Hekate
Hekate's JournalWhich other states besides California should Democrats be targeting in the coming year(s)?
Because, seriously, every state only gets two Senators, and California’s population, at 40 million, is 40% Latino. We are now a “majority-minority” state. Yay, us. I’ve seen this coming for 30+ years, and my little raised-in-Hawaii haole heart is totally fine with that.
Senator Dianne Feinstein has served this state well, and lately there’s been some notable pushback from old Sacramento (the capitol) and San Francisco hands about this notion (addressed elsewhere in this thread) of forcing her retirement. George Skelton asked this: “There are 7 octogenarian Senators. Only 1 is a woman. She is the only one being told to retire before her term ends. Why is that?” I’m paraphrasing, of course. Skelton ran through her career, both the long-ago and the recent, and while he found things to disagree with, he didn’t find deficiencies.
The people of California will be addressing all of this — age, race, gender, political party — in our next election cycle. The Governor got a chance to make a one-man choice, though he consulted with many people. Unless Feinstein actually dies (gods forbid) the next choice should be up to all the voters in California. We have some great potential candidates. Yay, us.
In the meantime, how about all those other states? Who’s up next?
Wrong, Symph. The GOP did not attack their wingnuts & were themselves absorbed by wingnuts...
How the hell do you think we got here? The GOP of my youth is gone. Eisenhower would not recognize its rotting corpse. There are no conservative intellectuals the rest of us can thoughtfully refute, there are Proud Boys ranting.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy was to embrace the racist Dixiecrats like long-lost brothers.
Instead of kicking Newt Gingrich out they embraced him. Instead of telling the Tea Partiers to pipe down, the said “Wow, we can use this energy to destroy John Kerry and smear him as a coward instead of the war hero he really is.”
At every step of the way the GOP embraced the Far Right, and now look where they are. Look where the country is.
Beware extremists.
Like you, I saw it in the news a year ago. I knew what "pandemic"
...meant, though it seemed inconceivable that — no, actually, what we are going through now did not seem “inconceivable” with Trump at the helm, not after all he had already done to hollow out the federal government. Just ghastly.
My TKR (total knee replacement) in February was among the last handful of elective surgeries at our hospital, which was already taking great precautions. I thank whatever gods may be that I did it then, because all of 2019 I could scarcely move for the pain, and if I’d waited I would still be in that condition.
I missed saying goodby to my 71 year old brother this year, but his death was from COPD, not COVID, and appears to have been peaceful. When a friend came knocking to check on him, he was gone, sitting on his couch with a glass of whiskey in his hand. My other sibs & I couldn’t make it out to Oregon to see him beforehand ... the thousands of miles, the multiple airports, the holiday crowds at the end of last year, COVID looming on the horizon like the massing of black clouds, then suddenly it was January 2020 and the world was shutting down.
My sis did travel — a required company retreat in January, after which she came down with some crud that left her gasping for air. Two trips to the ER before they admitted her for 5 days for this mystery crud. Many months later, turns out she has COVID antibodies. Well, well. I almost lost my sister, too.
I tried to get prepared to hunker down, but I was laid up and couldn’t drive. My husband works from home, and he was touchingly worried about me and my rehab: he took very good care of me, but I simply could not get him with the program of prepping for lockdowns and shortages. So all of that waited until I could drive by myself again.
NOW he gets it.
In March I laid off my cleaning ladies. They used to come twice a month, and that schedule was perfect for making us pick everything up and put it away the day before they cleaned. Yes, I was spoiled. Yes, I know how to do housework. Yes, I really miss them. I sent them money for a couple of months, hoping things would normalize, but it never did. I hope they are alright.
But my one goal is to stay alive until this is over.
My BIL and family think I’m making too much of this. I miss them and their warmth and good humor.
My daughter is an anti-vaxxer who thinks the flu she and her kids had in February was probably COVID and that they are immune now — I told her she better damn well hope she’s right, as regards immunity. She thinks masks are stupid, but kind of wears them here. Finally Dec 10 I emailed her to let her know we really can’t have her and the kids here, and explained all my medical conditions, and then explained that contact tracing is not a straight line, but extends to everyone she has been with and all the people they have been with. Not that I got to see the grandkids that much, but I miss them too.
My one goal is to live through this terrible time, but I still cried when I wrote that email. I’m crying now.
At some point this year the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” floated out of my subconscious and I knew it was shorthand for all of the longings and all of the losses of this year.
Next year I see my grandkids again and hold them tight. Next year my remaining brother and sister and I fly from the ends of the country to meet in Oregon to have a small wake for our brother who is gone. Next year maybe this country regains its sanity. Next year in Jerusalem. Next year the Promised Land.
My goal is to live to see it.
I support the full range of women's necessary medical care. When women are denied medical care....
...women die.
You don’t get to argue, based on your religion, what gets left out.
If it helps you, let me assure you that no perfect full-term Gerber Babies are being aborted.
Incidentally, in a democracy your religion is not the only one, and it is not the only yardstick for secular laws, which are ethically based. You are free to practice your religion, as I am to practice mine. (If you don't believe in abortion, by all means don’t have one.)
My Goddess encourages thoughtful decision-making, freedom of conscience, and the full range of women’s necessary medical care. I would never force someone who didn’t want an abortion to have one, no matter how stupid I thought that decision might be (there are women with life-threatening medical conditions who defy medical advice and continue a pregnancy, knowing it could kill them and leave their other children orphaned — but it’s not my decision).
Other religions in this country also encourage thoughtful decision-making and freedom of conscience. The basic Buddhist tenet of ahimsa has been used to query Buddhist sages about the issue of abortion — and the answer has been that a woman’s life must also be considered under that rubric, and that she needs to be able to decide for herself what will cause harm to her.
If you want other examples, know that there are quite a few sects of America’s Jewish and Christian communities that are pro-choice, and I can name them.
Peace.
Hekate
She brings up her resume all by herself & often. What is your point? That he should pretend ...
...not to take notice of her pride and defiance in that?
A lot of us people who’ve made something of ourselves academically, and sometimes even economically, have had humble beginnings. I canned pineapple in high school, cleaned houses in community college, sales clerked my way to a BA, supported my kids for a time as a secretary (now there’s a low-wage job). Fast forward... in midlife I paused to get a doctorate.
I’ll bring it up if it seems relevant to the discussion, like now. I am far from being ashamed; I’m kind of proud I kept plugging away. OTTH, IRL why bother? I’m not a politician. I’m retired now.
AOC is a politician — she’s young, ambitious, highly verbal, gorgeous (an asset not to be underestimated), and selling her life-story and humble beginnings as part of her political persona. We all notice that — she wants us to notice. Why be surprised if a group of skilled political ad-men also notice? They’re paying her a compliment. They’re offering her a chance to build a very important bridge for altruistic reasons. I hope she takes them up on it.
I don't know anyone alive who wallows in grievances about the Japanese attack in 1941...
If all you know about WWII is how it ended, you are sadly undereducated. Try looking up the Rape of Nanking. The Bataan Death March. The treatment of civilian prisoners.
Dresden was bombed to smithereens too. History is about remembering ALL of what happened. When you can do that, come back and talk to us about how that ghastly war ended.
Coda: the war ended and America led the world in rebuilding the ruins in Europe and Japan — ruins of those who had attacked the rest of the world and tried to take it over.
Thank you, Babylonsister
So, 47% of white women voted for Trump, as did 62% of white men.
While it gags me that anybody in their right mind could ever vote for Trump, the fact remains that if you are going to beat one gender about the head and shoulders, it should not be on the basis that “over half of white women voted for Trump.”
I’ve mentioned once or twice — or maybe a dozen by now— that I have had it up to my teeth with that canard. Left-wing opinion writers, as Chait refers to them, should be asking why significantly fewer women than men voted for Trump; or put another way, why significantly more men than women did so.
From the very beginning I called him the Mad King, long before several cartoonists...
...started portraying him as the nekkid emperor with an ermine-trimmed robe and sometimes King Louis XIV high heels.
It was just so clear — and I knew just who was the heir apparent, too: Crown Princess Ivanka, not her two brothers by Ivana. Princes all, but obviously nowhere near as important, and kept far away from the court on other business. Melania’s obviously the queen consort, and powerful in her own way — she has to be in order to protect her own young son from this nest of vipers. Melania comes by way of a secret treaty with a foreign emperor, as in days of old. Crown Princess Ivanka and her Prince Consort Jared are another marriage of the interests of two powerful houses of crime.
Tiffany — it was so clear from the body language of her half-siblings when she showed up in 2016: she’s just Daddy’s little bastard, and somewhere deep in what they imagine are their hearts they probably blame her birth for their parents’ split-up. I see she has now, by giving the required speech at this year’s RNC doings, managed to insinuate herself into the workings of the Mad King’s court and probably the family business as well — but Tiff, dear, deep in your own heart you’ll always know what they think of you, and that your own mother wasn’t as powerful or as clever as either Ivana or Melania, and is just a cast-off concubine.
I developed this psychological mythology out of a fascinated horror with what I could see of their family, and as a way of coping with it. They are warped, cruel, sick, and entitled, and visibly care for nothing but their own interests. I think they are everything our own Founding Fathers detested about Europe's centuries of monarchies, and feared for the new country they were forming.
They ran for president as Democrats. They lost. They did what was right & supported the winner....
....in order to defeat Trump, who is a very dangerous man indeed. Joe Biden not only won the nomination, he won the presidency by historic margins.
Joe Biden has already put John Kerry in his cabinet as Climate Czar. Biden is elevating the position not only to Cabinet level, but to sit at the National Security level. Kerry has a very long record in this regard. He was endorsed by no less than Al Gore.
Does this make you happy? It makes me happy. Or is it just “throwing the Bernie/AOC supporters a bone” and will they proceed to depart the Party in high dudgeon and, I don’t know, start a 3rd party?
Or is it not even a bone?
Uh-huh. I notice the usual tropes are on display in this thread: quotas, identity politics, ...
...and should only choose a woman if she happens to be the most qualified person in the known universe. It was exactly the same when Obama announced he was going to select a woman for the SCOTUS vacancy.
It’s instructive that when a couple of dozen candidates are presented who are all white men, nobody brings up identity politics, or quotas, or needing to be the most qualified candidate in the known universe.
Why is that, I wonder?
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