Thursday Nov 8

Well, most of the election 2018 is over though several tight races remain to be decided. I am gratified that Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa overwhelmingly dumped their Repthuglican politicians. I did see some interesting items yesterday to which I can't link because I didn't note them down at the time. They have been fermenting in my mind since. First the Republican strongholds that elected #45 remain pretty much intact except for the "Blue Wall" he supposedly toppled--a.k.a the midwest. But following the interactive map and looking at the distributions in the individual states I noticed that the national pattern was replicated within states. The Republican strength is in the rural areas and small towns while the Democrat strength is in the urban and suburban areas. In the 2016 election the Republicans peeled off the disaffected suburban voters and large segments of the the Democratic base in minority and female voters were also disaffected and stayed home. But the policies the Republicans pushed over the last two years haven't helped those disaffected voters (or their rural and small town constituents either.) And they were punished for that. Number 45 pushed new trade deals with Mexico and Canada to replace NAFTA but those delivered very little improvement over the old agreement and nothing he couldn't have gotten if we had gone with the Trans-Pacific Partnership which the Republicans opposed because--you know, OBAMA!!

I have ignored most of the prognostication about where the results of this election will lead because, truth be told, no one really knows. Those few I have read expect, like I do, more of what we have had  a lot of sound and fury and not much done.

Monday Nov 12

Oh, well. The entry above got lost in the shuffle. We got our first measurable snow fall. It didn't stay long and didn't require shoveling. We are getting our first stretch of sustained freezing temperatures. The gardens are pretty well done now. The hardiest of the plants (strawberries, thyme, bee balm, a lonely lavender and a couple of thyme have finally succumbed. We woke to frost on our windows for the last several mornings. We got used to frost on roofs of buildings and cars but it hadn't been quite cold enough to do more that fog the windows till now.

I just finished watching an ad that Iceland banned because Greenpeace was one of the producers and Greenpeace is "too political." Nimue Brown links to it and has an excellent criticism of the ban. So why are advertisements that encourage "business as usual" not as political as those which question "business as usual?"