Vee

My ex, a doctor in NYC who's been working in the COVID/trauma ward for the bulk of the pandemic, has it. He's slightly older than me and has preexisting conditions. I'm just hoping for the best. It's nowhere near what others have lost or suffered, but I do worry about him.

Why Locher insists on protecting bad soaps and their incompetent TPTB when they're long gone is beyond me, and it grates when you see him trying to shut down the actors.

Having exhausted all other options, Chuck will now move on to Democrats.

The concession speech:

Trump slips and gives the first indication of another administration coming in as he rambles on about taking credit for the vaccine he had nothing to do with. Lester Holt cuts in and interrupts him.

Toldja:

Oh lord. That'll be a barn burner. I wonder if they'll keep mistaking Paul Rauch for Linda Gottlieb like they did in Jeff Giles' oral history, where they credited Rauch for their amazing work together. He'd been fired by the time they were paired, IIRC.

You know I'm not interested in putting you on ignore. But I don't think it's too much to ask that we acknowledge the victory we have. There are a lot of people who've worked very hard and will still have to work hard, but who accomplished a pretty impressive victory despite everything we've all been through and are still going through, and that gives us a path to a much better future than the alternative. That all counts for a lot. If we'd lost to Trump then I'd have a lot more time for statements like 'the country is dead.' No, the country just proved it isn't. And it doesn't mean we're sweeping the real future challenges and heartaches under the rug to acknowledge that and have some hope for tomorrow.

Obama states what we all already knew:

Non-positive thoughts are one thing. God knows we've all been enduring them for years. But I'm sorry, saying this country is 'all but dead' when we just won an election pretty handily in spite of the racist, ignorant segment of the country that has always been with us - it didn't just spring up in the last week, or the last four years, so what they're doing now is no surprise - is just not accurate. The country just showed us the exact opposite of that statement. Our country actually has a verifiable future path now. I am able to white-knuckle through my hours, days, weeks and months a few less than I could five days ago. We have an incoming administration that can act on things in a positive way despite limitations (as Biden's new climate plan indicates, among other things) and that counts for a great deal. You know I care about you Carl, but I am not the first person here to call you recently on this sort of stuff. It's one thing to struggle with what we live with. It's another to give into despair in the face of reality. We won and I'm not here to pretend we lost and give up. We have too much work to do.

This is neither accurate nor what any of us need to hear after winning an election with a commanding result.