March 23

Cloudy today but the temps should go to near normal--about 40F. We got light snow showers but nothing that accumulated. Northwest of us got much more. I spent most of this morning finishing two hot pads. I haven't yet finished getting the What-not room reorganized and put back together. I will get back to it tomorrow. I pulled out a stack of our DVDs because the news is focused on that attack in Russia, Trump, and whether another Speaker of the house will face a discharge petition while another member of that caucus decided not only to retire but to retire immediately. Evidently he also waited until his governor can't appoint an interim representative. The Republican majority is now only 1. Usually we would have gone to soccer or rugby games but the English Premier League had a break and the Six Nations Tournament finished last weekend--Ireland won. Soccer will start up again next weekend.

Stray thought: a lot of pixels have been scattered over the moral outrage over Israel's actions in Gaza but no one has any leverage over the Netanyahu government. Not even the U.S. government evidently.  However, I remembered a story I read somewhere about a British governor in Indiana who faced a deputation of outraged Indians over his edict to end suttee (the burning of widows on their deceased husband's funeral pyre). The Indians insisted the governor couldn't stop them following their traditions. The governor thought for a moment and then told them that the British also had a tradition. If men burned women, the British hanged them. The Indians were free to follow their traditions but the British would build a gallows next to the pyre and then follow their tradition. The tradition of suttee stopped. If the U.S. told Netanyahu (and his government) that they are indeed independent sovereigns and make their own decisions but so are we and we do not agree to support (financially, politically, or militarily) actions we find morally abhorrent. The weak U.N. resolution our government put forward is a tepid response that I hope will be followed by MUCH stronger actions.

This sounds way too Trumpian. Netanyahu seems to think that Israel's problem isn't that its actions in Gaza aren't really justifiable but that Israel's government doesn't have people who can's "string two words together in English." In other words, their spokespeople are having trouble explaining the inexplainable (or unjustifiable.) Hasbara is an interesting word and I am surprised it hasn't migrated into English.

Ben Krauss has an interesting proposal to break the deadlock in Congress: an anonymous Congress. As Krauss noted the idea could work under both Republican and Democratic presidents and, under certain conditions, might not work. But everyone is getting very tired of people WE elect and pay six figure salaries doing nothing to address real problems. I remember a character in a novel I like commenting on discontent with the Federal government: people want government to do two things--win wars and solve problems. But our government hasn't done either for a long time. The reaction to that is already noted in the conflict between Texas and the Federal government over the southern border and that isn't the only point of contentious friction.