Election 2020 Open Thread: Sure, I’d Vote for A Woman, BUT…

by 10:48 pm. It has 96 Comments.

A reminder: Annie Linskey was brought up from the minors (in this case, the Boston Globe) because she wants to do to Elizabeth Warren what Amy Chozick did to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 cycle.

Every word Linskey writes should be scrutinized from that angle, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. (The Matt Viser co-credit can be ignored, as can Viser himself.)

Over the past few days, two of the leading male candidates in the Democratic presidential primary race — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — have escalated separate lines of attack as they attempt to counter the field’s most prominent woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is antagonistic and angry.

She also is an uncompromising elitist, they argue, suggesting that if she were the nominee, it would harm the party in the must-win states in the upper Midwest.

The new attacks, marking a more vigorous phase of the race, get at something far beyond her policy positions, and into one of the most fraught areas for a female candidate: Is she likable?

Pushing that argument is treacherous given that many Democrats remain upset over what they view as sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton, the party’s last nominee. Warren’s allies view the language being used against her as constructed to be particularly devastating for female candidate and beyond the policy divisions between her and her rivals.

Women’s activism — driven in part by Clinton’s loss — has fueled social and political movements, evident in the #MeToo campaign and in election results during the 2018 midterms and on Tuesday night. But it also comes as Democrats worry about turning off voters — many of them white, working class, and male — in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin….

It’s not me, but Some People Say… Thank heavens, Mike Bloomberg is about to parachute into Alabama and save us from the Mean Mommy!

Don’t just take my word — listen to Boston professional reporter, Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

… This kind of thing makes me crazy. An opponent launches a new “line of attack.” It is then described in detail, just so everybody gets the point. Then the reporters make no real value judgments as to whether the “line of attack” is a crock of beans or not—which, in this case, it plainly is.
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How To Start A Revolution

by 10:44 pm. It has 69 Comments.

Remember Lauren Duca? A decade ago in Trump years (2016), she wrote a viral Teen Vogue article, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”

Over a million people read the essay in under 24 hours (and one of them was Dan Rather, who shared the essay on Facebook that afternoon). As a friend put it at the time, “It’s like you decided to write about politics, and a hole opened in the center of the Earth.”

Her first post to Pancake Brains is heartwrenching. I honestly don’t know how she’s still standing, but I’m grateful she is and is still reminding us our democracy is at risk. As you can guess, she’s targeting empowering young people to stand up and take back their country and change the world.

How To Start A Revolution by Lauren Duca

Teen Vogue award-winning columnist Lauren Duca shares a smart and funny guide for challenging the status quo in a much-needed reminder that young people are the ones who will change the world.

In other news, enough tricksters stopped by that I am out of candy, but mostly because I encouraged a group of middle school boys to stop back by before they headed home and be rewarded with my leftovers as the clock struck 8. They were also rewarded with a Bixby and Scout visit. I had to work tonight while juggling Halloween, so they had to hang out in the back of the house because I could not also juggle them. I released the hounds just in time for the one last group of costumed revelers.

Open thread

 





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Holy Toledo

by 11:05 am. It has 428 Comments.

This is just…well, watch for yourselves if you didn’t see it live:

Trump uttered the words “white supremacy” under duress in the speech, snorting, eyes darting around like a hostage forced to read a sentence denouncing his comrades for a propaganda video. That’s what the media will almost certainly focus on, that Trump acknowledged that “white supremacy” is bad.

Most won’t bother to put it in context, i.e., to point out that the acknowledgement of the obvious was made necessary because one of Trump’s deranged followers murdered innocent men, women and children after parroting Trump’s own xenophobic demagoguery as his motive. Here’s a hot take from the non-Fox News media:

The fucking fuck? No, he did not “set a different tone,” you feckless fail muppets! Trump read an error-laden compilation of shitty platitudes designed to deflect blame from himself and shield gun owners and manufacturers from any consequences. And he did it poorly. Any pundit uttering or implying a “pivot” should be kicked in the junk repeatedly (metaphorically).

Meanwhile, back in Toledo:

Fellow citizens, we either kick the Republicans out of power at every level, or their insanity will engulf this country completely. We’re more than half way there right now. It really is as simple as that.





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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Good Take / Really, Really Bad Take

by 2:59 am. It has 24 Comments.

***********
Surely not even the most hardcore Talibangelicals could defend a serial child trafficker, you would would think.

Not so!, says Erick ‘Studying to Be A Pastor’ Erickson…

Hey, when you look at it right, *anything* can be an opportunity…


This is a Great Line and Also True

by 1:33 pm. It has 97 Comments.

I love this:

I don’t know if the GOP will recover from the wave of activism from women they have unleashed. I know we still have a lot of work with older white women, but I gotta tell you, all the women I know are MOTIVATED AS FUCK to beat Trump and Republicans from now until forever.

Anecdotally, I have signed up to be a County Captain for the WVCantWait campaign to elect Stephen Smith. Governor. I have spent the last week getting acquainted with the other volunteers across the state, reading and interacting on the FB page, reading the literature, etc. At any rate, EVERY SINGLE VOLUNTEER I have interacted with is a woman. And they are all motivated and ready to kick ass, and committed and passionate and helpful. I know that it is probably inevitable that I will be a county captain for six months before I am replaced by a woman who would do a better job than me. It’s kind of awesome, actually- women and teachers are going to drag this god damned state and country into the future and I wouldn’t want to get in their way.





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