Today is the start of my 23rd year here on DU

I had lurked for a while here in 2001. It was a place for me to help retain my sanity as I watched W steal the presidency. Along with Bartcop, Media Whores Online, and Atrios, it gave me vital information that often ran counter to the prevailing media narrative.

The day after 9/11, I made an account and started to contribute. I met and have read so many fantastic posters here. I have been through 5 election cycles, and all of the in-fighting that goes with Democratic primaries. DU has seen me through four job changes, a house fire, and cancer.

Just wanted to shout out to the founders, the mods, the contributors here. All of the news gatherers and posters that make this such a vital place. Looking forward to many more years ahead.

It's nice to know that so many people actively support the party of human values, kindness, care, and equity.

did this latest SC decision kill the movement to make the Electoral College obsolete?

I support the movement to create a popular vote for president via having states representing the required number of EC votes pledge their electors to the winner of the national popular vote.

However, the mechanism - having states assign their electors not based on how their vote tallies come out but rather on some other basis - sounds very much like the schemes that were voted down this week. Where Republican-run states could just assign their electors arbitrarily.

Does this effectively kill the plan to end (the relevance of) the Electoral College?

It Is Journalism's Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible

“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.

Trump just declared war on trans people

fuck that seditious, criminal asshole.

edit: link to his horrible speech.