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.

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?

https://www.theonion.com/it-is-journalism-s-sacred-duty-to-endanger-the-lives-of-1850126997

“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.

The Onion writes what the NYT should have.

fuck that seditious, criminal asshole.

edit: link to his horrible speech.

using their vast wealth accumulation as both the cause of future crises and the means of "escape".

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.

emphasis mine

except in cases of the health or life of the mother. The right wing fascists keep lying to say that progressives want abortion right up to birth, but that was never the situation in the US after Roe. They keep implying that we have to compromise and give up free abortions in the 3rd trimester - but that was never even on the table.

So happy to see women and men voters all over the country dealing out appropriate punishment to these religious prigs for denying bodily autonomy for women.

TFG keeps admitting to crimes. In public. That would have anyone else in chains for decades. Can we really not put a stop to this one man crime spree?

actually decreases everyone's freedoms. It means we all have to worry about being in public. When will the next NRA-fest be? Which innocents will be slaughtered? How can we make schools prisons - take away their freedom to be in an open, light-filled, liberating environment and replace them with windowless, booby-trapped, cement cells?

Why can't we win this argument (or at least make the argument) on the basis of maximizing everyone else's freedom not to be gunned down - or worry about ourselves or our loved ones or innocent friends that we haven't met yet - being gunned down?

Some of you may remember Grayson for actually having the guts to call out Republican inhumanity for what it is. He famously outlined the GOP healthcare plan as "Don't get sick. If you do get sick, die quickly."

He has lost some primary and general races in the years in between. And I remember there being allegations of domestic abuse during a divorce.

But he's exactly the kind of person I would love to see in the Senate, calling out Reptilian Bullshit.

See this wikipedia entry for the list of candidates in his race