The Wheel keeps turning.

I'm feeling pretty good about our holiday preparations here at La Casa Cantwell. The tree is up and decorated, as I mentioned last week; the shopping is done; and most of the baking is done. I have one more batch of cookies to make tonight, and a gluten-free option or two later this week. And I still have to wrap all the gifts. But I feel confident I'll have everything done by Yule, which this year is Saturday the 21st in North America.

What a contrast to the current drama just up the road in DC. In case you've been living under a rock, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on two articles of impeachment against President Trump this coming week. The vote is scheduled for Wednesday, and it's a foregone conclusion that the House will impeach Trump. Then the drama moves to the Senate, which is obliged to hold a trial on the impeachment articles. A couple of the folks in charge -- namely Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Lindsey Graham -- have already made it clear they expect to speed through a sort-of trial and vote to exonerate the president.

This is not a political blog, so I won't express my opinion on any of that here. (I already spend more than enough time posting about politics on Facebook.) But I expect you guys have gathered my opinion of President Trump anyway. And like a lot of other liberals and progressives, I find it hard, some days, to be upbeat about it all. Some of my friends are wondering why the House is bothering to impeach Trump when the Senate is going to clear him anyway, thereby giving him carte blanche to keep doing what he's doing. It's easy to fall into a pit of despair, especially since the House vote is coming just after Britain voted to keep their Conservative Party in power, which means Brexit will happen now for sure.

It's easy -- and profoundly depressing -- to agree with Medium blogger Umair Haque, whose post last week was titled, This is How a Society Dies. He compares the death spiral of the Soviet Union to what's happening today in the United States and Britain, and suggests that we may never recover.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, it did seem to happen overnight. One day the USSR was the Red Menace, the Communist global superpower that could take us down as soon as look at us; the next, they were a third-world country with nuclear weapons, and we, the United States, were the lone global superpower left standing.

But in the years since then, income inequality has hollowed out our middle class, and our poor never had a chance. About a year and a half ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council declared the United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world. Forty million Americans live in abject or extreme poverty, according to the UNHRC report, and 40% of us couldn't come up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense.

We're the only developed nation without universal healthcare, and yet any proposal from the left to rectify that insanity is met with criticism from the center and the right about how it's too expensive and anyway it doesn't work as well as those deluded lefties would have you believe. Never mind that it was the health insurance industry that wrote the arguments against universal healthcare.

So is the United States just a third-world nation with nuclear weapons? Some days I wonder. Some days it feels like the smartest thing to do would be to escape -- to emigrate to some other country, maybe somewhere sunny, with a stable government and decent healthcare, and hunker down 'til it's all over.

I brought up Yule for a reason. John Beckett wrote a lovely column this weekend about the solstice being the real reason for the season. People on Earth have been celebrating the turning of the seasons since the Earth itself began turning. In the Northern Hemisphere, the days have been getting shorter since June. In North America, this coming Saturday will be the culmination: the winter solstice. The longest night. In ancient times, people would sing, pray, and light bonfires and candles to beseech the sun to return.

And it always does. The Earth turns, and the days begin getting longer again. The singing and the candles don't have anything to do with it -- time turns, and the Earth turns, and the sun returns.

A lot of Pagans rely on the Wheel of the Year for their spiritual observances, but I think time is really more of a spiral. This coming spring will and won't be like last spring. Summer 2020 will be like all the other summers we've ever had, and yet it will be its own thing.

Maybe Trump will still be president then and maybe he won't. When President Nixon faced impeachment, the smart money was on his removal from office -- until he quit. Maybe Trump's impeachment will be like that: he won't leave office until he does, abruptly. And he'll probably let us all know by tweet.

Bernie Sanders tweeted this last week:

At this moment in our history despair is not an option. I've got four kids and seven grandchildren. I can't give up. You can't give up.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 9, 2019

It's far from the first time he's said it. But it rings especially true for me, in this season, when the Earth is turning and the sun will soon be returning. We can run, or we can stay and do what we can to make things better. I know which one feels right to me.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have one more batch of cookies to make tonight and they're not going to make themselves.

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These moments of Earth-turning blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The gaslighting of Ukraine.

Vasudevan Kumar | CC0 | Pixabay

Have you ever had a feeling of deja vu while watching a congressional hearing? Probably not. I don't think it has ever happened to me until this week.

This was on Wednesday, during the testimony of Gordon Sondland, the US Ambassador to the European Union. Sondland had already changed his story once. He testified to the House Intelligence Committee behind closed doors -- and then after reading about the testimony of some other witnesses, he "corrected" his own original testimony. So his public testimony before the committee last week was his third attempt to tell the truth.

While he was flinging his co-conspirators under the bus left and right, he said something that caught my ear. The comment came under questioning from committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Schiff was asking him to confirm that the US was withholding military aid and a White House meeting with President Trump until Ukraine agreed to look into two things: a Russian talking point that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in our 2016 election; and an investigation into corruption involving Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy exploration conglomerate, where Joe Biden's son was on the board of directors.

SCHIFF: He had to get those two investigations if that official act was going to take place, correct?

SONDLAND: [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.

Under further questioning, Sondland explained that the conditions for the announcement kept changing. At first, a statement from the government would be enough. Then the statement would have to come from a Ukrainian official. Then the announcement had to come from Zelensky himself. And he would have to do it in public. Trump wanted Zelensky "in a box," Sondland explained.

I've been in that box.

So this is a story about Basement Guy. You may remember that nickname from Mom's House, as I mentioned him in passing. I had met him in grad school.

When I was still in broadcasting, child care was a constant worry. I worked nutty hours -- often different shifts around the clock in the same week, especially after I went to Mutual-NBC Radio News -- and traditional child care just didn't cut it. I was always having to patch together something in addition to before-school care and after-school care. An au pair would have been perfect, but I couldn't afford to hire one on my salary.

When Basement Guy moved in, I asked him sometimes to watch the kids for me. His son was close in age to my daughters, so I figured it wouldn't be too heavy a lift for him. But he always balked (which in hindsight was a good thing, as he turned out to be a sociopath).

At last he came up with an offer: He would watch my kids for the summer if I'd buy him a truck. A used truck was okay. He was going to spend a couple of weeks in Costa Rica to do research, he said, so I'd have time to find him one while he was gone.

The offer appealed to me because a) I needed the help and b) he'd been using my car. So I said okay. I even asked a friend who had a friend who frequented auto auctions to keep an eye out for a truck for BG.

But then his request kept changing. He didn't just want any old truck -- he wanted a Ford F-150. It had to be black. It couldn't be any older than a certain model year. It could be a work truck, but not too beat up, and the seat shouldn't be all sat out. And he told his son about how cool it would be when I picked him up at the airport in his new-to-him truck.

In short, he was setting me up to fail. He'd boxed me in. The odds of my finding the specific truck he was looking for were slim to none. The friend-of-a-friend's report confirmed my misgivings: There were no trucks like that at the auction.

So I picked up BG at the airport in my car. He insisted that he drive, so I moved over and let him take the wheel. On the way back to my place, he said, "I guess you didn't get me a truck."

"No, I didn't," I said.

He was silent for a few moments. Then he said, "Well, I wasn't going to watch your kids this summer anyway."

Which is how I know in my gut that Trump was never going to give Ukraine the military aid, and he was never going to give him the White House visit. There would always be one more condition put on the things that were so valuable to Zelensky -- one more "favor to ask, though."

The only reason Ukraine got the military aid in the end is because of the whistleblower. The one who uncovered Trump's scheme to gaslight a foreign government in order to get dirt on a domestic political rival. The one Trump wants to meet face-to-face.

I hope that whistleblower is already in witness protection.

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The NaNo project continues apace. I got behind this week due to having a life (how dare I!) but I caught up a bit yesterday. I'm less than 15,000 words away from winning, which is totally doable, given I'll be off work starting Thursday for Thanksgiving.

In fact, let me get on that...

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These moments of bloggy deja vu have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and fans!

I need a nap.

What a difference a week makes, huh? Last Sunday, we were just beginning to hear about the existence of a whistleblower complaint against President Trump. The Washington Post broke the story about the complaint on Wednesday, September 18th. Then everybody in the media got busy adding details. By the time Tuesday afternoon rolled around, enough information had come to light that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi officially dubbed the ongoing committee investigations into Trump an impeachment investigation.

Impeachment. Boy, that word brings back memories -- none of them good.

I was in high school in Indiana when the Watergate hearings were underway. I remember walking into classrooms where the teacher had requisitioned a TV so he or she could watch the hearings during passing periods. President Nixon resigned in August 1974, just two weeks after the House of Representatives returned articles of impeachment against him. He never went to trial in the Senate. And then of course President Ford pardoned him, thereby dooming his own election chances but ensuring Nixon would never face prison for his crimes, either.

Then in late 1998, President Clinton was impeached. I have to tell you that '98 was a blur for me; that was the year I took family leave to spend the summer with my mother while she recuperated from cancer surgery. Then at the end of that summer, I was laid off from Mutual/NBC Radio News. So I spent the denouement of the Clinton saga -- the House referring the articles of impeachment and the Senate trial that ended in acquittal -- in Denver, where I was earning a paralegal certificate. I'd sometimes cast an eye at the headlines in the local paper, but to be honest, I was just as glad to be out of the fray.

Now it's Trump's turn. It's already the craziest impeachment story ever, and I have no doubt it will get worse.

Sometimes, when a big story breaks, old newshounds will ask each other whether we wish we were still part of it all. News people are adrenaline junkies. It's a rush to know something consequential before anyone else does and to be the person who tells the world. So when something big happens, "Do you miss it?" we ask one another. "Do you wish you were still doing news?"

Honestly? For this one, I'm just as happy to sit on the sidelines. Ever since Tuesday, the media has gone into overdrive. Keeping up with the headlines is like drinking from a firehose. It's been less than a week, and I'm already exhausted. And I'm only posting stuff to Facebook.

Delyth Williams | Pixabay | CC0

No, today's news business is for the young. Like, for instance, Andrew Howard of Arizona State University, who got the scoop that the US Special Envoy for Ukraine was resigning as a result of being named in connection with the impeachment inquiry. Kudos to him for recognizing he had a big story and for going with it.

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These moments of impeachy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. (If enough people buy my books, I'll never have to go back into news again. Thanks!)