Day 358…
Michael went for a walk this morning, so I’ve woken up into dead silence.
It’s a little eerie.
Congress is not in session today because of fears that there might be some sort of attack against members from the Republican far-right.
In 1790, using land donated from the states of Maryland and Virginia, a federal district was formed to create a capital for the new country. Included in the area was the port city of Georgetown, Maryland and the Virginia town of Alexandria. The new city was named in honor of President Washington.
Both Maryland and Virginia continued to govern parts of the new district. A levy court with 7-11 Justices of the Peace who were appointed by the President governed the rest. To make things even more confusing, the two individual cities that had been incorporated into the new district were allowed to retain their own municipal governments.
After the Civil War, the population of the federal district exploded. Newly emancipated former enslaved people were drawn to the area searching for work. By 1870, there were over 130,000 residents - three quarters more than had been there a decade before. Most of the district still had dirt roads and lacked basic sanitation facilities.
Despite the fact that some in Congress thought that since conditions were so bad that the capital should be moved, President Ulysses Grant, instead, passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871.
In it, the individual charters of Georgetown and Alexandria were revoked and combined with that of Washington county to create a unified territorial government. The oversight included an appointed governor, an 11-member council, a locally elected 22-member assembly and a Board to oversee infrastructure improvements to the district.
There have been other changes to how Washington D.C. is governed since then, the last major one being in 1973 with the passage of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act which provided for an elected Mayor and a Council, among other things, taking local governance away from Congress.
The reason that I went down that particular rabbit hole is that conspiracy theorists believe that the Organic Act of 1871 turned the District, and therefore, the entire United States of America into a corporation. They believe this because the words Municipal Corporation were used in the language of the Act, and these people didn’t understand what that means in legal terms. It is simply a legal term for any local governing body, whether they control cities, counties, towns, townships, charter townships, villages, or boroughs.
QAnon conspiracists believe that no President since then has been legitimate nor has any federal legislation. This includes the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933 which moved the date for the incoming President’s inauguration to January 20 from, yes you guessed it, March 4.
The extreme right-wing Republican supporters of the ex-President believe that after another insurrection today, that their leader will be reinstalled as the 19th President of these United States. This threat is so credible to law enforcement agencies, that members of Congress have taken today off.
Q followers find clues to support their lunacy just about everywhere. If you add up the numbers in 1871 you get to 17. What number is Q in the alphabet? It’s 17! That can’t be a coincidence, so it proves that it’s all true!
There are even conspiracy theories around the conspiracy theories. Some Q members are saying that the March 4th conspiracy theory was created by the Deep State of the far left to discredit QAnon. As if running an international child trafficking ring from the back rooms of a pizza parlor wasn’t time consuming enough.
Should the overthrow of the government of the United States of America not happen today, Q followers now already have a plausible, in their eyes anyway, reason why and they will be able to move on to the next coming of the righteous wrath of truth. The followers of Q are nothing of not resilient. They don’t even have their leader anymore. Whoever the actual Q is or was, they have been silent for months.
The goal of terrorist organizations is to disrupt. Today, they have succeeded. Calls on the ex-President to tell his followers to stand down have fallen on deaf ears.
Last week, 745,000 people filed 1st time unemployment claims. The new stimulus bill was passed by the House and is now awaiting its vote in the Senate.
Republicans, despite the fact that most of their constituents desperately need the assistance that this bill would give them, seem to be unified against it and plan on doing everything that they can to keep it from passing. Republican Senator Ron Johnson is insisting that the entire 700-page bill be read aloud on the Senate floor. This, alone, will delay the vote by 10 hours. After the reading, there will be 20 hours of debate.
Yesterday, Democrats agreed to lower the maximum income rate for people for them to qualify for the $1400 direct stimulus payments.
I don’t think that this is necessarily that big a deal. Michael and I are probably not going to get them, but fair enough. We don’t need them nearly as much as people on the lower end of the financial spectrum do. We do, however, need our unemployment benefits to continue so if lowering the bar for the one-off checks makes everyone happy and gets the bill through, then I say have at it. Of course, all of the determinations were made using our income figures from 2019. I don’t imagine that many people I know are in the same financial position now that we were in then.
How do the Republicans think that they are going to get approval for this obstruction from the people who voted for them? Their claims that the bill is too big, and that the government shouldn’t be spending this much is utterly ludicrous given how much money they spent during the last Administration when they were in charge.
Contained within this current bill is funding to expand and improve vaccine distribution. That is something else that we all need. The sooner we are all vaccinated, the sooner we can begin to reconstruct our national economy.
Montana and Iowa are joining with Texas and Mississippi in the lifting of their mask-wearing mandates. The new and more transmissible variants have all been detected in most of these places. The English variant is already on track to become the dominant strain here in the US.
Just to keep things interesting, a new variant has been detected in Brazil that seems to reinfect the recovered. This isn’t remotely over yet.
It’s hard enough to solve a problem but when the people who are actually on your own team do everything that they can to keep that solution from being achieved, it can become impossible.
Governor Cuomo held a press conference yesterday during which he apologized profusely and stated that he would not resign. Too little? Too late? Not enough? Probably all of that. His accusers certainly weren’t all that impressed.
Whether or not this derails the Governor completely and whether or not he actually changes his behavior remains to be seen. What he really did, yesterday, is put off his final reckoning for a while. The independent investigator, that he finally agreed to, will dig in deeper, and surely more will come out.
As I have said before, I am not for a second excusing anything that he’s done. Those of us living in New York have been at least dimly aware of some of his bullying behavior long before any of this came out.
For the moment, however, however flawed, we need him. Watching other Governors around the country cave to the fringes of the GOP, makes me grateful that we at least have someone at our helm, who regardless of whatever else he might do, won’t do that. After the war, there will be plenty of time for a full accounting and there should be one.
Republican Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas who was the former White House physician for a while under the last President is also under fire, himself. Reports of bullying and extreme out-of-control rages are coming in from many sources.
As we recreate our society, behavior like this, whether from Democrats or Republicans, cannot be allowed to continue. It can’t be allowed to continue in the entertainment business, either.
In my many years stage managing, I have seen a lot of unacceptable behavior that was tolerated because the perpetrator was in a position of power. Either because they were actually in control or because their fame gave them a pass - or so they thought.
It seems to me, that the drive necessary to become powerful often comes along with the less desirable side effects of bad behavior. Where does controlling leadership behavior end and bullying behavior begin?
People in leadership positions, and I will absolutely include myself, have a certain amount of ego and desire for attention. Even the very shy directors that I have worked with are completely confident about their own visions and become relentless while pushing them forward.
I can look at a problem and think, “I can fix this.” There is a cost, however, to every solution. Some people are happy with the end result and some are not. As the saying goes, you can’t make a cake without breaking some eggs. When, however, your solutions end up with the same people being unhappy time and time again then it is probably time to come up with another solution.
We are in a unique position in our society. We can change. I certainly include myself in that as well. There are plenty of recipes for egg-less cakes. Some of them are really good.
We cannot expect our Politicians to be better than anybody else. We can, however, expect them to ACT better than anybody else, at least in regard to the responsibilities that they agree to take on when they assume their offices. At the end of the day, they are all just people with the same driving passions as the rest of us. When they get into office, they take an oath to put our needs ahead of theirs.
When Elaine Chou, the Secretary of Transportation during the last Administration and the wife of the Senate Minority Leader puts the needs of her family and the businesses that she’s invested in ahead of the needs of the country, she should be prosecuted.
Putting her own needs first makes her corrupt. The actual definition of the word is, “having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.” Her selfishness would be fine (to a point) if she was just a private citizen, but she took an oath that while she was in office, she wouldn’t be. That oath appears to have been broken.
Every leader has the same responsibility. Not always easy to do. Sometimes they (we) need to be reminded of it.
We need to move forward, and we need people to be at the head of the line to choose the direction that we go in. We can all say where we want to go, but, at the end of the day, we choose somebody else to make that decision for us. We trust that they will do a better job of it than we would, ourselves. If they don’t, then we choose someone else.
For now, this is where we are going. Rather than complaining and making the journey harder, we should just keep going ahead as best we can.
Michael is back from his walk and the comforting sounds of breakfast being made are coming out of the kitchen. At some point while I was writing this, without my noticing it, the cat curled up next to me.
He’s dreaming about something because his paws are twitching. I hope it’s a good one.
There does not appear to be a big influx of people into Washington D.C. today. That doesn’t mean that something won’t happen, but if it does, it probably wouldn’t be at the Capitol.
So, for the moment, I am going to trust that our leaders are fighting the fight. For better or for worse we do have some capable people on our team.
Deep breath.
❤️Wow...so much going on even as we “wait”... good omen to hear Ziggy is dreaming, me too, as I continue to wear masks, maintain social distance, wash my hands...been challenging this year..to do the next thing right and look at what is right in front of me to be greatful for. Right now, looking up to a clear blue sky with spring whispering
🌸🙏