First weekend of the new year and it finally feels like the holidays are over. Speaker Johnson did manage to "win" a continuation of his speakership into this new Congress but I wonder what Trump promised the holdouts in the Republican caucus to switch their votes and how much Johnson promised.
My agenda for the new year involves a good cleaning and rearranging in the kitchen. Not all at once because I don't have the stamina for that any more. We also plan to watch less of the crap on TV--too much nonsensical repetition, too much programing that we either don't want to see at all or have seen all too much, too damned many commercials. I plan to tune into Pandora much more often.
Although the House managed to elect a speaker without an overwhelming amount of drama and chaos, and will easily confirm Trump's win I don't think passing meaningful legislation will be easy. The Republicans do have a majority in the House and I doubt the Democrats will try to give the Republicans a taste of the shit they served up last time. No one is spouting spurious notions of election fraud. But the margins are very thin and neither side is all that unified.
This post by Denise Donaldson at PONDERMENTS makes a number of points neither side wants to look at. As she notes the Democrats seem to be looking at their "messaging"and how it failed to convince voters to vote for them. Their message said everything was good, inflation was down, unemployment was down, we had the best economy in the world and the best recovery from COVID. A lot of people tried to tell their advisors and pundits that, at the personal level, the stats simply didn't reflect their reality. Take a look at the statistics in the article and remember that many of those statistics didn't make it into the measures of inflation. But the Republican message going forward into their "trifecta" government doesn't really reflect reality either. The problem of rising costs is not really something Trump can cure no matter how often he assures us that only he can solve it. Or wants to solve because any solution would hit greedy corporations hard. But Donaldson also note the neither party has the will to strike at the real root cause of our discontent. I have often said that we have left and right wings of the same party--the Wall Street Party.
You don't often see anyone suggesting that we should remove highways. Progress is usually defined by how many more miles of highway are built. This article is one of the few. During the decade after the "Great Recession" a number of places started reducing some four lane highways to two lane roads and some two lane roads were put back to gravel. All of the examples I saw in articles were in rural areas that no longer carried enough traffic to justify the maintenance. I don't think we will see a massive move to remove highways in cities and their surrounding areas. Too many people who work in cities actually live well outside the cities. A catch phrase of about a decade ago advised potential home buyers to "drive till you qualify" because so many were priced out of the city and near by suburban markets. That is about when we started commenting on the "refugees from Chicago" because, for a number of years, several families or couples moved into neighboring units while they searched for a stand alone home to buy or build. We haven't seen so many of them lately but some of the developments are still under construction.
