The California Drought is a Thing of the Past

This is Monday January 9, 2017 and we can safely say the California drought is a thing of the past.  It’s been raining and snowing heavily in northern California.  Yosemite National Park has been closed.  I’m assuming the Sierra snow pack is way ahead of last year.  Of course we've had the polar vortex back east and it's been around ten or less above zero in both Pittsburgh and Green Bay.  We around here in the past month have had the most rain since the year I got my Cannon Power Shot camera in December of 2010.   Just by way of trivia the first shot from that camera used as a blog photo was the one of the front door with shrubbery around that which isn’t there anymore.  All of the grass out back in the traffic island is a verdant green after being brown in vast portions.  All of the resavaurs in northern California are filled to capacity and they even have to release water.  All of these water conservation laws will become irrelevant.  That year it was raining heavily in December and early January and then it stopped early in 2011 and after that was the start of the drought, so it’s been nearly six years.  It was raining last night.  [material edited out here] It’s been raining this morning.  I made myself instant coffee.  I had Stephanie Miller on.  It was raining when I went out to the liquor store for a dollar coffee and I brought it into the dining room.  We had Cheerios and me and Judy crossed the room to the cart to get our own milk and juice.  Later Josie gave me a second orange juice.  We got scrambled eggs and a whole English muffin and butter and jelly.  It was coffee in a small cup.  I got a second whole English muffin from Paul Evans.

Stephanie Miller says Trump told 560 documented falsehoods during the campaign.  Yesterday the Bobsey twins, John Mc Cain and Lindsey Graham, were on Meet the Press.  They both were saying that yes Russia is guilty of computer hacking and trying to sabotage our way of life holding a free election, but that one shouldn’t infer from this activity that Russia had anything to do with the outcome of the election, but whether they did or not the issue should be investigated by Congress.  Stephanie thinks it silly to maintain that Russia had no influence on our election.  This is a no brainer.  Absolutely the Russian actions affected the outcome of the election.  Let’s see.  You have 77,000 votes among three rust belt states.  You have admitted sabotaging by a foreign power motivated by a goal of reversing the election results.  And furthermore if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee to begin with, then these three rust belt states may well have voted for Bernie over Trump.  And no, we shouldn’t have to “Just get over it”.  This is not a normal situation and if we ever think it is, we’ve lost something precious. 

Yesterday I had the computer on for Face the Nation in the afternoon.  Mitch Mc Connell and Reinz Priebus and Cory Booker were on.  Mc Connell has the gift of inconsistency.  He said when Obama was appointing his cabinet eight years ago that all of the candidates for the posts needed to be thoroughly vetted and we need to go slowly.  Now of course the shoe is on the other foot and Mc Connell wants to fast track all of the appointments so that “President Trump has a national security team ready to go on day one”.   They are going to ramrod these appointments through despite the questionable backgrounds of so many of these cabinet choices.  Clearly all of these candidates are so rich with so many foreign entanglements it should take longer th approve them rather than less time.  Of course Mc Connell is also inconsistent on Supreme Court appointments.  Now he’s all eager to fill the empty seat.   Normally these hearings for a new Justice take months and we’ll have to see how the process is speeded up this time.

 Sixty Minutes raised the ongoing moral issue as to whether the United States should work to get hostages out of foreign countries.  Say what you want to about Jimmy Carter.  Not one Iranian hostage lost his life.  All of them ended up getting released.  In 2014 when ISIS was getting going- - citizens from other nations were taken hostage in Europe and such.  But these counties bought ISIS off with a few million.  They’d pay the money and not admit it.  So why couldn’t the United States pay the money and not admit it?  It would seem to me that the propaganda value of all these beheadings we saw night after night on our TV were worth a lot more to ISIS for recruiting purposes- - then buying them off with a few million dollars.  There is a saying that is in use of “Where there’s life, there’s hope”.  How much value to you place on a human life.  Will paying off ISIS “finance their terrorism for future hostage taking”?  I guess they’ve run a study and the answer appears to be “No”.  But it does farther than that because it's government's policy to actually Prosecute private citizens who raise their OWN money to get hostages of ISIS released.  It's bad enough that Obama is not more "pro life" when it comes to droning Muslims, but don't throw our own people in jail for simply "exercising self defense".  

I dozed off during the second segment and roused just after seven thirty.  I went down for medication from April.  The line was short but the few people took a long time.  For the first time in weeks we got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I was glad of that.  I returned to the room and they were talking about decertifying Pluto as a planet.  This guy’s eleven year old daughter had a father who “killed Pluto”.    We all know there are constants in life.  Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and there are nine planets in the solar system, not eight.  But now in 2006 the whole question was “If we allow Pluto to remain a planet then what about all of these other planets we’ve discovered out beyond Pluto”.  But I’m unsure what planets they are talking about.  They say now that due to irregularity of orbits of the outer planets the existence of a big new planet out beyond Pluto is beyond question.  It’s a simple matter with a few mathematical formulas to determine first the location of this planet now.  Then they can calculate changes in the position of this planet over the past ten years.  From there it’s possible to extrapolate an orbital path and to a degree you can peg distance and size of the new planet.  If you were to assume a circular orbit then it matters almost not at all the size of the new planet.  This is because you can figure out the size after you have deduced the distance from the sun.  If you are able to calculate the length of time of its orbit from there you can go on to deduce the distance from the sun.  Besides you have the Hubble telescope out there and you’d think all of that space would have been scanned exhaustively for new heavenly bodies.  

The anti terriff people use the red hearing of the Smoot Holly bill of 1930 because back then it may have helped fuel the great depression.  Thom Hartman says that Smoot Holly had less than a three percent adverse impact on US Trade.  This caller on Thom Hartman says terriffs don't work and so therefore we should go hog wild with any trade deal like the TPP which emcompasses a whole lot more than free trade. This caller uses the line of Judy that "a terriff is just another tax".   Of course the caller was a spokesman for "The Club for Growth" which is one of these libertarian tea party organizations. Thom Hartman favors "picking winners and losers" and goes on to day "- - - and I want the United States to be the winner".  (Selah)