Posts Tagged ‘blackout’

A Moment of Clarity for Pirro?

Monday, August 3rd, 2026

By Bob Gaydos

Jeanine Pirro ... headed for the door?

Jeanine Pirro … headed for the door?

   What in the world happened to Jeanine Pirro? Did she sober up? Come out of a blackout and realize she was pimping for Donald Trump and didn’t want the job?

    Odds are — literally — that she won’t be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia much longer. At least those are the betting odds on Kalshi, a prediction platform which is the way many people apparently now react to the news of the day. Not by expressing approval or disapproval of the news, but by betting on the outcome. Orwell was right.

     How you feel about the news really doesn’t matter, apparently, if you can make a few bucks guessing on which side of the bed Trump slept on last night. And the odds in Pirro’s case are that he didn’t sleep at all when she contradicted him on his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool story.

     In one of the more surprising challenges to Trump’s  view of everything going on around him, Pirro dismissed the case against a former U.S. Olympic athlete who had been charged with carving up the bottom of the no longer reflecting pool with a knife, supposedly causing significant damage. That’s what the court papers filed by Pirro originally said.

    But Pirro last week abruptly dismissed the felony vandalism charges against David Hearn, 67, saying that the damage to the newly renovated pool was caused by the contractor, a friend of Trump’s, who got the renovation contract with no bid. A $14.7 million restoration project to be specific.

    Pirro conceded in court that the damage had actually been done by a rush job by a contractor trying to get the work done for the Fourth of July celebration, not by vandals.

    In response to Pirro’s dropping the charges, Trump posted, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking?” (Yes, he put a question mark at the end of that declarative statement.)

   The reflecting pool, of course, has been one of Trump’s pet projects in his campaign to destroy virtually everything worth seeing in Washington, D.C. Also, of course, Trump does not react well to being contradicted in public, especially by someone who he has appointed to a job, and especially if she is a woman.

    That’s why the odds on Kalshi of Pirro announcing her resignation or being fired before Sept. 1 were at 97 percent Monday morning. The odds spiked 21 percentage points over 24 hours. There was a 94 percent chance, the site said, that Pirro is gone before January 1, 2027.

    None of this is surprising to me. What I am literally stunned about is that Pirro did it. That she dared to contradict Trump publicly in such a high-profile case. She tried to blame the Interior Department for her change of mind, saying they gave her incomplete information when she first filed the charges against Hearn. They stuck to the Trump story (and probably kept their jobs) and said she got all the information available.

     Maybe Pirro actually read all the news stories saying experts doubted that vandals could’ve done the extensive damage to the pool, but that the contractor rushed the job and used the wrong kind of paint. Maybe she knew from experience that the judge wasn’t going to buy her vandalism argument. Or maybe she didn’t like the bar scene in Washington anymore or she just found it too difficult to keep lying so publicly on a daily basis.

    Or, maybe she’s been offered a seat along with Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, in a cabal of former Trumpers sensing an opportunity to get out before the you-know-what hits the you-know-what. The onetime loyal MAGA trio is trying to form a populist third-party, breaking away from Trump, accusing him of “betraying“ his base.

    Where have I heard that before?

     I still like my coming out of a blackout theory.

    

     

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People Power in the Neighborhood

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Genie Abrams

By Genie Abrams

During the power blackout in Newburgh last weekend, the whole city was without electricity, heat, hot water, traffic lights, street lamps, gas pumps, and a lot more items that are usually considered necessities. I took the opportunity to walk around the neighborhood in the almost cruelly bright, icy sunshine Sunday morning and found a whole lot going on …

Preachers preached, flocks flocked and even some businesses plowed ahead despite lacking electricity and heat. Two dozen workers’ cars were parked at Dickson Street’s Unitex laundry plant, a seven-day operation. A semi-tractor trailer driver, who had backed up to the loading dock at about 11 a.m., said, “They’re washing the laundry by hand in there, and we’re trucking it to other plants to be dried.” It’s crucial that the work gets done because Unitex supplies linens to hospitals throughout the region.

At Iglesia de Dios, a large church on the same street, worshippers flowed through its open doors to attend the morning service with pastor Joaquin Pena. “It’s wonderful to be able to worship together, even without power,” said one young woman who was herding three children inside.

The Sunoco station and convenience store around the corner, at South William and South Lake streets, was open. The gas pumps weren’t pumping and, since that’s what draws many customers, who then duck in for coffee and a hard roll, it was a bit lonely there. But by the light streaming through its wide-open door, clerks added up purchases using handheld calculators like the kind displayed, along with lip balm and tire gauges, on the shop’s walls.

Down the street, on South Lake between Broadway and Washington Terrace, Jessi’s Mexican-American Diner was doing a brisk business, thanks to a generator that enabled cooking to continue. “The place is packed,” said a man who was leaving with a large takeout bag. That assessment was confirmed by a line that extended out the door and down the steps.

“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,” the congregation was belting out at Grace United Methodist Church at about that same time. “Praise Him, all creatures here below!”

Nearly 35 people attended the two services there Sunday morning. Why didn’t they just snuggle under the covers and try to stay warm?

“They come in any conditions, to celebrate who we are – children of the One God,” said the Rev. Dr. Evelyn McDonald, pastor at Grace. “Even after a night that was challenging to the people of Newburgh, we awoke to a day that is bright – a day that is God’s day. We came to sing, to praise and to be spiritually renewed for the week ahead.”

The congregation stayed to enjoy one another’s company after services, along with cups of hot tea made on the church’s gas stove, which needed only a match to be fired up.

In sum, I found what I suspected I might in my neighborhood — a little thing like a lack of power wasn’t going to keep Newburghers from keepin’ on.

Genie Abrams is a longtime resident of Newburgh. She is a copy editor for the Times Herald-Record and author of the novel, “Louey Levy’s Greatest Catch.” Her website is genieabrams.com.

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