Tuesday--

No new snow--so far. Can't tell if we got any of the freezing rain the weather people thought we might. We have no reason to go out so we won't have to deal with it. We chatted with the secretary at our landlord's office. We could mail them our rent but it is so much more fun to hand deliver it and talk to them for a bit. Anyway--she lives outside town and lost power for a couple of days. Luckily she has a generator. We only had a couple of flickers--nothing like the two hour blackout that awful wind storm almost three weeks ago caused. From what one of the men said some residents seem to have confused the snow removal crews with god and complained about how long it was taking. According to one of our neighbors the crews had been working from 3 am when they reached our buildings in mid afternoon. Thankfully, we have nothing like that coming up.

I do love Margaret and Helen. They say what this old broad thinks and has often enough said out loud. And Victoria Stilwell and Sarah McGregor at Bloomberg Politics also note factors in the rise of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders that I have noted for a long while. Ever since the economic pundits declared the end of the recession in 2009 I have wondered what they were smoking. The major, if not the only, reason the unemployment rate is down is because the labor participation rate is also down. Not a case of that many more people being hired as that many more people dropping out of the labor market. Wages going up? Well, not enough to be more than a statistical blip and certainly not enough to counter inflation. But there is no inflation they say? Well, they obviously don't do the grocery  shopping. The fact that we are paying as much, or perhaps a bit more, for smaller packages doesn't seem to register. People have every reason to be angry and the traditional pols simply don't get it. Follow that up with Andrew Bacevich's commentary on how Trump is remaking American politics, and perhaps more if he is elected.