My grandmother was a very proper woman whom I never heard speak ill of anyone.

Except once.

Her husband was a Republican Senator who kept for posterity his thank you letter from Martin Luther King Jr. for voting for the Civil Rights Act.

Strom Thurmond, on the other hand… One of my older cousins asked her how he’d done his historic 24 hour filibuster and Gram did a sharp sniff, took a deep breath, and told us kids, “Well! He had a catheter installed under his pants.” The disdain in her voice was something so unexpected coming from her that I’ve never forgotten it.

(I debated saying contempt, but Merriam-Webster says disdain means considering someone as being beneath one’s notice or dignity and that captures it perfectly. Like I say, she was a proper woman.)

Today I watched now and then and then all of the last 45 minutes of Cory Booker’s speech before Congress. Senator Booker, with enough African heritage to know what it is to be a Black man in America today, was determined  to best the record of a man who had agitated for segregation and the snatching away of rights of people who looked like him. Booker was speaking up for the rule of law, the sanctity of the courts, and the rights of all of us. For us to reclaim all that is good in us as Americans and in our government.

And he did it. He did it. And he kept going, just for good measure, long enough to get past that 24 hour 18 mark to a solid 25-plus so that his number and Thurmond’s would never be the same. Beat the old bastard once and for all. It was a declaration that the old racist fascist in the White House is going to lose out to the judgments of history, too.

Gram’s reaction was never about the catheter. It was just the closest she could come to saying how p***-poor  Thurmond’s ideas had been and what kind of a person would go to so much effort towards damaging the lives of so many others.

Cory Booker stood there, for 25 hours on his feet straight he stood up for every single one of us and I am so proud and so grateful.

And thank you, Wisconsin! 

Someone had a lot of fun putting a dragon eye in that tree. The fact that the iris looks like a black beetle is the perfect extra Halloweeny touch to it.

Wrote to my city council members today. Wrote my congressman. Weighed the morality of being part of the April 5 peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations vs doing right by my family and not risking a flare by being out in the sun to hold up one of those placards. The physical reality of lupus always wins and I always stay inside and it’s so deeply frustrating–but it’s also how I made it to thirty-five years since diagnosis.

But by golly I can drive past slowly honking my horn and waving and cheering in solidarity.

Dunno if you saw the guy who tried pulling a stun gun on an older woman at a demonstration in front of the Berkeley Tesla dealership last week. It is fair to say that that UC Berkeley medical school professor was not having it. Peaceful, peaceful, guys! but yeah, she was not going to let him do that to anybody else.

Deep breath. And a thank you to the cops who came to serve and protect peacefully and they did.

I wrote about wearing the huge sunflower gerdan in protest and solidarity the Sunday after the election.

What I didn’t mention was ABT coming up to me, wanting to know if that meant what she thought it did.

Support for Ukraine and made in Ukraine, yes, and I’d promised the woman who’d made it that I would wear it in celebration the day her country wins the war.

That meant a lot to ABT.

Two weeks ago I motioned her over at church. I asked her, Do you remember? and she went Oh, yeah!

I told her, I ordered something and this artist gifted me with the extra of a small gerdan–one that I already have one quite like. Is blue a good color, and would you like it? I pulled it out of its bag, its beads sparkling. (Not all do, but that one does.)

I knew, but didn’t say, how insane rents are in this area and how they can leave a young couple without a dime to spare. One of the perks of being older is getting to share. She got a little emotional at the sight as she took it in her hands.

I didn’t run into her last week so she made a point of finding me today. It matched her blue dress perfectly. It matched her and what she so hoped for for the sake of good people fighting for their freedom, and in the face of what our terrible leaders did to Zelensky this past week, wearing her support out loud felt imperative. And now she could.

And there I was, doing the same: that large loud sunflower was back on me.

Conflict creates drama. At the very end, Trump reveled out loud at what great television this was going to make.

He’s a star, and some voters let him do it.

And so in the Oval Office, JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of campaigning for “the other side” last year, incensing 47 and egging him on to even greater bullying. Even knowing what I was about to see, it was astonishing.

This was supposed to be the President and Vice President of the United States of America, representing the hopes and aspirations of the American people before the world from inside the most important room in one of the most important buildings in our country, a temple to democracy, a place of diplomacy and peacemaking for all of our history.

I had read about it and thought, was it really that bad? I didn’t want to judge by what anyone else said about them, I had to go watch it myself.

Zelenskyy, put in an impossible spot, handled the betrayal with a great grace that was completely unseen by his attackers.

Trump played angry Mad King George to the hilt. Vance was worse because he was fully aware what they were doing and who would suffer and what the potential fallout could be across not just Ukraine but all of Europe–and that was fine with him.

Do the people who voted for these guys even know that they’re blaming Ukraine for starting an invasion of Ukraine by Russia and how twisted that is?

Vote for a rapist….

What is Putin holding over these men that they’re trying so hard to hurt people seeking to keep their precious freedom?

One whole side of the pomegranate tree popped out in small reddish new leaves overnight, officially declaring winter over. It had looked utterly dormant yesterday. Yay!

Things are starting to wake up.

In case anyone hasn’t heard: there is a move afoot to show the power of the people to those bent on ascribing it all to themselves.

Note that Jeff Bezos today announced that there will be no dissenting editorializing at his Washington Post from here on out: only those that support his vision of what ‘freedom’ means as he supports the current administration.

He asked the Opinions editor if he could agree to what he was being told to do, and Shipley said no. He is out.

Politico marveled, for a man supposedly bright about business, having already lost a quarter million subscribers in reaction to his exerting control over the editorial section before last Fall’s election, Bezos didn’t even try to hide it.

We have recourse. Friday, there’s a call for all to stop being consumers for one day: no buying (in some quarters, an exception is made for paying in cash to local small businesses, ie helping the little guy and not sending off a percentage of their earnings to the big banks via credit cards). No Amazon, no opening ads in your inbox, no shopping, no big corporations. Show our power of the purse to those whom that’s all they care about, to those who are cutting funds to the poorest (Medicaid, starving people, my stars) to give more to the richest.

Go on financial strike. Show them who’s really boss.

Just for a day.

There may need to be more.

Let’s see if Bezos lets it be reported on.

Note that Jennifer Rubin, lawyer and as of about a month ago a now-former editorial writer at the Post (her column was named Right Turn for her Republican take on politics, until Trump 1.0), co-founded “The Contrarian: not owned by anybody” a few weeks ago with one of the lawyers from the first impeachment hearing and it is already up to half a million subscribers. Nice.

There’s a saying in Europe, he said over dinner–France and Spain, at least. It is: We have the songs but they have the guns.

New one to me. I reminded him of the Pete Seeger story, where to his surprise the protest singer was invited to sing in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship. His car was tailed (and afterwards so much so that he wasn’t sure they would let him live.)

The large stadium was packed and the show carried live nationwide on the radio. Just before Seeger went on he was handed a list by some men clearly intending to look threatening of the songs he was not allowed to sing: most of his set.

So he walked out there, held up the piece of paper to one and all, told his audience what had just happened (knowing exactly how much that would tick off certain people) and said, I’ll tell you what: they said I couldn’t sing them. They didn’t say I couldn’t PLAY them. I bet you know all the words. Tell you what, I’ll play them and you sing them.

And sing they most certainly did, loud and clear. And the whole country heard it and knew they were not alone in resisting the dictatorship.

Franco’s regime crumbled after the concert.

When the people knew they weren’t the only people who had the songs, who were willing to sing the songs out loud and in defiance, the guns became powerless and irrelevant.

I thought of this after the story broke of a doctored video (NBC story link) playing on screens throughout the HUD building after all work-from-homes were required to work-from-work no matter where they actually lived that showed just how humiliatingly subservient 47 is to the (f)Elon. The regime’s men couldn’t figure out how to make it stop other than running from floor to floor and room to room unplugging the screens, knowing that unless they figured out more than that, that video would still be waiting to repeat on endless loops.

And knowing that so many people were laughing over it and that they had not succeeded in keeping it from getting out of the building must have burned.

There’s more than one way for a free people to sing.

R is a teen, and she was giving one of the talks in church today.

Her family moved here six months ago, and where they’d moved from had had a group of Ukrainian refugees that had lived in underground bomb shelters for months. She found that included teenage girls who didn’t speak the language here and didn’t know anybody and they didn’t know if they’d ever be able to return. Their home had been bombed.

R’s mom, also reaching out, found that the girls had made a video. Of them doing normal, daily things. Brushing their teeth. Washing their hands.

Only, there was no water coming out, they were just play-acting it. And laughing and giggling and making sport of the absurdity of it all because what on earth else could you do about it, so, hey. Love the old home before you tell it goodbye maybe forever, and they did.

It made me sorry for those Ukrainians that R’s family had moved away from them, but as I said to her mom, From the first day of meeting your daughter I knew: she is one of those people that you instantly know that when you are with them you are in the presence of a friend.

Her parents taught her well.

So, too, did those Ukrainians.

I don’t think I ever met him but I knew both the person who had the conversation with him and the person who’d referred him.

There was a college student who got a job in DC that he thought was really something. Democrats were the enemy, and he got assigned some cloak-and-dagger type excitement on behalf of the President himself. Pretty heady stuff for a kid just starting out.

Until someone asked him at church, Are you honest in your business dealings?

He said yes, because of course he was…but then because he did feel he was honest, he stopped to backtrack a moment, suddenly a lot less sure of himself. He explained what he was doing at work.

He got counseled to quit that job immediately, and he did, and thus rescued his name and future from infamy.

That was the day before the Watergate break-in. He had been doing preparatory groundwork for it, though I’m not sure he knew that.

He would be about 70 now, and he instantly came to mind when I read that the hackers going from Federal department headquarters to Federal department headquarters plugging in their servers and wreaking havoc on the workings of our entire Federal system under an unelected, unvetted billionaire who’s not even a Federal employee and has zero legal authorization to bypass Congress on any of this, while falsely invoking the authority of US Marshalls if the professionals didn’t comply, are all probably thinking they’re doing the country a great favor.

And they are college students. Or just graduated. With not a clue how the world really works nor the impact nor the treason of what they’re doing. The youngest, 19, went to our local high school and I wonder what his parents think of the job they now know he has. I mean, that’s too young to even be fully myelinated and he’s doing this?!

Creating the biggest data breach in the history of mankind and putting every single American’s financial security at risk. And that’s not even starting on the assault on our laws, our democracy, and our system of government. Not just the civil servants but members of Congress were locked out of the building when they showed up to ask questions.

Did those kids stop to think that Elon Musk–a man who came on a student visa but ghosted the college, ie an illegal immigrant–could now empty nearly every bank account in the country? Or let Putin do so? Or sell every piece of data in the Treasury to China, while Musk makes false demands to clear out the entire Civil Service coupled with severance offers of illegally high amounts that will not happen?

But back to the hackers. Every single dime the Federal government sends out or where it collects from is now exposed and at risk. Already there’s been a report of an automatic Social Security payment not going through but labeled Pending, with its intended recipient wondering how on earth they’re supposed to pay rent on time.

Gee, that’s a great story they get to tell their grandkids someday.

It is a crying shame that apparently there was nobody along those very young mens’ paths to ask them this one simple, direct question: Are you honest in your business dealings?

And if that doesn’t work, then, Would you be proud to tell your grandma what you’re doing?

More Anya apricot seeds went out in the mail, with a few left.

It is going to be cold and (finally!) rainy the next five days here, which feels fitting: the skies themselves mourning those lives lost in the air crash in DC.

James Fallows, pilot and reporter, says helicopters are forbidden above 200′ in that airspace. The New York Times says they were at 300′ and a half mile off the course directed by the controller–and that the helicopter pilot had flown that route before and knew those restrictions before they hit that plane.

It took me straight back to my mom’s close friend’s agony waiting to hear whether the father of her children during his commute home had been on the 14th Street bridge that another plane from National (now Reagan Airport) hit 40 years ago after not de-icing. He was not heard from for hours–but he was safe.

All those rescuers on those cold waters, hoping to be able to deliver that same news to other families but seeing only wreckage and worse.

Knitting. I tell you. Six rows again today. Needed to. Bright colors, fishy fish, creation-ing.

That second octopus’s last arm is just going to be too short if I don’t add another strand and put up with weaving its ends in, too. (Appraising look.) Nope. I’ll never be satisfied with it if I don’t. First thing tomorrow.

Remind me to break off a longer piece next time.

Flood the zone, the felon-in-chief’s favored fellow felon advised. Put more out there than the media can deal with at once.

And so 17 Inspectors General, those tasked with rooting out abuse or waste in government, were fired in an illegal manner yesterday, today all Federal grants were suspended in an illegal manner (meaning as part of it not just school lunches but that all Medicaid disbursements were stopped, till a Federal judge stopped the stopping but only for now) while ICE agents raided elementary schools for anybody suspected of being an illegal immigrant even if they were too young to know what that was or that they were born here and are citizens. And even if they weren’t.

Traumatizing the children. Y’know, when you let any disturbed individual buy a thousand rounds of ammunition for their many guns once they’re 18 but not yet fully myelinated, you just might want them to have the happier childhoods their loving parents were planning on instead. Think ahead.

Two million Federal employees were told in an email that they had the choice of emailing back “resign” and getting paid through September or to assume they’ll be fired or at best demoted.

Don’t do it. All of that was in violation of the law, too, including the sums any severance could entail per person. They want you to be the guilty party on losing your job. Air traffic controllers? Who needs them, right?

An old friend reposted his friend’s experience of having multiple ICE agents pull him over and wave guns in his face and yell and threaten him and lie that he had done things just now that he absolutely had not while he called the local police, who came to his aid and told the agents to get the hell out of there and leave the guy alone. And that was in a red state.

And if they’re already doing that to a citizen based on his name or looks…

Are there Republicans who are as outraged as the rest of the world looking on in horror? Are they hearing from their constituents?

We must speak up–like an individual stitch in a sweater, every voice matters.

I know they want us to throw up our hands and not look. I’m making myself look because I owe that to my dad’s memory for his service in WWII. The rule of law. Integrity. Compassion. Democracy. Those are ours and we will not let them be taken from us.

And then I knit four rows of afghan and started some bright new fish. Because that felt wonderful and hopeful, picturing a grandchild’s future delighted face.

Notable quote of the day from Robin Givhan of the Washington Post: “Patriotism is like the love that a parent has for a child; nationalism is akin to believing that one’s child can do no wrong.”

Meantime, I did six more afghan rows and I figure if I can keep that up I can finish it in under two months.

But what feels like the big thing is I went out there and pruned back the pomegranate tree by a third. Not even the tree companies like that job, or at least not their employees the one time I hired it out.

We were running out of January, though, and January is the time of year not only when it’s dormant but when its needle thorns are the least stabby (oh look there’s a splinter), though they are definitely still there. I skipped the pruning last year. Bad idea.

As I said to Richard afterwards, It was encroaching on the sour cherry and I would much rather have more sour cherries than thorny pomegranates. And not be stabbed at while I pick them.

So. Many. Branches. Thin, flexible, and in no way up to holding up the heavy fruit to come; instead they bow way down under the weight, like a cross between a porcupine and a weeping willow wearing jewelry.

Its haircut improved it immensely. I finally wised up and went looking for heavy gloves before reaching for the pile of cuttings.

Judging, wrote Carolyn Hax recently, is carbs for the ego: so satisfying at first but so easy to overdo.

And yet.

It is unfathomable that the day we remember and celebrate all that was good and noble and idealistic about Martin Luther King and his appeal to the best in our natures was the day we let the felon-in-chief back into the White House.

I do not want to see that face again. I do not ever want to hear that voice again. And yet, he’s managed to guarantee himself endless hourly media attention–again.

Any time he says something outlandish, the latest being wanting to steal the Panama Canal or invading Greenland–pay attention to what he doesn’t want you to see that he’s actually doing. It’s a tell, and it always was.

So to avoid all that I put in hours on the afghan. Six rows is the most I’ve done in a day, given that it’s such slow going. But in between I had to rest my hands, and would find email notifications; some, I just had to go look.

The richest oligarchs across the front row and the average joe left outside in the cold weather, no surprise there. Elon Musk, South African son of apartheid who came here illegally on a student visa because he never showed up at Stanford but stayed anyway, raising a Nazi salute–twice–not only in public but on camera in celebration of our newly sworn in racist-in-chief: that is staggering to the daughter of a man who put his life on the line to save the world from Hitler.

And it is so deeply sad to see those two in particular who have forsaken not just all those wives but the sense that we must all matter to each other in their zeal for power and money. If they had been in that Pacific Palisades fire like my sister, would they have cared what color the firemen who rescued them were? What *their* immigration status was?

In the end, which will come for them, too, everything they’re grasping at will become utterly nothing, and what on earth will they have then?

Like several hundred thousand others, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when Bezos interfered as he had promised the Graham family on buying it that he would never do, and killed its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

And then he flew to that place that had had the stolen–they were, they belonged to the National Archives, ie us–top-secret documents in strewed boxes in a gaudy chandeliered bathroom. To go kowtow to autocracy in person to show that he meant it.

But Jennifer Rubin, a fine legal mind, still wrote there. So did Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri and Eugene Robinson. Robin Givhan, I want to read anything she writes. Monica Hesse, too. Oh wait they just eliminated her position.

Milbank wrote a passionate piece in defense of continuing to support the Post in spite of its owner (who let them publish that.) With very mixed feelings, I resubscribed.

It’s my hometown paper. It’s the one that reported NIH’s weekly press conference on the latest discoveries in the world of medicine when I was a kid and I looked forward to that every Wednesday. Watergate. Meg Greenfield. Didn’t find out till after she died of cancer that the reason she’d always had the inside story on what Washington insiders were thinking was because she regularly threw grand parties at her Georgetown house in DC and mixed all kinds of people in politics together at the table. Katherine Graham’s autobiography. Woodward and Bernstein. This was and had always been MY paper.

But now it’s the place that fired Wesley Lowery for writing too well about a white cop killing an unarmed black man.

So I was thrilled today to find out–not from the Post, which still hasn’t announced that Ann Telnaes angrily resigned after they refused to run her editorial cartoon blasting the obsequiousness of the various billionaires seeking the felon-elect’s approval–that now Jennifer Rubin is out.

And not just resigned! A new (online) paper! Norm Eisen, her co-founder of The Contrarian, was legal counsel to the first impeachment hearing. Look at this list! (scroll down to see it) of people who’ve signed on to write with them!

Completely subscriber-funded.

I know a quarter million like-minded people who would be interested, just for starters…

It’s like Katherine Graham, who embarrassed her atheist parents as a kid by asking one of her friends who this Jesus guy was and why was he a big deal because she’d heard his name but had no idea, just figured out how to do this resurrection thing. Of something she’d made her life’s work.

I am really hopeful about this. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d needed that. Man, it feels good. Power will be met by truth after all.

We were invited tonight to a screening of the 11 minute film “Miracle at Gapyeong” by its producer, whose family we’ve known forever.

Brad and his wife gave a presentation beforehand to offer some background information on how the film came to be and the unexpected connections made between people who knew people who’d been there who had offered more information for it.

It’s the story of 240 soldiers from southern Utah who had been promised that if they stayed faithful to God they would come home from the Korean War. They were sent to back up the front with no prior combat experience and found themselves suddenly surrounded–and yet held off a major offensive of 4000 Chinese and North Korean soldiers who had just about surrounded them.

Per President Truman’s Presidential unit citation later, 830 soldiers surrendered to those 240 Americans! They were having to climb the mountain, where they were fully exposed, to try to escape our men’s fire.

Brad said the men asked each prisoner of war, as they were supposed to, why they were surrendering.  Again and again the answer was, We shoot you and you don’t fall down.

Fifty years later the Americans were invited back to South Korea to see a park built in their honor. That sculpture of a book? The pages on one side are written in Korean, on the other, English, telling the story of that battle.

And for those old men to get to see Seoul a beautiful city now, living in a democracy and free from war.

6.7, came the alerts on my phone, with a warning to get away from the coast. Tsunami alert! The quake was later upgraded to a 7, the tsunami alert canceled an hour later, and we are not on the coast and I’ve been told the Bay is not likely to do tsunamis. Hopefully.

My friend Kevin of the late Purlescence grew up in Humboldt County and once told me of eating in a diner there as a young man (I’m thinking around 1990) and some old-timers striking up a conversation with him.

I’m guessing they’d heard on that day in 1964 that there had been not only an earthquake in Alaska but the second largest ever recorded. My son-in-law, who grew up in Anchorage, described someone walking into a bank that held the guy’s mortgage, flipping them his house keys and saying, You own it now. Try to find it.

Now there was an underwater mortgage.

Back at the diner on the bluff, they were scanning the horizon and looking at the people on the beach down below. Suddenly they bolted and drove down there, and I’m picturing it as steep, windy, and narrow.

Tsunami coming! Get in, get in, get out of here! NOW!

The water was coming in as they drove back up that hill. They’d saved so many lives. And now, all those years later, they still scanned that horizon from their favorite diner on that bluff; you never know.