Here you go:
.@staceyabrams gives Dem response #SOTUResponse to #SOTU tonight. Her first time on C-SPAN? Over a quarter century ago. August 28, 1993. Addressing 30th anniversary March on Washington. She was a junior at @SpelmanCollege … Introduced by Lane Kirkland, then president @AFLCIO pic.twitter.com/xCgpLzSPr6
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) February 5, 2019
Open thread!
Adam L Silverman
I’m going to bed.
Mary G
The Hill has a write up in English of Xavier Becerra’s Spanish SOTU response:
jl
Thought Abrams gave a very good response, much better than anything I have seen before. Some of the content was great, said just the right things and hit the right notes.
Not watching the SOTU, I’ll look through a transcript. But checking out the lowlights on Josh Marshall’s twitter. Good to see Pelosi doing something useful with her time while Trump blathered and lied away! Also, I gotta go barricade myself against all those illegal caravans in trucks and trains and planes and automobiles that the dastardly Mexican government is sending into the US. I don’t know whether or not the looks on the central casting generals’ faces when Trump talked about that and sending more troops the border were ‘Is that lying idiot really saying that shit?’ or not. But, could have been.
Edit: or maybe the looks were “This dumb shithead is going to issue me a damn straight out illegal order one of these days, isn’t he?’
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Mary G
Video of Xavier Becerra’s response on Univision. He did it from a high school library in Sacramento flanked by the flags of America and California. One of the better backgrounds, with the state flag in the role of troll. He’s stiff, but pretty forceful.
Per Vox:
jl
What was eating McConnell? Whitiker looked charged up. McConnell looked kinda sad… heartbroken.. worried man not singing a worried song but looking like he wanted to.
Mnemosyne
Stacey Abrams was probably the single person I did the most work for last year, and I am still deeply disappointed that her opponent was allowed to cheat his way to “victory.” She is the real deal.
I saw her speech with the sound off and the closed captioning on, and in my completely biased opinion, she 100 percent nailed the optics. She managed to look warm and friendly while attacking the Republicans and having an audience behind her to bring energy into the room was a stroke of genius. Usually the responses are in an empty room straight to the camera, and it almost always comes across as stiff (it sounds like that’s exactly the problem Bercerra had).
Abrams is a very smart politician, and I look forward to being able to vote for her at the national level someday because, unlike her, I am not kind and generous enough to be a liberal in a red state.
cain
Stacy was a very forceful woman even in 1993. She spoke very well I thought.
Mary G
Excellent compilation of reaction shots:
Nancy and her papers are still my favorite, though Kamala comes close.
Mary G
And this drunk old biddy can have all the seats:
Whoops. Had to fix.
Mary G
They’ll have fixed this by morning:
jl
@Mary G: Well, I’ve seen enough pix and clips on Marshall’s twitter to know that is BS. But who am I going to believe, a reactionary old hack for my lying eyes? Conundrum.
sukabi
@jl: maybe he’s been informed of his impending indictment.
TaMara (HFG)
@Mary G: Embed for you and then I’m off ot bed, too.
TaMara (HFG)
And still my favorite moment:
HumboldtBlue
Many of you may not be familiar with John Barnes.
He’s a former football player for Liverpool Football Club and was arguably the club’s, the league’s, England’s and Europe’s best wing player in the mid-to-late 80s.
He’s a man intimately familiar with abject open racism on the sports field, (the picture shows him as he backheels a banana peel away from the corner flag before he takes a kick, the tossed banana peel a racist trope still used in Europe today to insult black men as mere monkeys) and a man who has been a steady voice of reason when it comes to social and racial matters.
There was a kerfuffle recently after a Scottish PM called Winston Churchill a white supremacist and mass murderer, terms taken with great umbrage by the Tories.
Liam Neeson has been brought under the microscope for some comments he made recently about wanting revenge against a black man and Barnes took Neeson’s side today in the way John Barnes always does.
He showed no reverence for the dead white supremacist, instead, he supported a man who took the time to think about what he had said and addressed it honestly.
Honestly and openly.
jl
@TaMara (HFG): Thanks. That was a spectacle both hilarious and disgusting, to quote one my favorite Founders sayings.
Just want to note that Kamala Harris’s wonderful grimace was in response to some snarky comment by Sherrod Brown in her ear, not directly to something Trump said. I hope I can soon read what the Dems were saying to each other during the speech.
Jay
AOC replies:
Why should I be “spirited and warm” for this embarrassment of a #SOTU?
Tonight was an unsettling night for our country. The president failed to offer any plan, any vision at all, for our future.
We’re flying without a pilot. And I‘m not here to comfort anyone about that fact.
Quote Tweet
Peggy Noonan
@Peggynoonannyc
And good natured with the white jackets, who I see some on twitter are calling the straight jackets. AOC had a rare bad night, looking not spirited, warm and original as usual but sullen, teenaged and at a loss. 2.
BTdubs, the brooch that AOC was continually looking at was of Jacklin Caal, the Guatemalan girl who was murdered with gross indifference in the custody of the CBP.
Jay
https://mobile.twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1093002613652684807
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Jay:
“Hey, I didn’t get a harumph outta that guy!”
“Give the Prezzinit a har-RUMPH!”
“Harumph! Harumph!”
American carnage, brought to you by its No. 1 proponent, in all its squalid turpitude.
Amir Khalid
@HumboldtBlue:
You had to be a strong man on the inside to do what John Barnes did in football, at a time when players of colour were a rarity. Great to see him still fighting the good fight.
hervevillechaizelounge
@Jay:
Why isn’t Peggy Noonan bitching about the male reps who lacked sufficient spirit and warmth?
The only “spirit” that hag can readily recognize comes in a 100-proof bottle.
Confession: I’d pay cash money to watch AOC beat her to death with a space heater—warm enough for you yet, Peggy Noonan?
poleaxedbyboatwork
Only saw clips of the noxious campaign rally, but was struck by how eager (even now!) the entire GOP caucus was to bark and dance like trained seals at every stinking herring Trump callously pitched to them like paper towels to the Puerto Rican people.
Even if one grants that Trump is a hostage to his base, that don’t mean they gotta follow. But they are. Enthusiastically. Rapturously. Good Germanly.
Given Trump’s obvious legal and political exposure, it suggests that many, if not most (if not all) in the GOP caucus are compromised and enmeshed and — worst of all — invested in Trump’s net of criminality and deceit.
One of the great many reasons why it’s vital for Dems to get their oversight on toot-fucking-suite is it will allow squishy media folks to (finally) say out loud what everyone who’s paid the least particle of attention already knows — the president of these United States is a criminal law-breaker who is unfit to serve. For manifold reasons, the Russan connex being but one.
In the Watergate era, the oversight committees ran *concurrently* with the special prosecutor’s investigations, and they served the purpose of educating a timid and unbelieving electorate. Am decidedly of the opinion that waiting on Mueller (who FSM knows when he’ll fucking finish) is a tactical and strategic error of the gravest order.
Let Mueller do Mueller, fine. He’s the lever for prosecution in the legal sense. But I’d like to see another fulcrum point applied in this mess that ain’t dependent upon the glacial pace of the criminal justice system. (To say nothing of th fact that the Mueller report may or may not ultimately getta fair hearing, being an adjunct of and subordinate to the Trump administration being investigated.)
If it can be credibly established that the Trump administration is shot-through with corruption, venality and rank criminality (and it can), this will reinforce the Mueller investigation, and it will go a long way toward pulling back the curtain on this roiling rolling travesty. It will do the honorable and necessary work of documenting the atrocities and helping those who are willing to have the scales fall from their eyes.
And it will make it politically tenable to not feel compelled to say, as Stacey Abrams did tonight (in the only low point of her address, imo) that “I still don’t want the president to fail”.
Well, I do want him to fail. Because he never learns Because he only gives a shit about 40 percent of the country. And because he’s not just a unrelentingly horrible person, he’s an unindicted criminal. The very fact that anyone feels compelled to say, out loud, that they don’t want Donald Trump to fail is a stark reminder of just how far we still have to go in achieving a national consensus.
imo
rikyrah
I love Ms. Abrams???
poleaxedbyboatwork
@rikyrah:
Me too. She’s great. No disagreement.
Not saying I don’t understand, politically, why she said “I still don’t want the president to fail.” Am saying Ms. Abrams feeling she should (or needs to) say this is a testament of how far we still have to go in making the case and achieving a national consensus that Trump is a menace and needs to be removed from office. (Along with Pence, so that President Pelosi can pick a suitable VP, of course.)