering. Some hick in Mississippi, in his 10×50 mobile home from 1972, feels he is just fine because Trump made those “forty-oneks” do great things on Wall Street. His investments have never been better.

You can’t escape the outrage. You can’t even escape the discussion. That dried up Cheetolini, with all his litigation and tantrums and just plain, repulsive buffoonery is everywhere. He makes for great ratings and great ad revenues and millions of clicks and feeds the corporate cogs of American capitalism. Do not be fooled by anyone with a furrowed eyebrow, an eyeroll, are words of concern, they’re all loving this and will milk every single outrage until the very bitter end.

I hope this end arrives, very, very soon.