The temperature was around 30 today and it was very dull the entire time. Fortunately, no wind.
Buddy seemed a little different today, and was not eating his hay like usual. Maybe he didn't like it!. Around 1 I went out to check on him as he kept to himself part of the time. Usually he and Rebel are connected at the hip.
When they finally got back together, instead of standing in the small pasture, they chose to stand behind the grooming room.
Little Wonder did not wear his black coat tonight. We were only out there for 10 minutes.
Both boys were ready to chow tonight after they got tucked in.
Late afternoon we had two more face chords of wood delivered. Gary will probably start stacking it tomorrow....but we might be getting 4 or 5 inches of snow tonight.
I made chicken soup with orzo for dinner.
We had it with peanut butter and jelly bagels along with some apples. Comfort food.
Night all.
As for the political scene:
I'm still making calls. Left a nice long message for Angus King this morning as he had some words with the Republicans (read the text written posted by Heather Cox Richardson) and I had to praise him for trying to set them straight. Occasionally Lisa M. and Susan Collins are able to stand up when they don't agree with what's going on. They have more guts than all the R men in the House and Senate. We have to keep bombarding their phone systems ... currently around 1400 per minute and that sounds pretty good to me. Everyday I get floored by what is going on. Now T wants to be the chairman of the Kennedy Center Board and show us what culture should really be. And the new Attorney General! What a piece of work. She, Kash, Pete and RFK lie as much as Trump. They sure changed their tunes the minute they were confirmed. Congress is useless and ignored. Of course I loved the cover of time magazine. Maybe T and EM will get a divorce sooner than later. Hopefully the people who put Trump in office are starting to realize that they are taking a beating along with the rest of us. He used them and now they are getting abused. Sorry if this ticks some of my readers off, but the lack of humanity in all directions has been horrifying. Please make an effort to stick up for this country.
Vought, King said, is “one of the ringleaders of the assault on our Constitution. He believes in a presidency of virtually unlimited powers.” He “espouses the discredited and illegal theory that the president has the power to selectively impound funds appropriated by Congress, thereby rendering the famous power of the purse a nullity.” King said he was “really worried about…the structural implications for our freedom and government of what's happening here…. Project 2025 is nothing less than a blueprint for the shredding of the Constitution and the transition of our country to authoritarian rule. He's the last person who should be put in the job at the heart of the operation of our government.”
“[T]his isn't about politics. This isn't about policy. This isn't about Republican versus Democrat. This is about tampering with the structure of our government, which will ultimately undermine its ability to protect the freedom of our citizens. If our defense of the Constitution is gone, there's nothing left to us.”
King asked his Republican colleagues to “say no to the undermining and destruction of our constitutional system.” “[A]re there no red lines?” he asked them. “Are there no limits?”
King looked at USAID and said: “The Constitution does not give to the President or his designee the power to extinguish a statutorily established agency. I can think of no greater violation of the strictures of the Constitution or usurpation of the power of this body. None. I can think of none. Shouldn't this be a red line?”
Trump’s “executive order freezing funding…selectively, for programs the administration doesn't like or understand” is, King said, “a fundamental violation of the whole idea of the Constitution, the separation of powers.” King said his “office is hearing calls every day, we can hardly handle the volume. This again, to underline, is a frontal assault of our power, your power, the power to decide where public funds should be spent. Isn't this an obvious red line? Isn't this an obvious limit?”
King turned to “the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the Treasury's payment system” as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with “zero oversight.” “Do these people have clearance?” King, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked. “Are the doors closed? Are they going to leave open doors into these? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems?... Remember, there's no transparency or oversight. Access to social security numbers seem to be in the mix. All the government's personnel files, personal financial data, potentially everyone's tax returns and medical records. That can't be good…. That's data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans' privacy. And we don't know who these people are. We don't know what they're taking out with them. We don't know whether they're walking out with laptops or thumb drives. We don't know whether they're leaving back doors into the system. There is literally no oversight. The government of the United States is not a private company. It is fundamentally at odds with how this system is supposed to work.”
“Shouldn't this be an easy red line?” he asked.
“[W]e're experiencing in real time exactly what the framers most feared. When you clear away the smoke, clear away the DOGE, the executive orders, foreign policy pronouncements, more fundamentally what's happening is the shredding of the constitutional structure itself. And we have a profound responsibility…to stop it.”
King’s appeal to principle and the U.S. Constitution did not convince his Republican colleagues, who confirmed Vought.
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