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I was planning on sending them a donation on behalf of the people of Florida and Texas until yesterday, when I heard our president, civilian Commander in Chief of the US Air Force and US Navy, say that it was really too hard to get help to Puerto Rico, because ...because... it is an island surrounded by water in the Atlantic Ocean, and you can't just drive a truck down there like you can to Texas and Florida. As is typical of his rhetorical style, he repeated these thoughts several times just to make sure we got the point. PR: just too hard for the mighty US to get to in any kind of hurry.

I lost it at that point.

I grew up on an island myself -- full of Americans of all colors, as it happens, and surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, as it happens. People in Hawai'i are Americans --as are the people of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Islands. THIS is now the criterion for not receiving timely aid from Uncle Sam, to whom we all pay taxes?

This makes my teeth itch, it is so awful. But that's how I ended up sending my 300 bucks to Direct Relief earmarked for some American islands in the Atlantic Ocean. If it were not for the president's comments, I would have simply said: where most needed -- but I kind of lost it.

Please help -- where most needed.

His entire life he has won "public feuds," and finally made it to the WH. He has no shame, he has no conscience, and he will tell any lie to advance himself if only for a moment.

The idea of taking anyone to court to fight the smears against both Clintons is almost laughable. It's been a GOP industry for 30 years -- the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. If Bill and Hillary had gone to court they would have been obliterated long ago. Instead they have proceeded with their lives, earning some money for themselves in the great American tradition, and by the way doing a lot of good in the world.

As for Hillary "fighting back" -- you may have noticed that she is. She wrote a book and is giving increasingly candid interviews. Yet some people on both the Left and the Right want the little lady to STFU and retreat to a cave to lick her wounds. We're still fighting that out here on DU, depending on the day of the week.

Hillary is doing her part, with dignity, poise, and blunt honesty. It's up to us to do the rest. Resist, tell the truth, and GOTV 2018.

...Darrell Issa and Dana Rohrabacher are just two who spring to mind. Both are GOP, both are dishonest, both are Californians, both are men, and one is in Putin's pocket.

To go after Nancy Pelosi in this fashion is so counterproductive and flat-out stupid that it makes me wonder if this crowd and its leaders are even who they say they are. She is one of the best legislative allies the DREAMers will ever have.

It reminds me of the crowd that shouted down, jostled, and disrespected Dolores Huerta, a living hero who worked alongside Cesar Chavez in dark and dangerous years and has never ever backed down from working to improve the lives of, specifically, Mexican and Mexican American workers.

What do these two people have in common? Well, they are both women, which seems increasingly like some criterion for persecution by people who claim to have some kind of progressive values. They are both small and older -- and Dolores Huerta is over 80 and tiny.

So I ask again of these protestors: Who the hell are they? Are they even who they say they are? Whose idea was this?

Was it useful to "look backward"?

As in: Why did this happen? How was it carried out? Who in Japan was supporting this? What were the ties to Germany and Italy? Were there any US citizens supporting the ideologies of, say, Hitler? Was there infiltration into the US government itself? How badly had our internal security been breached?

Do you think FDR et al. simply started the draft and the munitions plants without asking these questions?

WE WERE ATTACKED BY A FOREIGN GOVERNMENT AND ITS AGENTS LAST YEAR. Sure, a Democratic candidate "lost" the presidential election, but she is also one of the finest analytic minds in the business. Should we be telling her she has nothing to contribute? Why?

She not only has every right to speak out, but why on Earth would we deprive ourselves of her voice at this time? Why?

Her dad is from Jamaica and her mom is from India. She is not bi-racial but multi-racial.

But this being America, where the media could never get a grip on Tiger Woods being half Thai and he finally gave up and just let them call him black, I think it was also the media that definitively decided Kamala Devi Harris is African American.

Or maybe, confronted with a row of "pick only one" boxes all her life, she assigned it to herself. I follow her on FB, and her posts are heavily weighted toward African American achievements.

I am an Irish-American, raised in a multi-ethnic culture where it was the norm to be multi-racial. At some point in my youth I realized that both cultural identity and race itself are malleable. (In 1968 a college roommate told me the dread secret of a friend of hers: he was an octoroon. I looked at this young man with the square Saxon face, blue eyes, and straight blond hair, and realized that traditional Southern attitudes toward race were 100% insane.) Kids where I grew up could reel off the family tree from Denmark to China and all of Polynesia with a grin.

Sorry to go on like this, but it is a pet peeve of mine. I tried to write last night but had to quit. I have been back on the Mainland for almost 40 years, and can still be taken by surprise, tho why I don't know. After all, in Hawai'i I was just another haole (Irish? Pfft), but in California was informed by an African American co-worker that I am an Anglo, which would make my Irish ancestors turn over in their graves. My husband was born a Jew in Belgium, raised a Jew in New York, and transmogrified into an Anglo in California. When I was on the County Affirmative Action Commission, a younger Latino said in an accusatory tone that all the members of a particular subcommittee except himself were "WASPs," but I laughed in his face. I said, "Wrong by definition. Two Jews, two Irish, and a Catholic will never be Anglo-Saxon Protestant."

...if Senator Feinstein is primaried and defeated. It means the Dems enter the GE bloodied and weakened, and more likely to allow a Repub to gain the seat.

What people outside California often fail to understand is the sheer diversity of this place. We have more people than the country of Canada. We are on the cusp of a nonwhite majority. Many Asians trend Republican, not Democratic. We have swathes of very conservative people: I mean who do you think sends Dana Rhorabacher and Darell Issa to Congress year after year? We have some some very liberal Democrats indeed, as well -- but someone like Nancy Pelosi comes from a very liberal city indeed.

Our Senators reflect a lot of that. When liberal Dem. Barbara Boxer retired, we had not one challenger, but several good people lined up to fill a vacancy, and were lucky to get Kamala Harris (who some here have complained about for being insufficiently POC, when what she is is very mixed race). But her GOP opponents will be back, challenging DiFi with lots of money to back them up.

Diane Feinstein strikes some here as "too old" and "too moderate." But she is a thoroughly reliable Democrat who gets re-elected in this state year after year. People can certainly sound her out about retirement plans, because if she retires it will be like Boxer -- it will give a bunch of good Democrats a chance to run for a vacancy, rather than one spoiler trying to unseat one of our best Dem Senators.

My question would be: who among us is willing to lose that seat to a Repub in order to unseat Feinstein -- and why would that be?

"I tried to hold on to it, but he broke my wrist and when I yelled he planted his fist on my jaw. See, officer, I have the deep bruises and abrasions, and the broken bone. What? You want my ID? It's in my purse. Which was stolen."

The above is what we call a story, but of the analogy kind. If it were real, bruises and all, how much of it would be "very much subjective"?

Or is this a case of "a lot of violence on all sides"?

You see, the Democratic Party was walking along in broad daylight trying to win an election, seats in the House and Senate, the Presidency, all that. The Party (not just one candidate) was set upon by gangs of thugs (Russians, hackers, and more) and an awful lot of people stood by and just watched it happen (the media, Bernie Bros, Sarandon, et al.). Some even cheered the thugs on, just on general principles.

Nothing to see here, just move along, it's all subjective, no lessons to be learned from the principal victim, and besides, there were some very fine people among the thugs and a lot of violence on all sides.

It's all subjective, unlike physics.

Physics, by the way, has a branch called Quantum.

...to your line of reasoning.

"Marriage" of any kind presumes "consummation." You know, SEX. Now with consenting adults not under duress this is not a problem. Likewise it is not a problem if they choose to never physically consummate, as long as they were not lied to about this eventuality. Sex is a conjugal right. The law has always addressed it.

HOWEVER, with youths (or "kids" as you keep referring to them) or persons under duress (as is certainly the case with people threatened with deportation), physical consummation becomes a matter of financial or other transaction not related to love or the usual bonds of marriage. Rape, even.

Hey, girlie, I married you and you owe me.

You, Generic Other, are really wedded to your bright idea, but frankly it stinks.

...and never will be an actual conservative. They know the present-day Republican Party has failed egregiously.

Rather than piling on, lumping all conservatives together with the vilest of their base and enablers, tarring them all with the same brush -- it would be far more productive to recognize who our potential allies are in saving this country.

Addressed not just to you, obviously.

Raised as a strict monotheist by a Deist mother, I have a hard time abandoning monotheism as a habitual way of thinking, but as a student of mythology who was also a member of a Moon Circle for 20 years, I have to say that polytheism goes a long way toward extricating us from the mess we are in.

For instance, I used to feel as tho I might be struck by lightning for saying I do not believe in Joel Osteen's smug self-serving god or Mike Pence's self-righteous woman-hating god. Really getting how much gods are created by men in men's image (read: humans, for men) has allowed me to declare definitively that I do not believe in the mean, small, nasty god of Pat Robertson. Or, perhaps, it may exist in the pantheon, but being a mean small nasty god it certainly is not going to get my devotion. Just because they claim to be related to Jesus of Nazareth doesn't mean they are.

Look to the world's great living polytheistic pantheons, and the past ones that live on in our psyches. We don't have to swallow them whole or recreate the cultures they were/are embedded in -- which in my mind is much the point. But they have much to teach us about liberating ourselves from too narrow a definition of god(s), and how to recognize when others are trying to impose a straitjacket of belief on all the rest of us.