You'd be amazed. I was. Other people followed the Brooks Brothers Rioters long before I did...

Roberts has made some goddam stupid rulings overall...

I was appalled and disgusted when he gutted the Voting Rights Act.

I cried for 3 days after Dobbs — and a friend of mine who had been thru any number of failed rounds of IVF basically took to her bed for the same 3 days.

But his ruling about presidential immunity damn near gave me a stroke, and I wish I was joking. I thought Imperial Presidency was settled when we got rid of Nixon, I really did.

He and his Sleazy Six on the Court are trying to undo all the progress of the 20th Century, especially the second half, which was the first part of my lifetime.

So if the gentleman is “shaken” and having a sad, he fckng well should, and I hope it gets worse every day for the rest of his misbegotten life.

I've never forgotten those 2 clowns! Right up there with Get a Brain Morans!

The Apricot Hellbeast is spreading lies about hurricanes & FEMA. What do you remember about Covid?

That is, about how he handled it? Sometimes it’s a good idea to sit around the campfire and not allow the horrors of the past to go down the memory hole.

I think it was mass murder on Trump’s part.

I remember seeing my allergist post-quarantine, & he said 3 docs died at the clinic.
They were his friends.

I remember so many heinous things Trump did about Covid. —> Held super-spreader rallies, directly killing people who worshipped him and at least one who thought he was a friend (Herman Caine) . Sold US emergency supplies to China. Made American governors compete for scarce supplies like it was an effing TV show. Had his minions go to airports to collect deliveries off the tarmac, whisking them away to the gods knew where — forcing state agencies to order supplies be sent in “plain brown wrappers. “ Put Jared in charge.

People remember bleach and horse wormer. People remember Dr. Fauci getting his life threatened. People blamed Dr. “Scarf Lady” for her public humiliation, after a lifetime in public service, but that was just Trump going out of his way to make a woman crawl — I could see that, so why couldn’t everyone here?

I remember that Barack Obama left behind a beautifully prepared plan for the next pandemic, all printed up and distributed to various departments, and Trump didn’t just ignore it — he had the physical copies destroyed.

Just one more little thing: at one point a shipment of ventilators came in, and because of their scarcity, they got rationed to the 50 states. Remember how Jared and the Marmalade Shitgibbon pondered how they were going to punish blue states? California, pop. 40 million, got two. Two.

From time to time I need to remind myself just how sprawling this mass murder was, lest I myself forget everything but the bleach and horse wormer. How about you?

This started as a post in the thread linked below, & someone suggested it should be an OP. So for whatever it is worth, here it is, above.
https://democraticunderground.com/100219548584

I'm so glad you survived. I remember seeing my allergist post-quarantine, & he said 3 docs died at the clinic

They were his friends.

I remember so many heinous things Trump did about Covid. Held super-spreader rallies, directly killing people who worshipped him and at least one who thought he was a friend (Herman Caine) . Sold US emergency supplies to China. Made American governors compete for scarce supplies like it was an effing TV show. Had his minions go to airports to collect deliveries off the tarmac, whisking them away to the gods knew where — forcing state agencies to order supplies be sent in “plain brown wrappers. “ Put Jared in charge.

People remember bleach and horse wormer. People remember Dr. Fauci getting his life threatened. People blamed Dr. “Scarf Lady” for her public humiliation, after a lifetime in public service, but that was just Trump going out of his way to make a woman crawl — I could see that, so why couldn’t everyone here?

I remember that Barack Obama left behind a beautifully prepared plan for the next pandemic, all printed up and distributed to various departments, and Trump didn’t just ignore it — he had the physical copies destroyed.

Just one more little thing: at one point a shipment of ventilators came in, and because of their scarcity, they got rationed to the 50 states. Remember how Jared and the Marmalade Shitgibbon pondered how they were going to punish blue states? California, pop. 40 million, got two. Two.

Forgive me — I am not trying to hijack your thread. But from time to time I need to remind myself just how sprawling this mass murder was, lest I myself forget everything but the bleach and horse wormer.

Be well, Johnny and all my DU friends, and remember.

Dear Florida DUers -- please stay safe, & may you return to homes still waiting for you

My heart is aching for you this night

People are missing one of the biggest most glaring problems: LACK OF ANY HOSPITAL AT ALL

Turning away emergency patients is evil, all right. The long battle for the civil rights of non-white people included that.

Now it’s just us women of any color. Half the population, anything to do with our lady-parts, and we can be SOL.

However these hospital deserts have been building to an utter crisis for at least 25 years. I can put a date on it because of an intense conversation I had with a cousin in 2002. We seldom get to see each other, as not only were we raised in different places but his adult career has had him working overseas much of the time. Foreign policy he understands — the particulars of American life, not so much.

So, this particular convo had to do with the closure of small secular hospitals in rural parts of the US. You know the reasons: the for-profit model is killing them off.

Enter the venerable Roman Catholic Church. One of its missions throughout its history has been to care for the sick, as Jesus commanded. They’ve done some excellent work in that regard, from lepers to HIV patients. They are known for training doctors and nurses, and for sending them to places where there are none.

There’s just one teensy problem — saving the soul of an unborn baby takes precedence over the life of a full-grown woman who has already presumably had her chances in life.

In the United States of America the split in religion used to be very clear. There were Protestants, the majority of the population from the beginning, and there was everybody else. Catholics grew in number with floods of immigrants from Ireland and Italy. My ancestry is Irish.

Hospitals founded by Protestants (orJews) were both clear on the subject of giving priority to saving a pregnant woman’s life. That really was the majority opinion in the country for much of our history. Abortion might have been an unspeakable no-no, but an actual woman in labor or miscarriage was a patient.

So several things have happened to American hospital care: the for-profit medical system and the rise of the so-called Evangelical movement into political power. The overthrow of Roe meant removing federal protection from hospitals and clinics. The for-profit model means exactly what it says: big city hospitals might be struggling, but rural hospitals are as good as dead.

Roman Catholic hospitals are filling an empty niche, something they feel called to do. That’s always been fine as long as they were one choice among several, and not the only option for hundreds of miles. But American religion coupled with American politics and wedded to capitalism has made sure that niche was wide open — and only one group stepped up.

In other words, we brought this catastrophe on ourselves, and we have to fix it. May our courage not fail.

You did good, flying wahini. After Dobbs, I guess everybody here heard me explode I was so triggered...

I was the oldest child in my family. My mother gave birth to and raised 4 living children during the Baby Boom. During my first 9 years of life she was pregnant 7 times.

Of the pregnancies she lost, one was a full term stillbirth. One was a complete mess of a miscarriage in which she nearly bled out in the operating room and had a classic out of body experience. (I did ask her what it was, meaning gender, and she said the docs said they couldn’t even tell how many it was, it was such a mess.) The other miscarriage was incomplete, and she just lived with chronic blood loss, anemia, and utter exhaustion until the family doc noticed her ill health and questioned her when she brought us kids in for something, at which point he ordered her to to go for a D&C.

A D&C was standard of care, for God’s sake, for a variety of “female troubles,” way back in the 1940s and 1950s. And now in the 21st century Talibornagain fanatics and fascist idiots have redefined it as “abortion.” Seems they have decided anything to do with our lady-parts is an abortion.

That’s it. I’ve been careful — and lucky — and my contraceptives of choice always worked for me. But here’s something bizarre: the same religious fanatics and fascists long ago redefined the contraceptives I used in my fertile years as abortifacients, meaning they will lie about anything and everything to do with female reproductive care. And they really do not care if women die.

I have watched wildfires lash California's Central Coast many times in my decades here...

I have pondered our fate from many angles. Fire is an elemental force, and to watch it is to understand why the ancients saw it as a living being, the manifestation of a god.

To watch it destroy forests and chaparral is terrifying — but in the end they will renew themselves. Life wants to live. First the wildflowers will spring from the ashes, the ones called fire-followers…

But to watch wildfire sweep through what we think of as our space, to endure road closures and the myriad other things we cannot live without, is not only to fear personal loss and death, but to be reminded of how easily (oh, how easily) the works of humanity could be swept away from this very long and beautiful coastline.

But Life wants to live… and whoever remains alive, will return.

Regarding "the Hispanic vote" or "the Latino vote" -- they are not a monolith. Talking heads should look at a map...

It’s really exasperating. People originate in countries and islands over a continent and a half to the south of California and Texas.

In addition, a big swathe of the USA used to belong to Mexico, to be exact: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

There are families in the US who have Spanish surnames and have been here for centuries.

If pollsters are lumping all these millions of people into one voting bloc, they are doing us all not just a disservice, but committing malpractice.