Meanwhile...

I took a break to have a birthday, try unsuccessfully to get over my illness, drive northeast to spring my mother from the hospital, and welcome O for winter break, but that doesn't mean things weren't happening. The photo shows me at the far right of the TC Progressives' event at GreenStar—we gave the room four minutes on Running for Local Office and got a lot of interested volunteers and a few potential candidates. And Sunday, our Listening Meeting committee met to hash out an action plan for 2017.

Our Congressman, who ran the first time as a Tea Party guy, tracked to the middle and was threatened twice from the right, and now is a fervent Trumpeter, got more press than he's ever received thanks to progressive groups from our county and beyond ferrying protesters to his four town halls on Saturday and alerting the media. He had, to everyone's surprise, shown up in Ithaca at 11 PM to talk to the Catholic Workers sitting in at his Ithaca office. It appears, in the short run, anyway, that the fact that he stood up to the protests rather than running away (or refusing to hold town hall meetings, as some of our neighboring Congresspeople have decided to do) will make him something of a hero, which was surely not the intent of those who brought media coverage to the 23rd District. He was even on NPR again this morning—now he's everyone's go-to guy for this topic.

Meanwhile, it turns out that you can spout whatever bile you like about women, or transgendered folks, or immigrants, but when you cross the line into deviant sex practices, you're out.