calimary
calimary's JournalGood luck to her! I hope her recovery runs smoothly and swiftly!
I mentioned how my mom had this very drastic and, at the time, experimental surgery that involved three valves and an abnormally enlarged heart. Strips were taken out of the heart to bring it closer to normal size, they repaired two valves and replaced a third valve. It happened in early December of that year. She was veritably an invalid. A few weeks later, she was up and dressed and fixing Christmas dinner!
Our daughter had been born in October. My mom was so weak that she couldn't even lift the baby when we set her on her grandma's lap. Two-and-a-half years later, Mom came bursting into the delivery room when I was in hard labor, talking nonstop and complaining about why I hadn't called her yet to tell her our son had been born. I was still working on it! She was quite a gal.
And she lived another 17 years - til a couple of months after she turned 90.
Welcome to DU, Benton D Struckcheon!
Glad you're here! Seems a pity that the GOPers can't channel one of their own - Teddy Roosevelt. Isn't he the one whose nickname was "The Trust Buster"? They do clearly manifest which side they're on! I'm sure few if any people on the panel facing her questions had gone out of their way to try to seek justice - and hell, if you can't do it in your department, freakin' ASK YOUR COLLEAGUES OVER AT THE DOJ!!! THEY are in the position to do something about it! And if you aren't allowed to do that by law, as we're not allowed to fund studies of the impacts of gun violence on society, then dammit, change the freakin' law!
The other side is extraordinarily talented in finding ways around the law. WHERE are the thinkers on our side, who can figure out ways around the technicalities, the loopholes, the de-funding, and the legally hobbling obstacles that the other guys exploit and/or put in our way????
Oh yeah, and btw, kicking and rec'ing - with pleasure!!!
Totally! They should!
I hope she writes a whole new book, and then throws it at them!
They put their grudges and vendettas ahead of EVERYTHING. And EVERYBODY.
That's another reason why I am NOT for bipartisanship anymore. I'm NOT for having two parties - at least not at the moment, and not for awhile. I think we need as few of the GOP as possible in power positions, because this generation of GOPers is just all about being pissants. I hope we can shove more of them aside next year and lock in a stronger majority in the Senate, and take back the House, so MAYBE we can get a few things done without the interference of constant obstruction - just for pissants' sake.
The World's Biggest Entitlement Program is the GOP's assumption that it is entitled to rule, call the shots, set the agenda, dictate the morality, and own it all. Which is why I think THEY need to be owned (AND pwned, too, dammit!) for at least the next few election cycles. When you're nailed for drunk driving, you forced OFF THE ROAD for awhile. Your driving privileges are REVOKED. I think the same should be done to the republi-CON party. The very ones who are only interested in wrecking things should NOT be allowed into positions of power and authority over those who are needed to rebuild.
Frankly, I'm not interested in bipartisanship anymore.
SCREW 'em. My husband frequently argues that we need both sides. But then again, he's old enough to remember when "gentlemen's agreements" were exactly that. When there was more civil discourse. When people could get along better and agree to disagree but where one side (the CONS) wasn't trying to napalm the other (the Dems). Where things could indeed actually get done. Where, at 6pm, the reagans and the tip o'neills could drop their guard and go have highballs or martinis or beers together. When NO ONE hollered out "YOU LIE!!!" at the President DURING the State of the Union speech.
Btw - for those who bray "both sides do it" "both sides-both sides-both sides" "they're all the same" - please think back to the bush/cheney days and how much material in dubya's State of the Union speeches was a flat-out lie or based on lies, especially when they were all jonesing for war in Iraq and trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. WHO ON OUR SIDE HOLLERED OUT AT HIM? Mind you, at that very time, OUR side actually DID have so many more legitimate, fact-based reasons for doing so???
Now, granted, it's awfully easy to look back and sigh about "good old days," but that's not true, either. Those "good old days" also had witch hunts and joe mccarthy and Korea and Khrushchev and the Cold War and the racist mess in the South and - weren't such "good old days" for many non-whites and women of any color. And the one thing this band of teabaggers and ayn rand worshippers HASN'T done that has happened in the past is when they've actually taken canes to each other.
All I can say is I turn 60 this year, I started becoming aware of things as of President Kennedy and his family, and then more aware of things during the Vietnam and Watergate era. The first campaign activity in which I participated was when Tom Bradley ran for L.A. Mayor the first time (and lost), and the Student Coalition for Humphrey/Muskie. I can remember ten Presidents. My husband is a little older and remembers as far back as Eisenhower.
When I look back, it just seems to me that there's never been this much rancor as we see now, every day. I think the GOP started feeling its oats at the start of the reagan era, because not only did reagan come in, people like newt gingrich came in, and started remaking the attitude of his party into a belligerent, bullying mob. Being in-yer-face and stirring things up became cool. gingrich used to boast openly - "I'm a back-bench bomb-thrower!" Playing fair was wussy stuff. And that's when they aggressively began courting and mixing in, the radical evangelicals with their TV/radio empires and big bucks.
It felt to me that the political climate deteriorated completely when Bill Clinton had the gall to defeat george h.w. bush and deny him a second term. The second term to which his side just assumed he was ENTITLED, mind you. That outcome was in a large part thanks to the spoiler campaign of Ross Perot's. He got enough votes to cost bush1 enough states to seal it for Clinton who had the most votes out of the three. But nobody in the GOP ever seemed to care about that much. They laser-focused on Clinton from the moment he took office, trying to dig up dirt on him and get him out of there, or at least hobble his presidency. They spent the following six years trying to dig up dirt. Something. Anything. Finally found a stained blue dress. It was just nuts. Utterly ridiculous. What did they spend - 60 million dollars on Congressional investigations of ANYTHING Clinton-related, and that included Hillary too. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, they thought she personally had somebody murdered. The last time people tried to impeach a President was more than a century earlier! (Sheesh - I remember seeing the occasional "Impeach Johnson Centennial" buttons on someone's label back in the LBJ days.)
But I don't remember it EVER being this bad. I do NOT remember things ever being THIS bad. Where they've raised "NO" to a frickin' sacrament - even turning their noses up at ideas President Obama adopts that were originally their own! Shouting rudely at him in public during events of great decorum. Yowling loudly and all over everywhere about him being foreign, illegitimate, and alien. Being rude and disrespectful in large and organized and "legitimized" numbers. It's AWFUL!!!
And you know something else? It's NEVER been reciprocated - to that degree and that mass and volume. YES we marched against Vietnam (some of us just as much against a Democratic President - LBJ) as against Nixon. We raged against Nixon. Those of us who did were, by-n-large, dismissed as hippies and tree-huggers and other not-to-be-taken-seriously fringe groups. We weren't elevated to near celebrity status as a group, the way the teabaggers have been. Or as the televangelists and their followers were. They were all taken VERY seriously and given wide berth, plus lots of air and face time in the media. Our side and our leaders were basically laughed at. But our side has NEVER mounted the kind of aggressive hostility-based torch-and-burn assaults on the power structure as these assholes do now. There simply is NO "both sides do it" or "they're all the same" argument to be offered here. Our side is only starting to stiffen its spine - NOW. Criminy! It's taken DECADES.
I, for one, am glad to see it happen. FINALLY. Where OUR side rises up. And I think that's how it needs to be for at least a few election cycles to come. None of this bipartisanship crap. WE have to take COMPLETE charge and fix things. Set things straight. Clean up their messes with very few of them to insist on standing in the way. Because at this point, in this day and age, that's all they're interested in doing. I think they need to be minimized and sent to the corner and told to sit down and shut up for several election cycles - while WE fix things and get rid of their crap.
No bipartisanship for ME!
My mom had heart surgery at an advanced age like your mom's.
As a matter of fact, I think she was 73, too. Because it bought her another 17 years. She died a couple of months after her 90th birthday.
Blessings and prayers to you both!!!
And hey, THIS is what we pay our taxes for. Stuff like this. Stuff that really counts, that's really important, that really benefits and helps our fellow Americans who need it.
My hero!!!!!
She's going straight to the crux of the problem. The - cough - wheeze - ahem - "regulators" are just sitting there taking up space and marking time - til they can move over to the private sector and cash in. With the very fiends and felons they're supposed to be watch-dogging. Instead, they're fawning and lap-dogging and looking the other way, trying to maneuver themselves into nice cushy jobs with these same bastards. They're finding their position in line - hoping to become those bastards.
THANK YOU, MASSACHUSETTS!!!! You may just have redeemed yourselves for foisting wrongney and scott brown on the rest of us! We need at least 59 more like her. I'd love to see her as Senate Majority Leader someday - or even higher and with more clout.
Welcome to DU, guyfromla!
Glad you're here! Grab yourself a towel and a catheter and take a number! Unfortunately, you'll be at the end of a very long line. MANY of us here would like to give this asshole a piece of our minds, since it's clear he has none of his own.
FABULOUS retort! That goes into my quotes collection!
"Your taxes also purchase an F-22 jet fighter, but that doesn't give you the right to fly it," Saslaw shot back.
BEAUTIFUL!
See, THIS is what we need to do. Clamp a big ball 'n' chain around their ankles and hobble them completely. And that ball 'n' chain is something I'm sure they won't recognize or find familiar: THE REAL-WORLD TRUTH.
They've drunk so much of the CON-artists' Kool-aid that's been force-fed to them for at least three decades by now that they're incapable of rational thought. And they need to be reminded CONSTANTLY about how things really are. There is NO pie-in-the-sky. You will NOT magically become rich by continuing to vote republi-CON. There is NO "liberal media" (although there is INDEED CON-crackpot media GALORE). The study and pursuit of science is NO evil plot to negate the Bible. There is NO sinister black-helicopter plot to come and snatch their guns. There is NO "New World Order" or any such thing (except in the minds of the paranoiacs and other assorted berzerkos). The UN isn't some diabolical plot. And the "evil" intrusive gummnt doesn't exist - except the one of THEIR OWN design and creation that's pretty damn suppressive of minorities and women and the poor.
Reason is - they're just marking time til they can trade in government work for something
FAR more lucrative on Wall Street. Why make enemies ahead of time and mess up your prospects?
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Gender: FemaleHome country: USA
Current location: Oregon
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 81,267
