Kim

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

DISGUSTING! NOW IN MAINE:

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign featured Amy Acton’s estranged mother in an attack ad.

Now a Republican super PAC backing Susan Collins is targeting Troy Jackson’s family. Jackson’s partner of nearly 40 years, Lana Pelletier, has a message for Collins:

"When Troy first talked to me about running for the U.S. Senate, we started with what it would mean for our family. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. We knew the race could get ugly. But I never imagined U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and her allies would stoop this low. As a social worker and therapist, I’ve mostly stayed out of the public eye. My work is private, and I want the people I work with to know the focus is on them — not my politics or my partner’s career.

But over the last few months, people who do not know me have increasingly tried to tell the public who I am, what my relationship has been and what kind of family Troy and I have built together.

Collins has brought our family into this campaign herself. She has ridiculed us publicly, invoked my children in debates and treated deeply personal parts of our lives as fair game for political attack. I know Troy. We’ve been together for nearly 40 years. He is my partner, the father of our children and now a grandfather to our beautiful newborn granddaughter. I also know myself. I am not the person Collins and her allies seem determined to turn me into.

I am not a helpless woman who needs politicians to tell the world what happened in my own life. And I am not a punchline or a caricature of where I come from.

I’ve spent my career helping people navigate some of the hardest moments of their lives. That work has taught me to take allegations involving violence and abuse seriously — and how much care is required when we talk about it. That is part of what makes what is happening now so upsetting.

Earlier this year, a police report from nearly four decades ago became part of this campaign.

There was a fight between Troy and another young man when Troy was 19 years old. He took accountability for that and has never hidden it. The report included statements attributed to me that I’ve already said I don’t remember making and that are not accurate. I’m now forced to say it again because Susan Collins and her allies are using my family to tell a story that simply isn’t true.

I’ve spent nearly four decades with Troy since then. I know the life we have actually lived, the family we have raised and the person Troy has been through the years as a caring partner and father.

Our children have been dragged into this campaign. Our relationship has been mocked. Our family has been talked about as though there is something shameful about who we are or where we come from. There isn’t. I’m proud of our children. I’m proud of the life Troy and I have built together. I’m proud of how Troy continues to evolve and grow as a leader and advocate.

And I deeply resent watching Collins and her allies treat our lives as something beneath them — especially when serious issues involving women are manipulated into political weapons by people who show so little care for the women involved. If Collins truly cared about my voice, she could have listened to it. Instead, they’ve decided they know my life better than I do. They do not.

This is not the first time Collins has asked women to trust her while ignoring what they were telling her.

She voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme, who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and still says she does not regret it. Women warned her what was at stake. She did not listen to them either. I was not pushing Troy to run. But I understood that if people were hurting and he could help, it was bigger than any one of us.

When Troy sees somebody without much power being treated unfairly, he feels it deeply. And he has spent much of his life trying to do something about it.

There are families across Maine struggling to afford healthcare, heating oil and groceries. Their lives matter more than the ugliness of a political campaign. Those are the people Troy is running for.

I don’t expect everyone in Maine to agree with Troy. Ask him hard questions. Challenge his record. Disagree with him. But there should still be a line. Collins has been quick to demand respect and decency for herself. My family deserved the same.

I stayed quiet because I never wanted this election to be about me. Collins and her allies made a different choice. So if my name, my relationship and my family are going to be used to tell a story that isn’t true, Mainers deserve to hear from the person who actually lived that story.I know my own life. I know my family And after nearly 40 years with Troy, I know who he is, too."

[Aine Branagh @AineBranagh]

Because this ugly chud failed to do his job, this woman has to try this brutal, heinous crime in civil court. I hope she bankrupts Cornell. And I hope this asshole loses his job and career.

[Kim @kimutt629]

@lady_valor_07 Yes 👋

[Kim @kimutt629]

@GrowingUpRetro Me too! It’s the polite thing to do 🤗

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Kim @kimutt629]

Exactly!

[🦢 @damnidc__]

The fact that guys are getting angry about Uber giving women the option for women-only drivers is exactly why women need that option.

[Kim @kimutt629]

Way to go, Boston!

[Caro @CAHOLAB]

@DarrigoMelanie

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Lawrence O’Donnell: “We are now covering the physical decline and fall of Donald Trump. He’s aging terribly for a President. Donald Trump at his best age would have been the stupidest and most incompetent President in history, and the most corrupt.”

[Brian Cardone 🏴‍☠️ 🇺🇦 @cardon_brian]

🚨HOLY SHIT!🔥🔥Well that’s a wrap, this guy will never be invited onto a cable news show again, but damn if he didn’t tell the truth about income inequality in the US. Bravo sir!! You’re going to want to watch this!�

[President Biden Archived @POTUS46Archive]

Today, America and the world lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian.

[Chrissi Nielsen @NielsenChrissi]

Thanks Trump is trending...

President Joe Biden is the one who achieved peace in the Middle East

He got this ceasefire done between Hezbollah and Israel

He achieved this on
Thanksgiving week

Thank you Biden for your hard work

#TrumpIsUnfitForOffice

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

I just wanted to say thank you @KamalaHarris. You ran a wonderful campaign. A hell of a campaign. You appealed to our better angels. You had only 107 days to give it your all. And you did. Thank you for stepping up and trying to bring this country together. You did really well.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

🚨NEW: GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski has announced she will not vote to confirm a single Trump Administration appointment until they are fully vetted by the FBI.

RETWEET to thank Murkowski for standing up for our democracy!

[Karly Kingsley @karlykingsley]

This bothers me the most

[Kim @kimutt629]

@TheOnlyEsta Absolutely!

[Andrea C. Love, PhD @dr_andrealove]

The US has 15 vaccines for kids <18:

MMR
DTaP
Pneumococcal
Rotavirus
Varicella
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis A
Polio
Haemophilus influenzae B
Meningococcal
Human Papillomavirus
Influenza
COVID-19
RSV

NOT 72.
Not 72 DOSES from birth to age 18 (it’s ~35)
Stop letting people lie.

[Kim @kimutt629]

@scottjames 🤣🤣

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

A twice impeached, convicted felon, business fraud, racist, rapist, traitor who bragged about sexual assault is currently rewarding the worst people on the planet with extremely powerful positions of incredible consequence… because eggs were too expensive.