fun completely trivial fact: that photo of me from 1976 was taken at Mariella Pizza on 16th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan. apparently they went out of business ten years ago.
Almost 72 years on the planet. Married to the love of my life. Left leaning independent. Blabbermouth. Opinionated. “And justice for all attitude”.
Still working as a systems architect. Cybercrime scares me. AI doesn’t. But the combination does. Humans are required to model AI. Remember that. Anything evil it does - humans are behind it.
Voted for McGovern my first vote! Remember waking up to see Carter declared the winner that election! So excited! When every Democrat thereafter won, I was ecstatic. Still think Elon’s ninjas did something to rig 2024.
Love your work, Jeff! Still remember reading it for the first time. LMAO!!! Your levity and nailing the truth is sane saving! You give us hope!
Thanks a million 🤩 Happy New Year to you, Mrs. Spouse and all of your followers 🥳
Oof, still in tech after that long. I made myself wait until 58 and then I was OUT. Don't know your gender, but, from my point of view, tech never got better for women; it just got more subtle with the misogyny.
Aside from collecting spores, mold and fungus, I’m a 71 year old retired physician and windbag (have a Larry David gene or two) who enjoys posting quips (because I can’t write) and learning how to be a better person by reading, not reacting and finding the good in us. All in for the 2026 midterms when we take the house and begin impeachment and criminal investigations in January 2027. Your posts Jeff, always make my day. Thank you mightily!
70 year old retired Canadian woman here. Nervously watching what is going on in "the basement" of North America and hoping that things get better down there soon!
Thank you to all the Canadians who still have hope for us. I have to believe that we can turn things around. We're gonna evict the drug lord and clean out the meth lab.
No. More like that dank dark space, where you're afraid to go because you don't know what kind of creatures you will find down there. Evil lurks below and all that!
I’ve been screaming and pounding on the basement door trying to get out. Hopefully someone with the key will show up soon.
75 yo woman, Portland, OR for 12 years, lived in Alaska most of my life, worked as an RN, now enjoying two young grandsons, playing piano, learning watercolor painting, hiking and trying to stay sane.
Thanks for your concern, Gillian - we're in a dank crawl space for sure - some days I can't get past 'incredulous', but mostly I'm horrified/angry. I haven't posted in this community - maybe it will help!
I feel for you, but depending on where you want to move...some places are way more affordable than others. Toronto is out...but lots of other beautiful areas to choose from. I'm quite rural but it's a beautiful area and bargains can still be found.
I often think I should send you an insurance claim form -because your insights preserve the threads of sanity I (arguably) have left having lived through Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Dubya, and now -the criminal elect.
I enjoy your insights and hall of fame use of adjectives in describing our present journey through corrupt dystopia while Heather Cox Richardson provides vital background and historical context to our daily misadventures with the criminal elect and his cabal of sociopaths, alcoholics, and incompetents.
Ok, I can match Suzanne(my wife of 49 years name by the way!) for first votes, but unfortunately not in a good way. I was 19 in 1972, and voted for Nixon. Yes, I know, I almost immediately regretted it, even before Watergate. I was reared in Texas, in a very, very strict and “conservative” home and environment. I guess I was still somewhat brainwashed about “liberals.” I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and again in 1980. I have NEVER regretted either vote. Even in 1980, I instinctively knew Reagan was a fraud and a better actor than he is given credit for. His thinly veiled racism and I hate the government routine was the catalyst for the 45 year degeneracy into MAGA………
It is past time for a new “New Deal” and “Great Society.” I pray enough of us will believe that and act on it. There are way too many blasé and disinterested and shallow and foolish citizens amongst us.
People brought up conservative who find their own way are tops in my book! My parents were liberals (my father was an academic who was investigated by a McCarthy committee), we lived in NYC, everyone I knew was liberal. Went the hippie route, lived on a commune in Vermont! Gee! We were liberals! Now I live in a nice suburb where the majority are liberals. In other words, I got handed being liberal on a plate. I have so much respect for people who find their own way to the liberal mindset. It denotes high intelligence!
@Lucy Horton, I heartily agree! I once remarked to my dear friend Tim Ayers (brother of Bill Ayers of Weatherman/Weather Underground) that his parents must have been thoughtful and progressive to have raised four boys who were such mavericks. He said that, quite the contrary, they were very conservative (their father was an executive with, and eventually CEO of Commonwealth Edison) and horrified by their sons' activities.
I grew up in conservative deep east Texas with closed-minded country Texans all around me in the "bible-belt" area...My parents were both republicans but were not delusional or cray cray IMO compared to others in their circles.
Thankfully they grew up in large cities with educated parents but still too conservative for me to be like them LOL.
Though they were indoctrinated baby boomers, I never heard a racist remark out of them my whole life (I'm 55 now) .
I found my own way later in life not knowing I was a heavy left-leaning straight man who always noticed that democrats and liberals seemed to like my vibe and get along with me, including many LGBTQ friends that befriended me. I had no idea what it was because I didn't become political in 2009.
Then I figured it all out and found out who I was (all along).
Yeah, I'm a late bloomer but with certainty I was never a right-winger at heart.
Voted for Nixon!!!! Wow. I can proudly say I have never voted for a Republican for president or most likely any other significant office. I have voted for some local judges who were technically running as Republicans but in fact were simply doing a good job and politics didn't enter their work.
Before my stepdad got together with my mom, he dated a girl Shelley who was intensely into Nixon. He spent the 1960 election night at a wanne-be-victory-party in Nixon's Los Angeles headquarters, and recalls how the announcers would attempt to rouse the increasingly nail-baiting attendees by telling them how great Dick was doing in NEBRASKA! He and Shelley drifted apart, and she went on to be one of Nixon's main secretaries and married Pat Buchanan. As a result of this connection, we got Christmas cards from the White House all throughout the Nixon administration, to the great annoyance of my mother, a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine who put a McGovern sign on our lawn although dad was teaching at an arch-Republican military academy (George Steinbrenner was the commencement speaker-- this was before he bought the Yankees and became a nationally-known asshole, he was just a locally-known asshole, father of a couple creepy kids we called the Steinboogies).
I know. There's been a lot of revisionist history, but supporting RFK was sneered at, kind of like Bernie supporters sneered at Hillary supporters in 2016. I had a lot of bad flashbacks that year, probably accounting for my enduring gf distaste for Bernie.
I was passionate about RFK, but after that election I dropped out until 2000, partly because of his death, partly because of bullying from the Eugene Bros, in a time when middle-class white boys thought the world was all about them and keeping their asses out of Vietnam. So it was even worse than the Bernie Bros later. Despite being from an activist family (my sister was in the SDS and her college boyfriend was in the Weathermen) I had no interest in politics other than, voting until Florida 2000 brought me back. The first demonstration I ever attended was a "count all the Florida votes" one in December 2000.
I remember that well. I first voted at 18, and in Michigan there was a ballot proposal to lower the drinking age to 18, precisely because of the argument that you couldn’t drink, but could be sent to war and die for your country. It passed overwhelmingly (perhaps because 18 year old s were allowed to vote for the first time?) Anyway, as a college freshman, it was pretty wild on campus! Between the Vietnam protests and legal drinking, there were some raucous times! The legal drinking age went back to 21 four years later. It was a law just for us at the time.
I listen to oldies radio, and it strikes me how many songs were about girls wishing guys would come home, guys promising to be back, about letters from "my baby," about how they may never see each other again, all because of Vietnam. I don't know if the statistics show anything similar, but in my graduating class alone, there were more than 20 sweetheart marriages because we girls knew the boys we loved wouldn't make it past 19. That's why I marched for the 18-yr-old vote, and draft ended before my (now)husband was taken.
I was still in grade school. My sister, who was also in grade school, wrote to Nixon and told him he should drop out because he's a crook. He sent her a big package of campaign buttons, thanked her for her support and urged her to distribute the buttons to all her friends. I still have some of those Nixon-Lodge buttons! She became a student revolutionary in college. She's now a retried public defender, but I think she'd still say she detests Nixon, although, like all of us, her distaste for Trump has overridden everything.
I was too young to vote for Johnson, but Barry Goldwater .... remember when he was considered ultra-extreme? He'd be a Democrat now! I still have my copy of his campaign book "A Choice Not an Echo." Anyone else remember the odious person who wrote it?
It sure was! She really annoyed my mom back in the 70s when my mom was the president of the Chicago League of Women Voters. One time the state league had a fundraiser at someone's house who lived on the same street as Schlafly in East Alton, Illinois. My mom often recalled how the blanketed the entire street with ERA signs hoping she'd be annoyed (She was probably running around the country lecturing women on how they should stop working and stay home to wait on their husbands and kids.)
Same here but I was pretty politically ignorant and influenced by my Minnesota Democrat boyfriend. He became Mr. Spouse and voted for McCarthy for President at least once that I know of. He has been Mr. Spouse for 48 years and turned an Idaho raised Republican into a flaming liberal Midwesterner.
I abstained my first chance to vote, Carter/Ford 1976. I was in Europe all summer, and the papers there were all full of "WHO is this Carter guy?" and I had a dread that he would find himself in over his head and get rolled, but my dad warned me that Ford was blundering badly, that pardoning Nixon meant that the Republicans would just get worse and worse every time from then on. I went to an embassy to find out what it would take to get an absentee ballot, but it just seemed like too much trouble when neither of the choices excited me.
I was born in 1956, on July 4 (my mother went into labor late on July 2 but I kept her going for 28 hours: my aunt said I must really have wanted that holiday birthday), so the Bicentennial was also my 20th birthday. There were billboards in Germany, "Amerika! Wie du uns verwechselt hast!" (America, how you have changed us). The headline that morning in the Munchner Merkur (which I called the Munchkin Mercury) was BRAVO ISRAEL! for the raid in Entebbe freeing the passengers of a hijacked airline: I imagined Hitler rolling in his grave at the thought of Bavaria praising the Jews. I went to the Hofbrauhaus that night: that's usually a tourist trap, but that night all the local Munchkins were there, my money was no good, and at some signal they all started clinking spoons against their steins to get silence, and broke out into The Star Spangled Banner. Then, being Germans, they sang the second verse which no Americans know (they must have rehearsed for weeks), and then, being Germans, they sang the third verse, whose existence I had not suspected.
Pet peeve: the official term "semiquincentennial" for the upcoming 250th anniversary (although in my view, the republic died at 248 1/2 this past January) is a barbarism. The Romans would say "sestercentennial": ses-ter- meaning "halfway to 3" is the standard way of saying 2 1/2 (a sesterce, worth 2.5 bronze, was the standard small-change coin, a "farthing" when the penny was 10 bronze). At 2:30 we say in English it is "half past two" but more languages call it "halfway to three" like German "halb drei" and there is no language in the world that would call it "half of five." It is typical of today's world that not only do the officials in charge of naming the celebration know no Latin, but they did not consult anybody who knows any Latin.
I have been a computer programmer, lawyer, and math teacher but currently identify as an author, of Roman-era historical fiction. "The Year of Five Emperors" is a well-reviewed book examining a crisis (this was after the Five Good Emperors, who each adopted a likely young man as successor, but the choice of Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, caught the pox out east and died, so he had no choice but to leave it to his biological son Commodus, who rather murdered anybody who looked like a plausible successor, so his assassination left a power vacuum with no rules) from everyone's point of view, Senators and merchants and slaves and barbarians watching from outside, in Rome and Antioch and Gaul and Caledonia, illustrating the atmosphere of the times and how the society worked, or failed to work anymore. You can get it in one volume (an 800-page doorstop) at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-year-of-five-emperors2 or in two volumes at https://www.amazon.com/Year-Five-Emperors-Part-Pertinax/dp/1778831109/ref=sr_1_2 and https://www.amazon.com/Year-Five-Emperors-Part-Severus/dp/1778831257/ref=sr_1_3 and the sequel "The Baths of Caracalla" set a generation later shows the consequences of the breakdown of the old order, https://www.amazon.com/Baths-Caracalla-Sequel-Year-Emperors/dp/1778834167/ref=sr_1_1 (a further sequel "The Dangling Crown" covering Elagabalus, the craziest Emperor of the entire Roman history, is in the works).
Me, too. Got to see McGovern once, at a rally I went to with with my mom. As a high school newspaper reporter, I had gone to a conference at SMU, where we were all forced to attend a Nixon rally. There were pro Nixon signs at every other seat. To sit down, you had to hold up the sign. I held mine upside down. That night, on the news, there were stories about all the support that crooked asshole had from young people. I had my first leson in propaganda.
Happy New Year. 71 year old proud Jew. Introduced streaking on the Northwestern University campus in 1973. My favorite picture is me holding up the Chicago Tribune headline “Nixon Resigns” in 1974. Sang on stage with the Temptations in 1982. Love this community.
Wow, you were cutting edge. That craze really took off and went viral in 1974, although it was happening on some college campuses in 1973. Here in Cleveland, a local booking agent found some schlub bar band from the boonies and convinced them to change their name to "The Streakers" and perform in flesh-colored swim trunks. I went to see them and they looked so embarrassed as they cranked out "All Right Now," "Long Train Running" and "Smoke on the Water," al the bar band standards.
I'm 61, Mrs. Spouse is 73 and we LOVE your Substack! I'm one of the lone liberals in a family of religious, right-wing, Trump supporters. WHY they still support Trump after all this chicanery, I don't know. We were all raised by the same mother, who herself was the lone liberal of her generation of the family. As my handle suggests, I love knitting and crocheting. I'm also RETIRED as of today! I'm looking forward to now doing things that I enjoy and not that I dread. Happy New Year!
As a third generation American and an ethnic minority, my and my forebears' experience has been partly outside the mainstream. But more importantly, we have partaken of the vaunted American Dream, ascending the socioeconomic ladder to live now in comfort and security. My grandparents all lived into their eighties and nineties and yet were never literate in English. One set of them never owned a house or even a car. By dint of hard work and sacrifice but also the opportunities that this nation provided, and enough fair and kind people, here I and my generation are. My friends, family, and colleagues of my ilk have done the same. As such, we have a deep and abiding love and gratitude for America. To see this defiling of our society now is beyond sickening. Who am us? We am America. Or at least to my mind, we used to be.
So many (including a lot of right-wingers) had grandparents who never learned English but I guess it was ok because they were European. Now they treat not speaking English like a crime. I went to a friend's wedding a couple of years ago and sat with his Croatian friends including his 80+ year old mom who spoke very little English despite being in the country nearly 60 years. Meanwhile, he was marrying a woman from Bolivia whom he met when she was visiting a friend here three years earlier. When she told me she spoke no English when she first visited, I thought she must be lying. Her English was way better than Melania Trump's! I also have a Mexican friend (who just became a citizen — YAY!) who came here the same year as Melania and speaks English without an accent.
Can you imagine the hysteria, mockery and hatred from Republicans if a Democratic First Lady spoke English that poorly? Remember how they like to call Michelle Obama a "man".
It is difficult to express the viciousness, pettiness, hypocrisy, false piety, fake outrage, and downright nastiness of the right wing. As for Melania, being unable to lose one’s accent is an individual thing. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some can, some cannot. I would be more charitable to her if she weren’t down with the racism and xenophobia of her husband and his evil regime.
I would be more charitable if not for the demand from the right that all immigrants be instant Americans, dropping all signs of their previous existence and speaking perfect English.
I am 70 years old. Married for 37 years. I am retired. I was a technology facilitator; working with kids and teachers helping them integrate tech into lessons in the classroom. We have 3 cats, about to have 4. No kids. Lots of nephews and nieces. Live in Austin, tx. Love to travel; been to Italy and visited Israel 4 times. The first time I went, I participated in an archaeological dig for two months. That was the most amazing trip in my entire life. Active liberal democrat.
I am a cranky retired doc who retired to the cotton fields of SW GA. I grow Camellias and fruit trees and am a happy dad to 2 Dobermans, 2 Siamese, and 2 Parrots.
Hey fellow Siamese lover! I almost couldn't get up this morning because mine was on my chest purring. I've had Siamese since my mom took us to see "Lady & the Tramp" when we were kids and instead of demanding a cocker spaniel like Lady we wanted "one of those clever cats." Our parents got us one and I was addicted!
If you're cranky because you watched health care disintegrate around you, Stephen, I get it! I worked for the last nun CEO in a Daughters of Charity hospital, before the business model took over.
Speaking of SW GA - I was just remembering a brief residence there in the late 90's, where I was able to meet both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Truly lovely people.
Good morning! Happy New Year! I will be 73 on insurrection day…(🙄), live in Central WI, former school administrator (loved my job), married for 47 years. We have a daughter-philly area and son close by. One of my favorite things is playing in the World’s Largest Trivia Contest-been playing since college-55 years! EEK! Hoping 2026 will get our democracy back!!!
Hi from a fellow trivia fan. I play jeopardy on my Amazon Echo and am currently up 7 games/$15k. I toyed with applying to Who Wants to be a Millionaire when I was younger with a quicker brain. Never heard of the world’s largest trivia contest—I do play some bar trivia—I will check it out!
Ha! Okay!! Well….we did receive several trophies back in the day-before computers. Luckily we have some young adults who can find answers quicker than I can type a search for it! lol
I am older than you - 71 - married 40 years to a sculptor (a Vietnam vet - “Honor the warrior, not the war”). We live in supermajority red rural Missouri with 2 dogs, 6 cats and 3 horses. We join protests, write postcards to help other states (Missouri seems to be a lost cause) and do what we can. Your Substack helps keep us laughing at the awful things that really aren’t funny - but laughter beats despair. We are very grateful for you!
I love otters! I don't have a facilities to keep them as pets though. But I can go down to the natural history museum five minutes from me and visit the three who live there.
It is truly a spectacular state, but very difficult politically. In local elections there are rarely even choices. Jess Piper is heroically trying to change that all over rural Missouri. I’m too old and too busy (and unqualified) to run for office. I just hope for a reversal.
I'm 56, originally from Rhode Island, but lived long stretches of my life in Texas, Seattle, and ultimately Florida, where my husband and I live now. We have two sons in their early and mid-20s, respectively, and we also have a dog and two cantankerous cats. Hubby is a software developer and I'm an elearning editor and sometimes designer.
Happy New Year to you, Ms. Spouse, your daughter, and everyone in this community. :)
Hiya Michelle! I’m a bit like you—a copy editor nearer to 60 than 50. I live in Seattle with a husband in tech and a 21 year old son about to graduate and attempt to find a government job (as a data analyst; we tried to get him to do grad school to skip this mess for a bit but he’s going to try for state govt).
I’m a board game and video game fanatic (I play war games and survival ones) and I like to bake and do Japanese number puzzles. I can name many character actors, and I love street fairs.
I volunteer in local disaster prep and know how to use those heart attack boxes (AEDs). Recommend all get CPR certified as it’s kinda fun to bring those plastic dummy torsos back to life, and an easy way to give back to your community. My class was taught by cute fire fighters.
I love Jeff’s column to laugh through the tears and rage against the “politics as usual but kicked up to 11” machine.
Good morning Jeff, love reading you every morning. Michelle and I moved to Bend Oregon in 2024 where we love it. However, I lived the rest of my 66 years in the NE, childhood & teen yrs in PA, adult life in NYC (15 years, mostly Brooklyn), Washington DC (political and policy work), and Montclair, NJ. Publisher, editor, writer, press secretary, speechwriter, fly fisher, proud Dad of two high-integrity, high-caring young men. First vote, Carter. Central Oregon is a vast rural expanse of sagebrush and desert animated by the booming small (blue) city of Bend, and outdoors experiences everywere.
PS hard working grassroots Dems flipped our District from red to blue last year for the great Janelle Bynum. Previous Rep is Trump's truly nauseating feckless pointless DOJ Secretary.
Congratulations on raising two caring, decent sons. Notice how toxic masculinity and trophy-trad wife misogyny are both big parts of the right wing? Two sides of the same coin.
Thank you--they each express their masculinity in positive ways, but neither will they stand by in the presence of toxic jerks bullying others. Not ones to back down.
Terrific! Exactly what positive masculinity is. Stand up for those who need help. Would that the current zeitgeist returns to that. Gotta get rid of this current crop of awful excuses for men.
The most healing and regenerating events of 2025 for me--Mikie, my Montclair congresswoman, becoming a superstar and cleaning MAGA's clock in Nov. Exhilarating win.
How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all?
I'll see your Firesign reference and raise you one.
I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, working part time as a technical editor and co-owner of an upholstery shop. We have two rescue doggies and four rescue kitties as well as finches, parakeets, and chickens, and live in a 130-year-old farmhouse with my partner of 34 years. Our house isn't very big but it is small; it was built about 5 miles from here in an area known locally as Jam-Dam and then moved to its current location by sleigh along the Old Stone Road. The intent was to site it across the road but it started to slide off the sleigh so the movers dug a basement and left it where it was. The kitchen and bathroom were added in 1945 by a guy who still lives down the road, near another neighbor who just turned 106.
Ah, but I love the old(relatively) Spanish missionary homes with the red tile roofs, and the Victorian 'painted ladies'! California Mission-style homes are among the most beautifully crafted in the US, and I would know because we moved all over the country. My dad lived in an antique Saltbox, circa 1750. People were shorter back then. My dad was short too, but my husband got knocked in the forehead many times when going through the doorways. My favorite house was an expanded Cape in Amherst, NH. I was an interior decorator and design consultant for Laura Ashley, so I had a blast restoring that house. I apologize for the rant, but I'm a former House Nut. 🤪
It wasn't until I started traveling around the Eastern US that I understood what old really was. In Boston, Charleston, and Savannah, old means pre-Revolutionary War.
fun completely trivial fact: that photo of me from 1976 was taken at Mariella Pizza on 16th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan. apparently they went out of business ten years ago.
https://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2016/04/mariella-pizza.html
Almost 72 years on the planet. Married to the love of my life. Left leaning independent. Blabbermouth. Opinionated. “And justice for all attitude”.
Still working as a systems architect. Cybercrime scares me. AI doesn’t. But the combination does. Humans are required to model AI. Remember that. Anything evil it does - humans are behind it.
Voted for McGovern my first vote! Remember waking up to see Carter declared the winner that election! So excited! When every Democrat thereafter won, I was ecstatic. Still think Elon’s ninjas did something to rig 2024.
Love your work, Jeff! Still remember reading it for the first time. LMAO!!! Your levity and nailing the truth is sane saving! You give us hope!
Thanks a million 🤩 Happy New Year to you, Mrs. Spouse and all of your followers 🥳
Agree completely about Elon and the last election.
It’s so obvious!!
https://thiswillhold.substack.com/p/part-ii-are-they-really-just-the
She brings the receipts and lots of compelling evidence for all the crimes
Oof, still in tech after that long. I made myself wait until 58 and then I was OUT. Don't know your gender, but, from my point of view, tech never got better for women; it just got more subtle with the misogyny.
Handsome now l, Handsome back then.
Like Sean Connery, RIP, I think JT has gotten better looking ...
Oh, Sean ... dreamboat!
Uhm Connery is a mysogenist pos. And perpetrated DV on women, proudly.
But he was a looker. Too bad that's the way it often is.
Yes!
Aside from collecting spores, mold and fungus, I’m a 71 year old retired physician and windbag (have a Larry David gene or two) who enjoys posting quips (because I can’t write) and learning how to be a better person by reading, not reacting and finding the good in us. All in for the 2026 midterms when we take the house and begin impeachment and criminal investigations in January 2027. Your posts Jeff, always make my day. Thank you mightily!
Let’s take the house AND the senate!
Dr Hammer, are you an immunologist or an infectious disease doctor?
I collect spores, mold, and fungus but not intentionally.
70 year old retired Canadian woman here. Nervously watching what is going on in "the basement" of North America and hoping that things get better down there soon!
We trapped in that 'basement' are hoping the same.
Fatso's wanton attacks on a nation that has always been a good neighbor are among the top ten most disgusting things he's done.
Gillian, by "basement" do you mean meth lab? It sure smells like one down here. Dark, too.
Thank you to all the Canadians who still have hope for us. I have to believe that we can turn things around. We're gonna evict the drug lord and clean out the meth lab.
No. More like that dank dark space, where you're afraid to go because you don't know what kind of creatures you will find down there. Evil lurks below and all that!
We are in a crawl space down here.
…a dark, dank, creepy crawlspace, with a dark, dank, creepy clown in charge.
Amen, sister!! Enjoy your next 10 years; 80 is a bitch.
I’ve been screaming and pounding on the basement door trying to get out. Hopefully someone with the key will show up soon.
75 yo woman, Portland, OR for 12 years, lived in Alaska most of my life, worked as an RN, now enjoying two young grandsons, playing piano, learning watercolor painting, hiking and trying to stay sane.
thanks for canadians that took in our young heros that declared HELL NO I WON'T GO!
Thanks for your concern, Gillian - we're in a dank crawl space for sure - some days I can't get past 'incredulous', but mostly I'm horrified/angry. I haven't posted in this community - maybe it will help!
Come on in, the water's fine!
Gillian, we are sorry to be trashing up the basement!
Try being 67yr old retired 🇨🇦 🌈♀️♀️living down here! I can't afford to move back, housing in Ontario is so unaffordable.
I feel for you, but depending on where you want to move...some places are way more affordable than others. Toronto is out...but lots of other beautiful areas to choose from. I'm quite rural but it's a beautiful area and bargains can still be found.
Wouldn't Antarctica be the "basement?"
Most of my life in Alaska, born and bred, and Oregon.
Garbage collector, colloquially, garbage man. Drove a truck for 45 years picking up people's garbage. (Probably over qualified for that job as well.)
Wife, retired Chemistry Professor, Portland State University. (If you figure out that match, let me know.)
Married 35 years, no children.
81 years old Feb 11 this new year. You can play on my lawn, and humans are the best thing evolution could come up with????
US Army 1963-65.
First vote, 1966, when I was 21. Back then one had to be 21 to vote, 17 or so to die in Vietnam.
Terry, as an English/Studio Art major/minor who married an electrician from Oklahoma, I've got that match figured out. That's all I'm sayin'.
Thanks for sharing and happy new year Jeff!
I often think I should send you an insurance claim form -because your insights preserve the threads of sanity I (arguably) have left having lived through Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Dubya, and now -the criminal elect.
I've been vegetarian for 25+ years, a dad, a granddad, a highly successful youth baseball coach, and now work every day trying to cause as much good trouble as I can through the public interest projects I'm driving forward through https://civ.works (https://civ.works/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CivicSky-Media.pdf and https://civ.works/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cw_eci.pdf)
I enjoy your insights and hall of fame use of adjectives in describing our present journey through corrupt dystopia while Heather Cox Richardson provides vital background and historical context to our daily misadventures with the criminal elect and his cabal of sociopaths, alcoholics, and incompetents.
Hi George, I'm an avid reader of your Leadership Matters Substack. Excellent analysis!
Thank you so much Mary! I try to make each article informative and compelling.
I read it too! Excellent!
Ditto the insurance claim form, George! I'll look for you in Substack.
Thank you Deb. 🤓
Got ya beat. First vote, 1972, George McGovern. Sigh…
Ok, I can match Suzanne(my wife of 49 years name by the way!) for first votes, but unfortunately not in a good way. I was 19 in 1972, and voted for Nixon. Yes, I know, I almost immediately regretted it, even before Watergate. I was reared in Texas, in a very, very strict and “conservative” home and environment. I guess I was still somewhat brainwashed about “liberals.” I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and again in 1980. I have NEVER regretted either vote. Even in 1980, I instinctively knew Reagan was a fraud and a better actor than he is given credit for. His thinly veiled racism and I hate the government routine was the catalyst for the 45 year degeneracy into MAGA………
It is past time for a new “New Deal” and “Great Society.” I pray enough of us will believe that and act on it. There are way too many blasé and disinterested and shallow and foolish citizens amongst us.
People brought up conservative who find their own way are tops in my book! My parents were liberals (my father was an academic who was investigated by a McCarthy committee), we lived in NYC, everyone I knew was liberal. Went the hippie route, lived on a commune in Vermont! Gee! We were liberals! Now I live in a nice suburb where the majority are liberals. In other words, I got handed being liberal on a plate. I have so much respect for people who find their own way to the liberal mindset. It denotes high intelligence!
@Lucy Horton, I heartily agree! I once remarked to my dear friend Tim Ayers (brother of Bill Ayers of Weatherman/Weather Underground) that his parents must have been thoughtful and progressive to have raised four boys who were such mavericks. He said that, quite the contrary, they were very conservative (their father was an executive with, and eventually CEO of Commonwealth Edison) and horrified by their sons' activities.
In Vietnam days, that happened in many families. Nothing like the prospect of being drafted to fight in a pointless war to sharpen the mind!
I grew up in conservative deep east Texas with closed-minded country Texans all around me in the "bible-belt" area...My parents were both republicans but were not delusional or cray cray IMO compared to others in their circles.
Thankfully they grew up in large cities with educated parents but still too conservative for me to be like them LOL.
Though they were indoctrinated baby boomers, I never heard a racist remark out of them my whole life (I'm 55 now) .
I found my own way later in life not knowing I was a heavy left-leaning straight man who always noticed that democrats and liberals seemed to like my vibe and get along with me, including many LGBTQ friends that befriended me. I had no idea what it was because I didn't become political in 2009.
Then I figured it all out and found out who I was (all along).
Yeah, I'm a late bloomer but with certainty I was never a right-winger at heart.
Voted for Nixon!!!! Wow. I can proudly say I have never voted for a Republican for president or most likely any other significant office. I have voted for some local judges who were technically running as Republicans but in fact were simply doing a good job and politics didn't enter their work.
Before my stepdad got together with my mom, he dated a girl Shelley who was intensely into Nixon. He spent the 1960 election night at a wanne-be-victory-party in Nixon's Los Angeles headquarters, and recalls how the announcers would attempt to rouse the increasingly nail-baiting attendees by telling them how great Dick was doing in NEBRASKA! He and Shelley drifted apart, and she went on to be one of Nixon's main secretaries and married Pat Buchanan. As a result of this connection, we got Christmas cards from the White House all throughout the Nixon administration, to the great annoyance of my mother, a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine who put a McGovern sign on our lawn although dad was teaching at an arch-Republican military academy (George Steinbrenner was the commencement speaker-- this was before he bought the Yankees and became a nationally-known asshole, he was just a locally-known asshole, father of a couple creepy kids we called the Steinboogies).
Same here! I also was a volunteer during Eugene McCarthy's run for president in 1968 at the tender age of 17 (I'm 74).
Oh, God, I wanted McCarthy to win, but like all other attractive candidates he was betrayed by his own party.
I know. There's been a lot of revisionist history, but supporting RFK was sneered at, kind of like Bernie supporters sneered at Hillary supporters in 2016. I had a lot of bad flashbacks that year, probably accounting for my enduring gf distaste for Bernie.
Me too! I got Clean for Gene. Now 75.
Will you get Neat for Pete?
I was passionate about RFK, but after that election I dropped out until 2000, partly because of his death, partly because of bullying from the Eugene Bros, in a time when middle-class white boys thought the world was all about them and keeping their asses out of Vietnam. So it was even worse than the Bernie Bros later. Despite being from an activist family (my sister was in the SDS and her college boyfriend was in the Weathermen) I had no interest in politics other than, voting until Florida 2000 brought me back. The first demonstration I ever attended was a "count all the Florida votes" one in December 2000.
I was too, at 18.
Same !
Me, too!
Back in my day voting age was 21, so my first presidential vote went to Johnson. Wow, I’m old.
Same here! We couldn't vote at 18, but we were allowed to die in Vietnam.
I remember that well. I first voted at 18, and in Michigan there was a ballot proposal to lower the drinking age to 18, precisely because of the argument that you couldn’t drink, but could be sent to war and die for your country. It passed overwhelmingly (perhaps because 18 year old s were allowed to vote for the first time?) Anyway, as a college freshman, it was pretty wild on campus! Between the Vietnam protests and legal drinking, there were some raucous times! The legal drinking age went back to 21 four years later. It was a law just for us at the time.
Lol! Same for me! We would drive to Wisconsin (chicagoan) to drink for those 4 years.🙄
I was 17 when I went to college, having skipped a grade, but in Ann Arbor they did not card anybody at the time.
I listen to oldies radio, and it strikes me how many songs were about girls wishing guys would come home, guys promising to be back, about letters from "my baby," about how they may never see each other again, all because of Vietnam. I don't know if the statistics show anything similar, but in my graduating class alone, there were more than 20 sweetheart marriages because we girls knew the boys we loved wouldn't make it past 19. That's why I marched for the 18-yr-old vote, and draft ended before my (now)husband was taken.
I’m older than that. I’m not sure why I’m still around.
Glad you are!
I was just about to write the same thing and you took the words right out of my mouth, Cheri!
Oops. I’ll have them washed and returned to you.
Lois, if you ask Jeff why you're still around, I'm sure he'd say, "Because, f*ck you, that's why!"
😆
That right there is probably true.
Glad you’re here with us, Lois!
To piss Off the Magats, Lois.
Hang in there, baby!
Same for me. I was less than a year too young to vote for JFK.
I was still in grade school. My sister, who was also in grade school, wrote to Nixon and told him he should drop out because he's a crook. He sent her a big package of campaign buttons, thanked her for her support and urged her to distribute the buttons to all her friends. I still have some of those Nixon-Lodge buttons! She became a student revolutionary in college. She's now a retried public defender, but I think she'd still say she detests Nixon, although, like all of us, her distaste for Trump has overridden everything.
Nixon's crimes seem so quaint
Don't they ever though? He seems like a saint compared to Thump.
I was way too young to vote for him. But he was my political awakening when JFK came through town on a whistlestop campaign.
I was too young to vote for Johnson, but Barry Goldwater .... remember when he was considered ultra-extreme? He'd be a Democrat now! I still have my copy of his campaign book "A Choice Not an Echo." Anyone else remember the odious person who wrote it?
Please, do tell!
That was Phyllis Schlafly, wasn't it?
It sure was! She really annoyed my mom back in the 70s when my mom was the president of the Chicago League of Women Voters. One time the state league had a fundraiser at someone's house who lived on the same street as Schlafly in East Alton, Illinois. My mom often recalled how the blanketed the entire street with ERA signs hoping she'd be annoyed (She was probably running around the country lecturing women on how they should stop working and stay home to wait on their husbands and kids.)
Me, too. I remember tables being set up on campus to register 18-year-olds to vote after the law changed.
Same here but I was pretty politically ignorant and influenced by my Minnesota Democrat boyfriend. He became Mr. Spouse and voted for McCarthy for President at least once that I know of. He has been Mr. Spouse for 48 years and turned an Idaho raised Republican into a flaming liberal Midwesterner.
Same here. A Pyrrhic victory at best. Sympathy sigh…
I abstained my first chance to vote, Carter/Ford 1976. I was in Europe all summer, and the papers there were all full of "WHO is this Carter guy?" and I had a dread that he would find himself in over his head and get rolled, but my dad warned me that Ford was blundering badly, that pardoning Nixon meant that the Republicans would just get worse and worse every time from then on. I went to an embassy to find out what it would take to get an absentee ballot, but it just seemed like too much trouble when neither of the choices excited me.
I was born in 1956, on July 4 (my mother went into labor late on July 2 but I kept her going for 28 hours: my aunt said I must really have wanted that holiday birthday), so the Bicentennial was also my 20th birthday. There were billboards in Germany, "Amerika! Wie du uns verwechselt hast!" (America, how you have changed us). The headline that morning in the Munchner Merkur (which I called the Munchkin Mercury) was BRAVO ISRAEL! for the raid in Entebbe freeing the passengers of a hijacked airline: I imagined Hitler rolling in his grave at the thought of Bavaria praising the Jews. I went to the Hofbrauhaus that night: that's usually a tourist trap, but that night all the local Munchkins were there, my money was no good, and at some signal they all started clinking spoons against their steins to get silence, and broke out into The Star Spangled Banner. Then, being Germans, they sang the second verse which no Americans know (they must have rehearsed for weeks), and then, being Germans, they sang the third verse, whose existence I had not suspected.
Pet peeve: the official term "semiquincentennial" for the upcoming 250th anniversary (although in my view, the republic died at 248 1/2 this past January) is a barbarism. The Romans would say "sestercentennial": ses-ter- meaning "halfway to 3" is the standard way of saying 2 1/2 (a sesterce, worth 2.5 bronze, was the standard small-change coin, a "farthing" when the penny was 10 bronze). At 2:30 we say in English it is "half past two" but more languages call it "halfway to three" like German "halb drei" and there is no language in the world that would call it "half of five." It is typical of today's world that not only do the officials in charge of naming the celebration know no Latin, but they did not consult anybody who knows any Latin.
I have been a computer programmer, lawyer, and math teacher but currently identify as an author, of Roman-era historical fiction. "The Year of Five Emperors" is a well-reviewed book examining a crisis (this was after the Five Good Emperors, who each adopted a likely young man as successor, but the choice of Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, caught the pox out east and died, so he had no choice but to leave it to his biological son Commodus, who rather murdered anybody who looked like a plausible successor, so his assassination left a power vacuum with no rules) from everyone's point of view, Senators and merchants and slaves and barbarians watching from outside, in Rome and Antioch and Gaul and Caledonia, illustrating the atmosphere of the times and how the society worked, or failed to work anymore. You can get it in one volume (an 800-page doorstop) at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-year-of-five-emperors2 or in two volumes at https://www.amazon.com/Year-Five-Emperors-Part-Pertinax/dp/1778831109/ref=sr_1_2 and https://www.amazon.com/Year-Five-Emperors-Part-Severus/dp/1778831257/ref=sr_1_3 and the sequel "The Baths of Caracalla" set a generation later shows the consequences of the breakdown of the old order, https://www.amazon.com/Baths-Caracalla-Sequel-Year-Emperors/dp/1778834167/ref=sr_1_1 (a further sequel "The Dangling Crown" covering Elagabalus, the craziest Emperor of the entire Roman history, is in the works).
I was 19 when I voted for McGovern. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 and I was so excited to participate. My first rude awakening.
Me, too. Got to see McGovern once, at a rally I went to with with my mom. As a high school newspaper reporter, I had gone to a conference at SMU, where we were all forced to attend a Nixon rally. There were pro Nixon signs at every other seat. To sit down, you had to hold up the sign. I held mine upside down. That night, on the news, there were stories about all the support that crooked asshole had from young people. I had my first leson in propaganda.
Voted for McGovern and had a bumper sticker on my car : “Don’t Blame Me, I’m from Massachusetts”.
MA was the only state that Nixon lost.
DC went for McGovern, too.:)
Mine also!
Me too. I said Carter but that was wrong. I guess i blocked out that trauma…
Me too!
Me too. Had to be 21 to vote but I did.
Ditto!
Me too.
Happy New Year. 71 year old proud Jew. Introduced streaking on the Northwestern University campus in 1973. My favorite picture is me holding up the Chicago Tribune headline “Nixon Resigns” in 1974. Sang on stage with the Temptations in 1982. Love this community.
OMG, I was in Boston in college the same year you were (Simmons). We had a streaker on our campus that year - was it you??? LOL!
Remember when that was SERIOUSLY considered ‘rocking the boat’. My g-d
🤣
OMG! It is truly a very small world. I'm laughing.
Wow, you were cutting edge. That craze really took off and went viral in 1974, although it was happening on some college campuses in 1973. Here in Cleveland, a local booking agent found some schlub bar band from the boonies and convinced them to change their name to "The Streakers" and perform in flesh-colored swim trunks. I went to see them and they looked so embarrassed as they cranked out "All Right Now," "Long Train Running" and "Smoke on the Water," al the bar band standards.
I graduated NU in class of 73 even though I finished my classes at the end of Fall Quarter 1972. Sang one Spring day on Deering Meadow.
I'm 61, Mrs. Spouse is 73 and we LOVE your Substack! I'm one of the lone liberals in a family of religious, right-wing, Trump supporters. WHY they still support Trump after all this chicanery, I don't know. We were all raised by the same mother, who herself was the lone liberal of her generation of the family. As my handle suggests, I love knitting and crocheting. I'm also RETIRED as of today! I'm looking forward to now doing things that I enjoy and not that I dread. Happy New Year!
Yayyy, Retirement!!! Congrats! All the cool kids are Retired! You will love it. 😎💙
I ❤️ "all the cool kids are retired"! I love our generation! Proud Boomer! Nobody can top our music or our resistance to The Man. Groove on, Punkette!
Yessss, Paula! Agree 💯! We were so lucky to grow up when we did! Rock on, sister. 🤘🏼 You’re still a kid, though. I am staring 67 in the face! Heeeee 😆
P.S. I took early retirement at 62, five years ago during Dumpty 1.0. No way was I gonna risk waiting until full retirement age. Never regretted it!
Congrats on your retirement. It’s everything you thought it would be.
As a third generation American and an ethnic minority, my and my forebears' experience has been partly outside the mainstream. But more importantly, we have partaken of the vaunted American Dream, ascending the socioeconomic ladder to live now in comfort and security. My grandparents all lived into their eighties and nineties and yet were never literate in English. One set of them never owned a house or even a car. By dint of hard work and sacrifice but also the opportunities that this nation provided, and enough fair and kind people, here I and my generation are. My friends, family, and colleagues of my ilk have done the same. As such, we have a deep and abiding love and gratitude for America. To see this defiling of our society now is beyond sickening. Who am us? We am America. Or at least to my mind, we used to be.
So many (including a lot of right-wingers) had grandparents who never learned English but I guess it was ok because they were European. Now they treat not speaking English like a crime. I went to a friend's wedding a couple of years ago and sat with his Croatian friends including his 80+ year old mom who spoke very little English despite being in the country nearly 60 years. Meanwhile, he was marrying a woman from Bolivia whom he met when she was visiting a friend here three years earlier. When she told me she spoke no English when she first visited, I thought she must be lying. Her English was way better than Melania Trump's! I also have a Mexican friend (who just became a citizen — YAY!) who came here the same year as Melania and speaks English without an accent.
Can you imagine the hysteria, mockery and hatred from Republicans if a Democratic First Lady spoke English that poorly? Remember how they like to call Michelle Obama a "man".
It is difficult to express the viciousness, pettiness, hypocrisy, false piety, fake outrage, and downright nastiness of the right wing. As for Melania, being unable to lose one’s accent is an individual thing. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some can, some cannot. I would be more charitable to her if she weren’t down with the racism and xenophobia of her husband and his evil regime.
I would be more charitable if not for the demand from the right that all immigrants be instant Americans, dropping all signs of their previous existence and speaking perfect English.
I would be more charitable towards her if she weren’t a gold digging slant eyed Slovenian slut who is an embarrassment to our Country.
And who had Jackie’s rose garden paved over!
Yeah!!!
Right?? Melania speaks as if she’s fresh off the boat!
Good on you and your entire Family, Doc
We were small hungry men with hairy faces and burning feet. We were running away from poverty, the army, oppression, and the army.
And we took to them, and they took to us...
Is that a quote?
That's the reply to "Who am us, anyway?" in Firesign Theater's How Can You Be in Two Places at Once album.
Thank you. Apropos!
I am 70 years old. Married for 37 years. I am retired. I was a technology facilitator; working with kids and teachers helping them integrate tech into lessons in the classroom. We have 3 cats, about to have 4. No kids. Lots of nephews and nieces. Live in Austin, tx. Love to travel; been to Italy and visited Israel 4 times. The first time I went, I participated in an archaeological dig for two months. That was the most amazing trip in my entire life. Active liberal democrat.
Hi from Belton and San Antonio!
Native Texan here. Houston area.
I grew up in southwest Houston. After high school, moved to Austin and attended UT.
I am a cranky retired doc who retired to the cotton fields of SW GA. I grow Camellias and fruit trees and am a happy dad to 2 Dobermans, 2 Siamese, and 2 Parrots.
I also live in Georgia - though I’m in the foothills of the Appalachian Mtns - and often feel like the rare blue dot in a sea of red!
Hey fellow Siamese lover! I almost couldn't get up this morning because mine was on my chest purring. I've had Siamese since my mom took us to see "Lady & the Tramp" when we were kids and instead of demanding a cocker spaniel like Lady we wanted "one of those clever cats." Our parents got us one and I was addicted!
Helluva bio
Wait, what kind of parrots? I have a GCC--
Mexican Double-Yellow Amazon and a Lesser Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo. Both are 38 years old.
That’s amazing to have that long a relationship with your birds!
I know it must Please you to no end.
Ah great!
If you're cranky because you watched health care disintegrate around you, Stephen, I get it! I worked for the last nun CEO in a Daughters of Charity hospital, before the business model took over.
Speaking of SW GA - I was just remembering a brief residence there in the late 90's, where I was able to meet both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Truly lovely people.
Good morning! Happy New Year! I will be 73 on insurrection day…(🙄), live in Central WI, former school administrator (loved my job), married for 47 years. We have a daughter-philly area and son close by. One of my favorite things is playing in the World’s Largest Trivia Contest-been playing since college-55 years! EEK! Hoping 2026 will get our democracy back!!!
Hi from a fellow trivia fan. I play jeopardy on my Amazon Echo and am currently up 7 games/$15k. I toyed with applying to Who Wants to be a Millionaire when I was younger with a quicker brain. Never heard of the world’s largest trivia contest—I do play some bar trivia—I will check it out!
The $15k is imaginary, in case it wasn’t clear. You just play for fun against bots. But it’s amusing while I do the dishes. :)
Ha! Okay!! Well….we did receive several trophies back in the day-before computers. Luckily we have some young adults who can find answers quicker than I can type a search for it! lol
I am older than you - 71 - married 40 years to a sculptor (a Vietnam vet - “Honor the warrior, not the war”). We live in supermajority red rural Missouri with 2 dogs, 6 cats and 3 horses. We join protests, write postcards to help other states (Missouri seems to be a lost cause) and do what we can. Your Substack helps keep us laughing at the awful things that really aren’t funny - but laughter beats despair. We are very grateful for you!
I like that so many here are pet lovers.
not surprising - loving beyond one's own boundaries is one of the things that make us "liberal"
could be--never thought of that!!
Hey--you're right; I just noticed! My two furbabies (14 and 15 year old canine rescues) are my whole life. Anything for them!
Oh yeah!! I’m a former but future dog mom. I also love pigs, bats, and crows.
And ravens! and red squirrels!! and, and, and.....
I love otters! I don't have a facilities to keep them as pets though. But I can go down to the natural history museum five minutes from me and visit the three who live there.
Lucky you!!
Former Missourian, born and raised. Gorgeous state. Kills me what has become of it.
It is truly a spectacular state, but very difficult politically. In local elections there are rarely even choices. Jess Piper is heroically trying to change that all over rural Missouri. I’m too old and too busy (and unqualified) to run for office. I just hope for a reversal.
Gotta love Jess! That woman has grit!!
I love reading your Substack!
I'm 56, originally from Rhode Island, but lived long stretches of my life in Texas, Seattle, and ultimately Florida, where my husband and I live now. We have two sons in their early and mid-20s, respectively, and we also have a dog and two cantankerous cats. Hubby is a software developer and I'm an elearning editor and sometimes designer.
Happy New Year to you, Ms. Spouse, your daughter, and everyone in this community. :)
Hiya Michelle! I’m a bit like you—a copy editor nearer to 60 than 50. I live in Seattle with a husband in tech and a 21 year old son about to graduate and attempt to find a government job (as a data analyst; we tried to get him to do grad school to skip this mess for a bit but he’s going to try for state govt).
I’m a board game and video game fanatic (I play war games and survival ones) and I like to bake and do Japanese number puzzles. I can name many character actors, and I love street fairs.
I volunteer in local disaster prep and know how to use those heart attack boxes (AEDs). Recommend all get CPR certified as it’s kinda fun to bring those plastic dummy torsos back to life, and an easy way to give back to your community. My class was taught by cute fire fighters.
I love Jeff’s column to laugh through the tears and rage against the “politics as usual but kicked up to 11” machine.
Yeah, firefighters are hot. They drop off patients in our ER because many of them are medics too. Eye candy for the staff lol.
Bot
Why? Cause I’m posting a lot here? I’m lying in bed procrastinating getting up.
Good morning Jeff, love reading you every morning. Michelle and I moved to Bend Oregon in 2024 where we love it. However, I lived the rest of my 66 years in the NE, childhood & teen yrs in PA, adult life in NYC (15 years, mostly Brooklyn), Washington DC (political and policy work), and Montclair, NJ. Publisher, editor, writer, press secretary, speechwriter, fly fisher, proud Dad of two high-integrity, high-caring young men. First vote, Carter. Central Oregon is a vast rural expanse of sagebrush and desert animated by the booming small (blue) city of Bend, and outdoors experiences everywere.
PS hard working grassroots Dems flipped our District from red to blue last year for the great Janelle Bynum. Previous Rep is Trump's truly nauseating feckless pointless DOJ Secretary.
That election made my day! My wife's day as well.
Hi neighbor, wonderful to find brothers and sisters in the this good fight!
Congratulations on raising two caring, decent sons. Notice how toxic masculinity and trophy-trad wife misogyny are both big parts of the right wing? Two sides of the same coin.
Thank you--they each express their masculinity in positive ways, but neither will they stand by in the presence of toxic jerks bullying others. Not ones to back down.
Terrific! Exactly what positive masculinity is. Stand up for those who need help. Would that the current zeitgeist returns to that. Gotta get rid of this current crop of awful excuses for men.
So true
Bend is lovely.
We almost moved to Bend around 2000. It was so full of energy then. Almost bought a house there but decided to stay in California where we grew up.
As is Montclair ;)
The most healing and regenerating events of 2025 for me--Mikie, my Montclair congresswoman, becoming a superstar and cleaning MAGA's clock in Nov. Exhilarating win.
T H I S 👆🇺🇸
We had visited a couple years ago--just loved it. I spend many days on the Deschutes April-October. Thank you.
I live in Terrebonne, hello neighbor!
How are you doing, neighbor?
It is curious that Bend is north of North Bend. I love Oregon.
I got yelled at there when I attempted to pump my own gas. I understand that's since changed.
like that!
And very far west of South Bend
Congrats! My husband is a regular visitor to Bend from Seattle for your great mountain biking. He raves about the city!
How can you be in two places at once, when you're not anywhere at all?
I'll see your Firesign reference and raise you one.
I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, working part time as a technical editor and co-owner of an upholstery shop. We have two rescue doggies and four rescue kitties as well as finches, parakeets, and chickens, and live in a 130-year-old farmhouse with my partner of 34 years. Our house isn't very big but it is small; it was built about 5 miles from here in an area known locally as Jam-Dam and then moved to its current location by sleigh along the Old Stone Road. The intent was to site it across the road but it started to slide off the sleigh so the movers dug a basement and left it where it was. The kitchen and bathroom were added in 1945 by a guy who still lives down the road, near another neighbor who just turned 106.
Thanks for sharing the history of your house. That was so interesting. I live in California where everything seems to be less than 100 years old.
Ah, but I love the old(relatively) Spanish missionary homes with the red tile roofs, and the Victorian 'painted ladies'! California Mission-style homes are among the most beautifully crafted in the US, and I would know because we moved all over the country. My dad lived in an antique Saltbox, circa 1750. People were shorter back then. My dad was short too, but my husband got knocked in the forehead many times when going through the doorways. My favorite house was an expanded Cape in Amherst, NH. I was an interior decorator and design consultant for Laura Ashley, so I had a blast restoring that house. I apologize for the rant, but I'm a former House Nut. 🤪
It wasn't until I started traveling around the Eastern US that I understood what old really was. In Boston, Charleston, and Savannah, old means pre-Revolutionary War.
In Vegas, 1950 is old. Lol. But that's why many of our roads are in good shape. They are almost new.
Native of Flint here. Hubby and I love the UP!!
We're way out in the country about an hour north of Menominee....