What do you make of these?

The sun was setting and I felt like taking some photos of my now-blooming jacaranda tree.

Then I saw ..........something else.

The inquiry isn’t going to end simply or painlessly for Trump.

By Harry Litman

Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The milestone has emboldened White House critics of the probe to declare, as Vice President Mike Pence did on NBC News, that “it is time to wrap it up.”
Never mind that the Mueller investigation is, comparatively, in its infancy. The Whitewater probe of Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example, began in 1994 and ended more than six years later. Mueller’s 12 months of work has turned up more clear wrongdoing than Kenneth Starr ever did: There have been 20 indictments and 5 guilty pleas, including prominent senior members of the campaign and administration, and that doesn’t take into account the wealth of information that Mueller has yet to make public.
Some Republicans suggest that public opinion is shifting, that Trump’s refrain of “witch hunt” may be gaining purchase. As the president’s latest mouthpiece Rudolph W. Giuliani crowed, “We’ve gone from defense to offense.”
“Wrap it up” advocates can point to a slight uptick in Trump’s approval ratings, and a downtick in public support for the investigation. They seem to think that if Mueller doesn’t close up shop soon in response to political pressure, Trump’s position is strong enough that he could put an end to it, perhaps by firing the special counsel or the special counsel’s boss, Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, and weather any storm the move occasions.
They’re wrong. The probe isn’t going to end soon, simply or painlessly for this president. Trump remains in great peril.
Anyone paying attention over the last year knows Mueller will not yield to political pressure. His investigators haven’t leaked; they have ignored vicious personal attacks; they haven’t veered in the slightest from prosecutorial professionalism.

All of it at the link: http://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e (Scroll down for the article.)

The sun finally came out today and our flowers are starting to emerge too. This is our first Agapanthus (Lily of the Nile) to bloom this year.

Hope you enjoy!

My husband and I were on our way home from lunch out, and we were driving down a fairly steep hill. We could see across the LA basin, all the way to the San Gabriel Mountains. Now and then we get a pretty view like today's.

Back in the 50's, 60's and into the 70's, the clear view across the basin was rare. Smog choked our view as well as our lungs. The really bad days meant that you could smell the smog. We don't, any more.

But now the gov't is trying to reverse our progress. They want to take us back to those horrible days when lung diseases were rampant and many people died from breathing dirty air. Of course, people still die from our polluted air--but not as many as in decades past. The gov't. says that the rules for clean air hamper business and hurt employment. That's a load of shit.

We have worked very hard and have had some success, but there's still a lot of work to be done to make our air cleaner. And these yahoos want to derail it.

We aren't looking to go backwards. We have enough problems here without any efforts of the part of the Republicans to stop us, and send us back into the filthy air of the past. We don't need their intransigence.

We have a lot of cleaning up to do......and not just the air here in our basin.