I was driving down the main street of my town, on the way to a meeting of the VFP...

…over at the old Veterans’ Memorial Building. It was night and traffic was slow, as usual. I was anxiously listening to the news — and they did it. BushCheney did it. I began to curse. GD MF SOB. I kept it up until I realized that anyone can read lips when the speaker is using 4-letter words and I was driving slowly enough for them to do so.

What was I thinking? HE LIED. People were going to die wholesale because HE LIED. GD MF SOB I watched the cable news stations willingly submit themselves to unabashed propaganda in order to make a wrongful war happen. They trotted out special graphics and wrote special theme music, and ran it 24/7. Of their own free will. WHY?

The propaganda push was so blatant that several elderly Europeans of my acquaintance, including my mother in law, were getting sickening flashbacks to the 1930s. I was already involved in the local peace community at the time, and became a liaison between my friends at the VFP and other groups, which is how I met many people.

I’m not a veteran, nor am I a pacifist. In those years I still thought the country of my birth could be salvaged, and the VFP, gods bless them, were the antiwar marchers who marched under the US flag they had fought for. So I marched with them, and eventually was asked to join, and after a time they found out I knew how to chair a meeting…

But on that night, the wrongful war we tried to prevent began. And it unfolded as we knew it would, but with added corruption because this was BushCheney and the GOP and there was money to be made.

GD MF SOB

It's clear that some remember the Nixon-Kissinger relationship....

When does George Santos skedaddle out of the US? And where does he go?

Doesn’t Brazil want him back for some crime or other?

Peace to all my DU friends on this Thanksgiving. Peace to our war-torn world...

When someone thinks humans are inherently evil, they also think humans need to be stomped down hard

Why they focus so obsessively on sex is anyone’s guess — maybe because it brings us pleasure and closeness, and after all, if our very natures are inherently evil, why so is every indication of our sexuality.

Therefore, sex and sexuality need to be stomped down hard, driven into the shadows of shame and the darkness of twisted power-over. Power-over anyone perceived as weaker, like women and gay men, and over anyone actually weaker, like children.

Individual thought, differences of any kind, all evil.

Mike Johnson is sick and twisted and belongs nowhere near the halls of power.

Any normal person should be able to smell his festering psychic stink from across the country.

"A Miracle is Brightest in the Dark" -- The Marsh Family will break your heart...

Kick. Rec. Bookmark. Thanks for Thomas Jefferson...

I've changed. After 50 years of carefully saying I'm "pro-choice," Dobbs radicalized me

I’d already been paying attention to how the RW started changing definitions of contraceptions, and how ghastly the implications of personhood laws are for women using fertility clinics.

But when they started calling procedures “abortion” that I know to have been standard of care in obstetrics since my mother and her friends were having babies and miscarriages in the late 1940s and onward — that just gut-punched me in a very personal way. I have written about how rough my Mom had it giving birth to us 4 in the Baby Boom years. In addition to us, she had two miscarriages that almost killed her and one full term still birth. In college I knew a woman who had an ectopic pregnancy — and those are fatal if not removed very quickly. In my young married years I had a friend who was 4 months along when a routine exam with her OB-GYN revealed a very fast-growing cancer that needed specialized surgery (complete hysterectomy, ovaries, everything out) in another state — I was shocked that some idiot woman actually asked me whether they couldn’t “save the baby.” And on and on in the world of women.

So, thanks all to hell, SCOTUS — I feel very clarified on the subject. I now have no doubts in my mind that abortion is health care. You have come for my mother and my friends. I AM PRO-ABORTION NOW, thanks to the RW in this country.

I loathe Ivanka. But hear this: NO CHILD asks to be incested by her daddy. Just stop that.

Some of the comments here make me want to vomit.

There’s a lifelong host of psychological effects from having been abused this way.

I remember reading many times that a high percentage of prostitutes had been sexually abused as children — and from the first time I read that I wondered: what about those of us who don’t?

I remember reading that some girls end up as “daddy’s little princess” with all kinds of gifts and special privileges, and I wondered: what about those of us who never did?

It goes on and on like that. Studies that get published highlight the girls/women who stand out in some way — what about those who pretended as hard as possible that no such thing happened, and kept the secret for 20 years?

Ivanka Trump’s father has left a trail of utterly grotesque very public photos and interviews about his daughter as a child, as a teen, as a young adult. He fondles her, poses her… There was a lifestyle interview and magazine photos of the two of them on her bed, with her on the phone, clothed but very suggestive for someone who looked about 12 years old.

One of the most telling stories I’ve read in the past year is that (1) Ivanka’s childhood bedroom has never been changed a bit, and (2) she has never set foot in it since leaving home. Also there was a separate story last year by a woman who was sent by her lifestyle magazine to interview new-mother Melania, accepted a “tour” of the penthouse by Donald, and ended up in Ivanka’s bedroom being slammed against the wall by the big man himself. Rather reminiscent of how he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room, except the reporter escaped with a groping. Oh yeah, that great unforgettable story with Stormy Daniels, where he told a porn actress that she “reminded him of his daughter.”

He pressured Ivanka into cosmetic surgery at an early age. Having a nose job is common for high schoolers in some places, but if you look at her brothers and her old photos you can see how her chin, lips, and cheekbones were resculpted — early. Her aunt the judge recalled at one point how Donald wanted her to have a boob job in her teens, and how the aunt objected that it was much too early for that. She had the boob job — at what age I don’t know, but she was the talk of the Golden Globes.

So, Ivanka, as we can all see, became “Daddy’s Little Princess” practically from birth, Daddy literally forcing her hapless small brothers to compete for his unattainable attention. Special gifts, special treatment, lots of money — all the largesse of a very rich man. And all for the low, low price of being his doll, his thing, his object, always dependent, never free. Always transactional. Always subject to his whims and rages. — I wouldn’t want that life for anything in the universe.

As an adult, Ivanka is responsible for her own behavior in both the legal and ethical sense. She participated fully in Trump, Inc. and Trump White House. She absolutely needs to face the Law along with the rest of them.

But the abused child lives in her, twisted by her monstrous father. Just as you would not make jokes about prison rape as a knock on homosexuality, please refrain from making jokes about the incest inflicted on this woman when she was a child.

The implied clause "fled the government of" was perfectly clear to me

If one wants to quibble, people started leaving England for the New World seeking religious freedom far earlier than the reign of King George III.

My own first ancestor here was a Dissenter came to Massachusetts in the 1600s, because of persecution and threat of execution — a Protestant who was not the right kind of Protestant, in a kingdom where Church and State were as one.

Which is the point.

Edited to add this from your OP: