Rick Wilson on the Epstein cover-up. Cheers

Our country is sick. I'm over in Ventura, where ICE plus whatever thugs they drag along...

…showed up at the fields a couple of weeks ago at 6:00 am and seized highly criminal and clearly dangerous berry-pickers. Unless there’s been some change, that whole crop is now compost.

Ventura, especially on the Oxnard plain, is an incredibly productive agricultural area, and like the rest of California there's a symbiotic relationship with migrant farmworkers who come from Mexico and further south. (I say this not so much to you, but for anyone who may not have figured out the symbiosis part)

It’s always been a sin, afaiac, for America to treat fellow human beings like a political football — but what is happening now is both a brutal humanitarian crisis caused by the US, and a beyond-stupid policy that will guarantee a food crisis here in America.

Like I said, our country is sick.

If you are referring to quotas, yes, that worked very well for generations of white men...

Women need not be admitted/hired, they’ll only get married, then pregnant, and waste their education. African-Americans, certainly not. As for Jews, sooner or later the institutions had to recognize the exceptionalism of a tiny fraction, enough to have a quota that admitted a few of these competitors, but only a few and no more.

Ruth Bader-Ginsberg was one of only a very few women admitted to her law school — one of her professors (maybe the Dean himself) made her, during the introductions, stand up and justify why she, a woman, deserved to take a man’s place there. Quotas — because those places belonged to men, specifically white Christian men (but not Roman Catholic, because that would mean Irish and Italians and the Pope in Rome) .

Affirmative Action, on the other hand, does not operate on a quota system. The simplest possible explanation, the easiest to grasp, came to me from a County manager. County is civil service, and requires an exam as well as a resume. The exam has a range of acceptable scores. In a county with about 50% Latinos, how is it possible for the County employment roster to have almost no Latinos?

Well, back before LBJ, there used to be no requirement for open recruitment, so a supervisor was likely to simply tell his (his) current staff that an opening was coming up, and they would tell their relatives and neighbors. Interested persons would take the exam, and if they scored anywhere along the acceptable range (even the bottom of acceptability) they were hired. Long-time employees would say it was “just like working with family” — to which I say, “No Duh.”

Affirmative Action changed some laws (requiring open recruitment being one) and changed the County employment culture, too, at least in my county and at least until it was outlawed. Across the whole nation (in hiring and in education) the very concept was always tarred with the Right Wing accusation that AA was quotas for unqualified POC and women. “Unqualified women and POC” who were unfairly taking places that were rightfully those of white men.

The Right Wing has won. But AA, which I worked on for over a decade, was not a quota system. The Right Wing, in its insistence that AA is soooooo unfair, is simply admitting that their white sons cannot handle competition.

Since when does a potus & scotus get to overturn a Constitutional Amendment? I am confused about the 14th...

Legal Eagles of DU please help me here — I thought the 14th (birthright citizenship) was nailed down tight. I’ve had a lot to say — but here I am just asking: how is this even a legal thing to do, the way they are?

I have more questions, as well. The Sleazy Six apparently want to throw the issue back to the 50 states — which would leave a brown child born in California or Hawai’i a US citizen, but if born in Texas or Mississippi that child would be stateless.

How is this even legal for the Court to contemplate?

Finally, my mind circled back to Dobbs, which was thrown back to the tender mercies of the 50 states, and is creating chaos and dead women.

Again, I’ve had a lot to say about that — but today, this is my question: is SCOTUS complicit in trying to break apart the USA?

Quite literally, is there something going on at that high a level to fulfill the fantasies of secessionists at last?

I propose a new category in the TOS and in Alerts: just those kinds of posts...

I regret to say I have been snookered by them more times than I care to recall. It isn’t funny — DU has traditionally been the place where sources have been checked and given by the author before posting. This current trend degrades the site.

It’s particularly bad because one goal of RW authoritarians is to make sure people lose all sight of who and what to trust for information. When I joined DU I was fresh off my PhD, and research and verifying were second nature — but it was old-fashioned book research. We are in a cyber-world where by now I feel obsolete.

My oldest grandchild is in college and his mother is regrettably a nut who thinks Robert Kennedy Jr. (in my mind BobK or RobK) is God’s Gift. I have been struggling with how to guide this young man in, well, developing a bullshit-meter. The other day I finally gave him DU’s address, saying that we might be old but we check our sources — and realized too late that I no longer know if that is true.

You really hit a nerve, as you can tell.

My copy of "I inherited a mixed animal from uncle living in woods" just arrived from Amazon

I’m starting to read it tonight!

For the few who don’t know, it was begun 21+ years ago at DU one dark and stormy night by A-Schwarzenegger and became a cult classic here.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x624815

Now I know the author’s name is Richard Martin, and the only thing that could make this better is if the book was autographed.

News about the parade from a Toronto Star reporter who was there. Hmmm. Also pardon if it's been posted already...

Any idea what went up in the sky about an hour ago over the Central Coast? Did it blow up?

This is after 9pm now — I first noticed something strange maybe a quarter after 8pm. I looked out a window and saw a bright red cylindrical object, reflecting the sun from high up. Took me awhile to get outdoors, and by then it was gone, leaving very twisted and by then broken contrails behind — again, for awhile they glowed with the remains of the sunlight.

I didn’t hear a sonic boom, but then the coyotes were howling so I might have missed it. Vandenberg AFB (or Space Base, whatever it is now) is about 100 miles away, and we occasionally get to hear Muskrat’s satellites and whatnot taking off.

My problem with all nighttime sky phenomena is we live tucked into a valley, plus there are a fair amount of palm trees and mature oaks about. I feel lucky I saw this much by accident. But I still want to know if anyone knows what it was and if it was an unscheduled rapid disassembly of something.

Thanks.

🌮🌮🌮Hey, TACO! This is NACHO country! 🌮🌮🌮

I am so stealing this meme for my next sign.

Report from Ventura, CA. Many thousands, 5 to 10. I got interviewed by Channel 7...

Really great rally. Started with a moment of silence for the murdered Minnesotans.
My SIL drove — and this turned out to be her very first rally, and she loved it.

Questions: how is the weather in DC? Did it rain on Dear Leader’s parade? Is everyone staying safe?