I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!
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This is off-topic but I was so moved by MD Congressman Jamie Raskin's story of his son during this time when we've lost so many of our fellow Americans I thought I'd post it here....Depression is a horrible disease...It's kinda lengthy and large-sized and I hope I don't get into trouble for posting it..I thought it was beautiful and moving and in spite of the great sadness that surrounds it, it warmed my heart..such love always does....
"On January 30, 1995, Thomas Bloom Raskin was born to ecstatic parents who saw him enter the world like a blue-eyed cherub, a little angel. Tommy grew up as a strikingly beautiful curly-haired madcap boy beaming with laughter and charm, making mischief, kicking the soccer ball in the goal, acting out scenes from To Kill A Mockingbird with his little sister in his father's constitutional law class, teaching other children the names of all the Justices on the Supreme Court, hugging strangers on the street, teaching our dogs foreign languages, running up and down the aisle on airplanes giving people high fives, playing jazz piano like a blues great from Bourbon Street, and at 12 writing a detailed brief to his mother explaining why he should not have to do a Bar Mitzvah and citing Due Process liberty interests (appeal rejected).
"Over the years he was enveloped in the love not only of his bedazzled and starstruck parents but of his remarkable and adoring sisters, Hannah the older and Tabitha the younger, a huge pack of cousins, including Jedd, Emily, Maggie, Zacky, Mariah, Phoebe and Lily, Boman and Daisy, and Emmet and spoiled rotten with hugs and kisses and philosophical nourishment from his grandparents Herb and Arlene Bloom, Marcus Raskin, Barbara Raskin, and later Lynn Raskin, the best aunts and uncles a mischievous ragamuffin could ask for, including Erika and Keith, Kenneth and Abby, Mina, Noah and Heather, Eden and Brandon, and Tammy and Gary, and a cast of secondary parents who wrapped him in adoration and wildly precocious conversation like Michael and Donene, Ann and Jimmy, Kate and Hal, Kathleen and Tom, Katharine and David, Judy, Reed and Julia, Dar and Michael, David and Melinda, Angela and Howard, Helen, Sheila, Mitchell, Will and Camille, Phyllis, Shammy, Khalid and Zina.
"With all this love infusing Tommy's world and soul, girls quickly came to fancy this magical boy who always made time for the loneliest kids in class and frequently made up his own words to describe feelings and parts of toasters — and, to be clear, he took a strong liking to girls too, these omnipresent magical lovely girls he found who always had a profound beauty radiating from within. Tommy was raised on a fine Montgomery County Education, which took him through Takoma Park Elementary School, Pine Crest Elementary School, Eastern Middle School, and Montgomery Blair High School (with a frolicking detour to Ecole Active Bilingue Jeannine Manuel in Paris for one family sabbatical year where he learned French, tried to teach himself Japanese, and insisted on travel adventures through North Africa and the rest of Europe), but his irrepressible love of freedom and strong libertarian impulses made him a skeptic of all institutional bureaucracy and a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble. Once when third-grade Tommy and his father saw a boy returning to school after a weeklong suspension and his Dad casually remarked, 'it looks like they let finally let him out of jail,' Tommy replied, 'no, you mean they finally let him back into jail.'
"At Blair, Tommy's adult persona began to take shape: he co-founded Bliss, a life-changing peer-to-peer tutoring program and spent hours tutoring fellow students in Math and English; made wonderful friends he lavished attention on; became Captain of the Forensics Club and a savagely logical and persuasive orator in the Debate and Extemporaneous Speech Club where he had to be constantly reminded by his teammates that the purpose of high school debate tournaments is to score points and not convince people of the truth or change the world. He was active in the Young Dems and recruited dozens to get involved in the 2012 Obama reelection effort. On Prom Night, he threw a dinner party for 24 fellow students, including classmates who had no date that evening, and they all went to prom together as a group. He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line — 'forgive me, but it's hard to be a human.'
"Above all, he began to follow his own piercing moral and intellectual insights looking for answers to problems of injustice, poverty and war. A Bar Mitzvah from Temple Sinai, he taught a Sunday School with Heather Levy for two years at Temple Emmanuel, often substituting his social-struggle analysis of the Exodus story for teachings on the Hebrew alphabet. He ordered and devoured books on the Civil War and Maryland's history in it, World War II and resistance to Nazism, Jewish history, libertarianism, moral philosophy, the history of the Middle East conflict, peace movements, anything by Gar Alperovitz on the decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and anything by Peter Singer on animal rights. He began to pen these extraordinary essays and articles that now add up to well over 100 as well as write plays and extremely long polemical poems, which he eagerly performed for audiences astounded by his precocious moral vision, utter authenticity of emotion, and beauty of expression.
"At Amherst College, he majored in history, helped lead the Amherst Political Union, intellectually discredited the egregious Dinesh D'Souza who turned to pathetic insults when Tommy destroyed his argument from the audience with a simple question (even before D'Souza was soon to be convicted of federal campaign finance crimes), won the Kellogg Prize, created and performed one-act plays with his social dorm mates, and wrote a compelling senior thesis on the intellectual history of the animal rights movement. Spending his summers voraciously reading and soaking up all the wisdom to be had at his eclectic self-procured internships at the CATO Institute with Doug Bandow, J Street, the Institute for Policy Studies, ARC of Montgomery, Compassion Over Killing, and for Professor Frank Couvares, Tommy became an anti-war activist, a badass autodidact moral philosopher and progressive humanist libertarian, and a passionate vegan who composed imperishable, knock-your-socks-off poetry linking systematic animal cruelty and exploitation to militarism and war culture. He recruited gently and lovingly — but supremely effectively — dozens and dozens of people, including his parents, to the practice of not eating animals, and it will be hard to find anyone his age who has turned more carnivores into vegans than him. (He also cheerfully opposed sectarian holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness among a handful of vegans he met and would say, 'I'm working for a vegan world, not a vegan club.') A prolific and exquisitely gifted writer, he came to publish essays and op-eds in the Nation, the Goodmen Project, Anti-War.Com and other outlets. After his Amherst graduation, Tommy went to the Friends Committee on National Legislation to work on stopping the war in Yemen and on Middle East policy, and spent a year publishing more remarkable essays and articles (soon to be available to you) and launching a book of political philosophy offering a sweeping animal rights critique of Locke, Mill and classical liberal social contract theory.
"In 2019 Tommy went to Harvard Law School. He lived up in the attic of the home of Michael Anderson and Donene Williams, his Dad's beloved law school roommates, and made more remarkable friends. He studied constitutional law with Noah Feldman, criminal law with Carole Steiker, and property with Bruce Mann (Elizabeth Warren's husband); he loved the systematic thought and debate dynamics of law school but reported it to be like half an education because the moral philosophy component was somehow left out. Rather than read endless lists of long cases, why not have students read clear comprehensive statements of what the law is and then talk about what the law should be? So while zealously promoting his newfound favorite game — Boggle — to rescue his classmates and himself from the stress and anxiety of law school, he also pushed them to engage with social problems and found a strong affinity group in the Effective Altruists. He spent last summer working quite brilliantly as a summer associate at Mercy for Animals and found a knack for actual lawyering.
"This fall Tommy not only took a full complement of his second-year law classes, including Disability Law with Michael Stein which he loved, but, at the suggestion of his beloved Professor Steicker, became a Teaching Assistant with Professor Michael Sandel in his 'Justice' Course at Harvard. As a teacher, Tommy devoted great time to teaching his section of the class — working on his astonishing lectures and jokes, and meeting endlessly with his dozen students on Zoom, finding what was precious in their work and teasing it out. He loved his students and they loved him back. Not content with giving half of his teaching salary away to save people with malaria by purchasing mosquito nets with global charities, when the semester was over and after his grades were in and the student evaluations were complete, he made individual donations in each of his students' names to Oxfam, GiveDirectly and other groups targeting global hunger. When I asked him why he did this, he quoted something that he loved which Father Daniel Berrigan said about Dorothy Day: 'she lived as though the truth were true.' Tommy said: 'I wanted them to see that the truth is true.'
"We have barely been able to scratch the surface here, but you have a sense of our son. Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind. He began to be tortured later in his 20s by a blindingly painful and merciless 'disease called depression,' as Tabitha put it on Facebook over the weekend, a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.
"On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha's beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.
"He left us this farewell note on New Year's Eve day: 'Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.'"
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That was wonderful, real, very sad but also uplifting. I'm glad you shared. I guess sometimes some of the very brightest stars don't fit well in the world too well. Hard to be human sometimes.
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What a tragic loss, not only to his family, but to the whole world.
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Yes, what a tragic loss of a beautiful soul. There are some mysteries in life that I don't think will ever be resolved, such as how the disease of depression can take such a stranglehold on a person who seemingly has everything to live for. My condolences to the Senator and his family. I can't imagine the heartache.
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I am wondering at what point will we know the election results in Georgia? Since so many voted by mail, how long will it take to count every vote to see who the winners are?
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Trill: Thank you for posting the brilliantly writtten article about Tommy Raskin. They say "there is a fine line between genius and insanity" and in his case, this was true. Depression is such a hard disease to deal with on the part of the depressed and their family. How sad for his family and such a loss for the world. His star shone brightly if only for a brief moment.
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GO GEORGIA!
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"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else." Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, in an editorial in the Kansas City Star and reprinted in several other newspapers.
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Thanks for posting that. What a loss. Depression is pure hell. I think the best description was William Styron's "Darkness Visible". His parent's loss is unimaginable.
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Both of my usually slimy Republican Senators have announced that they will NOT object to the Electoral College votes when they are counted tomorrow. So I bit the bullet and sent them each an email thanking them for honoring their oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. I am sure they are getting plenty of outrage from the Trumpsters, so I thought I better weigh in on the other side.
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Thanks, ladies, for your words of "thanks" about the Tommy Raskin piece.... After I read it I thought of some folks whom I know or believe perished due to unrelieved depression--Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, Alexander McQueen--and I know there are very many more.....I do think that in many cases the creativity, exuberance, humor, and extroversion shown by sufferers is because they are waging a war against an invisible demon that has taken hold of them, valiantly fighting a battle to which they all too often succumb....
So incredibly baffling this disease, so incredibly sad these losses....
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The great lesson from the true mystics is that the sacred
is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life,
in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.
Abraham H. Maslow0 -
Ruth, good for you and good logic too. If we all gave a bit of praise when it is due, perhaps in time a change of heart might come about for some Reps. I have thought this already when I said ( sort of thought aloud ) how it would be for many Reps. to re-learn to live w/o the daily chaos, lies, pointed questions and general upheaval that was a huge part of Trump. I won't say president because in my way of looking at it -- he wasn't.
I know there are some who will likely never appreciate anything much about our side, but I hope in time most of those are gone. They are the ones who have constantly and pointedly made trouble keep brewing -- like Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Cruz, Nunes -- mostly Trump's biggest boosters. I hope it works out to be a HUGE mistake that many of them are going to pull their EC stunt tomorrow. I believe it is a huge one, but I hope it pans out that way in spades for that bunch.
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Nah, he's just too fat to flush and it would according to him "take more than 10-15 attempts to flush". Talk about stopping up the plumbing! LOL
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I'm getting nervous wondering if all hell is going to break loose tomorrow. Ready for this national nightmare to be over. I can’t believe that fucker Trump was caught on tape trying to coerce the Georgia official to “finding” votes for him and he is still backed by more fuckers from the Republican party who will contest the electoral votes. It is utterly unbelievable.
A very prominent man in town (big fish in a little fishbowl) has a BRAND NEW Trump flag flying outside his business, What a fucking outrage.
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DivineMrsM..Me too.
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Me too.
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Me four, except I have been very concerned for several days. Selfishly glad no dear ones live in DC or environs.
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so far dems are ahead. Lots of absentees to count so not tonight or even tomorrow. You just know the reps will call rigged if they don't win.
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Trump and his minions have made me sick to my stomach coming in, and they are doing the same going out!
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Sadly, half an hour ago the counts flipped in GA. Though Ossoff & Warnock outpaced Biden's percentages, they're losing with 79% of the vote in: Warnock by 1% and Ossoff by nearly 2%. There's a chunk of mail-in ballots in predominantly Dem. Atlanta-metro counties as yet uncounted, but they may not be enough. We may not know for sure till dawn.
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As one who lives in DC, as well as one DD, things are quiet in our neighborhoods. She lives in the DuPont Circle area of downtown and all is quiet there. I live further away from the downtown area and all is quiet here. Our police department is well trained in crowd control. I was appalled when government police officers were using the force they were to clear a way for the idiot’s photo op during the Black Lives Matter protest which sparked rioting and looting downtown. On top of that, National Guard troops from out of state were brought in without our Mayor’s approval. I take offense to Trump thinking he runs DC - NOT
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😫🤐
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I fear the DNC may have jinxed this with its "Congratulations, Rev. Warnock" e-mail at 8:56 CST. 58% of DeKalb County is yet to be counted, and a release of a big batch has been promised by 11pm EST but instead is dribbling in. And in both races, the GOPers' margins are widening.
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Lets cross the bridge only when we have too of things not turning out for us. If I have to wait till dawn, so be it. I expected numbers to change and I also expected it to be close. We will deal with what comes. Like any strong Democrat I'd much rather win and in fact, that would be much better all the way around. For one thing -- I definitely would wish to see McConnell get a suitable demotion. He is worse in some ways than Trump as he has been doing damage far longer -- although Trump's damage since it has been much shorter duration, has been pretty dramatic.
It has been hard for everyone here to go through these last four yrs. It has in fact, been a monumental struggle. I think most of us knowing we were going to be force fed an illegitimate election and president gave up to the point of waiting , mostly quietly, ( except here on this blog ) for someone or something that would be able to keep Trump in tow or even remove him. But 4 yrs. later, still unable to feel totally free -- so I guess while there is a hope we might get through this run-off, I need to wait till whatever occurs is official.
kathindc, I hope things remain quiet for you and your daughter. I imagine the police have been on high alert and will stay that way. Mayor Bowser did call in the Nat'l Guard which likely was a good idea. Just to make sure that things don't get out of hand. I may be a party of one, but it is still hard for me to fathom why anyone outside of a total nut job would go to DC and create havoc for a "loser". I mean -- it has been known and widely publicized that Biden won and that it cannot be changed. I understand fighting for what you believe, but in this case -- when the 'loser' asks you to come make trouble heaven help you if you are not smart enough to figure out what little it will take for you to be a "loser" too.
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looks like we need to hope for 2022...
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Am prepared for whatever comes in Georgia.....know that incumbency and Rs hold on GA is strong so it might go their way...I understand the importance of D wins but for me the big one is in the books...
We cut off the head of the fish....
To me the Reps could have won every race in the country in November and it wouldn't have mattered (well, you know what I mean..) had Trump secured a second term...
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