...and what a strange pair of historical bookends it creates if you look at it a certain way.

Senator Joe McCarthy was a crazy Commie-hunter who ruined numberless lives with his Inquisition. But I'll give him this much: he thought he was saving this country from Russia. He was despicable, but a traitor he was not.

The modern Republican Party, currently led by Trump (who is really more of a symptom than a cause), is a whole different kettle of stinking fish. They have chosen to stand by the men who literally will sell this country to Russia for cash. They are despicable -- and traitors.

In one lifetime. I honestly do not understand this.

But today Congressman Schiff delivered a resounding, blistering, "At long last, have you no shame?" to the GOP. And Lawrence O'Donnell is right: this speech is going to be remembered a long long time.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Adam Schiff.

It's a funny thing about what is and is not common medical knowledge, and my late mother is a bit of a touchstone for me in that regard. She was born in 1924, and I guess you could call her an educated housewife, in that she went to college until her scholarship ran out.

But while raising 4 kids on dad's blue collar paycheck, she kept reading and reading, and now that I look back I realize how much science sunk into me -- not from school but from her. DDT? Asbestos? She knew about those things in the early 1950s and told me when I was quite a young thing. "Oh, I stopped making candied orange-peel because they're sprayed with DDT and it can't be washed off." "Don't handle the rest-pad for the steam iron, dear. It's made of asbestos, which gets into your body and never comes out."

Her older brothers played high school football in the late 1920s/early 1930s, wearing leather helmets. They grew up to be successful men. But something about a known percentage of football players becoming permanently addled (i.e. brain damaged in some way) meant that she absolutely refused to sign off on my youngest brother joining his high school football team, no matter what kind of helmet he wore.

My point is: We knew this. It's now made some spectacular news because pro-football stars commit suicide or otherwise self-destruct. But the information has been around for a very, very long time. And people just effing don't pay attention until the lawsuits pile up. Not the broken bodies, the lawsuits. So I hope this kid wins.

Short of a nuclear catastrophe, this will never happen.

And it certainly wouldn't be peaceful. California, which outsiders think of as entirely Blue, has its fair share of alt-right, white-nationalist, KKK, Nazi groups, sovereign citizens, and all of them heavily armed and dangerous. You think they'd go along quietly?

We already had a nutball Calexit plan that was supposed to go on the ballot -- the leader had an address in San Diego, iirc, but his office was in (wait for it) Russia. California Republic, riiight.

Then another that involved splitting California into 3 states. It got hotly debated at good old DU, where people thought we'd get 6 Democratic US Senators out of the deal. On the contrary, the two inland states would vote very conservative, yielding 4 GOP Senators from there and 2 Dem Senators from the Coast.

Show me where there is any legal, Constitutional, provision for secession from the United States. It was already tried. It didn't work.

As for peaceful partition with people choosing to relocate: get yourself a book on the history of the partition of India and Pakistan.

...when the news broke, and I realized that she is brighter than he is. Brighter and better prepared. Ha!

Frank Figluzzi was one of her guests, and one of his comments (before the news broke) really struck me. We all know Trump has spent two solid years defaming the DOJ and the intelligence services.

Trump's new trope is that the people "persecuting" him were never elected, so they have no right to go after him, and "his people" will never stand for it.

Figluzzi put his finger right on it: these are the words and ideas of the Sovereign Citizens. Just to make it perfectly clear to his listeners, Fig said that if a traffic cop pulls over a Sovereign Citizen, that guy is likely to shoot the cop. Because they don't recognize the authority of the cops because they are not elected. Sheriffs are elected. Etc.

Just let that sink in. Fig looked quite concerned.

Anyhow, skipped most of Chuck Todd because someone stopped by, and we don't care for him anyway. Ended up waiting for Rachel, who was outstanding. The guests for Nicolle, Rachel, and Brian Williams were also outstanding.

Oh -- Adam Schiff was on and in answer to a question outlined a comprehensive plan for what Congress can do if Trump and/or Barr decide to be uncooperative. He just reeled it all out, quite calmly. If this, then that, and that, and that. No stress, no mess. No handwringing. No anger. Just a man who knows his job quite thoroughly and is prepared to do it.
Found it here. https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017536169

Periodically I would come back to DU, and it was a bit of an insane asylum. Good Lord 'n' butter. I wanted to throw my iPad across the room. Thank you for your post.

...go much deeper than the face she was born with, and she is ripe for caricature by political cartoonists. The preacher's daughter lies so much and is so angry and contemptuous of reporters' questions that her face is distorted much further. And she dresses funny.

You know what? Among my friends and relatives are a whole variety of body types and problems, and I would never mock them. I would never mock strangers, either.

But people like Trump and Sarah H thrust themselves into my life -- all our lives -- with evil intent.

We have very few weapons to fight them with on a day to day basis, and satire and mockery have always been the weapons of the powerless.

I refuse to give up those weapons and I refuse to be shamed by misguided people who are so sensitive about themselves that they cannot see past that.

...it was understood in my family that we would get summer jobs, and I worked through college, so I was well-inculcated in society's expectations and limitations by the time I graduated HS in '65.

Someone else brought up airline pilots. Not a career ambition of mine, but still. I remember at one time (probably in the 1970s) reading that one of the reasons women were having SUCH a hard time breaking into the commercial airline piloting field was that all the men had achieved so many hours in military service starting in WW II, so the men were miles ahead. That's why women couldn't get hired: no military service. Oh, and size. Then the struggle began to get women into the Air Force as pilots.

Fast forward decades, when one of my mother's dearest friends died, essentially of old age. The whole time I'd known her, she'd been a secretary. At her memorial service I read some things in her scrapbook and had to pick my jaw off the floor. That little woman had been a WW II pilot of military aircraft.

How? You may well ask. Well, while Rosie the Riveter was building aircraft, Penny the Pilot was ferrying the planes across the US continent to military bases, where they were then flown across the ocean into battle by men. Manly men.

It made me furious to learn that. I had no idea, not only about Eileen, but about all the other women who flew military aircraft before I was born, and the lies of omission we were taught as history.

Environmental contaminents are so pervasive in America that amniotic fluid tests positive for hundreds of toxic substances. Like 600+. That's at all socioeconomic levels and all levels of education, whether their moms ate organic food or not.

These toxic substances range from rocket fuel that contaminates underground aquifers in So Cal to household pesticides and so much more.

SOURCE: Articles from the Los Angeles Times several years back. I subscribe.

Autism has always been around, just by other names. But the drastic surge in autism feels to me like these kids are the proverbial "canary in the coal mine." (For those who don't know, coal miners in some regions used to take a caged canary underground with them as an early warning device for odorless gasses that could blow up or simply kill them quickly. When the canary keeled over, that was the signal for the miners to get the hell out.)

But as for blaming mothers, which used to be the favorite culprit -- that also has been thoroughly disproven. I think our culture is poisoning our own babies.