June 5, 2015

The Westboro Baptist shit-souls claim they'll protest Beau Biden's funeral

Hm.

"Hi, we're the Westboro Baptist Church!"

"Hi, we're the Secret Service!"

CRUSH ANNIHILATE DESTROY SHOOT REPEATEDLY STOMP AND CRUSH

"Well, that settles that."

One can dream.

June 5, 2015

Here's the bare fact: *I* should have been banned well before NYC_Skip.

This is not meant as a call-out to the admins, or to anyone at all actually. I'm calling myself out, truth be told.

I posted a thread calling the president a POS used car salesman !!!here!!! because I lost my temper with the only insurance company the ACA allowed me to access in NH, and was stupid enough to take it out on my keyboard. I had my reasons, and it was because my wife with MS and my baby daughter were being put in peril by a gruesomely selfish and greedy insurance bureaucracy the ACA handed us to as our only choice in this state...but I'm not getting into it again, and if you want to, you'll be talking to yourself and not me.

The point: We've all said some rotten shit on this board over the years. Some of us (me!) have said shit that would hyperactivate a statue. It's amazing they still let me in the door...but they do, and that's my ultimate purpose with this post. Skip wasn't just a member here. He gave service to the organization as a Mod back in the Mod days on DU2. He was a hard-boiled contributor, and if his contributions made me want to beat him with a length of lead pipe - aaaaand they did on many times many occasions - well, that's the price of admission.

He fucked up big time, and no mistake. That was a shit stupid ugly thing to post. He got lost in the forest of the argument and ran smack into a tree...and I know I know I know he pissed off and offended a lot of people whose opinions I deeply respect...but if my opinion carries any degree of respect in this demented joint, here it is: Give the cat a break. I cannot honestly say I like him very much - we've had our share of round-and-rounds, and they have seldom been pleasant - and I don't at all respect everything he has to say by any means.

That goes for quite a lot of you assholes, as it turns out.

He has put in the work with this joint. Like it or lump it, he's part of the DNA.

He fucked up badly. Allow him a chance to apologize, and open the batwings for him again. I was given that chance once. So should he.

One man's opinion.

-- WilliamPitt
DU Member since May 21 2001

June 2, 2015

I didn't know this Group existed until about 90 seconds ago.

This is a completely useless fuzz-post.

But anyway, hi! It's a privilege to be here.

Go Bernie. Go go go.

June 1, 2015

The Loved and the Lost: A Note to the Biden Family

Joseph R. "Beau" Biden III, then attorney general of Delaware, addresses the Democratic National
Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 6, 2012. Biden, the eldest son of Vice President
Joseph R. Biden Jr., died of brain cancer, his father announced on Saturday, May 30, 2015.
(Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)

The Loved and the Lost: A Note to the Biden Family
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Monday 01 June 2015

Like an old Irish blessing, the rain is falling softly upon the field that is my back yard. It is, along with the forest beyond, a verdant riot of green, so lush that it seems it would paint your hand if you brushed it. The flowers have come back, as have the birds, all blues and yellows and reds and song. The garden is bursting. After the grinding astonishment of white and cold that was winter, this detonation of life is like a long embrace from an old, dear friend.

As I write this, my daughter sleeps in her room. The soft susurration of the rain is God's own lullaby, and by God, it works. All of her tumbling two-year-old energy melts away like butter in a saucepan when that sound drifts through her springtime-open window, and she sleeps the sleep of the righteous. When I checked on her a bit ago, she was curled on her side, head on her pillow, her Pooh Bear clutched close in a deep embrace, with her ever-growing strawberry-blonde hair cascading across an untroubled brow.

To say that I love her is to say the rain outside is wet. That is simply too simple. I adore her in the Latin sense of the word, "adorare." I worship her. She is my lodestar, the axis of my universe. She is my heart. I am because she is. Before she was born, I was very quietly terrified of my impending fatherhood, terrified of the caliber of my unknown abilities as a father. After she arrived, I discovered to my delight that I was actually good at it, and she has become my best friend. When I walk through her playroom to my office, she asks, "Daddy work?" I reply, "Yes," she runs to join me yelling "Yay!" and climbs into my lap, and we write together while listening to "The Last Waltz," her current favorite.

She is my heart, my very heart, and if I lost her I would be obliterated utterly ... and so my mind and my soul are bent today toward the hearts of Vice President Joe Biden and his family. Mr. Biden is required now to bury a beloved son after already having buried his wife Neilia and his one-year-old daughter Naomi, who were killed in a collision with a tractor-trailer truck just before Christmas in 1972. No parent should have to bury a child. Mr. Biden has lost two - one who never had a chance to grow up, and another in the full flower of his life - along with his wife. It is like some nightmare koan: the mind reels, and stops, and all is only sorrow in aftermath.

It is an old story all too often repeated: the children of the powerful wind up being terrible people. Beau Biden, who succumbed to brain cancer on Saturday at age 46, was a notable and underscored exception to that rule. He served as state Attorney General of Delaware, served in the Delaware Army National Guard's Judge Advocate General Corps, and did a tour in Iraq. In 2008, he introduced his father to the convention in a speech that knocked paint off the walls. He was widely considered to be the front-runner in the Delaware governor's race in 2016 before that wretched disease laid him low. He fought the cancer for two years, and his father's family grave plot has become crowded once again.

(snip)

In the end, and from one husband and father to another, the best I can do is share the words of another public servant named Abraham Lincoln: "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming ... I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost."

Godspeed, sir. I am so very sorry.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31085-the-loved-and-the-lost-a-note-to-the-biden-family