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.

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.

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.

(Photo from two years ago. I had no idea this one was going to be so huge when I ordered my first gerdan, I had no frame of reference yet.)

I wore all-black to church today. I’d asked after one of my friends in Ukraine and had gotten an anguished message back wondering where would they go, whether they would even live, how would they get through this.

I knew in my bones that only the color of mourning would do. And my very large, bright yellow sunflower gerdan: there have been Ukrainian refugees living next door to that church and I wanted them to feel seen. I wanted to bear witness to the importance of supporting the innocents whom American voters just sold down the river. It was my I Protest outfit. But anyway.

There are two people in that congregation who–well, one once showed me her official socks with that name on them.

The monthly senior potluck was this evening and I looked around and thought, hey, look–we’re not the youngest ones anymore!

People were chatting, the hostess was trying to get people to get started; Richard motioned me over to where he had a seat at a table ready for me.

Ms. Socks was to the other side.

Note that she and I do not discuss politics because it would do no good–but I have noted that as her guy’s behavior got worse and worse over these past few years she avoided me more and more, which is a shame, because other than that one (very big) thing I consider us old friends. More and more though with a sense of wistfulness and loss.

Why should I let him of all people call the shots in our personal lives. So I turned to her and asked her about her house and how the remodeling was going.

She seemed surprised that I would want to talk to her, which struck me as terribly sad, but answered my question and we went on to have a normal conversation like it should always be and she enjoyed a bit of my blueberry cobbler, too.

I think Bill of Penzey’s Spices has a point: Cook. Feed people. Love them.

It helped.

Making myself knit so many baby afghan rows before each time I go re-check the election returns, watching these early ones in horror. Do people even remember what a President is? How could anyone, anyone vote for a felon convicted of dozens of counts of financial fraud, a man found by the court to be a rapist? The guy who crowed over overturning Roe and then casually mentioned in the past week that he tried to get his second wife to abort? The resulting daughter was out campaigning for him.

The lies, the cruelty. The violent insurrection, fer cryin’ out loud??

Why, why, why?

So that did it. I figured if my head is daymaring old car accident scenes it’s past time to take on the source of that stress and answer my own admonition. I’d already put in most of the work but there were a few things on that ballot I needed to learn more about first and decide on.

(Really? A guy in LA made tens of millions off a loophole for charities and made himself a slumlord and fought building better and something about a stadium and paid for repeating defeated ballot propositions as a hobby so there’s ‘the revenge proposition’ about his AIDS foundation regarding rent control? We need Tim Walz over here. Say it with me, Tim: Weird!)

Arizona’s ballot made the front page for being two pages long, front and back–it was going to hold up the lines!

Beginners. Ours was three like that. That’s normal. What it does is tell the voters to do their homework ahead of time so as not to waste anyone else’s. (Pretty much a moot point now that our ballots are mailed to everyone.)

It felt contagiously good to go through all that and declare it ready, so Richard sat down with his.

Prop 34 was the weird one. It should have been fixed by the legislature–you know, where different ideas get hashed out, justifications get shot down, motivations get holes poked in them, compromises made, and tax- and ratepayers’ money gets looked after. Supposedly.

We checked fronts and backs multiple times making sure we’d filled out every single thing correctly. The envelope, too. Card A, I went back and looked at one more time.

Kamala Harris. My filled-out oval beside her name. I held that in my hands and eyes and just let it wash over me.

There was a woman my age reading all the print all over the ballot boxes trying to make sure she was doing this right, a little flustered as I approached at being caught in her uncertainty, afraid of potentially doing anything wrong but quickly letting go of that as she saw my face and laughing for joy with me as we saw our ballots, our precious precious at-long-last votes, our declarations of democracy and hopes for all we hold dear to continue as they slowly slid down inside those slots out of sight.

A neighbor. I have no idea who she is, all I know is if we ever see each other again we will most likely throw our arms around each other in recognition of all that that moment had meant.

And then I went home, found this, and watched Kamala Harris’s speech at the Ellipse, starting at one hour twelve.

That. That was a speech of unity for the ages. That is my future President. That is what I did my part to help come to be. I can’t wait.

The joy!

It’s one of my very earliest memories. I was in the far back of the station wagon (there were no seatbelts there in those days) and I was being thrown around the inside of the car–the roof and I were not supposed to come at each other like that–along with the other kids and I didn’t LIKE it and my daddy was in control of the whole world and I didn’t understand why was he doing this and I was mad. Stop it right now!

A brake cable had snapped and wrapped around an axle (did I get that right, Mom?) and suddenly we were doing a 360 at full speed on the freeway and going over an embankment. Mom remembers the gasoline tanker we missed by inches. My oldest sister remembers the petting zoo we fell into at the bottom where we kids were entertained by the animals as we waited for help. The trucker went on to the nearest phone he could find to call the police to tell them a family had just died back there.

But we hadn’t; somehow we went on with our cross-country trip after that. I wonder what the car looked like. I have no idea.

I wondered tonight why those very old images had come to mind and had to stop a moment to puzzle it out.

I had just read Jeff Bezos’ new editorial: the one wherein he claims himself as a fellow journalist to the Post and proceeds to gaslight both his readers and quite possibly himself, but with obvious discrepancies between his story and Lewis’s. Lies from the both of them, but Bezos might even half-believe them. Right after Trump held an actual Nazi-wannabe rally.

It’s like Bezos had just cut that brake cord himself while we the voters and the honorable reporters are trying to control that wheel and guide where our car lands as it careens out of control.

We can still steer this to safety, though. They can’t take that away from us–yet.

Not now, not ever. We can do this. VOTE.

Wow, Philadelphia Inquirer. Well done.

This was such an antidote after being stunned at the weaselly dishonest complicity of William Lewis’s piece insulting the Washington Post’s readers re why the Post will not make an endorsement between two Presidential candidates that Lewis claims are equally worthy. The Philadelphia Inquirer showed just exactly how one stands up for democracy and the rule of law against the rapist commando-in-thief.

The Post’s Board wrote an endorsement of Harris–but Lewis refused to allow them to publish it.

Rupert Murdoch’s old henchman–remember the case of the dead girl being searched for whose phone was hacked and messages sent from it to her frantic parents as if she were still alive, in order to sell tabloids in Britain? Yeah that guy–has absolutely no business running the newspaper of Katherine Graham and Woodward and Bernstein, of Deep Throat, of the Pentagon Papers.

I read the Washington Post daily growing up and the moment years ago that reading it online became a possibility, I subscribed.

I now expect to read, but it won’t likely be reported there, just how large a percentage of their readers canceled today like I did in protest. There seem to be an awful lot of us.

Tonight, thirteen of their columnists put their careers on the line to speak against the decision at the once-great paper they have loved. (Update a few minutes later: now sixteen.)

Why we need to support local, locally-owned journalism: how many people these days get to have a newspaper that does a graph like this?

Across: the names of the candidates.

Down: the questions being asked them.

Their answers: No in red, Yes in green, with a little chat emoji to link to ‘see more of my answer on this’ if the candidate so desires.

Which also means that at a glance you can see which ones didn’t think it worth their time to explain their point of view nor to try to persuade.

It’s certainly not all you need to know about any of them but it is definitely a great starting point.

The vice presidential debate tonight: Walz was earnest, Vance was slick and fast and a clearly well-practiced gaslighter and liar. Trump capped the price of insulin at $35!

I was waiting for the moderators to say no, Biden did. Democrats had been trying to set price caps on Big Pharma ever since Medicare added drug coverage and Biden finally got Congress to pass a phase-in over several years of the most prescribed meds. This was huge.

Vance complained to the moderators that they’d promised no fact checking. Which, the Washington Post pointed out, was a complete lie. And even if it had been true, wouldn’t you WANT the facts to be presented?

Etc.

It was good to see how civil the two men were to each other. It was surprising that they seemed to agree on things like childcare to help young people make it ahead. It was gratifying that Vance was horrified that one of Walz’s children had witnessed a shooting.

It was astonishing and deeply disconcerting to hear how easily and quickly Vance lied about just about everything. Millions cut out of housing because of illegal immigrants? Just how many people who can’t get a Social Security number did he think were signing closing papers on houses, or even just rentals? My husband as a Red Cross volunteer responded to a two bedroom apartment fire that left twenty-two immigrants homeless. They were so poor and so crowded they slept in shifts. The Red Cross didn’t ask about their papers; they cared about the people.  Whom did Vance think were building those houses while being unable to afford one themselves? The Post wondered if he’d added up every bed in every homeless shelter to come up with that random number?

But then he already said he makes up stories to illustrate his political point. I have no doubt he slandered the Haitians in Springville Ohio because they were the darkest-skinned immigrants he could think of and he knows his base.

Trump lies every time he opens his mouth, but at this point you don’t know how much of that is his dementia. Vance–his eyes gave him away a number of times–knew exactly what he was doing and he did it anyway. Get elected, Article 25 that Alzheimer’s idiot at the top and it’s all yours, buddy, he seemed to be saying to himself.

Walz finally asked him point blank: who won the 2020 election?

Vance’s gish galloped off in the opposite direction just as fast as it could run.

Years ago, someone I know opened a candy shop near both a university and a high school: target audiences. It did so well she opened a second one in another town.

The guy she hired to run that one was a recent graduate of a top-notch culinary academy, I guess getting in on the ground floor.

This was when political ads were being run warning of a bogeyman–remember when superpredator got smushed into its own single word for awhile? Ie big and black and tall and on illegal drugs that supposedly made him extra strong. After all, the Willie Horton ads had worked for Bush and Dukakis’s candidacy had gone down in flames.

Her employee was a large African-American man.

Her husband was the one who told me of the phone calls–multiple, he reiterated over my stunned disbelief, not just one and not just one person, of people telling them they would not step foot in that second store unless they fired the guy. They had walked in, seen him, and walked right back out.

Instead she offered him a job at the first store and closed the second and made a point of telling that town why. She wasn’t going to be in any way associated with a populace that treated a good man that way and they should be ashamed of themselves.

That was thirty years ago.

Today I was in that town. My audiologist is there, and my hearing aids needed cleaning. Since I have a lot of knitting I want to do on that afghan I brought it with me, carry-around project or not. They warned me it would be awhile, and I knew that, no worries.

So I had a front row seat.

A couple came in. Mid-eighties, easily. He was tall and stooped and walked carefully; she was just as old but more easily mobile. Perfectly coiffed in the kind of hairsprayed upswept curls my grandmother’s generation regularly saw their beauticians for, and perfectly sculpted and tummy-tucked in her skin-tight clothes. She looked seriously about 85 pounds but for the improbably large chest. There is a posh country club nearby and all they needed was the golf cart to complete the look.

He settled down on the couch and she went to the desk. I had started an afghan row with its five dangly balls of yarn.

I finished the row.

Started another one.

Finished it.

Finally, she walked back towards her husband and did a disdainful little yank with her head back towards the young African-American woman who had been trying to help her with all the graciousness one could ever ask for.

There had been others before her who had appointments (including me.) They were going to have to wait.

My friend’s story of long ago came flooding back and I knew I had to do something to show support without putting the young woman on the spot. How do you do this right especially when you know you didn’t hear everything. But I’d seen.

Turns out that technician was the one to bring my finished hearing aids out from the back room two thirds of an afghan row later (and after the couple had left.) The insides had collected water because I’d let it go too long since the last cleaning and that means it takes awhile to dry the electronics safely. So mine took longer.

No worries, truly.

As I put them in I looked at her and asked a little sheepishly, knowing it would be cutting into her work time, Can I show off my moose?

Sure!

I spread the afghan out a bit so she could see and she exclaimed over it and reached to touch that inviting, beautiful wool as I held it so she could. I thanked her; she beamed; she told me, sounding less convinced of it as the words were coming out of her mouth, I could never have the patience for that, while her face started to say maybe I could? I actually want to, no really want to now…

I said, You start off small and work your way up.

Her face! Made me wish I could have taken the time to teach her on the spot.

There’s a yarn store maybe two blocks away; maybe we will have a new knitter soon.

But I loved that the fact that I’m one gave us a means to make each other’s day and, as much as could be done, make up for that earlier experience.

—

(Let me add here that having written most of this earlier and walked away to think about it some more, I’ve reflected on how hard it is to be elderly and stuck being a caretaker, if that was their case. And as someone whose own husband is 15″ taller and quite a bit bigger I know there are limitations on how one would be able to manage. But you just don’t demean others who are trying their best to do right by you. You just don’t. She should have known by now at long last that treating others badly can never make her happier.)

James Fallows is both a reporter and pilot and you’ll often get a cockpit’s-eye view of the world from him.

One of the first things they teach you about flying in DC, he writes, is how absolute the rules are on restricted flight space there.

Last Wednesday a plane took off from DC National Airport (now called Reagan.) It flew straight.

There is only one take-off runway and every plane on it must immediately turn left over the Potomac River.

It did not.

Its flight path was about to take it directly over the White House.

The air traffic controllers reminded the pilot to make that turn. Still no turn.

Finally, they commanded the pilot to call a number upon landing. Fallows says no pilot ever wants to hear that command. He doesn’t say outright that their license is forfeit but it’s certainly an implied possibility, along with I’d guess potential criminal charges.

To my knowledge, this is the first time that airspace has been breached by an unauthorized plane since 9/11. This happened last Wednesday. The name of the plane was the Eastern Express.

It was the chartered campaign plane of one Donald Trump, with JD Vance listed as passenger.

One can only wildly guess at what was going on: was Vance trying to say this will all be mine soon? Was the pilot a MAGA who’d fallen for the rules don’t apply to us mentality of his boss? Was the pilot out to lunch?

But you just can’t be, and certainly not there.

By the time Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 there were fighter jets scrambled to take it down rather than let it continue its course to crash in DC now that we knew that day what those planes were doing.

And a week before that anniversary Trump’s plane threw away the rules and invited that kind of response. Why? Just, unfathomably, why? What message were they sending?

Springfield, Ohio is being destroyed because Haitian immigrants are pouring in and they’re, like, they’re eating everybody’s cats and dogs. They’re eating them! He had to say it twice because repetition makes the lie true.

It does, right?

And then in his closing statement he claimed our military is destroyed because Harris had given all our weaponry to Afghanistan.

What the what now?

He seemed to think she was already President. At other times, he had to be reminded that Biden was not the candidate.

Twice, the moderator asked him point-blank if he had any regrets about January 6. Twice, he turned it into a snarl of self-pity and self-justification–and he claimed nobody had died.

And then blamed “their side” for the death of the “beautiful woman” repeatedly warned and then shot while climbing through the window towards the terrified Congresspeople in the chamber caught on the other side with a mob trying to beat the doors in.

Meantime, Harris had the perfect “Please continue” face. Re Jan. 6th, she reminded him that she. was. there.

She didn’t have to say any more than that.

She told what she was offering the American people in terms of policies and plans, to expand the caps on drug prices to more meds–the concession Biden had had to make on Medicare negotiating drug prices having been that they would start off with only so many being regulated in the first year and the second and the third, etc. Child tax credits. First-timer housing support. (Let me raise my hand here and say thank you USA for the FHA loan on our first that got us in.) Small business support. The return of manufacturing these past three+ years, and the jobs that came with. A tax plan that builds the middle class back up again (and one quite a bit less liberal re soaking the richest than Biden’s.) And, always, the right of a woman to make her own medical decisions, while citing cases of women miscarrying and bleeding in hospital parking lots after being refused care for fear of jail time on the part of providers.

And that’s not left-wing talking points–that has happened. Including sepsis from that lack of care.

Mean, angry, self-centered, chaotic, and, frankly, nuts, vs calm, knowledgeable, competent and caring about others and the future we offer our children with our votes.

It’s just really not a hard choice. Let’s do this.