Rest in Power, Brooke Ellison

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 04, 2024 · 5:28 PM PST

2024/02/04 · 17:28

"My life has been shaped by challenges and adversity of all different kinds, but it has not been characterized by them. I am not defined by them" Brooke Ellison, 1978-2024

I don’t remember much about September 4, 1990. It was the first day of my senior year in high school, in the DC suburbs, and I do have some vague memories of meeting some of my teachers for the first time, but that’s about it. I certainly had no idea that, about 250 miles to my north on Long Island, a family I didn’t (and still don’t) know would never be able to forget anything about that day.

I do remember the day I learned about that, though. It was almost exactly a decade later, in June 2000. I was halfway through my master’s degree and spending the summer on campus working at the rare book library. I happened to have the TV on while getting ready for work, and I chanced to overhear a story on some morning news program (I’m guessing either Today or Good Morning America) about Brooke Ellison, the first quadriplegic to graduate from Harvard.

We all do stupid things when we’re kids. You did. I did. Brooke Ellison did, on September 4, 1990. On her way home from her first day of seventh grade, she tried to run across a highway and got hit by a car. She survived, but was paralyzed from the neck down, unable to even breathe on her own. As I watched the news about her, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own memories of that long-ago first day of school. I was your average angst-ridden suburban teenager, hating my life and having no idea just how easy I really had it. Here was someone who did know, because she had once had it just about as good as I did and had lost nearly everything – except her intelligence and the love of her family. Someone who stared death in the face at age 11, and death blinked. Someone who had every reason to give up on life…and instead earned a degree from Harvard in cognitive neuroscience.

Now, I’m not here to praise Harvard too much for what amounts to simply complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (and I suppose I should acknowledge here that I went to Yale). If anyone besides Brooke Ellison deserves praise for her accomplishment, it’s her mother, Jean Ellison, who was with her throughout those four years. As Ellison said at her commencement speech, “My mother has been with me, every hour of every day…I would not be here if it weren’t for my mother. None of us has escaped the love and caring of others.”

She wasn’t done with Harvard yet. In 2004 she earned a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, then went on to earn a PhD in sociology from Stony Brook University in 2012 and become an associate professor there. Along the way, she ran for New York State Senate in 2006. That campaign was notable for her Republican opponent running an ad with a constituent who talked about her love of golf, although she had “a huge handicap”. Stay classy, Republicans.

She also published two books about her experience, the first of which was made into a TV movie directed by Christopher Reeve (immediately before his passing). In 2014 she was elected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; in 2017 she joined the board of directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She used all these platforms and others to be a tireless advocate for stem cell research. That “and others” includes Daily Kos, where she published a diary called “Stem Cell Research and False Dichotomies” in August 2010.

I never met Dr. Ellison, though I was fortunate enough to have the chance to interact with her on that diary. But I also never stopped following her and being as inspired by her example as I was awestruck with her accomplishments. I woke up this morning and read on Facebook that she died last night. No word yet on just what happened, but I wouldn’t want to dwell on that anyway. What does matter is that her example will live forever, and that we can all carry on her fights – for stem cell research, for the rights of the disabled, and most of all, for everyone to never give up. She sure as heck never did.

All I can think of to close this diary is what I told her in my comment on that diary back in 2010: “Next time I find myself thinking there's nothing I can do about something, I promise to think of this diary and of you.” Always have, always will!

When I got It

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday September 28, 2018 · 11:46 PM PDT

2018/09/28 · 23:46

#WhenIGotIt

I’ve been seeing a lot of calls for men who support Dr. Ford to do something, and quite rightly so. To that end, I think sharing our own learning experiences as to what women have to live with might be a good place to start. With any luck, it might make other men think about some things they’ve seen and heard, and what those things really mean.

If the above sounds to you like I’m trying to make it all about men, or all about me, all I can say is, that’s not my intention at all. Quite the contrary. What I do want to do is make other men take a good look at what their fellow human beings have had to live with for a very long time. When did you get it? If you haven’t got it yet, could it be you just didn’t want to?

Right, then. My story.

I spent most of the summer I was 14 at my grandparents’ place. Those of you who know me, know I have something approaching a self-taught PhD in rock and roll history. That summer was when that all began for me, when I discovered the Saturday night oldies show on WFEA back in Manchester. (Like the audiophile in making that I was, I heard dozens of classics for the first time through headphones on the AM station – the closest an eighties kid could get to listening under the cover on a transistor radio back when those songs were new!) Suddenly my head was swimming in all this wonderful music, and I wanted to learn everything I could about it all.

Not knowing if I’d be able to get any decent stations in rural Pennsylvania, I taped half a dozen or so cassettes with new-to-me oldies to tide me over during the trip. (I was right to think that would be a concern: I remember playing with my radio in my bedroom – which had once been my dad’s room – and finding nothing I liked much.)

One of the songs I taped was “Where the Boys Are” by Connie Francis. Utterly of its aggressively innocent time, saccharine as could be, just the sort of thing generations of teenage boys have loved to hate…naturally, I loved it. I can still remember lying in bed at night and listening to that tape in the dark – because that’s what there is to do at night in Mt. Pocono when you’re not old enough to drink – and imagining how wonderful it would be to have someone pining for me like that.

“Till he holds me, I’ll wait impatiently…” Having just finished the trial of ordeal that was (and I’m sure still is) junior high school, I was feeling pretty impatient for something that sweet an innocent myself. I can’t recall if I knew then that such innocence was just as mythical in 1960 as it was in my own time – quite possibly not, and I don’t suppose it was very healthy to wish for something that could never be. But given some of the awful stuff I’d seen my friends from school getting into when they were barely through puberty, the idea of a more innocent time was as irresistible as it was unattainable. I still don’t know anyone who has positive memories of junior high, if it comes to that.

Remember what I said above about wanting to learn all about my new favorite songs and the people behind them? Back home at the end of the summer, I was off to the library and the bookstore to do just that. From there, it didn’t take long for me to learn exactly what my fellow rock history buffs have been screaming at me through their computer screens for the past two paragraphs: in 1974, Connie Francis became one of the world’s most famous rape victims.

I still remember standing there in the aisle of the bookstore with Fred Bronson’s Book of #1 Hits, disbelieving such a thing could have happened. Now, what I thought next was problematic at best and sexist at worst, but please remember I was only fourteen years old: “How could anyone do that to the voice of such beauty and innocence?” I see now how messed up that attitude was – rape is rape no matter what the victim’s lifestyle is or how un-innocent s/he is, and it’s never okay. What I saw then was the very embodiment of all things nice, and someone somewhere out there was “bound and determined to destroy all the gentle” (as a more recent musical hero of mine once put it).

Why?

There was no way I or anyone could answer that. What I did know from that moment on was that rape can happen to anyone, anywhere. Not a nice thing to learn, but as long as it’s a reality that women have to live with every day, I’m glad I learned it relatively early in life.

And yes, I now know the movie Where the Boys Are – for which the song was written – has a rape in it (not to mention that the rapist was a Yalie). There was no IMDB or Wikipedia in 1987 for me to read all about a generation-old teen movie that wasn’t even highly regarded in its own time.

So, guys? When did you get it? How can you help other men get it? Let’s talk.

We're With You, Mates! Photos from the March in Melbourne

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday January 21, 2017 · 4:29 PM PST

2017/01/21 · 16:29

Outside the State Library of Victoria - Note the flags at half-staff

One of the first things you notice as an American living in Australia is that the locals don’t consider their country as far away from ours as we do. Geographically yes, of course, but socially and politically they tend to see us as a harbinger. So that whole “If my party loses this election I’m moving to Australia!!” thing you hear now and then in the US? You never hear it here, and people might even look at you funny if you tell them we say that back home. (If you’ve ever wondered, yes, Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day is in print here and is considered just as much of a classic...but in the Australian version, he plans to move to Timbuktu.)

All of which is my way of setting the scene to illustrate that Australians are just as perturbed by Trump as Americans are. And yesterday, about 6,000 of them joined us American expats in marching against Trump!

As you’ve likely read by now, Melbourne was reeling yesterday from an a ttack by a deranged young man on Friday that claimed at least four lives and injured about 20 others. (The usual suspects blamed everything from Islam to gun control, but it looks like the guy was just mentally ill.) I think if anything, that only strengthened our resolve to get out and march.

And march we did:

There were a fair share of Americans in the crowd, as shown by a show of hands when one of the speakers asked us to identify ourselves. But the diverse, peaceful grouping was concerned with the rise of Trumpism everywhere, as reflected by Pauline Hanson and the One Nation party here in Australia (another reason why Trump’s win was ominous to a lot of people here), and the focus was on fighting back all over the world.

But even over here, it’s Trump who inspires the best signs:

As early as the afternoon of November 9 (local time when the election returns came in), I was acutely aware that Australians in general were just as outraged and disgusted as we were back home. On the train home from the election watch party, I overheard a number of locals expressing their dismay without ever knowing there was an American present. It was, quite frankly, rather embarrassing to know my country was capable of causing that kind of consternation even this far from home. But the upside of that is that they’ve got our backs when we fight back! Yesterday, I saw that in no uncertain terms.

Notes from Down Under: The Whole World Really IS Watching!

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday November 07, 2016 · 5:48 PM PST

2016/11/07 · 17:48

I know it rubs some of us the wrong way when the rest of the world passes judgment on our politics. No single American ever asked to be born into the world’s cultural hegemon, and we don’t necessarily want it that way. But it IS that way, and others will be affected by the choice we make on Tuesday, this year even more than most years, and they are watching us and wondering why on earth we let things get to this point even if Trump probably is going to lose.

So I was reminded while walking past a school near my workplace today, when this turned up on the sidewalk:

The work of a bored kid going for shock value? Entirely possible. But it does show just what the rest of the world is going to think of us if we blow this. Let’s make sure we don’t!

One new vote for Clinton in NC

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 01, 2016 · 6:34 PM PDT

2016/10/01 · 18:34

Chances are we’ve all got a few friends who are stubborn holdouts against Clinton, for one reason or another. By now you’re probably banging your head against a wall, wondering how on earth anyone can look at Trump and honestly believe the e-mail flap is a deal breaker against that. Or maybe it’s not the e-mail, but rather some pet issue or other on which they are absolutely resolute.

Such was the case with one friend of mine. WAS. What has changed that is a lesson in why people like us should never shut up about the other side’s extremism: sooner or later, it does get through to some people. Not all, but enough for us to win.

Out of respect for my friend’s privacy, I won’t go into details here on why she was so staunchly opposed to Clinton. I will say I had — and still have — respect for her reasons, although I disagree with the conclusion she drew as far as whom to vote for. That said, we have had some rather intense debates on the matter and they’ve become fairly heated a couple of times, and they did leave me wondering how it was that she — or anyone — could look at the realistic options out there and conclude that voting third party was a good idea. Especially in North Carolina of all places.

Her response was essentially that she was through with voting the lesser of two evils. My response to that was that Trump would be substantially worse than Clinton on the issue she was most concerned about. While I have no doubt at all that I’m right about that, this is where Trump’s lack of a record is something of, well, a trump card. We can point to any number of crazy, disgusting and stupid things he’s said, but, with the exception of being an unethical weasel in business, we can’t point to things he actually did. Clinton, for better and for worse, has a record to answer to.

For my friend, that amounted to a dealbreaker. Until now.

By now, you’ve surely heard about this little stunt courtesy of Grass Roots North Carolina: a raffle fundraiser whose prize is a photo of Hillary Clinton, an AR-15, and some ammunition. Lest there be any doubt as to the purpose, the website helpfully explains, “We won’t tell you what to do with the photo, but when we ran a picture of Hillary on the front of our newsletter, we heard it was very popular at the range.”

I’m as disgusted by this as anyone, but there’s a silver lining: this morning, my friend posted a link to that page on Facebook, and announced that it was the last straw for her. In other words, the alt-right’s extremism has cost them a vote that was all but in the bag for them in a state Trump absolutely positively can’t afford to lose, and where the needle has been shifting back and forth for months. (My friend wasn't actually going to vote for Trump, but I believe anything except a vote for Clinton is a vote for Trump.) Congratulations, guys.

Remember, this sort of garbage isn’t new. The far right has been this extreme and this hateful for a long, long time. What is new is that those of us who know about it now have an easy and effective way of getting the word out to those who used to just dismiss us as partisan mudslingers. Maybe those links you’re sharing are only going to change one or two minds this election, but remember: there are a lot of us. One or two new votes each will add up very quickly, especially in swing states. And this year has given us a wealth of opportunities to force people to see the light.

So whatever we do, let’s not shut up!

Hotel Trumpifornia

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday July 15, 2016 · 2:24 AM PDT

2016/07/15 · 02:24

Have a laugh on me in these depressing times...

At a high school in Iowa

Wild corn-shucks for hair

Shades of Wallace and Thurmond

Rising up through the air

Said The Donald to GOPers,

“Blame it all on the weak!”

“Rapists, druggies and welfare mothers,

We’ll build a wall by next week!”

All the white working class men,

Want tax cuts for the rich

‘Cause they’ll cut off their right arms

Before they’ll vote for that...lady

How they fall for division,

An intolerant place.

Some hate for religion

Some for gender or race!

Welcome to the world of Trump and Pencey!

Such a lovely abode

For the xenophobes

They’re living it up in the world of Trump and Pencey,

Where they can’t stand change

And life’s a shooting range

There she stood from retirement

She got the mushy middle blues

But at least she’s not medieval

On health care and right to choose

Bill and Barack and Bernie

Soon they all got behind,

Since the only alternative

Scared ‘em out of their minds!

So she went to the red states,

“Let’s show Donald the door.”

They said, “We haven’t had that spirit here

Since nineteen-sixty-four!”

And still those voices kept calling

From up in the Trump Towers,

They said, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her…blood coming out of her wherever…a great, great wall on our southern border and I will make Mexico pay for that wall…It’s freezing and snowing in New York, we need global warming!...With the proper woman, you don’t need Viagra...even my Jews would say Merry Christmas, blah blah blah”

Welcome to the world of Trump and Pencey!

Such a lovely place,

If you’re pale in the face

Plenty of angst in the world of Trump and Pencey,

But no relief in Carolina,

Unless you prove your vagina!

Guns in every classroom,

Kids deported every day,

And they’ll say, “Make America Great Again,

It’s the American way!”

At the convention in Cleveland,

The sane hope for a fluke

The media make their usual excuses

But he still walks and talks like a Duke!

When we get to November

There’s a whole lot at stake

If you think they’ve got a passage back

To when America was great,

Think of whom it was great for,

And your choice – will you rue it?

You can vote for anyone you want,

But you can never undo it!

Debunking the "Not in 80 Years" Nonsense Made Easy

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 14, 2016 · 7:05 PM PST

2016/02/14 · 19:05

By now, you have surely heard the Republicans’ baseless and self-serving claim as to why Obama shouldn’t nominate a replacement for the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Exact phrasings vary, but the gist of it is that for 80 years, no lame duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice successfully.

I know you’re probably thinking either this has already been debunked, or it’s so demonstrably wrong that there’s no way it’s going to fly beyond the next few days. If so, you’re right about the first point, but I wouldn’t count on the second. Remember “I invented the Internet.” Remember how easy it was to disprove, and yet that it did real and tangible damage before it was widely understood that Al Gore never said any such thing. Remember, too, that the usual suspects continued to cling to that claim years after it was debunked, knowing the truth would never get in the way of a winning soundbite.

That, among many other examples, is why we’ve got to take this latest absurdity seriously. Fortunately, it’s a fairly easy claim to lay waste to. So if you’ve got a family reunion coming up and your right-wing uncle is going to be there, here’s how you can break it down once and for all. (No, your uncle won’t listen – but others in earshot might. They’re the ones we need to fight for!)

First of all, an overview of exactly what was said. The claim appears to have originated with Senate Judiciary chair Charles Grassley, R-IA. On Saturday, just hours after Scalia’s death, Grassley said, “The fact of the matter is that it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year.” He was following the lead of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, who appears to have been the first to say the next president should choose Scalia’s successor; but it was Grassley who offered the actual rationale.

Within hours, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were repeating slight variations of the claim. On Meet the Press, Cruz said, "It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year." Then, at the latest Republican debate, Rubio morphed it into, “In fact, it has been over 80 years since a lame-duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice."

So within 24 hours, we went from “the Senate doesn’t confirm nominees” to “no vacancy has been nominated and confirmed,” to “no lame-duck president has” nominated a justice. The distinction is not unimportant, as those are three different claims with different implications; but all are agreed on one magic number: 80 years. That’s a good place to start, because…

There was no significant change 80 years ago regarding Supreme Court nominations. This is partially because 80 years ago = 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was up for election but, notwithstanding one poll so laughably flawed that it is still taught as a bad example today, he was in no danger of losing. So FDR was not a lame duck 80 years ago – or at any other time in his presidency. If we start the clock at 1936, there wouldn’t be a lame duck president for another sixteen years, until Harry Truman announced his retirement in early 1952. (Truman was the last president not subject to the 22^nd Amendment, so although he was highly unpopular throughout his second term and unlikely to win again, he was eligible to run.)

Now, knowing what I (a former Iowan and a longtime political junkie) know about Chuck Grassley, I have no doubt whatsoever that he pulled the number 80 out of his ear. But if we were going to be generous and assume the claim was based on something, he might have been thinking of Benjamin Cardozo as the last Supreme Court justice nominated and confirmed in a presidential election year. That was in 1932, a bit over 80 years ago but not far off; but even if we overlook that minor error, there’s a much bigger one: Grassley said the practice was “not to confirm Supreme Court nominees” in an election year. That has in fact happened as recently as 1988, when the Senate (which by then included Grassley) confirmed Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court.

There’s a bit of an asterisk on that one in such that Kennedy was nominated in 1987; but that still doesn’t pass muster with Grassley’s claim that the Senate never confirmed nominees. He didn’t say anything either way about when they were nominated. By the most literal interpretation, it does pass Cruz’ test, since Kennedy was not “nominated and confirmed” in an election year; but that is clearly not what he meant (although I wouldn’t put it past him to argue that he did). As for Rubio, Cardozo doesn’t hold up at all as a benchmark: President Hoover nominated Cardozo in February 1932. He didn’t become a lame duck until he lost the election in November of that year.

So there is no reasonable basis for “the past 80 years” whatsoever.

There have been no Supreme Court nominations during the last year of a lame-duck president’s term in the past 80 years. The aforementioned Anthony Kennedy was confirmed during the last year of Reagan’s second term, but he was nominated slightly before then.

It’s only fair to note here that no one has actually said they were referring only to the last year of a president’s term; but it’s fair to say that has been implied, due to the talk of election years. The distinction between the last year and the entire last term is just as meaningless as the 80-year figure itself, since there is no fundamental difference whatsoever in the president’s position between those two periods. (The closest I can think of is that sometimes you have a sense of which party is going to win the next election; but this year we don’t really have that – and if anything, the evidence favors the Democrats.) Nevertheless, if you consider the overlap between Grassley’s, Cruz’ and Rubio’s versions of the claim, we’re left with the eighth year of a president’s term only. In the past 80 years, there has never been a nomination during that year. (This is in part because justices will often hold off on retiring until they can be sure their replacement will be of their own party – Byron White and Sandra Day O’Connor both did that – but that’s beside the point.) Even if we included Benjamin Cardozo, he was actually nominated and confirmed just before Herbert Hoover’s last year began. Two days before, to be exact: he was confirmed on March 2, 1932 while Hoover left office on March 4, 1933.

But what about presidential election years? That is what Grassley actually said, to be fair. In the past 80 years, there have been only three times a nomination came before the Senate in a presidential election year (including Kennedy in 1988, which as noted above was a carryover from 1987). All three were successful: Frank Murphy in 1940, William Brennan in 1956, and Kennedy in 1988. The latter two were confirmed by a Senate in the controlled by the opposite party. The closest Grassley’s claim comes to being true is the case of Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Abe Fortas to Chief Justice and Homer Thornberry as a new associate justice in 1968, but that had nothing to do with any tradition of refusing to hold a vote because it was an election year. (If anything, it was because of an earlier generation of Chuck Grassleys and Ted Cruzes who saw an opportunity to tie Washington in knots until they could get a Republican president to name the next chief justice.)

So there you have it. No tradition of refusing to consider a lame-duck president’s nominees, whether you define lame-duck as the entire second term or only the final year; no change 80 years ago that we have respected ever since, and only one tangential precedent that was really just another case of right-wing obstructionism. Bring this to the table, and you can expect your uncle to dissolve into his usual whining about “Jesus, Reagan and motherhood!!!!” You’re welcome.

“And in America, EVERYBODY Has a Gun”: The View from Down Under

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday October 05, 2015 · 4:49 AM PDT

2015/10/05 · 04:49

The first thing you learn as an American living overseas is that the rest of the world doesn’t hate us the way we tend to suspect they do. They might think we’re a bit rough around the edges or that we have lousy taste in food, or that our movies are too schmaltzy and our beer is a bad joke, and they certainly don’t get why we as a society have decided health care is a privilege; but by and large they like us like that crazy cousin you wouldn’t want to live with but enjoyed hanging out with once a year. In a decade of mostly living overseas (on three continents, in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries), the positive reactions I’ve received outweigh the negative ones by ten to one at least.

They like us, but they also believe most of the stereotypes about us.

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday September 04, 2014 · 3:54 AM PDT

2014/09/04 · 03:54

Many's the hour I've lain by my window
And thought of the people who carried the burden
Who marched in the strange fields in search of an answer
And ended their journeys an unwilling hero

-Phil Ochs, “A Toast to Those who are Gone”

Bernard Baran, who died earlier this week, was most definitely an unwilling hero. He was only 49. Officially the cause of death was apparently either a heart attack or stroke (the autopsy wasn’t complete as I was writing this). But really, hate killed him. Anyone who knows his story knows that. And they also know it’s no surprise that it took 30 years for hate to defeat “Bee” Baran. For 22 of those 30 years, he endured a living hell most of us couldn’t imagine in our worst nightmares, and which I doubt too many of us would have survived with our spirits intact.

But he did.

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday July 26, 2014 · 2:19 AM PDT

2014/07/26 · 02:19

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’re probably familiar with the “Women Against Feminism” meme that has been taking social media by storm. There have been several excellent rebuttals, but all too predictably, a fair bit of “both sides do it” as well. Perhaps you’ve seen the one on TIME Magazine’s website, dated July 24. I’m not going to link to it here, for two reasons: 1) it doesn’t deserve the attention that might draw to it, and 2) I have done my best not to have anything to do with TIME ever since that Ann Coulter cover story in 2005. But a friend of a friend of mine on Facebook did post a link to it today, which I have to confess I clicked on out of morbid curiosity.

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday March 13, 2014 · 5:59 AM PDT

2014/03/13 · 05:59

I live in Singapore. This has its advantages, such as the fact that the miserable winter most of the US just shivered through was only a rumor over here (sorry!), or how when I forget an American friend’s birthday, I can post a “happy birthday” on their Facebook page the next day and it will still be on time. But it also has its disadvantages, and I suffered through one of those this morning when I read this diary. It left me with a number of things I’d have liked to add, and which I didn’t see in the comments. My apologies to anyone who did touch on what follows; I read the comments in a bit of a hurry and I may have missed a few.

RamblinDave

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday February 04, 2014 · 2:07 AM PST

2014/02/04 · 02:07

Harold is a Vietnam vet who loves our country very much, though he does have a very different view of it than I (and most other Kossacks) do. I always keep that in mind when he starts mouthing off about how anyone who voted for Obama isn't a real American, and when he expresses disgust at the progress we've made in gay rights, and when he rhapsodizes about how wonderful Ann Coulter is even if she is a tad too liberal, and so forth. You probably know the type, and maybe you have a Facebook friend or two like him as well.

Newer
Older

RSS

Rest in Power, Brooke Ellison

When I got It

We're With You, Mates! Photos from the March in Melbourne

Notes from Down Under: The Whole World Really IS Watching!

One new vote for Clinton in NC

Hotel Trumpifornia

Debunking the "Not in 80 Years" Nonsense Made Easy

“And in America, EVERYBODY Has a Gun”: The View from Down Under

Bernard Baran, 1965-2014

Stop TIME-Splaining: What TIME Gets Wrong About Feminism (UPDATED)

Open Letter on the NJ Birth Case Debate

Mouthy Right Wing Friends on Facebook? Don't Get Mad, Get Even!