Today is January 26, 2025. Today Elliot and I took out items from our 14-year-old car that we are giving to Elliot’s daughter, “Emily,” and her husband “Allan” on Wednesday, January 29. In fact, we’re going to effect the transfer of the title and car to Emily actually on Thursday, January 30. We’ll spend Wednesday driving down to Wilmington, Delaware, where we will break up the 5-hour drive by spending one night at the Residence Inn in Downton Wilmington. Then we will take the car to Emily and her husband on Thursday, whereupon we’ll spend one night in Silver Spring before taking the train back to New York on Friday. This will be our last road trip with the Nissan Altima. And when I left the car on the street later in the afternoon after transferring items to the new car, our Subaru Forester Sport, I looked longingly at the car, feeling the moment of letting go of the automobile in just a few days.

Other than having breakfast out with Elliot at Jackson Hole, today was very sedate, compared to my long day out with my friend “Seth” yesterday.

Also today I received my first critical text for launching my political group that is supposed to be meeting tomorrow in the afternoon. The only good thing about it was that it wasn’t nasty and it didn’t contain vulgarities like so many posts seem to have on social media platforms. The user just wrote this: “You got to be kidding! Trump the best man for the job! He defends my democracy clearly. Grin and bear it.” I had no intention of engaging with this person, so I did not answer her.

As of yesterday, I had 14 members. However, only one other person is supposedly attending the meeting tomorrow. I did call the restaurant just to give a heads-up about the potential conclave, but who knows, it might suffer the same fate as last week’s nonmeeting. Only time will tell. I also received one other critical text from someone who found the time, 1:30, not conducive for working people and suggested it was not a good time to convene this type of organization. I never thought of that when I scheduled the meeting for a Monday afternoon. Maybe I just figured that anyone interested in the group would be retired and have the time to attend a meeting during the afternoon. Now I might have to reconsider when to have these meetings. Would I need to move up the beginning time of the gatherings to early or late evening or even have them over the weekend instead? It will be certainly interesting.

When we take the car down to Wilmington on Wednesday, it will mark the end of shifting the car back and forth on Thursdays and Fridays. I will not miss those days at all. It will be easier then to have just the one car, and we will cancel the insurance on the Nissan on the last day of January.

The recent stupid decision by Chump to pardon ALL of the January 6 defendants has received intense backlash from many corners, including from – gasp! – some Republicans even, and one former MSNBC commentator had these words for Democrats in an online article for AlterNet entitled “Mehdi Hasan suggests Dems ‘shut down as a political party’ if they don’t ‘run on’ this Trump move” by Maya Boddie. The decision to do this was met with criticism even from former Senate Minority Leader “Bitch” McConnell (R-KY). Finally finding his voice, McConnell said, “No one should excuse violence. And particularly violence against police officers.”

On Saturday night, the jerk known as Donald Chump bragged about the pardons to a Las Vegas crowd of MAGA supporters, but now, Democrats are being urged to rally against the president’s move.

Ex-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan has urged Democrats to take advantage of the outrageous action carried out by Dump, which former U.S. District Judge Shira Sheindlin called “legally authorized but constitutionally unpardonable.”

Hasan indicated, “If Democrats can’t run on this, can’t use this to their advantage, then they should shut down as a political party and give up doing politics.” Hasan wrote this on X.

Well, that’s it for now. We tried to watch one of the nominated movies for Best Picture of 2024 which is on Netflix: Emilia Perez that stars Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, and trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon who plays a Mexican cartel leader who enlists the aid of a lawyer (Saldana) to help her transition into a woman. Gascon is the first openly trans woman to be nominated for Best Actress in this film that has garnered 13 nominations. What is strange about the film is that it’s a musical, with most of the numbers sung in Spanish. We managed only to watch a little over an hour of the film, which is over 2 hours. So far, it’s received tremendous backlash from the trans community and from other quarters. I heard two online video reviews of it in which both critics gave it a stunning thumbs-down. How could the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences be so wrong in determining the quality of its films? Of course, the film which is directed by a Frenchman, Jacques Audiard, hits all of the correct culture war buttons: emphasis on LGBTQ+ rights, particularly transgender issues (which this new administration is hellbent on unrecognizing), focus on Latin America and its social ills, the drug cartels, and its many hapless victims. Anyway, we will have to decide to continue watching the film, despite how we feel about it.

Have a good week.

And so it went!