Plenty of fights here about it. I got so my only reply was "SCOTUS, SCOTUS, SCOTUS"...

I had lunch with an old lefty political friend 2 weeks before the election and couldn’t dissuade her from Hillary-hatred.

I never saw her again — true, I moved, but my email address is still the same, and I have a phone. I just … couldn’t. The election of Trump was a gut-punch like no other.

And here we are, as Fiona Hill said in her testimony.

Ever look at a topographical map of the continental US? Ever talk to a civil engineer about ...

…crossing the Rockies? Ever check your water bill and try to translate how many gallons your household uses per day? How much your town uses?

Ever figure out how much water it takes for the food you eat?

I have no idea what other places are doing, but California has been at this a long time, some places better than others. We’ve piped water around a very geologically complex region, drained it from one state to another, dammed it, conserved it, piped it out of underground aquifers, learned to live with less, passed ordinances to fine homeowners, and on and on.

Did I mention the planet-wide population has passed the 7 billion mark? I didn’t? Well, it has. Their smog is our smog, their pollution is ours, their overpopulation needs food and water just like ours, and the US population what percent of the total? 4.21%.

I suppose all us Californians can move to the Great Lakes states, but I will tell you a bunch of us already tried moving to Canada and the Pacific Northwest looking for, among other things, places with much more rain and cooler climates. The locals were not thrilled to see us come in any great numbers. Last year all those places had wildfires. The rain is not arriving. And as we speak, they are suffering a triple-digit heatwave without AC because who the hell ever needed AC before now?

Oh, I think I forgot to mention the world population — it’s now actually 7.9 billion.

Kicktoons. Darren Bell really captured the essence, and *those eyes* The original postcard ...

….has an inscription on the back from “Aunt Myrtle” who wasn’t in the postcard photo. I see Bell included her in his version. Dear sweet Aunt Myrtle.

Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920. The back reads, "He killed Earl's grandma. She was Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle."



https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lynching-of-lige-daniels.jpg







My comment: there are images that really cry out to be included in high school history textbooks, and among them are that cherished embroidered sack given by a mother to her 9 year old daughter when the child was sold away. And this postcard. Students, let’s talk about what you see in these silent objects. What do they say to us? To you?

I know a Wobbly, & though it's tempting to say, "and you, sir, are no..." I'm sure you feel cloaked...

…in righteousness. Nonetheless, a person can still learn.

I’ll keep the DiFi issue short, because the last time I tried to lay it out cogently, the post I was responding to was gone before I was done.

My Senator is not an “untouchable darling of DU” as someone called her. She’s a woman who has spent her life in service to Democratic principles and to the people of California.

If she were an old-time Southern politician still able to breathe and vote, she’d be wheeled out onto the floor of the Senate until the age of 100, cherished by the voters who sent her there and by her fellow Southern politicians.

But not us Dems, oh no, because age and experience mean nothing to some of our cohort, even absent a little forgetfulness. The proof of that was the big push to get rid of Nancy Pelosi in favor of someone still wet behind the ears.

Critics from which century? In its time it was a powerful indictment against slavery...

… not just the US, but around the world. President Lincoln, on being introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, is said to have remarked to her, “So you’re the little lady whose book started this great war…”

Whatever criticisms we may have in the 21st century, however we may cringe at the long-suffering piety of Uncle Tom or fail to be moved by the travails of Little Eva crossing the ice floes — in the 19th century the portrayal of the suffering of slaves, the callousness of their owners, and the brutality of Simon Legree pounded home the lesson of this stain on our country to people in the non-slave states who were not already abolitionists and gave strength to the impassioned arguments of those who were already abolitionists.

People around the world were moved. Plays based on the book were performed — one such appears in The King and I / aka Anna and the King of Siam.

But enough. I simply believe in historical and cultural context, and not denigrating and dismissing literary works that don’t pass muster in today’s world in every aspect.

My friends & I worked so hard that year, ages 20-21. It was my big intro to politics...

A friend who was going to Long Beach State College came back to and told us about Senator Eugene McCarthy being the first to run on an antiwar platform, and away we went.

Another friend who had some kind of connection to Bobby Kennedy (I never figured out what) went to work on his campaign; but McCarthy got there first, so my friends and I were loyal, yay us.

The night of the primary election we hung out in our headquarters on the town’s main street, watching the returns on TV. Some older guy tried to kick in the door, but it was locked. We watched, until it was clear that we lost. I went home to my little apartment, where all I had was a transistor radio, the battery of which of course gave out, so I went to bed.

The following morning I went downstairs to see the old couple whose house it was; they were glued to the tv in shock, still in their nightclothes. In a montage of the commentary, we watched Mankiewicz age about a century overnight. I could weep now for that memory.

And that was it. I knew it was all over for those of us trying to elect an antiwar candidate.

1968 was a terrible year for assassinations — how could it get even worse? Yet it did. We got to see the Chicago Dem Convention’s police riots unfold, and my friend from Long Beach State had friends who were there in person — one of whom was in his political party office minding his own business when the cops stormed in and threw him against the metal filing cabinets.

I could hardly wait to leave California, and had already been accepted to the university back where I came from in 1965. At LAX as I headed for my plane back to Hawai’i, I saw passengers from Chicago coming back, wearing black armbands.

How could it get worse? Well, we got Richard Nixon, didn’t we?

As for Hubert Humphrey, poor guy. I had to grow up some more to gain perspective on him — he had an exemplary record as a progressive from Minnesota, before agreeing to run with LBJ. And over many decades, LBJ himself was considerably re-evaluated, coming up as one of our great presidents on social justice policy — if only it had not been for the Vietnam War.

RIP, Bobby. You gave your all.
RIP to our other liberal Democratic politicians of that time, who each in their own way gave their all, even if not brought down by an assassin’s bullets.

RIP to our youth.

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