In the face of 37 indictments, the President’s continued actions to undermine the Special Counsel investigation raise the questions: what does Putin have on the President, politically, personally or financially?  part of a statement released by Speaker Pelosi’s office on Saturday.

I’ve had a lousy winter cold and the last two weeks have faded into a grey haze of not much but sleep, blowing my nose, watching TV, and reading tweets so I feel out of it. Before my cold, I read that Nancy Pelosi was going to run for Speaker again, and I was disappointed. She is, after all, 78 years old and definitely old school at a time when I think new blood and new ideas are needed. But, between naps, as I watched the shutdown drone on, I began to think that she is the perfect foil for Trump. When Trump blinked and ended the shutdown with what seemed like no resolution, I was sure she was the right person. I’ve read that Pelosi won this round (but I think it is more accurate to say that everybody lost and that Trump lost the most). That’s not surprising to me. For a woman to rise to the office of Speaker of the House, she has to be better than any man around (after all, the default position is always White Male).

Right after the shutdown, which seems a long time ago now, I was thrilled to read the line at the top of the page, which I saw on a retweet from Ilhan Omar @IlhanMN, then I was incredulous, and finally, a little scared. Oh my God! The Speaker of the House or, Nancy, as Trump says he calls her, is going after the President and that is scary because Trump, himself, is scary crazy. He is usually the craziest guy in the room and he could do anything if pushed into a corner. I’ve calmed down now by thinking that if I had to make a bet between Speaker Pelosi and President Trump, I would take Pelosi, every time.

I guess that bet is a no-brainer though, women have to be better to make the team, let alone be the captain of the team, just like anybody of color. The average woman in Congress is much smarter and more capable than the average guy, she has to be. The amount of work that it took Trump to get where he is not even in the same ballpark as the amount of work it took Pelosi. As a woman in what has been a man’s game for most of her life, she has overcome more pain and rejection than any imagined by Trump. Pelosi’s rise to power has made her thick-skinned, while Trump’s waltz has, paradoxically, left him even more thin-skinned and isolated.

The Problem With Trying to Do Good from Inside the Bubble

It is pretty easy to see that poor neighborhoods are underserved by the government just like poor people are underserved; just drive through a poor neighborhood. What to do about it, however, is harder to see. I default to One thing that is nice in a neighborhood is a park, a place to have lunch or take the kids on Saturday. The problem with that, I just read in an interesting article in Bay Nature, is that when we put parks in poor neighborhoods, it gentrifies the area. This is where I get a little confused; if gentrifying the area is bad, and it certainly seems to me that it is bad for the residents that get gentrified out, what is good? I keep reading that poor areas are food deserts, so maybe what a poor area needs is a good market and maybe, rather than a park, the funds should be spent subsidizing that market. Maybe a market that gives classes on healthy eating. We have community gardens that are subsidized, why not markets. And, I want to add that I’m in the bubble of white, middle-class, entitlement so, rather than listening to me, the real people who should be listened to are the existing residents.     

In the well, of course, department, but still….

Former U.K. deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is now vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, and recently purchased a home in Atherton for $9 million.

In the how dumb can somebody be department.

“Pelosi is playing checkers. Trump is playing chess. Trump’s intuitive mind is a super-computer. … He is a strategic savant. Instead of wasting energy on things like tact, his brain focuses on strategy.” A Tweet by Bill Mitchell.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC is a phenom unlike any I can remember. Not only is she changing the Democratic Party, pulling it left, she is also changing the National Conversation or, as Bloomberg puts it: Thanks largely to her, the Overton Window on tax rates has just been moved significantly to the left, and she has been on the public stage less than a month. In the back of my mind, I am worried that she’ll flame out, but most of me thinks that she won’t, my hope tells me to think that she’ll continue to change the world. I’m curious what you, gentle reader, think of this.

Meanwhile, her comment to tne tweet above:

I believe this is called a “paradigm-shift”

Psychological projection. Psychological projection is a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. Wikipedia

What the above quote from Wikipedia doesn’t say is that everything is a projection. We see the world through the vail of our own consciousness and we can only see what we first believe. A couple of days ago, I got in a spat with a friendly neighbor. Like me, he self identifies as part of what he called the nutty left, but, unlike me, he thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is arrogant and a complete grandstander. He thinks that: this kind of shit is not good for us. I hold the polar opposite position. For a lot of reasons, I think that this kind of shit is good for us and we need more of it. In fact, the thing I most like about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that she is asking, out loud, for laws and programs that Democrats say they want but have been afraid to ask for. All of a sudden Global Climate Change and raising taxes on the rich are being talked about again.

It bugs me when I talk to my fellow Liberals and they all say they want Single Payer or a decent wage for low paid workers but they have a litany of reasons why it isn’t practical to bring up right now. It bugs me because I know that if you want something, that is not enough, you rarely get it if you don’t ask for it. That you only get what you ask for is my good advice for the Democratic Party and it kind of shocked me when I realized that it was not the advice that I’ve been following recently (which is, I suspect, why it bugs me so much when I see the Democrats doing it).

I feel like my life has been contracting lately and, at 78, that is troubling. Last Friday night or, maybe, Saturday morning, it dawned on me that, like many of my Liberal friends, I was holding on tightly to a litany of reasons for why going out and expanding my world isn’t practical right now. Michele and I attended a retreat over Friday night and seeing how hard I was resisting change was both frightening and liberating. Frightening because I saw my projected self in the stuck-in-the-mudders I’m so critical of and liberating because I can change what I do see.