Three quotes from over the weekend:

“What caused the protests at Trump’s rally is a candidate that has promoted hatred and division against Latinos, Muslims, women, and people with disabilities, and his birther attacks against the legitimacy of President Obama. What caused the violence at Trump’s rally is a campaign whose words and actions have encouraged it on the part of his supporters.“–Bernie Sanders

And, in what may be the only statement uttered by Ted Cruz that I’ll ever agree with:

“Any candidate is responsible for the culture of a campaign. And when you have a campaign that disrespects the voters, when you have a campaign that affirmatively encourages violence, when you have a campaign that is facing allegations of physical violence against members of the press, you create an environment that only encourages this sort of nasty discord.”–Ted Cruz

Trump, of course, denies it, has put the blame squarely on the protesters, has suggested that they’re the ones who are escalating the conflicts, and while there is no doubt some truth to that–some of those folks are not going peacefully; they drag their feet, they try to shout over the sea of voices shouting, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and “USA! USA! USA!”–Trump has been not-so-subtly asking his supporters to knock people around for weeks now. How many times has he talked about how he’d like to punch somebody in the face? Or how, “in the old days,” they’d carry a guy like that out on a stretcher? It’s no surprise that it’s happening, and it’s going to get worse: in his Twitter feed, Trump has basically put out the call to his supporters to go and disrupt Sanders’ rallies:

“Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren’t told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!”

Note how he doesn’t say it is Sanders or his campaign telling “disruptors” to go to Trump events, yet that’s exactly what he means, and his supporters know it. the implication. And he doesn’t tell anyone to go to future Sanders events and start throwing punches around, but he never pointed to someone chanting “Black lives matter!” at his own events and said, “Punch that guy in the face.” Yet, that is exactly what happened. And you can bet that it will keep happening, and that it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

+++

A few notes of a much more cheerful nature:

We picked up the Magpie for Spring Break this past Thursday, and we’ll have two whole weeks with the little birds home, as the Catbird will come home this coming Friday for her week off. Unfortunately, they only get a little window of overlap, but it will sure be nice to have them here.

Yesterday, I walked out of the building where we have our writers’ group, looked up, and saw about two dozen turkey vultures wheeling around the sky overhead. Always a nice sign. March can be highly unpredictable around here, and the last two winters we’ve had a lot of cold and a lot of snow extending very late into the month, but I believe the worst is over. No frogs or toads calling yet, but it won’t be long.

And that’s about it for me; how are you?