Actually, it was easy since my Mom was a Democrat. My dad a Republican. My mom always laughed about cancelling votes knowing it didn't really happen but finding it funny anyway. I will say back in those days, Reps. weren't so dangerously warped like they are now -- so I sort of enjoyed the viewpoints from both my parents. If I had to choose though I would say my dad was VERY partisan it seemed to me. My Mom seemed more flexible but since she worked from home a lot I watched her make more decisions and that likely influenced my thinking.

My parents were both Democrats. My Mom worked at the polls during elections when I was a kid. Seems like the Republican Party began to their descent into the abyss when Newt Gingrich got involved. The GOP is unrecognizable.

John Oliver on the Abortion Ruling https://youtu.be/MalsOLSFvX0

Off topic here: the story of corrections officer Vicky White and inmate Casey White, incarcerated on murder charges, They weren't related but apparently in a romantic relationship. She helped him escape and they were on the lam 10 days; a tip helped law enforcement locate them today and after a pursuit and car wreck, Vicky White shot herself. Casey was taken into custody. Vicky has died from her injuries. She was 58, he is 38.

A bizarre story and one that always begs the question, What in the hell was she thinking? It appears the two may have been involved since 2020. I read that she'd recently started paperwork to retire and sold her home, taking a lot less than market value. There's footage of her buying men's clothing days before the escape. It was a highly planned crime. Except what did she actually think would happen once they were both fugitives? This scenario never ends good. It also sounds like they were found less than 300 miles away and I wonder what that's all about. You'd think they'd have wanted to get a lot further away. Who knows. CNN reports that Vicky's supervisors “described her as a "model employee" and a "reliable person," and the case left friends, family and everyone who knew her stunned" by her recent actions. This includes her mother, who's been very cooperative with the investigation.

Another tidbit from my Lincoln book: By 1855 the Whig party had collapsed and Lincoln was looking for a new political home. One of the new groups at the time was the nativist/anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. This is what Lincoln wrote to a friend, "I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

I agree he, Casey, was a master manipulator. It had to be a powerful lure. Vicky was considered an “exemplary employee” and as Lauderdale County jail's assistant director of corrections, was by all accounts a model employee for the 25 years she worked at the facility, until last month.

Description of Casey White: “a hulking 6-foot-9 inmate decorated with white supremacist tattoos, was serving 75 years for a 2015 "crime spree" that included, but was not limited to, a home invasion, carjacking, killing a dog, and attempting to kill an ex-girlfriend. In September 2020, he was charged with capital murder over the "brutal" stabbing of a 58-year-old woman, the U.S. Marshals Service said. Shortly after the indictment, he had been moved to the Lauderdale County jail to await trial for the woman's murder. During his pre-sentencing proceedings in 2015, Casey White allegedly threatened to kill the ex-girlfriend, as well as his sister, if he ever escaped from jail.”

Other inmates reported he was getting some special privileges from her like extra food.
It’s crazy she kept this secret so well hidden from her coworkers and family all that time. After all those years in law enforcement, Vicky was bamboozled by such a disgusting criminal, ruining her reputation and costing her her life. Leaves me shaking my head.

Compassion is not religious business, it is human business; it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability; it is essential for human survival. The Dalai Lama

There was a Showtime mini series Escape at Dannemora that starred Partricia Arquette, Paul Dano, and Benicio Del Toro that was based on a true story. She worked at a prison in upstate NY. Was involved with two prisoners and escaped with both.

Been following the election in the Philippines. Looks like aMarcos family member was elected as president. Interesting that the people have forgotten how the Marcos family stole billions from their country.

May 9, 2022

Weeks of speculation that Russian president Vladimir Putin would use the May 9 Victory Day celebration to announce he was escalating his war on Ukraine were incorrect. The celebration went off—subdued this year—and Putin delivered a speech, but it simply covered his usual topics. During the day, hackers broke into Russian televisions with the message: "The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands…. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war."

Instead, the powerful speech of the occasion came from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, filmed outside walking down Khreshchatyk Street, the main street in Kyiv, where normally there would be a Victory Day parade. Zelensky claimed Ukrainian ownership of victory against the Nazis in World War II, then turned to the story of the present.

Ukrainians are fighting, he said, "[f]or our freedom. For our independence. So that the victory of our ancestors was not in vain. They fought for freedom for us and won. We are fighting for freedom for our children, and therefore we will win…. And very soon there will be two Victory Days in Ukraine. And someone will not even have one left. We won then, we will win now, too! And Khreshchatyk [Street] will see the parade of victory—the victory of Ukraine."

At home, a big story broke over the weekend, reminding us that the ties of the Republican Party to Russians and the effect of those ties on Ukraine reach back not just to former president Trump, but at least to the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain.

Late Saturday night, political strategist Steve Schmidt, who worked on a number of Republican political campaigns including McCain's when he ran for president in 2008, began to spill what he knows about that 2008 campaign. Initially, this accounting took the form of Twitter threads, but on Sunday, Schmidt put the highlights into a post on a Substack publication called The Warning. The post's title distinguished the author from those journalists and members of the Trump administration who held back key information about the dangerous behavior in Trump's White House in order to include it in their books. The post was titled: "No Books. No Money. Just the Truth."

Schmidt left the Republican Party in 2018, tweeting that by then it was "fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. With the exception of a few governors…it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party's greatest leaders.... Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values." Schmidt helped to start The Lincoln Project, designed to sink Trump Republicans through attack ads and fundraising, in late 2019.

The apparent trigger for Schmidt's accounting was goading from McCain's daughter Meghan McCain, a sometime media personality who, after years of slighting Schmidt, recently called him a pedophile, which seems to have been a reference to the fact that a colleague with whom Schmidt started The Lincoln Project was accused of online sexual harassment of men and boys. Schmidt resigned over the scandal.

Schmidt was fiercely loyal to Senator McCain and had stayed silent for years over accusations that he was the person who had chosen then–Alaska governor Sarah Palin as McCain's vice presidential candidate, lending legitimacy to her brand of uninformed fire-breathing radicalism, and about his knowledge of McCain's alleged affair with a lobbyist.

In his tweetstorm, Schmidt set the record straight, attributing the choice of Palin to McCain's campaign director and McCain himself, and acknowledging that the New York Times had been correct in the reporting of McCain's relationship with the lobbyist, despite the campaign's angry denial.

More, though, Schmidt's point was to warn Americans that the mythmaking that turns ordinary people into political heroes makes us unwilling to face reality about their behavior and, crucially, makes the media unwilling to tell us the truth about it. As journalist Sarah Jones wrote in PoliticusUSA, Schmidt's "broader point is how we, as Americans, don't like to be told the truth and how our media so loves mythology that they work to deliver lies to us instead of holding the powerful accountable."

Schmidt's biggest reminder, though, was that the director of the 2008 McCain campaign was Richard (Rick) Davis, a founding partner of Davis Manafort, the political consulting firm formed in 1996. By 2003, the men were representing pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Yanukovych; in July 2004, U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow for exposing Russian government corruption; and in June 2005, Manafort proposed that he would work for Putin's government in former Soviet republics, Europe, and the United States by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage.

From 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of "mobsters and oligarchs" look legitimate. In 2016, Manafort went on to lead Donald Trump's campaign, and the ties between him, the campaign, and Russia are well known. Less well known is that in 2008, Manafort's partner Rick Davis ran Republican candidate John McCain's presidential campaign.

Schmidt writes that McCain turned a blind eye to the dealings of Davis and Manafort, apparently because he was distracted by the fallout when the story of his personal life hit the newspapers. Davis and Manafort were making millions by advancing Putin's interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe, working for Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Schmidt notes that "McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian yacht at anchor in Montenegro."

"There were two factions in the campaign," Schmidt tweeted, "a pro-democracy faction and…a pro Russia faction," led by Davis, who—like Manafort—had a residence in Trump Tower. It was Davis who was in charge of vetting Palin.

McCain was well known for promising to stand up to Putin, and Palin's claim that she could counter the growing power of Russia in part because "[t]hey're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska" became a long-running joke (the comment about seeing Russia from her house came from a Saturday Night Live skit).

But a terrific piece in The Nation by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in October 2008 noted: "He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain's political advisors have advanced Putin's imperial ambitions." The authors detailed Davis's work to bring the Balkan country of Montenegro under Putin's control and concluded that either McCain "was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin's interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn't care."

Trump's campaign and presidency, along with Putin's deadly assault on Ukraine, puts into a new light the fact that McCain's campaign manager was Paul Manafort's business partner all the way back in 2008.

If I didn't love your all and my exercise ladies so much, I would seriously think about throwing in the BCO towel. Pretty sad.

On a brighter note, perhaps Putin's medical problems will take him out of the picture. One can hope.....

Totally agree Ruth. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of the ladies here in person. What a blast. But this “upgrade “ is getting harder to deal with.

Don't contact the mods, Illinois or they'll find a way to get rid of your memes too! There apparently are security breaches, which along with everything else is taking forever to resolve.

I won't leave, but I feel bad because I just check a couple threads and sign back out. I'm not checking out other posts where someone might need some help or encouragement.

I agree with David Gergen, Ruth. Time for genX and the millennials to take over leadership.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the site, but feel like the Mods are taking the blame for poor decisions by BCO executives. I’m enjoying the topics I’m currently part of, but when I’ve tried to find other information, it’s impossible without getting help from the Mods. Can’t imagine being newly diagnosed trying to navigate this mess.

Not sure this will pass, but found it interesting https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Summary%20of%20Judicial%20Ethics%20and%20Anti-Corruption%20Act.pdf

I guess I will go later and check out the glitches thread. I did have the notion that getting involved with the mods might not be real beneficial for me. At least I can try and find memes for others to enjoy as long as my "posting" capabilities are left in place. It is still a mystery to me -- why me. Why I can still post them. I feel bad, but I don't feel bad -- you know.

Cardplayer, I don't actually blame the mods. I think they have been as forced as we to work with all the imperfections. So far as they are concerned, they are the nearest targets for issues and problems. I think it is easy to feel that they have inside info when they don't and likely are as perplexed by much that goes on.

I will keep hoping for a resolution while wondering just how many people didn't hold on here and how many new people may be lost thinking this is not the place for the help and comforts they are needing.