THE WAKES OF SANDY, ATHENA & ELECTION DAY

Took a walk around the nearby park I often post about and couldn't believe there is still small snow banks where the precipitation from Athena was plowed a week ago, despite the warm weekend and bright sun today and above freezing temperatures.

Also more trees down and big branches still not collected and even some wires still not reconnected from Sandy (and some people still without homes or electricity in the homes they still have). All kind of freak reverb from two unexpected weather events, the first an historical precedent—Sandy—the other just an unexpected and unusual weather event for this time of year and so soon after Sandy.

But the freakiest reverberation from recent events is the reaction to the election from the rightwing Republicans (and for the first time in years the distinction between the rightwing Republicans and the not as rightwing Republicans is actually out in the open as a few brave souls in that party try to draw their fellow travelers back to some semblance of reality).

That Mitch McConnell who vowed to make Obama's first term his last after Obama was first elected now after Obama's reelection is vowing to oppose Obama's promise to raise taxes on the wealthiest, a position not only most voters support but most nonvoters as well, is just plain tiring. One of the basic tactics of the right is to wear everyone else down with their repetitive insistent relentless attempts to deny reality.

And McCain joining Lindsey Graham in bashing our U.N. ambassador and the president and the administration for the tragedy in Libya, now simply referred to as Benghazi after the location of the attack, with no one in the administration or the media pointing out that under the last Republican administration there were ten times as many attacks on our embassies leading in some cases to the deaths of "Americans" and not a peep from McCain or Graham or any Republican.

The same old double standard. Again, how tiring and boring and old and worn out and desperate these rightwingers are. I needed a break from politics, but unfortunately the attacks on Obama and even more so on ideas and policies and directions and in some cases people I agree with aren't taking any break. I hope this time the Obama team and the leaders of the Democratic Party use the coalition of voters that elected them to keep pressure on the president and the Dems in Congress to not cave in to rightwing Republican demands and continue to push for taxing the wealthy.

Will anyone point out that if we were living in the Eisenhower era, or even the Nixon one, when the tax rates for the wealthiest were above 90% and 70% etc. there'd be enough money to wipe out the debt and enact programs that would raise wages and create new jobs and expend the so-called "middle class" to create more consumers and therefore an expanding economy again?

I'm exhausted from a long day so I may not have articulated what I meant to say as clearly and succinctly as I'd like to have, but you get the idea. No time to rest on any laurels.