Usually, I lie in bed and light up my phone. I flex my spine some and read first, Heather Cox Richardson* and then scroll around twitter for forty minutes or so (saving wordle and Spelling Bee for later).

But now that the House is governed by corrupt cretins who call themselves republicans but are really anti-government Christo-fascists or straight-up nihilists, I’m gonna have to set limits.

There will be a lot of gaslighting. Pissing in the wind. Obstruction. Projection. Faux outrage. Performative legislation — and by that I mean the passing of bills that will die in the Senate and that they KNoW will die in the Senate (well except Boebert who may not understand how a bill becomes a law).

Great use of our tax dollars.

Remember how they passed a bill to dismantle the ACA — what was it? Seventy times? Even seven times would have been disgraceful. And THAT, my friends was a version of the GOP that today would be considered “reasonable.”

Let the jerks huff and puff and mischaracterize everything they do. One hopeful friend believes their bogus Ben Ghazi-style investigations will backfire big time, screwing them in 2024.

Is “bogus Ben Ghazi style” redundant? Of course it is.**

I’m mostly worried about the debt ceiling. If it isn’t raised, the U.S. will default on its loans. Established in 1917, the debt ceiling has been raised nearly 100 times and almost always without a fuss. However, the extremist-GOP reps plan to use the vote to extort concessions such as cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

I haven’t delved into what exactly those repercussions would be both because I kinda don’t want to know and because my brain shuts off when I hear words like “currency” and “interest rates.” But it’s pretty clear that defaulting would be catastrophic.

Once upon a time, we could assume that such a maneuver was a bluff. No more. This right-wing extremist party is prepared to burn it all down.

Time to learn about yet another arcane government procedure: the discharge petition.

Anyway, all of this is by way of saying, right now (and maybe for the next two years), I cannot listen to as much news.

Jim Jordan — a walking jabberwocky of bile. MTG — puffed up with her newly exalted status and perhaps benefiting from a consult with a stylist — but still a dumb Nazi. McCarthy! Trump ass-licking shameless SINO (Speaker In Name Only) empowered (briefly?) to do shit that will hurt us all. There are too many more sickening folks to name. I don’t want to hear from any of them.

So today, I left my phone off initially. I tossed treats around the backyard for Finn to find. We do this “nose work” most mornings but unlike most mornings, I joined him outside. Drank coffee under an umbrella. It was almost 60 degrees.

Phone went on later and it was to listen to a talk by a Buddhist nun.

I will leave you with a minor but pleasing piece of synchronicity. A couple of days ago, I discovered the account RacialEquityInsights on Instagram. Took a screen shot to remind myself to go back later and take a listen. A few hours later, in an email listing out the “homework” for my call-group’s next anti-racism conversation, there were a handful of videos listed from this very site. Ta-dah!

Now you can check them out too.

* Heather Cox Richardson’s daily letters to an American, if you don’t already know, are excellent summations of the day’s news. She’s a historian too, so whenever something relates to events before, during, or after the Civil War, for example, she makes concise and informative comparisons. If you were to listen ONLY to HRC, you’d stay informed. I have a couple of friends who safeguard their mental health by doing exactly this. You can pay for her Substack publication but I get a daily email that I don’t have to pay for. It is more than sufficient.

** The GOP’s plans to investigate anything and everything Biden is why, by the way, I am celebrating Garland’s appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate the documents that recently surfaced in Biden’s former office and his Wilmington home. The House will NOT have access to info regarding an ongoing investigation (no matter what they say).

https://instagram.com/racialequityinsights?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=