59 Comments

I can't wait until I never have to hear about Trump again. I am sick of him and his cult. Illiterate blowhards, one and all.

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Line forms over there, buddy.

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And it's a very long line.

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I found myself actually tempted to buy Woodward's new audiobook until I saw the non-announcement announcement and realized that I could achieve the same result by banging my head against the wall two or three times. actually, a dozen times is more like it.

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🤣👏

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I won’t live so long. Both he and Rupert appear to be vampires sucking the blood out of our country, and eating the brains of the cult nuts, some of whom are dear to me. What a shit show.

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Yes. Can't wait.

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I found this strangely comforting! If the outcome of next Tuesday turns out to be gut wrenching and awful, I think your foretelling of the future is spot on. The only thing that scares me is the idea that Weasel McCarthy would be third in line for the throne.

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Me too, Ellen . I read it twice so I could be doubly comforted !

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Or the Repubs bring on Trump to be Speaker of the House....shudder

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Per Rick Wilson, everything tRump touches dies, but not our country. We will wrest it from their evil hands or die trying! Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!

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Well...despite the clown show, we'll still be here standing up to craziness and working for a democracy that can deliver what most folks really would like to have delivered. I wonder just how much more BP medication I can take safely? Thanks for making me smile. This period of time actually makes the 60's look reasonable - which of course they were! Onward and upward - from my favorite hymn.

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Yes, I was involved in the "cutting edge" of the 60s and it definitely wasn't this crazy (though I was once close to scared hitch-hiking I-80 and getting stuck in Rock Springs WY till just before dusk when a trucker took pity on me).

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Summer of '65 I hitchhiked with a friend from Aspen throughout the West (Grand Canyon, etc.) and then to Detroit. it got really scary around Four Corners, where we asked a native if there was a good place to crash. he said "nowhere safe." so we said "but, but..." and pointed to these towns on a map. he laughed and said "those ain't towns, those are just trading posts. he told us to buy some rope to encircle our sleeping bags because "rattlers won't cross a rope," which sounded really, really iffy. we found ourselves in Gallup and met a guy who was there to pick up his Caddy and drive to NYC. we stayed with him till St. Louis and the ride was great, but he spewed the most stereotyped racist insanity I'd ever heard. finally Howie, my friend, decided to end it by telling the guy that he was active member of SNCC and didn't appreciate that talk (he obviously had the cojones I lacked). it was a very hairy two minutes but the sonofabitch actually cooled it.

there were two other great parts of the story: at the beginning, we crept out of Aspen on the back of a pick-up truck and the guy blasted his radio which was playing a wild, very long record I'd never heard before, so I asked what it was. the answer was, I would realize years later, too perfect to be true but perfect enough to be true at the same time. it was "Like a Rolling Stone." swear to god.

the other "great thing" (actually a real bummer) was being laid up for two days in Grand Canyon National Park with a nasty case of epididymitis. god knows why. I blamed the usual tendency of a sixteen-year-old to practice what the old Boy Scout Manual warned about till sometime later in that storied decade.

it's possible I'm trying to cheer people up. I even found myself giggling for a half second in fond remembrance.

I just watched a new HBO documentary about the automat. so beautiful, I was crying at the end, which was also about the death of another beautiful, vanished thing about this town. and this country, even if the automats were purely a NYC/Philly thing.

and since this desk chair is kicking up my sciatica....

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Half a second of fond remembrance, hahahaha.

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Lordy, I remember the hitchhikers. Couldn’t imagine people putting themselves at such risk. Glad you lived to tell the tale, and so many more.

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back then, it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I wasn't crazy about doing it alone, but only because I vastly prefer company to being alone. or, at any rate, I did then.

but I didn't know anybody back then who avoided hitching because it was especially dangerous. it just wasn't a THING.

but nowadays, if I had kids (I don't) and found out they were hitchhiking, I'd have to be packed in ice or something.

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Yes. We were lucky we grew up when we did.

But I can tell you there were people I knew who had VERY BAD experiences hitch-hiking. Not the kind of stories to re-tell. So it wasn't all ponies and rainbows back then either. But less bad then than similar would be now.

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ahhh...you can probably double it. I did.

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Bravo, TC. Thanks for the pep talk.

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"Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end." Sonny Kapoor in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). Great film, great quote. I keep telling myself this in order to get thru this election, and the next...

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Good quote.

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👋 👋 👋 👋 👋 👋 👋

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One of my favs too, quote and film.

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"It is not the end of democracy, so long as we are still here." And we can make our own "fine mess"😉 to keep it going.

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Keep making “good trouble”!

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The term —drooling defectives —is worth the price of your subscription.

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A tall gypsy baring THE FUTURE FORETOLD entered TAFM’s inner sanctum today. Would we learn the results of the midterm elections and whether The Orange Ogre will run again, I wondered?

Sworn to secrecy were we, but come closer, (in a faint whisper), 'One of the parties will filibuster everything so hard the filibuster will scream for mercy, poor thing.’ And the Orange Ogre -- what of him? (TC)

Can you remember a time when you finished a TAFM piece feeling relaxed and content about the future? The only thing that I can say is that the handsome gypsy may have FORTETOLD, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, but then again, maybe not.

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DEFCON ONE indeed.

Hatches battened down, standing by.

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Thank you for pushing my “Be Cautiously Optimistic” button today. It’s so rusty I thought it would never work again.

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Mine too

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TCinLA---another winner! So true--it is not over until We the People say it is over---and that is not on Nov 8 or 14 or whenever. And T* is in deep doo doo. Your prose is getting up there with Charles Pierce for, among other things, chuckles in the tough sections....... Have a good weekend out there. Time to go get those crooks...... Peace and Courage.

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Thanks TC. You made my day.

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Trump sees the presidency as his best defense for his legal problems. Period.

McCONnell is a KKKoch Traitor and will continue relentlessly to destroy this democracy. They pay him well.

The rest of the RNC Goons are on the take and there’s plenty of “Citizens United” money to go around.

The voters of the US see it all as a forum for bully’s settling a score because they made bad choices in life. They took the covid $$$$ and bought fancy electronics and guns. Food insecurity? Inflation? What have they put away for a rainy day?

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Thanks for this TC. I really needed this today.

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Well done TC. Another reminder that the fight continues regardless of how Tuesday turns out. And, who knows, the pollsters might be wrong for the first time and we might come out much better than the doomsayers are predicting. If not, there's always next year.

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