[Y[oung people have now been voting solidly Democratic, and in increasing numbers, in every election since Donald Trump's victory in 2016. In the 2018 midterm election, more than two thirds (68%) of voters under 45 cast ballots for Democratic congressional nominees and in 2020, 58% voted for President Biden ...
The video is from 1979 at Madison Square Garden. Carly Simon, James Taylor, Gtaham Nash. No Nukes concert.
Republican and former CIA officer and Congressman (Texas) Will Hurd was on Meet the Press today. I've seen him often on the news over the last few years, and though he is a Republican, I always thought he seemed like a good person ... back in 2018, he and fellow Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke went on a 1,600 mile road trip together, and both survived ;)
I'm posting about him being on Meet the Press because he did something on the show that I have not yet heard any Republican except Chris Christie do. He told the truth about the monster ...
[T]he facts on the ground. Donald Trump is a liar. Donald Trump is a national security threat. Donald Trump willingly knew that he had this country's secrets and he was trying to tamper with evidence to hide that he had that information. All of those things are true and it doesn't matter who the head of DOJ is ...
I think he deserves to win the Republican primary, but the truth is, the country needs Trump to be the Republican candidate, because the monster will never ... never ... win a presidential election again. Republican politicians and their zombie voters need to learn, by losng over and over and over again, that their m.o. of hate, deception, exclusion, and repression is not only wrong, but it doesn't work.
I'm watching this 60 Minutes story about the legal marijuana industry in California. I was surprised to learn that marijuana is the state's biggest crop, that the state is losing money on the industry, and that illegal growing and selling has actually increased since it became legal. I'm only partway into the episode, so who knows what else will be revealed.
I haven't used marijuana since I was in high school. It was my least favorite of the drugs we kids tried and I've not been interested in using it again now that it's legal. Weirdly, my stepfatther had a prescription for it, and I found that somehow disturbing.
The latest tv series I've been watching is Sweet Tooth ...
an American fantasy drama television series developed by Jim Mickle. It is based on the comic book series created by Jeff Lemire and published by DC Comics' ....
Sweet Tooth is set in a fictional world in which a virus has killed a majority of the world's human population, coinciding with the emergence of hybrid babies that are born with animal characteristics. Convery plays Gus, a naïve 10-year-old part-deer boy, who sets out to find his mother after the death of his father. The first season received critical acclaim and won two Children's and Family Emmy Awards.
I've only watched the first episode so far, but it seems very good. This is the first thing I've watched on Netflix's streaming site. I belonged to the DVD part of Netflix for many years but they are closing it down soon.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday in response to reporters’ questions while standing in front of a nearly all-White crowd of supporters ...
DeSantis - the "sane" alternative to Trump? I'm sure those people victimized by the historical and still existing world-wide practice of slavery would view this concept .... the idea that slavery is actually a bebeficial experience for the enslved ... as obscene. I know I do.
God, the Republicans really have cornered the market on evil. I honestly can't fathom how nearly half of Americans can support them.
The three liberal Supreme Court justices took aim at their conservative colleagues for allowing the early Friday execution of an Alabama death row inmate who had raised claims about the state's history of botching the lethal injection process.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, declined to block the execution of James Barber, who was put to death at about 2 a.m. local time ...
Yes, the "pro-life" and "Christian" Supreme Court conservative majority strikes again. Oh, I forgot ... the only lives that really matter are those of "innocent" and "umborn" humans.
Sorry to use so many quotation marks, but it's the only way I can express the dubious quality of the way conservatives use all these words. If I wrote those sentences correctly, it would look like this ...
Yes, the extremist right-wing Christian-ish Supreme Court conservative majority strikes again. Oh, I forgot ... the only lives that really matter to them are their own. But they will pretend to care about the lives of embryos and zygotes, calling them innocent, saying God loves those lives best of all, though something without a brain, heart, or nervous system has the same capability of being innocent as does your pet rock.
The little skunk was out early - usually he and his family wait until dark to eat the cat food. I couldn't get too close so the picture is kind of fuzzy.
After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point.
Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse ....
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive ...
Trump is a rapist. Republican politicians who support Trump are supporting a convicted rapist. Of course, they have always known this about him, but as long as there was no conviction, they could pretend it wasn't true. There really is no bottom for the Republican party.
Last year our electric company, which gives customers free trees, let us order three of them. We asked for an oak, a maple, and also a plant called the Bubba desert willow. We did get the oak and the maple, but the Bubba desert willow was so popular that there weren't enough.
But this spring they sent one along. That's him at the top of the page :)
[...] according to experts, the term “fetal heartbeat” is misleading and medically inaccurate.
“While the heart does begin to develop at around six weeks, at this point the heart as we know it does not yet exist,” said Dr. Ian Fraser Golding, a pediatric and fetal cardiologist at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. Instead, at six weeks, the embryo will develop a tube that generates sporadic electrical impulses that eventually coordinate into rhythmic pulses, he said ...
But that's ok, because this bill has nothing to do with medical facts or science. It certainly has nothing to with what Iowans want either: a 2/3 majority of Iowans are pro-choice ...
Nope, this is about religion. The bill, like the many other "heartbeat" abortion bans passed in Red states, is about a small minority of religious extremists (less than a third of the country) forcing their questionable beliefs on the other two-thirds of Americans, including other Christians. They have the power because of the religious conservatives on the Supreme Court, and that's all that matters to them. This is what theocracies like Iran do to their people. Can our own "morality police" be far behind?
Finally, an over-the-counter birth control pill. I first started using birth control pills when I was in high school. Conservatives say pills are not safe or effective, but in the 35 years that I used them, I never had any problems. This will make a safe and effective contraception available to more women, and give them more control over their lives. Here is a twitter post from Melinda Gates ...
My family, my career, & my life as I know it were all made possible by contraceptives—and I’ve talked to many women around the world who feel the same. I’m encouraged to see the U.S. take this monumental step to expand access for women across the country. https://t.co/ulOqxaRw4q
— Melinda French Gates (@melindagates) July 13, 2023
Here, where I live in the suburbs, the homeless are evident. We used to see a small encampment of them at the public library, but they were recently ousted. There are some at the grocery store too. And I live near the river, where many homeless encampments are.
What is dispiriting are the pervasive myths that most homeless people are unhoused because they are mentally ill or because they are drug addicts. It's a blame-the-victim mentality that lets you distance yourself from them .... "that could never happen to me".
I'm all to aware how easily one could become homeless. Rents are very expensive. There is Public Housing for those who qualify, but it too costs money and you can be waiting on a list for years. I feel so lucky that my sister and I inherited this house when my mother died.
I don't know why the state government can't get it together to help these people. Why not take a look at an example of success on this subject, like Finland. They first give homeless people a stable place of their own in which to live, and everything else follows that basic necessity.
Key Democratic lawmakers are breaking with President Joe Biden over the controversial decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, arguing that providing the weapons, which are banned by more than 120 countries, cedes the moral high ground and will end up indiscriminately killing civilians ...
I don't think we should be sending cluster bombs. Beating the bad guys by becoming the bad guys seems a flawed practical strategy, and morally wrong too. Churchill talked about "victory at all costs" because without victory, "there is no survival". I guess that's the thinking here. But then all our high and mighty rhetoric about good vs evil is just BS?
But hey, that's ok. They're just animals. As long as those who love exploding loud, toxic, and often illegal fireworks for untold hours (and days) get to exercise their freedoms, it doesn't matter how much damage is wrought. Cuz this is American, where personal freedoms are more important than anything or anyone else (unless you need an abortion, of course).
How can anyone vote for Reppublicans, given that they, as a party, pretend that man-made climate change doesn't exist. And it's not just that they will refuse to deal with the problem, it's also that they are actively trying to make it worse with their policies!
Today at the grocery store I heard a man say that his mother had spent more than $1000 on fireworks for tonight, and I think she wasn't alone.
I'm surrounded by a neighborhood full of brain-dead (and doubtless deaf) jerks who have been blowing up their mostly illegal fireworks for literally hours and hours and hours.
The outdoor cats are hiding under the house, terrified, and I will spend all night worring that my home here in drought-world will catch fire.
One weird thing about the recent Supreme Court decision which makes it legal to discriminate against gay people, is the fact that the case is based on a purely hypothetical situation. More ...
If the Supreme Court persists in making rulings based on fiction, how can we take any ruling seriously?
Certainly, this is not a sentiment uniquely inspired by or limited to the opinions the court has issued in its latest term, which ended today with rulings on anti-discrimination law and student debt relief. One of the cases handed down today was brought by a Christian website designer who wants to reject the business of same-sex couples who have in fact never sought her services and may have been invented, while the other involved a student loan debt servicer as an unwilling plaintiff in an effort to end President Biden’s student debt forgiveness program. Just these two cases alone should be enough to throw the court’s legitimacy into question—but they join a long line of recent rulings based on shaky (at best) claims and pure wish fulfillment of the militant Christian right.
Still, it feels unnerving to some, even those caught in the crossfire, to see injuries invented wholesale and lies accepted by the highest court in the land; to see rights so openly trampled on the flimsiest of pretense ...
The Christian Right has finally achieved the Supreme Court it always wanted. They will continue to bring cases that would never normally have been heard, much less have won, to their extremist Court . They will target every issue they obsess about. I expect cases to be brought soon to overturn the right to contraception and tto overturn he right to marriage for LGBTQ people. The Right want sto drag America back to the 50s ... I was there, and it wasn't a good place for anyone who wasn't white, Christian, straight, and male.
Joe Biden doesn't want to expand the Court, but why not? Americans' opinion of the Court is at rock bottom, and Republicans are going to do their worst no matter what Democrats do. We have to fix this problem while we can, before there is nothing left to save.
