Some real gems there, thanks. The reason that Texas is freezing with no power etc, is because the state refused to be part of the national US energy grid, in order to avoid regulations. They wanted to be ‘independent’ re energy supply! Because they are not part of the grid, other states cannot help them. Also of course they had absolutely no preparation for such a event either. Even read some climate change denier in their administration, say he thought people would rather be freezing with no power, than rely on the grid, absolutely bonkers or what. They are trying to blame renewables for the power cuts, but everyone knows that’s tosh, they only use 8% in renewables at best. It looks like they are not about to change the backward stance any time soon.
I have been watching some old (1930/40s) Sherlock Holmes films on YouTube, some have ads and horrifically, Farage is doing ads, about money and savings, but I skip past as soon as possible dreadful, a real conman. Horrible. The films are good though, for the time! The Scottish accents are good, the ones that are not fake anyway!
The thing about being independent is that, well, you are independent. So you need to deal with it.
Farage’s face comes up far too often on these YouTube videos. Very annoying. I’m not sure who thought that he would be a good choice. Surely no one actually trusts him?
Tris, well… er… some of your views on Indy at any cost [is] are [a] little bit on the extreme end of the normality spectrum. [A bit clumsy: on the extreme end is better.]
I work just over the road from Stewarts. Friday is beer day; they refill your bottles. Yum yum. Two other breweries in the estate, too; Top Out and Black Metal.
I’m not sure that believing that your country, which always votes to the left of the political spectrum could probably do a better job of running its own affairs that is being done by the government largely elected by the country next door, which is always on the right of the political spectrum, would be called extremist.
I make no bones about it. I don’t like right wing politics. I don’t like royalty and aristocrats. I don’t like titles.
If that’s too extreme for you, I’m surprised you used to be in the Labour Party. That’s pretty much what they used to believe before they fell in love with ermine and Tony Blair fell in love with Mrs Thatcher.
I’m back! With the aid of my Dubai partner Francesca – and the wwonders of remote laptop maintenance. Or as she calls it,the Age Concern Helpline. Nonsense! I’m not short on IT skills but setting up our TriMedia email would test Bill Gates and Alan Turing combined.
Anyway, thanks to all for goodwishes to the RS. Three weeks today since The Fall and three weeks tomorrow since the replacement hip installation. She has made a remarkable recovery and apart from a slight remaining hirple is now whizzing around. I’m always on hand with a can of WD40 to help loosen up the joint, having been the very model of domestic support and solace throught the entire business.
So many topics where I would have been chucking in my tuppence worth, but you been spared that affliction. Till now… atand by for renewed despatches from the Mulgarian bureau.
Haha. I was going to send you the one about China and the submarines too but forgot. I mean that’s an actual newspaper that printed that! Loved the Cupid.
Anyway here’s Jimmy Ferguson
“My wife is putting on a lot of weight.
But she has had a lot on her plate recently”
“I made my water bed more bouncy.
I filled it with spring water.”
“I named my dog 5 miles.
So I can tell everyone I walked 5 miles today.”
Newspapers are capable of perpetrating the most obvious idiocies in headlines. Classics include ‘MacArthur flies back to front’ and ‘Allies push bottles up German rear’.
Entered this one earlier but doesn’t seem to have made it. Apologies if it turns up twice. Apropos the China subs, newspapers are very capable of perpetrating obvious idiocies in headlines. Classics include ‘MacArthur flies back to front’ and ‘Allies push bottles up German rear’. In my Middle East days I was puzzled by a head ‘QATAT, KUWAIT MULL AIR LINK’. Would I soon be able to fly from Doha to Tobermory? Certainly more convenient than Heathrow, but no such luck. Just sub-editors’ fondness for ‘mull’ as a nice short word that fits into headlines more easily than ‘consider’ or ‘contemplate’.
People in Texas are mad at Ted Cruz, while everyone else is laughing at him.
Since the Supreme Court decided that interstate power grids are subject to federal regulation, the Texans have decided to go it alone. So no power could be sent to Texas from either the eastern or western interconnections, the two big power grids that otherwise cover North America, both US and Canada. Then as Texans shivered in the dark and frequently had no water due to frozen pipes, Senator Ted decided to vacation in warm sunny Mexico at the Cancun Ritz-Carlton, while the right wing Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, claimed that it was those damnable Democratic renewable energy-loving radical socialist Democrats who are at fault.
Abbott was awarded four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact checker, and Ted Cruz caught the attention of Saturday Night Live and the Lincoln Project. (Seems like every smart phone in the world shot footage of Ted’s Mexican holiday.)
Tell me Danny are you perchance a Deplorable from the Redneck reservation!! 😷😂
Ted says it’s just the antifa haters that are attacking him.
Although with Ted there is a lot to hate about him I mean just loads and loads.
Why he even threw his daughters under the bus .
I mean who would do that ???
I’d have bought the story about Texas not being prepared for this weather, if it were not for the fact that it appears to have happened twice in the last decade.
Lincoln Project is always good.
Ted Cruz is a very unpleasant man.
As Niko says, who would try to cast the blame on their kids, then their wife. And, even if it were their fault, he’s a senator. He should have said…well, we have a responsibility to be here to help sort things out…to speak to the White House… to organise stuff.
Tris…….The Texas storm was not even as bad as routine winter storms that occur farther north in the Great Plains and across the northern states, and have previously even affected Texas. But the Texas utilities just didn’t prepare for it. So when some wing turbines froze up, that was what the finger pointing politicians wanted to talk about, even though the big failure was in the fossil fuel supplies of oil and natural gas. In Texas, it’s all about a relatively unregulated electrical power industry that ignored best practices for cold weather operation, and by design is not connected to the North American power grids that otherwise could have sent power to Texas when the system was on the verge of collapse.
Oh well, at least Ted is back on the job now. He posted photographs of himself handing out bottled water over the weekend. 😉
“I’m glad someone in Ted Cruz’s Senate office finally instructed him on how to fake compassion, humanity, and creating the illusion that he cares about the people he was elected to serve.”
Shouldn’t have contemplated a break; shouldn’t have blamed his daughters; shouldn’t have blamed his wife; shouldn’t have tried to make up for it with publicity shots of him handing out water…
Still, at least he didn’t throw the water at them.
I don’t know what the regulations are like in Texas. I see he was wearing a mask… but should he have been touching other people?
Tris…..I noticed that too. Seems like a bad idea. Looks like he’s shaking hands in one picture.
Generally speaking, the requirements and recommendations on mask wearing and social distancing varies from state to state. I really don’t know what Texas is doing now.
Many Republican states never established enforceable rules since Trump always seemed hostile to mask wearing and usually didn’t do it himself. He also famously held White House gatherings where social distancing wasn’t much practiced, and mask wearing was only optional at best. It became a political issue and there was very little in the way of a national policy. I suppose some governors have actual legal authority in that area and others don’t.
Fair enough, Danny. I’d have thought Texas would have been on the lax side about any precautions, what with most of them being bathed in the blood of Jesus an all.
Niko……Ted probably figures he’s hearing from a lot of “deplorables” these days. 😉
Ted didn’t have a whole lot of friends, even before the Mexican holiday debacle. (He even LOOKS a lot like Joe McCarthy BTW.) If he loses the votes of a lot of the crazy Trumpies, he may have to seriously reconsider his presidential ambitions.
I noticed that the story about his daughter changed as circumstances warranted. Such as when the New York Times found out that his original return trip plane reservations indicated a longer stay than he first indicated.
Nice picture of Ted in the first class lounge at the Houston airport:
Niko…..I think an early version of the story was that he had planned to stay a few days in Mexico and “work” from there (presumably from his suite at the Ritz-Carlton.) This was confirmed by a reporter from the New York Times who found that his reservation originally ran through the weekend. But then he said that he changed his mind while on the airplane and decided to immediately return to Texas.
Cruz has never really been hugely popular in Texas, except that once he won the Republican primary, then the normal Texas Republican party vote elected him in the general election. But Democrat Beto O’Rourke ran a close race against him in 2018. Cruz beat O’Rourke by only 2.6% of the vote that year, and Democratic strength in Texas is increasing. So Cruz could have a tough senate race in 2024, which is also a presidential election year in which he had apparently planned to run for president.
Texas has a strange election law which permits a person to run for office as a senator and simultaneously be a candidate for President or Vice President of the United States. In 1960, this statute permitted Lyndon B. Johnson to run for Vice President and, at the same time, seek re-election as United States Senator from Texas. LBJ was on the ticket as VP with John F. Kennedy, and was also on the ballot for the US Senate. Johnson won both offices, and immediately resigned the Senate to serve as JFK’s Vice President.
As far as I know that law is still on the books in Texas, which would allow Cruz to run for both Senator and President in 2024. He might well lose the vote for both offices.
I like no 9, with the Union flags which seem to be breeding uncontrollably.
To be clear, not because of the flags, which I regard as agressive and threatening, but the concept of even more proliferation taken to the extreme.
It’s like they said: One flag isn’t working, let’s try … then when that didn’t work, they thought three, four. 100… Let’s flood the place with butchers’ aprons.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Pic 8: Until now, I have never been sure how to pronounce the new president’s name.
Bidden, Bydand.
It seems that the motto of the (since 1990 disbanded) Gordon Highlanders comes closest.
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Well, there you go. Educated by Munguin’s Republic! 🙂
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You should set up your own University.
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Don’t give him ideas, Marcia.
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I think Munguin would make a fine Rector.
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He can certain wreck stuff, DonDon.
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Some real gems there, thanks. The reason that Texas is freezing with no power etc, is because the state refused to be part of the national US energy grid, in order to avoid regulations. They wanted to be ‘independent’ re energy supply! Because they are not part of the grid, other states cannot help them. Also of course they had absolutely no preparation for such a event either. Even read some climate change denier in their administration, say he thought people would rather be freezing with no power, than rely on the grid, absolutely bonkers or what. They are trying to blame renewables for the power cuts, but everyone knows that’s tosh, they only use 8% in renewables at best. It looks like they are not about to change the backward stance any time soon.
I have been watching some old (1930/40s) Sherlock Holmes films on YouTube, some have ads and horrifically, Farage is doing ads, about money and savings, but I skip past as soon as possible dreadful, a real conman. Horrible. The films are good though, for the time! The Scottish accents are good, the ones that are not fake anyway!
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The thing about being independent is that, well, you are independent. So you need to deal with it.
Farage’s face comes up far too often on these YouTube videos. Very annoying. I’m not sure who thought that he would be a good choice. Surely no one actually trusts him?
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Just saying tris ,Conan et al
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/22/people-with-extremist-views-less-able-to-do-complex-mental-tasks-research-suggests
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Things like grammar perhaps? Correct punctuation?
Just saying…
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Ooo !! Conan the elitist
I’m so ashamed I’m away to boil me heid .
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Ok, Niko. Could you do it outside, please… Munguin dislikes the smell of boiled head.
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Are you suggesting, Niko, that Conan and I… and other Munguinites are extremists?
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tris well er some of your views
On Indy at any cost is little bit on the extreme end of the normality spectrum .
Apologies for me granma and punch 🤛 uation wonder 🤔 if Conan would tutor me happen I pay Him in beer
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Certainly. I like a challenge. Anything by Stewarts Brewing will do.
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Tris, well… er… some of your views on Indy at any cost [is] are [a] little bit on the extreme end of the normality spectrum. [A bit clumsy: on the extreme end is better.]
That’s worth a bottle of 80/-.
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LOL
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I work just over the road from Stewarts. Friday is beer day; they refill your bottles. Yum yum. Two other breweries in the estate, too; Top Out and Black Metal.
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🙂
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P.S. They currently have 750ml bottles of barrel-aged stout. Not cheap, but big and cuddly.
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LOL. I bet.
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I imagine he’d love to, Niko.
He likes really good beer.
I’m not sure that believing that your country, which always votes to the left of the political spectrum could probably do a better job of running its own affairs that is being done by the government largely elected by the country next door, which is always on the right of the political spectrum, would be called extremist.
I make no bones about it. I don’t like right wing politics. I don’t like royalty and aristocrats. I don’t like titles.
If that’s too extreme for you, I’m surprised you used to be in the Labour Party. That’s pretty much what they used to believe before they fell in love with ermine and Tony Blair fell in love with Mrs Thatcher.
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I’m back! With the aid of my Dubai partner Francesca – and the wwonders of remote laptop maintenance. Or as she calls it,the Age Concern Helpline. Nonsense! I’m not short on IT skills but setting up our TriMedia email would test Bill Gates and Alan Turing combined.
Anyway, thanks to all for goodwishes to the RS. Three weeks today since The Fall and three weeks tomorrow since the replacement hip installation. She has made a remarkable recovery and apart from a slight remaining hirple is now whizzing around. I’m always on hand with a can of WD40 to help loosen up the joint, having been the very model of domestic support and solace throught the entire business.
So many topics where I would have been chucking in my tuppence worth, but you been spared that affliction. Till now… atand by for renewed despatches from the Mulgarian bureau.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Mulgarian? New laptop. Same old typos. Not a bad accidental conflation of Munguin and Bulgaria, though.
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I assumed it was …
He is considering the idea of asking your president to change it.
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Welcome back, John.
I’ve kept people updated about the RS and Howard.
Congratulations to Francesca for sorting you out!
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Haha. I was going to send you the one about China and the submarines too but forgot. I mean that’s an actual newspaper that printed that! Loved the Cupid.
Anyway here’s Jimmy Ferguson
“My wife is putting on a lot of weight.
But she has had a lot on her plate recently”
“I made my water bed more bouncy.
I filled it with spring water.”
“I named my dog 5 miles.
So I can tell everyone I walked 5 miles today.”
LikeLiked by 4 people
Newspapers are capable of perpetrating the most obvious idiocies in headlines. Classics include ‘MacArthur flies back to front’ and ‘Allies push bottles up German rear’.
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Oh these are a couple of corkers…
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Entered this one earlier but doesn’t seem to have made it. Apologies if it turns up twice. Apropos the China subs, newspapers are very capable of perpetrating obvious idiocies in headlines. Classics include ‘MacArthur flies back to front’ and ‘Allies push bottles up German rear’. In my Middle East days I was puzzled by a head ‘QATAT, KUWAIT MULL AIR LINK’. Would I soon be able to fly from Doha to Tobermory? Certainly more convenient than Heathrow, but no such luck. Just sub-editors’ fondness for ‘mull’ as a nice short word that fits into headlines more easily than ‘consider’ or ‘contemplate’.
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Ha ha…
That would be handy, although probably not too well used.
Your post did turn up…
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Good old Jimmy.
Spring Water!!!!
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12. Les Parker is brilliant. That is all.
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If the sign beside the ditch is real and not a photoshop, well done to whoever put it there. I like the cupid one too
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🙂
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People in Texas are mad at Ted Cruz, while everyone else is laughing at him.
Since the Supreme Court decided that interstate power grids are subject to federal regulation, the Texans have decided to go it alone. So no power could be sent to Texas from either the eastern or western interconnections, the two big power grids that otherwise cover North America, both US and Canada. Then as Texans shivered in the dark and frequently had no water due to frozen pipes, Senator Ted decided to vacation in warm sunny Mexico at the Cancun Ritz-Carlton, while the right wing Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, claimed that it was those damnable Democratic renewable energy-loving radical socialist Democrats who are at fault.
Abbott was awarded four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact checker, and Ted Cruz caught the attention of Saturday Night Live and the Lincoln Project. (Seems like every smart phone in the world shot footage of Ted’s Mexican holiday.)
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Tell me Danny are you perchance a Deplorable from the Redneck reservation!! 😷😂
Ted says it’s just the antifa haters that are attacking him.
Although with Ted there is a lot to hate about him I mean just loads and loads.
Why he even threw his daughters under the bus .
I mean who would do that ???
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Danny: The videos were great.
Windmills, properly looked after can, of course, work perfectly well in the winter.
Greenland (population 57,000) managed this. Texas (population 29m) doesn’t.
I’d have bought the story about Texas not being prepared for this weather, if it were not for the fact that it appears to have happened twice in the last decade.
Lincoln Project is always good.
Ted Cruz is a very unpleasant man.
As Niko says, who would try to cast the blame on their kids, then their wife. And, even if it were their fault, he’s a senator. He should have said…well, we have a responsibility to be here to help sort things out…to speak to the White House… to organise stuff.
He really is a pile of weird beard.
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Tris…….The Texas storm was not even as bad as routine winter storms that occur farther north in the Great Plains and across the northern states, and have previously even affected Texas. But the Texas utilities just didn’t prepare for it. So when some wing turbines froze up, that was what the finger pointing politicians wanted to talk about, even though the big failure was in the fossil fuel supplies of oil and natural gas. In Texas, it’s all about a relatively unregulated electrical power industry that ignored best practices for cold weather operation, and by design is not connected to the North American power grids that otherwise could have sent power to Texas when the system was on the verge of collapse.
Oh well, at least Ted is back on the job now. He posted photographs of himself handing out bottled water over the weekend. 😉
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ted-cruz-texas-winter-storm-latest-b1805316.html
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“I’m glad someone in Ted Cruz’s Senate office finally instructed him on how to fake compassion, humanity, and creating the illusion that he cares about the people he was elected to serve.”
Spot on.
We see you!
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LOL Tris……..Yes, that’s a great comment!
Any politician who can’t fake compassion and humanity doesn’t deserve his office. 😉
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Mishandled from the get go.
Shouldn’t have contemplated a break; shouldn’t have blamed his daughters; shouldn’t have blamed his wife; shouldn’t have tried to make up for it with publicity shots of him handing out water…
Still, at least he didn’t throw the water at them.
I don’t know what the regulations are like in Texas. I see he was wearing a mask… but should he have been touching other people?
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Tris…..I noticed that too. Seems like a bad idea. Looks like he’s shaking hands in one picture.
Generally speaking, the requirements and recommendations on mask wearing and social distancing varies from state to state. I really don’t know what Texas is doing now.
Many Republican states never established enforceable rules since Trump always seemed hostile to mask wearing and usually didn’t do it himself. He also famously held White House gatherings where social distancing wasn’t much practiced, and mask wearing was only optional at best. It became a political issue and there was very little in the way of a national policy. I suppose some governors have actual legal authority in that area and others don’t.
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Fair enough, Danny. I’d have thought Texas would have been on the lax side about any precautions, what with most of them being bathed in the blood of Jesus an all.
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Yes, Greg Abbott (the Texas governor) certainly wouldn’t do anything that might have displeased Trump or the Bible-thumping right wing Texans.
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Niko……Ted probably figures he’s hearing from a lot of “deplorables” these days. 😉
Ted didn’t have a whole lot of friends, even before the Mexican holiday debacle. (He even LOOKS a lot like Joe McCarthy BTW.) If he loses the votes of a lot of the crazy Trumpies, he may have to seriously reconsider his presidential ambitions.
I noticed that the story about his daughter changed as circumstances warranted. Such as when the New York Times found out that his original return trip plane reservations indicated a longer stay than he first indicated.
Nice picture of Ted in the first class lounge at the Houston airport:
https://www.vox.com/2021/2/18/22289273/ted-cruz-cancun-scandal
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Well he had a pretty big bag to just to fly there and back 🤔
You do wonder how in hell did he get elected and then re-elected…….
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My guess is … Texas is solid Republican. Cruz is Republican.
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Niko…..I think an early version of the story was that he had planned to stay a few days in Mexico and “work” from there (presumably from his suite at the Ritz-Carlton.) This was confirmed by a reporter from the New York Times who found that his reservation originally ran through the weekend. But then he said that he changed his mind while on the airplane and decided to immediately return to Texas.
Cruz has never really been hugely popular in Texas, except that once he won the Republican primary, then the normal Texas Republican party vote elected him in the general election. But Democrat Beto O’Rourke ran a close race against him in 2018. Cruz beat O’Rourke by only 2.6% of the vote that year, and Democratic strength in Texas is increasing. So Cruz could have a tough senate race in 2024, which is also a presidential election year in which he had apparently planned to run for president.
Texas has a strange election law which permits a person to run for office as a senator and simultaneously be a candidate for President or Vice President of the United States. In 1960, this statute permitted Lyndon B. Johnson to run for Vice President and, at the same time, seek re-election as United States Senator from Texas. LBJ was on the ticket as VP with John F. Kennedy, and was also on the ballot for the US Senate. Johnson won both offices, and immediately resigned the Senate to serve as JFK’s Vice President.
As far as I know that law is still on the books in Texas, which would allow Cruz to run for both Senator and President in 2024. He might well lose the vote for both offices.
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Aww… wouldn’t that be a pity, Danny!
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😉
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Danny, I just wanted to let you know that I have watched that Nancy Sinatra clip about a million times.
I absolutely love that bit about 2 minutes in, where the brass section kicks in.
Thanks again.
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DonDon……Ha Ha! I do recall how impressed you were with the way that brass section kicks in. Something worthy of careful study, over and over…..LOL!
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As a trombone and tuba player, I really appreciate the brass.
Honest.
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DonDon…..Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. 😉
Playing the tuba reminded me of this video I first saw years ago…..LOL.
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Cows are obviously more intelligent than we usually give them credit for.
Thanks again, Danny, I enjoyed that. Though not as much as Nancy, of course.
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😉
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Larry the Cat
@Number10cat
Boris Johnson: “I can’t guarantee that it will be irreversible, but that’s the intention”
If you can’t guarantee it, then it’s not irreversible, it’s reversible. That’s how words work.
Η φτωχή γάτα προσπαθεί να εξηγήσει λέξεις στον παχύ χοντρό ξανθό μπλουκ
(I ftochí gáta prospatheí na exigísei léxeis ston pachý chontró xanthó blouk)
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Larry the cat speaks Greek ???
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For the benefit of Boris, who seem to be pretty inarticulate when it comes to speaking English.
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Larry is pretty smart. 😉
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Smarter than his human.
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I like no 9, with the Union flags which seem to be breeding uncontrollably.
To be clear, not because of the flags, which I regard as agressive and threatening, but the concept of even more proliferation taken to the extreme.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s like they said: One flag isn’t working, let’s try … then when that didn’t work, they thought three, four. 100… Let’s flood the place with butchers’ aprons.
That’s bound to work…
Hmmmmm
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