Ah, Groundhog Day. When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up. After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate. The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit. This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement. Almost any depth of snow can be removed. 0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel. 2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow. After that it get trickier, but it can still be done. And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.
A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster. If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it. Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway. That’s very unfortunate. Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface. This works but it is extremely labor intensive. So, I hate rain in the winter. And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.
Alright, enough whining.
So, what’s new? Well, tariffs. Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places. And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed. Wow. Trump is going full steam ahead. Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do? Nothing.” But then he does three more things. One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s. These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country. Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens. Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem. I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with. I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better. Sort of an anti-Obama.
Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week. If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote. And that’s actually me being optimistic. There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate. McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train. I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI. Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby. This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.
Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data
As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie. So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic. Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.
We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say). I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow. This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end. But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth). I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens. Now that’s showmanship.