And In Between….What Happened?

Almost shocked to see that we have already done 10 days in March. While March is the beginning of spring, over here it turned out to be rather the opposite. Our coldest days of this winter happened in March and for Pete’s sake we are heading right into another cold weekend with another –15C or so and a bone-chilling wind out of the North-West. Yesterday I tried to stay outside, in spite of a strong westerly wind, or shall I call it …..STORM. I had picked up firewood again and was hell-bound to split it right afterwards. But I was exposed to that storm and after a couple of hours I was bone-frozen, so I was hurrying inside for a hot coffee. Compared to yesterday it was easy today as I just took a car ride over to the city of Eastport,ME where the chamber of commerce had arranged a meeting to inform about the future of a boat or ferry connection to both Lubec,ME and Deer Island, New Brunswick. Lots of people, some of them running businesses, had taken the opportunity for getting an update on the situation. And the “Situation” was and is that some years ago their wharf collapsed in the middle of the night, taking away any possibility of having cruise ships visiting and taking away the landing for a shuttle ferry to Lubec. Ever since that sad event we have heard the noise of ramming pylons for a new wharf into the ground. By now, the work is slowly coming to an end and hopefully and finger crossing, a new wharf will stand completed by the end of July, which means well into the summer season. Eastport is one of those typical old brick-towns with small storefronts all along water street.                             The Fisheries Wharf Down by the harbour stands a statue for the fishermen looking down water street greeting and welcoming tourists to the waterfront.                    Looking over to Campobello Island Not that I especially enjoy to sit in a meeting, but today it provided the opportunity for a car ride and a stay in warm surroundings. They even had coffee and donuts for everybody.                             Eastport Harbour While I was on the road I extended my trip to Calais for some shopping. Needed a new headphone to use with my laptop. When I watch  a movie I don’t want to disturb Bea so I put on my headphone. . Was home again around 3:00pm and enjoyed the warmth of the house - for the rest of the day

When Will The Results Sink In?

The really big Trump scandal (almost) everyone is missing   by Will Bunch , Daily News Columnist @will_bunch | bunchw@phillynews.com I probably picked the wrong weekend for a long car trip with my satellite radio, the weekend of Donald Trump's "Tweets Heard "Round the World"!!! Hour after hour, the pundits on CNN or MSNBC struggled so mightily to explain the inexplicable -- the pre-breakfast Twitter blast from the 45th President of the United States accusing the 44th President of the United States of bugging his office at Trump Tower, Watergate-style, at the height of the 2016 election campaign. What did President Trump really mean?, the pundits asked. And asked. And asked. Now that Trump is the leader of the free world (whatever that even means anymore), did he use his awesome access to high-level information to learn the secrets of the FBI or other agencies that could have been listening? Or was he making it all up? And what was he really trying to do in accusing Barack Obama of wiretapping his campaign? Look, the reality is that trying to detect motive, or some grand strategy, with Donald Trump is a fool's errand. The Donald is usually living proof of Occam's razor, that the best explanation is usually the simplest one. The guy had a terrible week in which he got hammered on the Russia scandal, then tossed and turned all night in his plush Mar-a-Lago bedroom, got up before dawn, turned on Fox News and scrolled through Breitbart News -- and took out all his frustrations on one of his favorite targets, a kind of Twitter blast from the past. The idea that it might be more than a little improper for the sitting president to accuse his predecessor of lawbreaking -- especially with no proof -- never crossed his mind. Believe me. There's no way to minimize the two things that everybody's talking about this weekend. The growing list of Trump inner circle members who met with Russia's ambassador or other Russia officials and insiders during the campaign, the non-stop lying about who met with whom and what they talked about, and new evidence that Trump changed the GOP platform at its convention in Cleveland to make it more pro-Russia all grows more incriminating every day. If there's fire behind all the smoke, if the Trump campaign did somehow collude with Russia to commit a crime -- computer hacking -- to influence the election, then it's game, set and match. Donnie, we hardly knew ye. The related plotline, based on the president's bizarre and seemingly unfounded, or at least badly sourced, rant is the idea that the man holding the nuclear codes might also be not all there mentally. I bring this up  because this weekend the Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize-winning (and conservative) columnist Bret Stephens tweeted (and later deleted it)..is the president mentally ill (just as the New York Daily News' front page, "NUTS!" was hitting the street)? I actually think -- unless Trump does something like moon the Joint Chiefs of Staff or claim that Egypt's pyramids were build for grain storage (wait, that guy's the HUD secretary, never mind) -- that such conversations are counter-productive. I don't think people -- even top psychiatrists -- should be diagnosing people -- even the president -- from long distance. Despite all the blather about the 25th Amendment (as if Trump's Cabinet or the toady GOP-led Congress would actually move against their glorious leader), the American political system isn't really set up to determine whether people are mentally ill, nor should it be. It IS set up, though, to determine whether a president is committing crimes or doing other terrible things. And isn't Trump and his crew giving us plenty of ammunition, especially in the "doing terrible things" department. The way-too-much cable-TV pundit blather I heard these last few days was almost 100 percent about Trump's tweets, and close to 0 percent about the OTHER scandal of the new administration, the rapid gutting of environmental regulations and rules on safety and consumer protection, with plans to slash pollution enforcement and unleash a human rights nightmare on undocumented migrants and their families. Despite the focus on disarray in Trump's West Wing, the presidential temper tantrums and legislative stalling on big issues like Obamacare, Team Trump now has both hands firmly on the steering wheel of the vast administrative state -- and it is driving America into a ditch, ginning up immigrant fear to satisfy Trump's base even as middle-class Americans are getting flattened at the expense of Big Business. Consider these developments in the last few days: The Trump administration is working on a budget that would gut environmental enforcement in this country -- slashing $2 billion and 3,000 jobs at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For example, an EPA program that seeks to reduce algae blooms and pollution that threatens the Great Lakes -- yes, the same region where voters gave Trump his Electoral College victory -- would be reduced from $300 million to just $10 million. -- Team Trump also wants to cut a whopping $500 million or so from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) program that sends satellites aloft to monitor extreme weather and the effects of climate change. The former head of the agency told the Washington Post, “Cutting NOAA’s satellite budget will compromise NOAA’s mission of keeping Americans safe from extreme weather and providing forecasts that allow businesses and citizens to make smart plans.” But given the president's hostility to global warming science, that was probably the idea. -- In the same vein, Big Auto asked the Trump administration for help in rolling back tough rules on curbing tailpipe emissions and converting to electric cars that would have reduced America's greenhouse gas emissions by about one-third. The Trump administration asked industry, in so many words, how fast would you like us to get that out to you? -- Those rules won't get as much attention as Trump's looming order on a new travel ban -- ignoring findings from his own Homeland Security Department that visitors from the affected countries aren't committing terrorist acts -- or his immigration crackdown. While Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) continues to operate on steroids in major American cities, the administration is weighing a new policy that would separate migrant children from their mothers at border crossings. "That type of thing is where we depart from border security and get into violating human rights," U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, said. That type of thing also used to be major news -- but not in a time when we are so easily distracted by President Trump's roving thumbs. But the reality is that -- for all the media coverage of a White House implosion -- the Trump administration really is "a fine-tuned machine" when it comes to serving its corporate benefactors and gutting any pretense of regulatory oversight. I did, however, add the word "(almost)" to the headline of this piece because the New York Times is out tonight with a really good overview of all the favors that the new president's crew has performed for Big Business, even as they poison the air and the water that Trump's blue-collar voters ingest. The newspaper chronicled more than 90 rules affecting the public's health or safety or protecting consumers that have been rolled back, eliminated or gutted in just the first six weeks of the Trump administration. It's a startling change -- one that the Times called the "leading edge" of top Trump adviser Steve Bannon's scheme for "the destruction of the administrative state." I guess you could say that screwing over the little guy to benefit billionaire campaign donors and corporations isn't exactly brand new -- but it's never been done this fast, this blatantly, and with this little compassion. I don't know if Trump's policies are "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," but I do consider them a crime against human decency. And even if Trump were to be miraculously impeached over Russia or gets 25th Amendment-ed to a farm upstate, do you think that a President Mike Pence would care a flying fig about the purity of your tap water? Sometimes I think about the launch of the Trump administration in terms of Ronald Reagan and his famous 1984 re-election ad, "Morning in America." But morning in Donald Trump's America is a place where the Houston sunrise struggles to break through the smog, where coal plants are up early dumping toxic goo into your streams, and Latin American families hide behind closed curtains, fearing a knock on their door. And the worst past is that the sun isn't even over the treetops yet. Personally, I might add that if you used to complain about the cost of President Obama’s occasional trips to Hawaii and Florida for golfing and family vacations, you might want to look into the 3mill./weekend for T-Rump’s frequent trips to his little Mar-A-Lago retreat. Over his first month in office travel costs are –hitting the 10mill.-Dollar mark. All of that being the average American’s tax money. http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/trumps-weekend-trips-to-mar-a-lago-cost-taxpayers-millions/

Listening To The Storm

We are 2 weeks only from beginning of spring, yet we are having the coldest weekend during the entire winter. And here I was thinking we were done with it all. Alright, we got clear skies and lots of sunshine, but it doesn’t help when the mercury hits –16C  (3.2F) and the wind is howling with 50-60km/h out of the arctic north. While it started cautiously, it intensified to full strength over the afternoon. Going outside is like feeling thousand needles piercing your skin, so when we have to (go outside) we make sure we have covered as much skin as possible. What hasn’t happened all winter, happened today: A water line to our bathroom froze. We are currently employing electric heaters in the basement to try get the water back. Fortunately, the kitchen water is still flowing. So it basically turned out to be an inside weekend, listening to the storm. Trash cans have been rolling around in the neighbourhood, and anything not tied down has been moving from neighbour to neighbour. The Bay is white of foam and no boats are challenging their destiny. I drove down to the wharf and 4 boats were tied to the floating dock. It was extremely low tide and not much water in the little harbour. Snow is almost gone and I say we were lucky enough that this storm was without precipitation. But we are sure looking forward to some milder days again for the coming week.

For More Than 150 Years, Texas Has Had the Power to Secede…From Itself

A quirk of a 19th-century Congressional resolution could allow Texas to split up into five states, the idea being conceived as an early form for gerrymandering. An 1851 map of the United States shows Texas and the New Mexico, Utah and Indian Territories. (Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas) By Erick Trickey SMITHSONIAN.COM MARCH 2, 2017 Before John Nance Garner became Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, and before he declared the job “isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” the cow-punching, whiskey-drinking, poker-dealing Texas congressman pushed a plan to grab even more clout for his already enormous state. Across his career, as a turn-of-the century Texas state legislator and in interviews given during his time in Congress and on the occasion of his 1932 ascension to Speaker of the House, “Cactus Jack” argued that Texas could, and should, split itself into five states. “An area twice as large and rapidly becoming as populous as New England should have at least ten Senators,” Garner told The New York Times in April 1921, “and the only way we can get them is to make five States, not five small States, mind you, but five great States.” Thanks to the terms of Texas’ 1845 admission to the Union, he argued, the state could split anytime, without any action from Congress—a power no other state has. Garner’s idea went nowhere. But the congressman from Uvalde, in the Hill Country west of San Antonio, was carrying on a long West Texas tradition of trying to turn the Lone Star State into a constellation. Dividing Texas into many little Texases was seriously considered at the time Texas became a state and for decades afterward. The idea survives today as a quirk in American law, a remnant of Texas’ brief history as an independent nation. It’s also a peculiar part of Texas’ identity as a state so big, it could split itself up—even though it loves its own bigness too much to do it. “We’re the only state that can divide ourselves without anybody’s permission,” says Donald W. Whisenhunt, a Texas native and author of the 1987 book The Five States of Texas: An Immodest Proposal. “That’s just the way it is.” Article IV, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress must approve any new states. But Texas’ claim to an exception comes straight from the 1845 joint congressional resolution admitting Texas into the Union. It reads: “New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas and having sufficient population, may, hereafter by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the Federal Constitution.” Supporters of Texas division say this means that Congress pre-approved a breakup. This map shows the boundaries of the United States, and Texas, in 1839 (Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas) Slavery, and the tense power balance between North and South in the 1840s, explains the clause. When Texas joined the United States after nine years as an independent republic, it claimed even more territory than the 268,580 square miles it covers today. It laid claim to half of present-day New Mexico and a weird stovepipe of land, formed in part by the Rio Grande and Arkansas rivers, that reached north to what’s now central Colorado and bits of Oklahoma, Kansas and even Wyoming. That northern tip poked above the 1820 Missouri Compromise line, which did not allow slavery north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes. How would such a giant piece of the West be divided? In early 1845, when Congress debated Texas’ admission, Northern congressmen wanted to divide Texas in half, splitting the state in half diagonally, from the coast east of Corpus Christi up to the state’s northwest corner, with Austin just to the east and San Antonio to the west. Slavery would be prohibited in thinly populated West Texas, where many anti-slavery Germans had already settled. But Southerners rejected that proposal as too restrictive of slavery. Instead, Isaac Van Zandt, the Texas republic’s top diplomat in Washington, pushed the four-new-states clause as a Southern-friendly alternative. “Van Zandt…became very intimate with the Senators and Representatives from the southern states,” wrote Weston Joseph McConnell in the 1925 book Social Cleavages in Texas. Van Zandt, like the Southerners, thought splitting Texas into a group of states would give the South more power. Texas’ admission to the Union, with the new-states clause included, passed Congress 120-98. The only concession to the North: Slavery would be prohibited in any states formed north of the Missouri Compromise line. In 1847, Van Zandt ran for governor of Texas, promising to divide it into as many as four states. Dividing the state would give Texas more power in Washington, Van Zandt argued. He also thought that Texas, with its small settlements hundreds of miles apart, couldn’t be governed efficiently. (Making himself governor of a smaller state didn’t seem to bother Van Zandt, evidently.) Texas historians tend to think Van Zandt would likely have won and split up the state, if he hadn’t died of yellow fever a month before the election. When Congress redrew Texas’ northern and western borders as part of the Compromise of 1850, paying Texas $10 million for what became eastern New Mexico and pieces of four other states, the statute included a line that preserved the new-states clause. But a proposal to split Texas into two states at the Brazos River failed in the state legislature, 33-15, in 1852. Most of its supporters came from east of the Brazos, another example of the widespread grievances between east and west Texas. Each accused the other of incompetence and neglect. But that quarrel lost out to Texans’ pride in their shared history. “Which State would yield the emblem of a single star?” asked the Texas State Gazette. “Who will give up the blood-stained walls of the Alamo?” Texas again came close to breaking up during Reconstruction. Radical Republicans, elected at a time when most former Confederates couldn’t vote, tried to carve up Texas at its constitutional convention of 1868-1869. Their stated aim was to create a Union-friendly West Texas that might rejoin the U.S. earlier than the rest of the state; critics argued they were really trying to create more state offices for themselves. Pro-division delegates were a majority at the convention, but they couldn’t agree on a map—a recurring hurdle for Texas divisionism in the early years. “It’s impossible to get Texans, cantankerous as they are, to agree on a plan,” Whisenhunt says. This 1842 map shows the boundaries of the Republic of Texas at the time. (Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas) Stymied Radical Republicans wrote a “Constitution of the State of West Texas,” which promised civil rights for blacks while proposing to deny the vote to ex-rebels, Ku Klux Klan members, and newspaper editors and ministers who’d supported the Confederacy*. (That provocative and potentially unconstitutional idea reflected Reconstruction debates about restoring ex-Confederates’ rights and citizenship.) But public opinion stood in opposition to their plan. Pro-division meetings attracted few people. Nearly every newspaper in the state rejected the idea. Some mocked the idea of creating a state in sparsely populated West Texas by suggesting alternate names: “The State of Prickley-Pear (Cactaea),” or “The State of Coyote.” Thwarted, the radicals appealed to Ulysses S. Grant, president-elect and commanding general of the Army, to intercede. He didn’t. “One Texas was amply sufficient to have on hand for the present,” Grant told a reporter. Texas never came close to dividing after that, though West Texas’ coyotes howled about leaving when they felt neglected. They threatened to break up the state in April 1921 after Governor Pat M. Neff vetoed a bill to build a college in West Texas. The same day as the veto, 5,000 angry West Texans met in the town of Sweetwater and drafted resolutions calling for a breakup unless the legislature redistricted the state and built the college. Their threat may have inspired Garner’s division talk with The New York Times later that month. “For the next three years west Texans assumed a militant attitude both in and out of the legislature,” wrote Ernest Wallace in his 1979 book The Howling of the Coyotes. The legislature established Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University, in Lubbock in 1923. “This token appeasement quieted the division sentiment,” Wallace wrote. In 1930, Garner brought up division again, out of anger at Congress for passing the Smoot-Hawley tariff. “Texas would make 220 States the size of Rhode Island, 54 the size of Connecticut, six the size of New York,” argued Garner, still hoping a divided Texas could outvote the Yankees. Garner was the last prominent politician to support Texas division, but the idea still lives on as a what-if in political junkies’ obsessive blue-red map-gaming. In 2009, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight drew up a fantasy five-way split that created three Republican mini-Texases, a blue state along the Rio Grande, and a swing state around Austin. “Let’s Mess With Texas,” a 2004 Texas Law Review paper, argued that wily Texas Republicans could use the 1845 new-states clause to gerrymander their way to eight more U.S. Senate seats and Electoral College votes. A response from Ralph H. Brock, a former State Bar of Texas director, argued that the new-states clause would violate the Supreme Court’s equal-footing doctrine. The idea that Texas could divide and grab eight more Senate seats appeals to Texans’ self-image as a unique, sprawling, powerful state. But that same sense of self will prevent Texans from ever actually trying it. “It’s a novel idea that they might like at first glance,” Whisenhunt says. But 30 years after he wrote his book encouraging Texas division, he’s now convinced it’s basically impossible. How to divide Texas’ oil wealth, which funds its major state universities? Besides, Whisenhunt, 78, recalls the wound to the Texas psyche when Alaska displaced it as the largest state in 1959. “There’s a strong amount of pride in being the biggest, the best, and the first,” he says. *…the idea would do a lot of good today as well.