#maybe it's because the cnn trump town hall has had me thinking about this a lot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fahrni · 1 year

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Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning!

I hope everyone is having a splendid morning. I began composing this post while my coffee was brewing. My cup is now in hand. That means the old noggin will wake up so I can finish. ☕️

Waxy

This morning, I was shaken to learn Heather B. Hamilton (formerly Heather Armstrong) aka Dooce is no longer with us. I learned the news from a post to her Instagram, confirmed by several friends after and then the Associated Press, announcing the tragic news that she died yesterday at the age of 47.

I think this caught most of us off guard. Dooce was one of the folks I followed in my early blogging days and was very influential to blogs in general. She wasn’t just a Mommy blogger.

RIP Heather. 🧡

Vox

Donald Trump has just been found liable for sexual battery against journalist E. Jean Carroll.

Good for E. Jean Carroll. I’m glad she made a large withdrawal from the bank of Trump. The man clearly doesn’t respect women, he doesn’t respect anything, except maybe Putin.

I hope more women come forward for their day in court now. This man deserves to be shamed at every turn so normal people see what a disgusting human being he is.

Cars are so darned expensive. I have no idea how anyone can afford a new one. Kim and I have purchased one new car in our 35 year marriage and she took it back a week later because she didn’t like it. The car was $15,000.00 out the door.

Good thing she took it back. It was a Saturn. 😆

WPE WebKit Blog

In the previous post in this series, we explained that WPE is a WebKit port optimized for embedded devices. In this post, we’ll dive into a more technical overview of the different components of WPE, WebKit, and how they all fit together.

I’m a sucker for articles about porting software and making it run on many platforms. This piece is a 30,000 foot view of WPE and a short read if you like this kind of stuff. Plus it has a nice little diagram. Always a plus in my book. 🖼️

Jezebel

A Texas man, 22, was arrested on Wednesday evening for fatally shooting his 26-year-old girlfriend for traveling to Colorado to get an abortion, the Dallas Morning News reported on Friday.

Texas is full of absolutely insane people packing guns on their hip.

Look, a woman’s body is hers and hers alone. Sure you could ask, even beg, her not to get an abortion if you’re the father of the child but ultimately it’s her body, her choice.

Your choice is to stay and support her decision or walk away.

This man chose to take her life and destroy his. Poor choice dude.

Republican politicians love to say we have a mental health crisis that causes these senseless crimes. Why is Texas so full of mentally unstable people with guns? Texas needs better leadership or we should boot it out of our Union. 🤬

Ned Batchelder

At work, we work in GitHub pull requests that get merged to the main branch. We also have twice-yearly community release branches, and a small fraction of the main-branch changes need to be copied onto the current release branch.

It’s surprising how powerful git is. Ned has put together a great little guide for how one might cherry pick their commits.

There are so many ways to manage code changes and branches. This is one of many and worth your time to read if you’re a developer of software.

Oh, and it has beautiful diagrams to illustrate what he’s talking about. 👨‍🍳💋

Rolling Stone

CNN Is Hosting a Town Hall for a Guy Who Tried to Get Me Killed

This piece is by Officer Michael Fanone. Mr. Fanone was one of the Capitol Police Officers tasked with protecting the Capitol on January 6th and had a front row view of the violence of that day.

He’s right, CNN shouldn’t provide a stage for a domestic terrorist. TFG should be tossed in prison and disqualified from holding public office, but no, we’re gonna let him run for President again know full well he’ll destroy our democracy if he wins.

Officer Fanone is lucky to be alive. 🍀

Pixelfed is the Fediverse version of Instagram. Like Mastodon it doesn’t have a corporate master and anyone can host their own server.

I’m not sure why Instagram would see it as a threat, but here we are. 😂

The Next Web

The UK bank analysed its internal customer fraud data between 2021 and 2022. It found that the Meta-owned sites and apps account for a whopping 80% of all scam cases within its three biggest fraud categories: purchase, impersonation, and investment fraud.

I have a feeling Mark Zuckerberg was thrilled when Space Karen took over Twitter because it’s been such a mess nobody is talking about how terrible Facebook is.

crnković

How I accidentally breached a nonexistent database and found every private key in a ‘state-of-the-art’ encrypted messenger.

Buyer beware. Companies can make claims about how awesome their technology is and it could be janky. This is a prime example. It looks like the company is lying to hide their flaws or maybe they don’t know what they’re doing?

WBOI

Students at Carroll High School announced last week they would be putting on an independent production of the play canceled by administration earlier this year.

These kids had their school play shut down because it included a non-binary character and a gay couple.

This is the world we live in and we can choose to love people for who they are, not shame them.

This will, of course, go down in history as a head scratcher in future generations. They’ll wonder why we were so stupid to be so afraid.

Apple Press Release

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today unveiled Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad.

I’ll be interested to know how many Audio and Video Professionals make use of these new apps. Hopefully we will see some great reviews from folks who actually do this kind of work.

I love their pricing. Yearly for $49.00 US or $4.99 per month US. It’s great because you can subscribe for a month and try it out. If it works for you great! You can subscribe for a year. If not you’ve lost $4.99. Not bad.

I’ve decided if I ever get around to writing my next app I will be using this pricing model. It should allow for constant updates throughout the year and no need to worry about batching up a bunch of big features for that big one time new version sale.

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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

More than half of the Democratic field crowded into San Francisco this past weekend for the California Democratic Convention, where they tried to stand out in the crowded primary as the clock ticks away for the candidates to qualify for the first debates.

And with less than a week for candidates to hit the threshold to make the debate stage, the Democratic National Committee announced a rule change which leaves Montana Gov. Steve Bullock on the outside looking in. Bullock had qualified for the first debates, in Miami at the end of June, based on polling, but the DNC said on Thursday that two ABC News/Washington Post polls — one of which had put Bullock over the top — would no longer be counted. As of Thursday afternoon, that left 20 candidates who had met thresholds via polling and/or fundraising.

Meanwhile, the mass shooting in Virginia Beach last week brought the issue of gun violence to the fore, and former Vice President Joe Biden seemingly set himself apart from the rest of the crowd when he said he supported the Hyde amendment, which blocks federal funding of abortions. On Thursday, however, he appeared to reverse that position.

Here’s the weekly candidate roundup:

May 31-June 6, 2019

Michael Bennet (D)

Bennet met the polling criteria to participate in the first Democratic debate scheduled to take place later this month in Miami. He garnered 1 percent in a national CNN poll on Tuesday, which is the third qualifying poll he has reached 1 percent in.

In the aftermath of the deadly mass shooting in Virginia Beach, Bennet told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” that, “I think the president can make a difference. The House of Representatives has passed background checks to close the internet loophole. This person bought the guns lawfully as we know. Every single fact pattern will be different. We should pass those background checks — 90 percent of Americans support it.”

The Colorado senator spent the weekend campaigning in South Carolina while many of his fellow 2020 rivals were at the California Democratic Convention.

Joe Biden (D)

Biden broke from the other 2020 candidate when his campaign announced that he supports the Hyde Amendment, but he would be open to repealing it. Then, on Thursday, he said that he no longer supported the policy. “I’ve been working through the final details of my health care plan like others in this race and I’ve been struggling with the problems that Hyde now presents,” he said.

The Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, three years after the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. It encoded abortion as a protected right, but stipulating that federal funding could not be used to pay for abortions. A few years later, Congress made an exemption for cases in which there was a threat to the patient’s life. An exemption for cases of rape or incest was added in the early 1990s. The law largely affects patients who are on Medicaid, meaning low-income patients have to pay for an abortion out-of-pocket. Many of the other candidates responded by calling for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment.

Biden also released a $5 trillion climate plan which calls for net zero emission of carbon pollution in the U.S. by 2050. The plan includes $1.7 trillion in federal spending over 10 years; the rest of the spending would come from the private sector.

Cory Booker (D)

The New Jersey senator unveiled a plan to make housing more affordable by offering a tax credit to people who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. According to researchers at Columbia University, the refundable renters’ credit would benefit more than 57 million people — including 17 million children — and lift 9.4 million Americans out of poverty.

Booker’s housing plan also includes measures to expand access to legal counsel for tenants facing eviction, reform restrictive zoning laws, build more affordable housing units and combat homelessness through funding grants.

At the California Democratic Convention over the weekend, Booker also addressed the issue of gun violence.

“We are seeing the normalization of mass murder in our country,” Booker said. “It is time that we come together and stand together and take the fight to the NRA and the corporate gun lobby like we have never seen before. We can lead that fight and we can win.”

Steve Bullock (D)

On Wednesday, Bullock announced the first official policy of his presidential campaign, designed to keep foreign money out of U.S. elections. His “Check the Box” proposal would require all 501(c)(4) groups that aren’t required to disclose any of their donors and Super PACs to “check a box” saying that they are not taking money from foreign actors. Lying “will carry the penalty of perjury,” according to Bullock’s policy.

In a Des Moines Register op-ed, the Montana governor wrote, “Trump’s dark money loophole is telling these secretive groups that they don’t even have to disclose the source of their funding to the IRS. It opens the door not only to significantly more spending by corporations and wealthy donors, but also to potential spending by foreign entities.”

Pete Buttigieg (D)

During a MSNBC Town Hall on Monday, Buttigieg said he “would not have applied that pressure” for Sen. Al Franken to have resigned in 2017 over sexual harassment allegations, without first learning more about the claims.

“I think it was his decision to make” the South Bend, Indiana, mayor said. “But I think the way that we basically held him to a higher standard than the GOP does their people has been used against us.”

At the California Democratic Convention, Buttigieg leaned into his position as a Washington outsider and said the country needs “something completely different.”

“Why not a middle-class millennial mayor with a track record in the industrial Midwest? Why not a mayor at a time when we need Washington to look more like our best run cities and towns, not the other way around? And why not someone who represents a new generation of leadership?” the 37-year-old mayor said.

Julian Castro (D)

The former Housing and Urban Development secretary unveiled a sweeping police reform plan Monday, aiming to prevent officer-involved shootings, increase transparency and end “police militarization.”

“Even though we have some great police officers out there, and I know that because I served as mayor of San Antonio, this is not a case of just a few bad apples,” Castro said on CNN. “The system is broken.”

Included in the proposal are restrictions on the use of deadly force, the increased adoption of technology such as body cameras, an end to stop-and-frisk tactics and expanded bias training.

Bill de Blasio (D)

De Blasio earned his first union endorsement since launching his presidential campaign. The New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council announced their support on Wednesday and even said they would campaign for the New York City mayor in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

John Delaney (D)

Delaney criticized the DNC guidelines which include a 65,000 donor threshold as one criteria to qualify for the presidential debates. He argued that the criteria leaves voters excluded from the process.

“I don’t think we should have a donor standard, I absolutely don’t think the Democratic Party should be about money. Fifty percent of the American people can’t afford basic necessities, I’m running for those people,” he said on MSNBC.

On health care, the former congressman from Maryland was aggressively booed at the California Democratic Convention for denouncing Medicare for all as “bad policy.” His proposed health care plan would keep private insurance as an option.Jeff Chiu/AP

After New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed Delaney’s health care plan over Twitter, urging the candidate to “sashay away,” Delaney responded by asking her to a debate, but Ocasio-Cortez declined.

“I think that’s too bad because I think health care is the most important issue facing the American people and she obviously has an issue with my plan, based on that she tweeted that thing at me, and I would have loved to debate it because I think these things should be a battle of ideas,” Delaney said in a phone interview with ABC News.

Tulsi Gabbard (D)

The Hawaii congresswoman reacted to the House passing the “DREAM and Promise Act” which would protect young undocumented immigrants and immigrants with temporary status who were once covered by the Obama-era DACA program. She said on Fox News, “The hyper-partisanship around this issue has gotten in the way of delivering a real solution. This legislation and finding a solution for these Dreamers is something that has had bipartisan support.”

Kirsten Gillibrand (D)

Gillibrand released a plan to legalize marijuana, which called for expunging all non-violent marijuana convictions. Gillibrand said that under her plan, tax revenue from recreational marijuana would be put “towards programs that help repair the damage done by the War on Drugs.”

The New York senator also participated in a town hall on Fox News, where she attacked the network for its coverage of abortion. Gillibrand was asked about her position on “late-term abortion” and she began her response by reiterating her stand that “when it comes to women’s reproductive freedom, it should be a woman’s decision.” She then criticized Fox News for creating “a false narrative” on the issue.

Gillibrand was cut off by moderator, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who said, “Senator, I just want to say we’ve brought you here for an hour.”

Wallace continued, “We have treated you very fairly. I understand that, maybe, to make your credentials with the Democrats who are not appearing on Fox News, you want to attack us. I’m not sure it’s frankly very polite when we’ve invited you to be here.”

Gillibrand said that she would “do it in a polite way,” but she was interrupted by Wallace again who said “instead of talking about Fox News, why don’t you answer Susan’s question?” referring to the question asked by the member of the audience.

Still, Gillibrand attacked the network for their use of the word “infanticide,” calling it “illegal” and “not a fact.” She added, “I believe all of us have a responsibility to talk about the facts.”

Kamala Harris (D)

Harris was rushed off the stage Saturday while speaking at the MoveOn #BigIdeas forum in San Francisco after an activist rushed at her and grabbed the microphone out of her hand. Harris returned to the stage, about a minute later, to chants of “Ka-ma-la” from the audience.

An animal activist group claimed responsibility for the man rushing the stage. He was identified by the group as Aidan Cook. The group’s spokesperson, Matt Johnson, told ABC News that Cook was not detained or arrested; he was simply kicked out.

John Hickenlooper (D)

The former Colorado governor has struggled to gain traction so far. He faced a disruptive crowd at the California Democratic Convention when he said, “If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the answer.”

The crowd of Democratic activists responded to his message with a chorus of boos and a massive display of waving “Bernie” signs.

Hickenlooper responded to the boos by saying, “You know, if we are not careful we are going to help re-elect the worst president in American history.”

Jay Inslee (D)

The Washington governor has been pushing hard for the DNC to dedicate one of its presidential primary debates to the topic of climate change. DNC spokeswoman, Xochitl Hinojosa, responded in a statement saying, “the DNC will not be holding entire debates on a single issue area because we want to make sure voters have the ability to hear from candidates on dozens of issues of importance to American voters.”

Inslee called the DNC’s decision to not host a climate debate “deeply disappointing.”

“The DNC is silencing the voices of Democratic activists, many of our progressive partner organizations, and nearly half of the Democratic presidential field, who want to debate the existential crisis of our time. Democratic voters say that climate change is their top issue; the Democratic National Committee must listen to the grassroots of the party,” Inslee’s campaign said in a press release.

Amy Klobuchar (D)

Klobuchar secured her first Iowa endorsement from State Rep. Ruth Ann Gaines. Gaines said she’s endorsing Klobuchar because of the senator’s “commitment to addressing and prioritizing mental health.”

Seth Moulton (D)

Moulton said in a CNN town hall that if elected, he would seek to change current Department of Justice guidelines which prevent a sitting president from being indicted. The comment came after former special counsel Robert Mueller said that a “longstanding” department policy prevents a sitting president from being charged with a federal crime.

Beto O’Rourke (D)

O’Rourke released a voting rights plan which called for term limits for members of Congress and for Supreme Court justices. O’Rourke is calling for members of the House and Senate to serve for no more than 12 years, and for justices to be capped at one 18-year term. O’Rourke said that after a justice completes their term, they would be permitted to serve on the federal courts of appeals.

The former Texas congressman’s plan also includes measures to increase voter participation, including by making Election Day a federal holiday and by allowing automatic and same-day voter registration.

Tim Ryan (D)

Ryan flipped his position on impeachment, this week, saying he believes Congress has to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. The Ohio congressman made his announcement during a CNN town hall, saying that Mueller’s statement last week made him support impeachment.

Bernie Sanders (D)

Sanders spoke at Walmart’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday, directly criticizing the company for paying its employees low wages and lobbying for a resolution that would give hourly workers representation on the company’s board of directors.

As many Democratic candidates spoke out on abortion rights this week, comments by Sanders in 1972 — prior to the Roe v. Wade decision — resurfaced via Newsweek. He told a Vermont newspaper at the time that it struck him as “incredible” that the male-dominated state legislature, and politicians in general, “think that they have the right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body.”

This weekend, Sanders visits Iowa to speak at the Capital City Pride Candidate Forum in Des Moines, he will march with McDonald’s workers who are seeking higher wages and attend the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, among several other events.

Eric Swalwell (D)

Swalwell talked about his assault weapon ban and buyback plan on ABC’s “The View.” He said that he’s the only candidate calling to “ban and buy back every single assault weapon in America.”

The California congressman also left the door open to drop out of the presidential race and run for re-election for his House seat. Swalwell said he is open to running for a fifth term in Congress, but said he wouldn’t make that decision until December.

Elizabeth Warren (D)

Warren announced on Thursday that her campaign staff has unionized.

“My campaign has submitted their support to join IBEW 2320,” Warren tweeted. Her campaign joins a growing number of others that are showing support for unions and unionizing themselves. The Sanders and Castro campaigns have also unionized and the Swalwell campaign had previously said they were unionizing.

Andrew Yang (D)

During Pride Month, Yang tied his signature universal basic income proposal to the LGBTQ community, noting in a BuzzFeed interview that he’s heard from many people who say they’ve been kicked out of housing and fired from jobs over their sexual orientation. He said it is his plan to give all American adults $1,000 per month, which could help them “adjust if they’re economically singled out.”

Yang will be among the speakers at the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids on Sunday.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Christopher Donato #Sruthi Palaniappan and Adam Ke

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go-redgirl · 4 years

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***Live Updates*** Trump Holds Minnesota Rally

President Donald Trump will hold a Friday evening rally in Bemidji, Minnesota.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for live updates.

All times Eastern.

—

8:13 PM: Trump says if Biden wins, China wins and then claims he saved the Iron Range. Trump says he is only in the White House because the O’Biden administration did “such a crappy job.”

Trump says Kamala Harris tried to “Me-Too” Biden and tried to call him a “racist.” He says Biden’s campaign appearances are “pathetic.” Trump says he has an obligation to watch Biden’s town hall events because Biden is his competition.

8:10 PM: Trump says after they saved the Jackson statue, nobody has showed up in four months because they don’t want to go to jail for 10 years. Trump says, like ISIS, they are ripping down history and destroying greatness.

8:08 PM: Trump now mocks Fox for hiring Donna Brazile. He wonders how he beat Hillary in the debates even though she had all of the questions in advance.

Trump praises the DC police. He claims they “charged” when his chief of staff said so and prevented the Andrew Jackson statue from being ripped down. He says they “beat the hell out of these guys.”

Now he’s back to talking about jailing people who take down statues for 10 years and how that stopped the rioters from targeting statutes.

8:07 PM: Trump says the only thing the “anarchists” understand is “strength.”

8:05 PM: Trump rips the agitators for “not having any idea what they are doing” and for being a “bunch of thugs” for ripping down statues of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and even Gandhi.

Trump talks up Robert E. Lee, saying the South would have won the Civil War had it not been for Gettysburg. He says there weren’t cell phones back then to tell the troops to never fight uphill.

8:00 PM: Trump says he was in DC 17 times before he became president and never slept over. He then says on his inauguration day he had everything walking down Pennsylvania Avenue–he had police, he had military, he had soldiers, so much power and strength….

He keeps reminiscing about going in the White House to live for the first time and then jabs the Clintons for leasing out the Lincoln Bedroom.

Trump says people have said the only person who got worse press than Trump was Lincoln. Trump thinks Lincoln may have gotten bad press but he has gotten the worst.

7:58 PM: Trump says “Concast” and “MSDNC” are “sick people” who don’t want to report the news. Trump says CNN is “one of the greatest jokes of all time.” Trump wonders how they are using public airwaves for free without getting licenses. Trump says they have to report the truth when using airwaves. He says Comcast spends a fortune in public relations and he ruins it by calling them “Concast.”

Trump says “we’re trying to be a terrible group of deep-state people.”

7:56 PM: Trump says today Biden delivered remarks, “barely,” to unions after spending 47 years sending their jobs overseas.

Trump now wonders if Ilhan Omar married her brother and says the writer of that story should be given the Pulitzer.

7:52 PM: Trump, obviously unaware of Ruth Ginsburg’s passing, floats nominating Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to the Supreme Court. He says he’d get 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats who want to get him out of the Senate. Trump then stresses the importance of the Supreme Court in the election.

Trump now says the enthusiasm gap in 2020 is the greatest they have ever polled.

Trump says Biden’s supporters are only excited about beating Trump, and he says historically those candidates don’t win.

Trump says Hannity says you wouldn’t want Biden to run a McDonalds stand so you can’t vote for him to run the country.

He says he ended Jeb’s career by saying he was low-energy, but Joe is “off the scale. Joe’s got nothing going.”

7:49 PM: Trump says AOC “controls Pelosi” and Pelosi would love to get rid of her. Now he’s mocking Pelosi for going to a beauty salon without a mask and getting caught.

7:46 PM: Trump going off on Russia Collusion and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Acid-washing. Getting rid of phones with hammers. Trump says Hillary claimed the emails were for yoga lessons. Trump says if they were indeed for yoga lessons, Hillary wasn’t getting her money’s worth.

Trump says think about how angry it makes him when he thinks about this because Democrats are held to a different standard. Trump still going off on Jeff Sessions for recusing himself and allowing Hillary “to get away with that.” Trump says “maybe there is something they can do.” Trump says he guarantees her emails are in the State Department and they should find them.

7:40 PM: Trump says if Biden is elected, people like Ilhan Omar, who has done “so many criminal acts,” will influence him. Trump says it’s a “damn disgrace” that Omar is able to get away with it.

Trump claims AOC spent “$2 million on bullshit” and if Republicans did that they’d be in jail.

7:38 PM: Trump says Biden doesn’t even know what “science” is and mock Biden for drawing circles on the ground because he can’t draw crowds and Biden has to save face. Trump says now they are doing roundtables with Biden because they are embarrassed by the circles.

7:37 PM: Trump says he just saw a poll that showed him down nine in Minnesota.

“I don’t think so,” Trump says. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

7:36 PM: Trump says “we’re rounding the turn on Covid” and says a vaccine is coming. Trump says this is an “amazing country” and “we’re not going to let radical left socialist/communists take over our country.”

7:35 PM: Trump rips “Democrat-run disasters” and says all that was needed was the National Guard to come in and stop the rioting. Trump says if they have any more flare ups, they’ll send them in again.

7:31 PM: Trump talks about Ali Velishi saying the protesters were peaceful while a city was burning behind him wonders if he should shave his head like Velishi. Crowd says “no” and Trump says he would go down 21 points in the polls if he shaved his head.

7:29 PM: Trump talks about rioters rampaging across Minnesota and says the good police officers are “not allowed to do their job.” Trump says they were told to leave the precinct and the “rioters” knocked the place down.

Trump this would have never happened under New York Mayors Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani.

7:28 PM: Trump says he was motivated to get Big Ten football back after Biden ran a commercial blaming him for football not starting on time.

7:27 PM: Trump says he is “your wall between the American Dream and chaos.”

“I’m your wall,” Trump says.

Trump says he once asked a Senator who is the dumbest Senator and the Senator answered “Joe Biden.” Trump says this was 25 years ago.

7:25 PM: Trump says “Sleepy Joe” will turn Minnesota into a “refugee camp” and overwhelm your childrens’ schools, overcrowd their schools, and inundate their hospitals. Trump also says Biden will get rid of the jihadist travel ban and open the floodgates to terrorists.

Trump says his administration deported numerous illegal alien Somalies today and “your children are much safer as a result. Thank you President Trump.”

7:22 PM: Trump tells Minnesotans one of the most important issues is refugees. Trump then ask how the hell did Ilhan Omar win re-election.

“It’s unbelievable,” Trump says.

Trump says everyone needs to know Sleepy Joe’s plan to flood the state with Somali refugees. He says Biden has promised a 700 percent increase in the importation of refugees from the most dangerous places in the world, including Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.

Trump says Minnesota will be “overrun and destroyed” if Biden and and the radical left wins.

Trump says they allow people to blow up things and loot while they are protesting and says he decided to call his rallies “protests against stupidity.”

7:17 PM: An energetic Trump thanks the audience for attending the rally on “fast notice.” Trump says he’s going to win Minnesota because Democrats did nothing for Minnesota except close up the state. Trump says a lot of people “weren’t treated right” until he came along.

7:16 PM: Trump exits the airplane and is ready to start the rally. This is the first time a U.S. president has visited Bemidji.

7:02 PM: Air Force One is landing and the rally should get started soon. Another high-energy crowd.

6:55 PM: Biden says he’s confident as he follows Trump around the Midwest after the president called out “Hidin’ Biden” for staying in his “basement.”

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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As US polls draw near, Joe Biden, in a rarity, attacks Donald Trump from battleground Pennsylvania

Joe Biden faced his first sustained questioning from voters as the Democratic presidential nominee Thursday, as Pennsylvanians pressed him on issues including health care, racism and policing at a CNN town hall-style event held less than seven weeks before Election Day.

At a gathering in Moosic, Pennsylvania, not far from his childhood home in Scranton, Biden — who played up his local, middle-class roots — sought at every opportunity to turn the focus to President Donald Trump’s stewardship of the coronavirus, casting the president as a callous leader who cannot empathise with the concerns of most Americans and who has exacerbated the hardships they face.

“You lost your freedom because he didn’t act,” Biden declared. “The freedom to go to that ballgame, the freedom for your kid to go to school, the freedom to see your mom or dad in the hospital. The freedom just to walk around your neighbourhood, because of failure to act responsibly.”

The appearance offered a test of his verbal agility less than two weeks before the first presidential debate, after Biden spent the summer largely off the campaign trail with limited and often controlled interactions with the news media. Headed into the evening, he may have benefited from the low expectations Republicans have set about his ability to communicate clearly, seeking to throw doubt on his mental acuity.

But as the night got underway, while there was the occasional tangent, Biden delivered a relatively energetic performance defined by withering criticism of Trump and palpable enthusiasm for connecting with voters after many months without much significant interaction with them, indicating to several that he would be open to follow-up conversations.

The setting reflected the extraordinary nature of campaigning in a pandemic: a stage was constructed in a parking lot at PNC Field, where the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre minor league baseball team plays. Biden and CNN’s Anderson Cooper stood a significant distance from each other, and the Democratic nominee often gestured with his mask in hand. Audience members listened from their cars, as if it were a drive-in movie, according to CNN. And voters stood at a distance from Biden as they asked him questions.

Biden seemed keenly focused on the location, making frequent references to his working-class ties as he sought to connect in a region where Trump’s populist message had significant appeal in 2016. The former vice president has long hoped to cut into Trump’s advantage with white voters without college degrees.

“Maybe it’s my Scranton roots, I don’t know — but when you guys started talking on television about, ‘Biden, if he wins, would be the first person without an Ivy League degree to be elected president,’ I’m thinking, ‘Who the hell makes you think I have to have an Ivy League degree to be president!’” Biden demanded. Numerous presidents have lacked Ivy League degrees, but he earned applause in the crowd.

“We are as good as anybody else,” Biden continued. “Guys like Trump who inherited everything and squandered what they inherited are the people that I’ve always had a problem with, not the people who are busting their neck.”

A number of Biden’s allies have urged his campaign to talk more about the economy, an area where Trump has traditionally had an advantage, according to polls. Earlier Thursday, as Trump’s campaign unfurled new ads focused on the economy, Biden’s advisers painted the president as an opponent of “working people.”

“I really do view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue,” Biden said that evening. “All he thinks about is the stock market.”

“How many of you all own stock?” Biden continued. “In my neighborhood in Scranton, not a whole hell of a lot of people own stock.”

In a statement, Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that Biden should have received more scrutiny of his plans and record on matters including the economy.

“This was classic Joe Biden: untethered to the facts, his own record, or reality,” he said in a statement.

Trump made his own campaign appearance Thursday in Mosinee, Wisconsin, where he spoke outdoors for more than 90 minutes to a crowd on a blustery airport tarmac just feet from a wingtip of Air Force One, which was parked behind him.

In rambling remarks, Trump warned that the 2020 election was a choice “between law and order on one side and chaos on the other".

“On 3 November, Wisconsin will decide whether we will quickly return to record prosperity or whether we will allow Biden and the Democrats to impose a $4 trillion tax hike, ban American energy, confiscate your guns” and “shut down the economy”, Trump said, in remarks that significantly distorted Biden’s agenda. He also proclaimed Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy as a bedbug” and said he looked forward to seeing what Vice President Mike Pence “does to” Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, in their debate next month.

Biden, often seeming to be in a punchy mood, lobbed his own attacks on Trump’s sense of reality.

“He may be really losing it — he’s president,” Biden said, as he addressed the civil unrest that has played out in some American cities. “I am not the president. This is Donald Trump’s America. You feel safer in Donald Trump’s America?”

Biden’s appearance came as he has sought to centre the presidential campaign on the response to the coronavirus. On Wednesday, he stepped up his warnings that Trump was politicising the rollout of a vaccine, and at the town hall, he discussed the issue at length, stressing his deference to scientists even as he described the staggering uncertainties that would accompany the successful deployment of a vaccine.

The opinion of the federal government’s top infectious disease expert would be important, he said: “I don’t trust the president on vaccines,” he said. “I trust Dr Fauci. If Fauci says a vaccine is safe, I’d take the vaccine.”

Throughout the event, Biden blasted Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis — as he has many other times in recent months — and pointed to revelations from a new book by journalist Bob Woodward that the president knowingly minimised the risks of the coronavirus. He also sought to connect many voters’ questions back to that subject.

But the issues that arose were wide-ranging, and Biden, who visited firefighters after the event, seemed keenly attuned to the politics of Pennsylvania.

“I will win Scranton,” Biden later insisted to reporters, according to a pool report. “Listen to me. I will win Scranton. And we were losing Scranton and Lackawanna County till I got put on the ticket. This is home. I know these people.”

Asked by reporters whether he believed that he was the reason Barack Obama had won the county, he replied: “I know I helped in this county. I helped in this state. We were losing by seven points in Pennsylvania. I get announced as the candidate. Five days later, we were up by six.”

It was not immediately clear what polls Biden was referring to — a RealClearPolitics compilation of polls from the 2008 race, when Biden was added to the ticket, did not show Obama losing Pennsylvania in the general election.

In a critical battleground state that Trump won in 2016, one where hydraulic fracturing is both a contentious issue and a source of jobs, Biden declared that there was “no rationale” for eliminating fracking at the moment.

As Biden focused on Pennsylvania, Trump declared his love for the state of Wisconsin, although at times he had a curious way of showing it: he had to ask the crowd how to pronounce Mosinee and then did not repeat it himself.

“I don’t know why the hell I like Wisconsin, but for some reason,” he said, trailing off, as the crowd — in which many people did not wear masks — chanted, “We love you!”

Also Thursday, Biden embraced a proposed income subsidy that is a focus of growing Democratic support. The plan, an expansion of the child tax credit, would offer $3,000 per child a year ($3,600 for those under age six) for all but the wealthiest families — essentially creating a guaranteed income for families with children.

Analysts have estimated the move would cost roughly $100 billion a year, a significant sum but less than half the annual cost of Trump’s tax cuts, which mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans.

Katie Glueck c.2020 The New York Times Company

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s-leary · 7 years

Text

Fascism Watch, February 10-14

Me: Congress has pulled three all-nighters in a row and Trump is off to Florida for the weekend. I can take a break!

Trump staff: Hold my beer.

Trump

NY Times: Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said.

CNN: Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign

Trump turns Mar-a-Lago Club terrace into open-air situation room

“Someone opened up a laptop, and at the table . . . a group of Japanese people stood around the prime minister and Donald, and they were all looking at the laptop,” said Jay Weitzman, a member of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and founder of the Pennsylvania-based parking management company Park America. He was sitting three tables away from Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday evening.

“Whoa,” Weitzman remembered thinking. “What’s going on?”

“Turns out, it was a missile launch,” he said Monday.

Trump ran a campaign based on intelligence security. That’s not how he’s governing.

“Donald Trump for the longest time has been using a insecure Android phone that by all reports is so easy to compromise, it would not meet the security requirements of a teenager,” Weaver told NPR, and while he couldn’t say for sure, “we must assume that his phone has actively been compromised for a while, and an actively compromised phone is literally a listening device.”

That’s just one of the phones that may have been at the table for the conversation.

Russia 'considering handing Edward Snowden to the US as a gift to Trump'

The Kremlin Is Starting to Worry About Trump

US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russia dossier

A serving general is openly criticizing Trump. That's extraordinary.

Gen. Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command, expressed concern about upheaval inside the White House.

“Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil. I hope they sort it out soon because we’re a nation at war,” he said at a military conference on Tuesday. Asked about his comments later, General Thomas said in a brief interview, “As a commander, I’m concerned our government be as stable as possible.”

Cabinet & Federal Appointees

Mike Flynn & the National Security Council

Mike Flynn flamed out spectacularly over the weekend and resigned on Monday.

Friday:

Did Mike Pence get burned by Michael Flynn?

Michael Flynn's debacle “This reminds me of the run-up to Iran- Contra.”

Sunday:

Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down

The Spy Revolt Against Trump Begins

Monday:

National security adviser Michael Flynn resigns

Sally Yates warned Trump that Flynn had been compromised

K.T. McFarland Expected To Leave Current Position On NSC

McFarland brought some of Trump’s energy to national security council meetings, the Times reported Sunday. The paper reported that many “apolitical” members of the council were uncomfortable with her displays of partisanship, including at one recent meeting when she urged them to “make America great again.”

You know, I was watching The Hunt for Red October again over the weekend, and the presence of political officers on the Soviet submarines reminded me how very bizarre the Trump team's political incursion into national security affairs would seem if we hadn't been observing it in slow motion.

Why Flynn's Resignation Matters. "A senior American official was compromised by his relationship with a foreign government. Who else has ties to the Russian state?"

Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller doubles down on claims of voter fraud and of 'thousands' of voters bused into New Hampshire.

Miller is so obviously promoting autocracy that even the Morning Joe crew are appalled:

Donald Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller appeared on the political talk shows and made a series of disturbingly despotic statements about the administration’s view of executive power, including the appalling declaration that “…our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial, and will not be questioned.”

The consistency of Miller’s statements across his appearances on various shows makes it extremely clear this message came from the administration itself and was not a one-off instance of overreach by a staff member.

The idea of the president having supreme power that cannot be questioned was so absurd that even Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski called it out as autocratic.

Shaun King profiles Stephen Miller's ten pounds of bigotry in a five-pound sack

Reince Priebus

Trump friend says Priebus is ‘in way over his head’

Kellyanne Conway

Conway denies retweeting white nationalist. She says someone else used her phone to do it. That's somehow better?!

In a remarkable interview, Kellyanne Conway’s spin about Mike Flynn crashes and burns

Pressed on that point, all Conway could do was respond that Flynn had been in on national security briefings and deliberations as late as yesterday, and then added that, “as time wore on, obviously the situation had become unsustainable.” But that’s an implicit concession that Flynn had been kept in this highly sensitive role despite the fact that his situation had become “unsustainable.”

Chaffetz, Cummings support ethics office opinion that Conway likely broke rules

Sean Spicer

Trump’s press secretary just called Justin Trudeau ‘Prime Minister Joe Trudeau of Canada’

Betsy DeVos

Education Department flunks spelling

Did Betsy DeVos Make You Want To Run For School Board?

Pence

Pence did not learn that Flynn misled him on Russia until last week. He's throwing Trump under the bus.

With Pence gone, fellow Republicans undo his work in Indiana

Congress

Chaffetz says the House Oversight Committee won't investigate Flynn. He also thinks the protesters at his town hall last week were paid and came from outside Utah. I don't think there is a single person in Congress who is accurately reading the mood of the usually-complacent moderate voter right now. Maybe we should all send them postcards with Libba Bray's fabulous poem.

While Trump scandals mount, Chaffetz decides to investigate... a cartoon character.

The chairman of the powerful panel — the main investigative committee in the House — sent a letter to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demanding to know why, in an attempt to raise awareness of the Zika virus, “CDC appears poised to make a sole source award to the Jim Henson Company for $806,000 to feature Sid the Science Kid in an educational program about the virus.”

Republican senators call for investigation into Trump's ties with Russia and want Flynn to testify, finally. Maybe they can goad Chaffetz into doing his job where his constituents' screams failed.

Protests

Military veterans are returning to Standing Rock and pledging to shield indigenous activists from attacks by a militarized police force. “We’ve stood in the face of fire before. We feel a responsibility to use the skills we have.”

ACLU: It’s Time for Members of Congress to Show Up and Stand Up for Standing Rock

Immigration Ban

A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone

DREAMer arrested in Seattle

Immigration Agents Arrest 600 People Across U.S. in One Week

Trump Says Refugees Are Flooding U.S. in Misleading Allusion

International

Russia Deploys Missile, Violating Treaty. But we have the greatest respect for and confidence in comrade Putin!

#fascism watch #resist #fascism #politics #donald trump #mike flynn #mike pence #jason chaffetz #kellyanne conway #sean spicer #nodapl #nobannowall #stephen miller #betsy devos #Reince Priebus #kt mcfarland #sally yates #edward snowden

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itsfinancethings · 5 years

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October 22, 2019 at 07:00AM

I trust Bill Kristol. Not his political opinions, which are nuts. The guy wants to bomb Iran. No, I trust Bill Kristol’s commitment to Intellectual Elitism. He is the very model of a modern major elite: soft-spoken and chipper, with a default half smile that implies he’s looking at a world as if it were a beautiful painting that’s not quite centered on the wall. There are no photos from any period of Bill Kristol’s life where he does not look old.

Bill’s dad was Irving Kristol, a member of a group of writers redundantly called the New York Intellectuals, making Bill a second generation Intellectual Elite member. Bill spent more time at Harvard than John Harvard. He graduated magna cum laude in three years, got a PhD in history, and taught political philosophy there. Harvard is where Bill met his wife, who later got a PhD in classical philology. Do you know how hard it is for a Republican to get a girlfriend at an Ivy League school?

Bill’s commitment to Intellectual Elitism makes him the perfect Founding Father of the new political party that I want to create. The old parties are dying, the ones who argued over how much socialism you dipped into my capitalism. They’re being replaced in each country by parties representing populists versus parties who believe in globalism. Brexit has split the Conservatives. The McCain/Romney followers have left the Trumpists. In Italy, the Five Star Movement formed a government with the League; in Greece, Syriza aligned with Independent Greeks. In France, the left and right jointly protested gas taxes to reduce carbon emissions by burning cars in Paris while they wore yellow vests, because the French like to stay safe in traffic even when rioting. These groups have a thousand differences but one thing in common: a hatred of the Intellectual Elite.

So I want to form a new party. In the Intellectual Elite party, conservatives will sit at a table with liberals, saying grace over meals of cold-pressed juice.

Bill is already starting to work on this, in exactly the way I hoped he would: he’s joined a secretive, elitist organization that works to save the Intellectual Elite. Even better, he is a member of two secretive, elitist organizations that do this. Patriots and Pragmatists consists of a mix of about fifty Republicans and Democrats who meet a few times a year. One conference was held at Sausalito’s Cavallo Point, a resort built on a former army base that has rooms that were former officers’s residences and a spa offering “energy work,” thereby pleasing and annoying both left and right. The group has yet to talk about forming a new political party, instead focusing on ways to tout democratic ideals. This sounds lazy to me. I fear they spend too much time in conference rooms and not enough time doing energy work.

In case Patriots and Pragmatists fails, the second secretive, elitist organization that works to save the Intellectual Elite that Bill belongs to has a more direct plan: Since the 2016 election, Bill and more than one hundred other Intellectual Elite Republicans meet every other week to figure out how to regain control of their party. This organization also has a great name: the Meeting of the Concerned. “Concerned is a euphemism. It’s the Meeting of the Freaked Out,” says member Brink Lindsey. To my chagrin, they do not drink brandy in a wood-paneled offices. “The aesthetics match the mood. We have a windowless conference room with various breakfast items,” says Brink about the basement offices of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. I have never heard a term as sad as “various breakfast items.” Even the Holiday Inn calls them “hot and fresh fare.”

I am not allowed to attend the Meeting of the Concerned since some members are worried that I’ll reveal their names and Republicans will expunge them from the party, thereby decreasing their power to change it. The group is so secretive that CNN has never covered it despite the fact that their meetings are in the same building as CNN’s DC headquarters.

So I reproduced a meeting. I found out who the members were, called them while I ate a tiny muffin and cereal from one of those single-serving boxes you can pour milk into, and started the conversation by saying, “Can you believe what Trump did today?”

The first thing I learned in my pretend basement conference room was that members of the Meeting of the Concerned do not agree on how to handle populists. The two competing philosophies are change and fight: Is it better for the Intellectual Elite to study the populists’ criticisms and adjust our policies, or to shout at them for being racist idiots?

Every one of my liberal friends has chosen fight. They cheered the DC restaurant that kicked out Sarah Huckabee Sanders for working as Trump’s press secretary.

The Intellectual Elite didn’t used to embrace fight. Michelle Obama’s directive from her 2016 Democratic convention speech was “When they go low, we go high.” But two years later, former Obama attorney general Eric Holder told a crowd, “When they go low, we kick them.” Democratic representative Maxine Waters held a rally in Los Angeles that was 10 miles from my house and 1.8 miles from a Whole Foods, in which she said, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

These attacks seem like the oppressed fighting back against their oppressors, but they’re actually skirmishes in the war between two elites: The ones who care about ideas and the ones who care about money.

The restaurant yellers aren’t ethnic minorities. This is all rich-white-on-rich-white violence. More than 90 percent of whites with postgraduate degrees who voted for Hillary Clinton believe it’s “racist for a white person to want less immigration to help maintain the white share of the population,” while only 45 percent of minority voters feel that way. More than 80 percent of white people who voted for Hillary Clinton think diversity makes America stronger, while only 54 percent of black voters agree. Progressive activists are twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, three times more likely to have gone to grad school, and way more likely to be white. Only 3 percent of progressive activists are black. Progressive activists are me and my friends. We are the ones most scared about the Trumpists because they are coming to replace us.

Fear is not a good reason to surrender to the gut instinct to fight. The most important thing we elite can do is act elite. Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, the swoopy haired Concerned member, is frustrated by seeing politicians host town hall meetings that devolve into mob shouting. “Having respect for Congress as an institution should be part of a ‘small c’ conservative culture. You put your hand on your heart when you salute the flag, you wear a suit to church, and you wear a suit when you talk to someone from Congress,” he says. “If you honestly thought you had a solution, would you come to a town hall unshaven in a T-shirt to talk to a member of Congress? I don’t think these people believe this is how political change happens. They just want to shout and feel good.”

Bill Kristol feels the same frustration. “The appeal to expertise doesn’t work, obviously. The appeals to history and common sense don’t work. Maybe modern liberal skepticism and rational argument has always been a little bit more tenuous than you think. People think, ‘That kind of society doesn’t do much for me and is kind of boring,’” he says. “I went to a couple of the Trump rallies in 2016 and there’s a lot of ‘This is a lot more fun than a boring political speech.’ It’s a combination of anger and entertainment.”

I want to make a plea solely to my fellow Intellectual Elite, largely because you’re the only ones who make it to the end of an article.

Our new party needs to embrace Humble Elitism. We don’t have a choice. Because an angry war is a war that populists will win.

In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech to the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis under the advice of his chief of staff, Bill Kristol, who undoubtedly regrets it. “We have two cultures: the cultural elite and the rest of us,” Quayle said. “I wear their scorn as a badge of honor.” It is hard to admit that the man who could not spell potato and thought it was likely that we could breathe on Mars understood something, but he did.

The fuel of populism is rage at those who claim higher status. To extinguish the populists’ fire, we have to stop dismissing them as deplorable, racist, ignorant, unsophisticated, sexist, and I’m going to stop here in case someone tweets this sentence, which will impede my strategy. We have to bite our lips, feel their pain, and do that thing where you slowly nod while squinting.

I fail when I’m smug. The thing I’ve been most smug about is not listening to decades of people telling me I’m smug. I was so young when people started calling me smug that they used the word precocious, which means “smug child.” My smugness is the least elite part of me. It’s insecurity stemming from yearning to be in The Loop. It’s tribal—a way to exclude others by drawing a circle around ourselves. It also fails our beloved scientific method because it almost never works. The only people who have ever been convinced by smugness are shoppers at Whole Foods.

We have to stop introducing ourselves by listing our jobs, our secret organizations, and what college we attended, which I am refraining from doing right here, although I would love for you to look it up on Wikipedia, which I should not mention that I’m listed on.

We need to stop acting as if our electric cars, our organic food, and our fair-trade, single-origin coffee make us more evolved humans, when they simply make us poorer humans. We need to stop lecturing West Virginians about the obvious inanity of remaining in the coal industry when we are working in the journalism industry.

Humility is not much of an ask. Part of embracing facts, logic, and history is knowing that we will sometimes be wrong. Galileo was wrong about tides. Albert Einstein was wrong about quantum physics. I was wrong about smugness. The point is: I’m exactly like Galileo and Einstein. This smugness thing is going to be tough to overcome. But if anyone can do it, it’s us. Seriously, this is not going to be easy.

Adapted from I Am Forming A New Political Party For Smug Elites Like Me by Joel Stein (Grand Central Publishing).

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thisdaynews · 5 years

Text

First 2020 debate puts Democrats on edge

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/first-2020-debate-puts-democrats-on-edge/

First 2020 debate puts Democrats on edge

Uncertainty over the first debate amid a crowded Democratic field is unsettling candidates accustomed to more control over their circumstances. | Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images

2020 elections

Candidates still don’t know whom they will be debating against, or even which day they’ll be on the stage.

Qualifying for the first Democratic presidential debate was the easy part. Now comes the challenge of preparing for it.

With the first debate in Miami now less than a month away, at least half-dozen major candidates have begun to block out time or lighten their schedules to prepare.

Story Continued Below

In telephone calls and conference rooms, advisers are peppering them with potential questions. The candidates are practicingtightening their answers, cognizant of the seven to 10 minutes of total speaking time they expect to be allotted. And they are watching clips of the 2016 Republican presidential primary debates to familiarize themselves with the dynamics of debating on a crowded stage.

All of it is taking place under the expectation that the first debate will represent the most significant milepost of the campaign to date, a make-or-break event that will likely lead to the first winnowing of the crowded 23-candidate primary.

For candidates accustomed to far more control over their circumstances, the run-up is proving to be an unsettling experience.

“This is not a scenario that any of them have been in,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton confidant who played the role of then-candidate Donald Trump in Clinton’s debate preparations in 2016. “It’s almost like a particle accelerator … It becomes a group dynamic that you can’t really control.”

Few candidates, if any, have debated 9 other rivals before. None of the contenders knows yet whether they will appear on June 26 or June 27 — as many as 20 candidates will be split over two debates on successive nights — or even whom they will be debating against. Those dynamics are combining to create a deep sense of uncertainty and frustration surrounding an evening likely to be marked by the largest national viewership yet of the campaign.

One campaign adviser to one top-tier campaign likened the unknowns surrounding the debate to a “black box.” An adviser to a different campaign said, “It definitely hurts how one prepares for a debate, especially since it’s your first introduction on the national stage … It’s tough when there is a ton of pressure to meet thresholds, and we can’t get more than two weeks to know who we will be on stage with.”

The campaigns plan to participate in a conference call on Thursday with Democratic National Committee officials, where questions about debate logistics and format are expected to be addressed.

But the candidates are unlikely to know on which night they will appear until about two weeks before the debate — and some candidates will continue to sweat out whether they will qualify at all.

In interviews with about a dozen campaigns, advisers said they are beginning to intensify their preparations. Several officials said they would hold campaign run-throughs with multiple people acting as proxies for rival candidates, though perhaps not with a full complement of nine actors representing nine candidates. Others are trying to anticipate from which opponents they might expect crossfire.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Kamala Harris are among those who recently started focusing on debate preparations. An aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren told POLITICO that while it’s still too early to intensely strategize for the debate, it’s also a challenge “when we don’t know who we will be on stage with until a few days out” and said it would be “hard to have a moment” with 10 people competing for airtime.

Another campaign highlighted the difficulty of not knowing who else would share the stage, saying staffers who would otherwise study old debate tapes of potential competitors to “get in their heads” are instead presenting a composite of multiple challengers in practice sessions.

“We’re preparing for a cross-section; there a lot of candidates who have similar positions on the big issues, we know where a lot of our peers are coming from,” an adviser to California Rep. Eric Swalwell said.

For lesser-known candidates such as Swalwell, the debates present an opportunity to gain a much-needed step in the primary.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has hired a debate director, Geoff Potter, and he and his advisers have held initial calls about how to approach the first debate. Unlike a congressional, gubernatorial or U.S. Senate debate — where the resulting media coverage can be more significant than the debate itself — millions of viewers are expected to be watching next month, amplifying the significance of a live performance.

In a recent call among Inslee’s advisers about the upcoming debates, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s criticism of President Donald Trump as a “chaos candidate” in 2016 came up as an example of how one-liners can fall flat. Several other candidates have made similar calculations, with one adviser to a lower-tier candidate saying, “You can’t be artificial about this … Voters see through it when candidates deliver a zinger.”

John Delaney, the former congressman from Maryland, has been watching recordings of both the Democratic and Republican primary debates in 2016. His communications director, Will McDonald, noted that, “For most people, this is going to be the first or second time they’re tuning into this contest.”

Advisers for campaigns that are clustered at the bottom of polls said part of their focus in the upcoming weeks will be navigating how lesser known candidates can distinguish themselves without coming across as combative.

Advisers to multiple candidates suggested that they are preparing to draw contrasts in the debate — but more likely with the rest of the Democratic field as a whole, not one any candidate in particular.

“Maybe you have three minutes in a debate, four minutes, what are you going to do? Are you going to try to swing for the fences, the way [Marco] Rubio did going after Trump? Or are you going to attack somebody else?” asked Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “It’s just an impossible situation … The Lincoln-Douglas debates, it wasn’t Lincoln, Douglas, Johnson, Smith, Harris, Fitzgerald, O’Reilly. It was Lincoln-Douglas.”

Lamenting the format, Stevens said the debate will not resemble a debate as much as a “multi-candidate press conference.”

“It’s crazy,” he said.

One rival everyone is preparing for — and who will not appear on stage — is Trump. He’s widely expected to tweet his reactions to the debates as they unfold, and Democratic strategists said it’s possible the debate’s moderators will ask some questions based on his tweets. For Democrats who have benefited politically from provoking the president in the past, the possibility of engaging with him in real time is widely viewed as a potential boon.

Butseveral candidates are alsopreparing to defend themselves against criticism of their records. That could potentially come from other candidates — but more likely, their advisers believe, in the form of challenging prompts from the debate’s moderators. In part for that reason, several campaigns pointed to the proliferation of televised town halls as their most significant practice for the first debate.

“I think preparing for a debate is just like preparing for a town hall,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told POLITICO recently. “You just want to be able to articulate what you’re for in a way that is concise, which is harder for me, and direct.”

Asked if she had been drilled on giving shorter answers by her staff, she said, “Not yet.” However, she added, “But I did practice it in my first town hall with MSNBC because every break we had, the producer would say, ‘OK, those were great answers, but shorter, shorter, shorter.’ I was like, ‘OK, OK, OK!’ So I think for my second town hall, CNN, I think, if you watched it, you’d see that the answers were shorter. So I’m getting better.”

Several advisers to candidates outside of the top tier said they hope to be on stage with former Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders — the two top polling contenders — either to guarantee they’ll get the most eyeballs, or to convey an immediate contrast. One adviser of a second-tier candidate relished the thought of being on stage with Biden: “I can offer you the younger alternative of what you’re looking at right now.”

“I want to be next to Joe Biden so the country can Google ‘who’s the Asian man next to Joe Biden’ and then they will discover Andrew Yang,” little-known entrepreneur Andrew Yang said. “I think that’s the ideal. I’ve done the math and I have approximately an 8 percent chance of standing next to Joe Biden.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told reporters in New Hampshire recently, “It’s going to be really interesting because you’re going to have so many people, and it’s luck of the draw which night you’re going to be, who you’re going to be standing next to — maybe going to be really tall, don’t know.”

The front-runners are feeling pressure in a different way than those still trying to make an introduction to a national audience. With so much attention on their age, Sanders and Biden cannot have a Rick Perry-like forgetful moment. Biden will be expected to be the adult in the room. And Warren’s reputation as a policy wonk means she’ll have added expectations to drive the discussion or at least have well thought out responses to most questions.

As the front-runner, Biden is widely considered the most likely to face a pointed challenge from his competitors in the debate. But advisers to many of his rivals remain wary of attacking him too sharply. Even if a competitor could wound Biden in the debate, in a multi-candidate field it is unclear who would benefit.

“In 2016, if Bernie attacked Hillary and he landed a blow, it’s possible those people came to Bernie,” Reines said. “And if Hillary landed a blow on Bernie, people came to her. Now you have a situation where Liz Warren might take a shot at Bernie Sanders, because they’re kind of fighting for the same pool, and a voter says, ‘I don’t like Bernie’s answer, but I don’t like the way Warren asked it, so I’m going to take a hard look at Kamala.’”

He said, “You’ve got a little bit of a Whac-A-Mole situation, and that’s going to play out on stage.”

Christopher Cadelago contributed to this report

#debate #Democrats #Foreign #Politics

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hellofastestnewsfan · 5 years

Link

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa—Demographically and economically, Iowa isn’t actually that representative of the country as a whole. But even as the demographics and economics make it less like the rest of America, Iowa’s absurdly outsize role in picking the leader of the free world remains.

Enter two candidates, in the space of 48 hours, who both see the state as crucial: two women, two senators, two former local prosecutors, two people who had breakout moments during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings last fall, two presidential hopefuls on their second trips to Iowa since launching their campaigns.

[Read: Amy Klobuchar for president?]

Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris need the same thing, but they need it for opposite reasons.

Literally dozens more Democrats are in or circling the race. But the dynamics between these two, both doing well in early polls, contrast familiar Midwest pragmatism with diverse Left Coast progressivism. And most important for the ultra-energized voters here: Who is best to beat Donald Trump?

[Read: Kamala Harris’s campaign strategy—don’t pick a lane]

For Klobuchar, Iowa is her neighbor to the south—“We can see it from our porch in Minnesota” is the line she uses—conveniently located in geography and order on the primary calendar. A win in the Iowa caucuses could validate her pitch that the 2020 election is calling out for someone who can link the years her grandfather spent working in a mine to the “grit” to stand in a snowstorm for her own campaign announcement two weeks ago, and connect a purported hard-nosed pragmatism to years of big wins in her home state. For Harris, the state is the essential test of whether the parts of the country far from the square in Oakland where 22,000 stood in the streets for her announcement rally last month are really ready for a half-Jamaican, half-Indian woman from California who speaks bluntly about what’s gone wrong with America.

On Thursday night, Klobuchar was at the United Auto Workers hall, the featured guest at the Ankeny County Democrats annual dinner. On Saturday night, Harris was on the other side of town at the United Steelworkers hall, keynoting the Iowa Democratic Party Black Caucus. Klobuchar, as she always does, built her speech up to a quote from Walter Mondale, talking about Jimmy Carter’s presidency: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.” Harris, as is her custom, progressed to a paraphrase of Coretta Scott King: “The fight for justice and the fight for civil rights must be fought and won with each generation.”

Afterward, I asked Klobuchar what she thought being a senator from Minnesota, compared with being a senator from California, would mean to Iowa.

“It means that for me, going south for the winter is going to Iowa. It’s easier to get here,” she said. “It’s important to have a lot of people running, but I am a candidate from the heartland, and it’s an important part of our path to success in the general election.”

[Graeme Wood: The two Amy Klobuchars]

Was she arguing that senators from the coasts—not just Harris, but Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand—wouldn’t be able to win?

“Senators from the coast have won in the heartland in the past. So I don’t think it’s that. It’s that my No. 1 request was to be on the Agriculture Committee. I served on that committee for 12 years. I’ve played a major role in getting the farm bill passed,” she said. “I know these issues here.”

Klobuchar likes talking about herself as an underdog, and structurally that’s how she started a campaign that many people thought she wasn’t actually going to go through with. She’s short on campaign staff, here and nationally, and arrived with just one person on her payroll and a handful of others who’d come in as volunteers. She had a surge of online fundraising after she announced, but aides have acknowledged in conversations with others that money is going to be a scramble and that her best hope is to scrape by enough to make it through Iowa, and then count on an explosion of interest if she wins to carry her over.

And so she lays it on thick, talking about the two states’ main agricultural exports, or how they both put a premium on butter-carving contests. On the list of ways the states are similar that she read from on Thursday evening: “You have the world-famous matchstick museum, and we have the only museum in the world devoted to Spam—or, as we call it, the ‘Guggen-ham.’”

But her main argument is that the country needs a pragmatic president, and that starts with making a pragmatic argument for why she should be the nominee.

“We need to win. So here’s my deal: I have won every single congressional district in the state of Minnesota, including Michele Bachmann’s, three times,” Klobuchar said, referring to the former congresswoman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate who helped popularize Tea Party politics in the run-up to a campaign that got much more attention than actual votes. With Democrats nationally nervous that Minnesota is in danger of slipping away—in a shocker, it had the smallest margin of any state Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and Trump’s campaign has been public about Minnesota being at the top of its 2020 target list—Klobuchar leaned in.

“He has said to me several times, ‘I would have won Minnesota if I went back there again,’” she said, attempting a Trump impression that leans more on making the president sound dumb than making him sound like he’s from Queens, New York.

Harris landed here after two weeks of a sublimated freak-out, churned by Republican websites, that all tracked back to her being black. Just a sampling of the stirred-up controversies: Is she black enough? What does it mean that her husband is not black, but Jewish? How does she use hot sauce? What were the circumstances when she smoked pot? How extensive and authentic is her knowledge of rap music? Did she really order chicken and waffles at a famous soul-food restaurant?

[Jemele Hill: Kamala Harris’s blackness isn’t up for debate]

Harris had only briefly passed through Iowa since making her candidacy official, popping in to do a CNN town hall on her way back to Washington after the Oakland kickoff rally. But the state is key for her too: She wants a top finish here next February that would solidify her as a front-runner and give her the momentum going into a four-week blitz around the country in which most of the delegates will be awarded. Her expectation is that there wouldn’t be enough time or money for even the best political organization to keep up with her if she racked up enough early wins to create the momentum and a sense of inevitability.

This second trip was a full weekend of town halls and local Democratic events that she kicked off by greeting Asians and Latinos at the state capitol. She was trailed everywhere by the cameras and the staff entourage that mark a candidate being thought of as a front-runner.

Already in two weeks as a candidate, Klobuchar has started wearing creases into some of the lines she keeps using. Harris, meanwhile, has been delivering the same stump speech almost verbatim since hitting the midterm trail (including here in Iowa) in October, telling the same jokes, as if each time an ad lib has just come to her, like when she mocks smooth-talking candidates for sprinkling “lovely dust.” Beyond the performance skills as a candidate that Harris is demonstrating as she continues to introduce herself to voters who’ve never seen her in person before, she notably does not vary the speech much, no matter who’s in the crowd. Some bits get cycled in more frequently when she’s in front of minority audiences, like when she hammers the wage gap for black and Latino women, or mentions the radically higher mortality rate for new mothers, but nearly every audience hears her talk about Russian interference, just like nearly every audience hears her say that parents of 12-year-old black boys shouldn’t have to sit down with their sons and have “the talk” about how police are more likely to harass them because of the color of their skin.

Everywhere, Harris keeps to her “Let’s speak some truths,” rhetorical spine, and every time, it builds up to the same one: the truth that there is more that unites Americans than divides them, despite the efforts of Trump.

“Part of our strength as a nation is we are aspirational,” she said in her opening remarks at her town hall on Saturday afternoon. “Part of our strength is we will always fight to get to that place. Let’s hold on to our nature.”

It’s a call to unite behind her, and to believe that others will unite behind her, specifically because she is different and can piece a broken nation back together.

Maybe it was that the town hall was on a college campus in Ankeny, or that no one had to pay for a seat, or maybe that Harris is already being treated as a political celebrity, but the crowd was not only bigger—it was younger and significantly more diverse. By Saturday night, when she drove through a blizzard from a soup dinner in Ames to make it to the United Steelworkers hall for the Black Caucus event in West Des Moines, the crowd wasn’t as big as Klobuchar’s sold-out dinner two nights earlier. But those in attendance responded more enthusiastically to having Harris in the room.

Based on the questions they’re getting and the conversations they’re having while shaking hands in the crowds, Klobuchar is still being treated as an interesting person voters want to get to know, while Harris is being looked at as someone people are trying to squint at and see as a nominee.

That’s how Klobuchar and Harris are putting themselves out there as well.

“I have grit,” Klobuchar said on Thursday night. “And I have friends and I have great neighbors in Iowa. And I have every reason to believe I can do this.”

“I intend to spend a lot of time in Iowa,” Harris said on Saturday afternoon, doing her best to project strength. “I intend to win.”

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shakeel786blog · 6 years

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Trump weighs in on racist Roseanne Barr tweet asking for his own apology from Disney CEO

The White House responded to the outrage over Roseanne Barr‘s racist tweet Wednesday by saying that “no one is defending what she said” but at the same time attacking “hypocrisy in the media,” citing “the most horrible things” said “about this president and nobody addresses it.”

Interested in Roseanne?

Add Roseanne as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Roseanne news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

Reading from a prepared statement at a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Sanders asked, as the president did in a tweet earlier in the day, why Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger had called former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to apologize for Barr’s tweet and hadn’t called him to do the same for comments made about him on Disney-owned ABC’s “The View” and another Disney network, ESPN.

“Where was Bob Iger’s apology to the White House staff for Jamele Hill calling the President, and anyone associated with him, a white supremacist? To Christians around the world for Joy Behar calling Christianity a mental illness? Where was the apology for Kathy Griffin going on a profane rant against the President on The View after a photo showed her holding President Trump’s decapitated head? And where was the apology from Bog Iger for ESPN hiring Keith Olbermann after his numerous expletive-laced tweets attacking the President as a Nazi and even expanding Olbermann’s role after that attack against the President’s family.”

“This is a double-standard that the President is speaking about, nobody is defending her comments, they’re inappropriate but that’s what the point that he was making,” Sanders said.

Neither Iger nor Disney immediately responded to requests from ABC News for comment.

Griffin, who was fired from CNN’s New Year’s Eve program, apologized for her actions but later took back her apology on “The View.” She reportedly used an expletive referring to Trump and said, “This president is different and I have been through the mill and so now I’m back on the road.”

Behar apologized for referring to comments made about Pence by former Trump White House aide Omorasa Maginault Newman on the CBS program “Celebrity Big Brother” warning against Pence ever becoming president. “He’s extreme,” Newman said. “I’m Christian, I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things.”

“It’s one thing to talk to Jesus,” Behar said. “It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you. That’s called mental illness, if I’m not correct, hearing voices,” Behar reportedly said on “The View.”

Iger was later quoted as saying Behar’s comment was “wrong” and that her apology was appropriate.

After Hill tweeted comments about Trump, the network put out a statement saying they “do not represent the position of ESPN. We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate.”

Later, as reported in Vanity Fair in October, Iger explained that the decision not to fire Hill was made with context in mind, referring to Trump’s comments last August about the white nationalist and counter-protests in Charlottesville that there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

“There are a lot of people out there who were outraged,” Iger said. The promise that was given to them in the Constitution, that they fought for in the Civil War and civil rights movement, he said, is “the opposite” of what Americans have seen in the last few months, Vanity Fair quoted him as saying.

“It’s hard for me to understand what it feels like to experience racism,” he added in the interview. “I felt we needed to take into account what other people ESPN were feeling at this time and that resulted in us not taking action.”

ESPN has taken conservative fire for recently rehiring Olbermann who has blasted Trump as a “Nazi” in tweets.

Sanders comments Wednesday came after she was asked whether the president has spoken to Barr and why he chose to address the ABC apology instead of the underlying issue of concerns about the racist comment she tweeted out. Sanders did not say whether the president specifically condemned Barr’s tweet.

Earlier Wednesday, the day after ABC canceled the hit reboot of “Roseanne,” Trump — a fan of the show — weighed in on Twitter and didn’t repudiate the racist remarks Barr made but instead called for an apology from Iger.

Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that “ABC does not tolerate comments like those” made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

The apology from Iger Trump referred to came Tuesday, before ABC publicly announced the show was canceled in a statement from Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment. “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” she said in the statement. Iger later added his own comment to the statement on Twitter. “There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing,” Iger tweeted. ABC Television Group and ABC News are both owned by Disney, though the entertainment company is separate from the news division.

At an MSNBC town hall on racism Tuesday night, Jarrett thanked Iger for calling her. “I want to mention Bob Iger, who is the CEO of Disney called me before the announcement, he apologized, he said he had zero tolerance for that sort of racist, bigoted comment and he wanted me to know before he made it public that he was cancelling his show and so I appreciate that they did that so swiftly,” she said, adding that she thought it was the right move.

Barr’s post early Tuesday morning, which has since been deleted, said that Jarrett, who is African-American, looked like “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby …” She has since apologized.

There is a long history in the U.S., dating back to the days of slavery, of African Americans being depicted and referred to as apes or monkeys as a way to dehumanize and justify discrimination.

Twitter

Roseanne Barr posted a tweet on May 29, 2018 that read, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

Wednesday’s tweet was the first comment on the firestorm from the president, though he called the show and its success “great” when it aired back in March. Trump didn’t mention the controversy at a rally in Nashville on Tuesday night.

In Ohio in March, he told the crowd he called Barr after the show aired to congratulate her.

Andrew Harnik/AP

President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, on May 29, 2018, in Nashville, Tenn.

“Even look at Roseanne. I called her yesterday. Look at her ratings, look at her ratings,” the president said, adding that the show was doing well because it resonated with his base. “And it was about us. They haven’t figured it out, the fake news hasn’t quite figured it out yet,” he said.

On “Good Morning America” earlier that day, Barr called the call “exciting” and said she’s known the president for a long time.

“I’ve known him for many years and he’s done a lot of nice things for me over the years, and so it was just a friendly conversation about working and television and ratings,” Barr told “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos over the phone.

She also reflected on a need for more “civilized” conversation in the country.

“That’s what we need to do as a country is figure out what we don’t like, talk to each other and discuss how we’re going to get it changed or fixed,” Barr said. “I really hope that it opens up civil conversation between people instead of just of mud-slinging. I really do because I think we need to be more civilized in that,” she said.

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Thursday, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that next week’s presidential debate would be held virtually. President Trump, however, has said that he isn’t going to waste his time with a virtual debate, promising instead to hold a rally.

Trump is down 9.8 points in national polls and is steadily losing ground each day in our forecast to Biden, as we inch ever closer to the election. Refusing then to participate in the debate when he could use it as an opportunity to mount a comeback against former vice president Joe Biden is a curious choice. Doesn’t Trump need the debates to mount a comeback?

Let’s talk Trump’s case for — and the case against — needing the debates.

OK, what’s the case for him needing them?

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): He needs something. #analysis

But seriously, the debates are among the few, regularly scheduled major moments in the fall campaign, so they do present an opportunity to shake things up, even if they’re not certain to do so.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): To a first approximation, I agree with that, although it’s overstated. Our research on primary debates suggested that a debate is equivalent to something like six to 10 days of normal campaigning and news, in terms of how much they move the polls. So it’s as if Trump is taking a week off the clock in an election in which he trails by 10 points.

With that said, maybe this ups the importance of the third debate — if there is one.

geoffrey.skelley: But we also can’t know given Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis whetherif Trump is really up for a two-hour debate right now, so perhaps he’s avoiding something that could be even more damaging.

sarah: One thing we talked about a lot going into the first presidential debate, is how much that first debate (more than the others) can really shake things up, but as former FiveThirtyEighter Harry Enten has also written, the second debate is not necessarily a game changer, and there’s no reason to believe that the person who didn’t do well in the first debate rebounds in the second.

Isn’t it possible then, that Trump, holding his own rally in which he doesn’t have to play by any moderator rules, isn’t necessarily a terrible move?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): The problem is that he’s been holding campaign rallies all year long, and they haven’t helped him overtake Biden in the polls.

The days when cable news would air his rallies nationally are over. Maybe they get some nice local earned media, but that simply isn’t gonna measure up to a debate, as Nate mentioned.

geoffrey.skelley: It depends on the coverage. If it’s “Trump hasn’t recovered from COVID-19 and it’s irresponsible to be holding rallies,” I can’t imagine that helps him when 60 percent of the country said Trump was wrong to say we shouldn’t be afraid of COVID-19, and two-thirds said if he’d taken the coronavirus more seriously, he probably wouldn’t have gotten sick.

natesilver: Yeah, Trump is a fairly bad debater to begin with and it’s fairly likely that he would still be experiencing physical or mental ailments by next week thanks to his COVID-19 diagnosis. So the CPD gives him an excuse to pull out rather than him looking like a

geoffrey.skelley: And what if his rally is sparsely attended or looks that way in pictures? It’s his Tulsa rally all over again.

natesilver: Nobody will give a shit about the rally either way, I don’t think.

Unless, again, Trump appears sick or something.

sarah: OK, but from Biden’s POV, a skipped second debate is … fine by him? If anything, he would have more to lose than Trump in the second debate?

nrakich: Right. Traditionally, the front-runner wants fewer debates and the underdog wants more. That’s why you always see hopeless Senate candidates challenging their opponent to 10 Lincoln-Douglas-style debates or whatever.

natesilver: Unless Biden thinks Trump would be so bad that it would be worth debating him even if he’s being risk averse. Like if Biden’s up by 10 points now, and on average he’d gain 2 points by debating Trump, you might do that even if there’s a chance you’d decline instead. It depends on what the variance is.

geoffrey.skelley: A town-hall format would probably play better to Biden’s style, too, answering people directly, etc.

But the debate wouldn’t be in-person, so maybe that’s less relevant.

nrakich: That strikes me as overconfident, Nate. Biden could screw up too. I don’t think you can just assume he’d gain an average of 2 points by debating Trump.

natesilver: I’m not assuming he’d gain 2 points, I’m saying conditional on that assumption, it might be worth debating.

But also: Trump has lost every general election debate he’s conducted, per post-debate polling.

And he has COVID-19 and is on steroids and is acting erratically, even for him.

geoffrey.skelley: Who knows how a virtual town hall debate would go, but Trump was seen as the main cause of the disruption and chaos at the first debate, so it wouldn’t shock me if he did the same thing in that format — if the debate were held.

nrakich: That would be so awkward with the potential lag. Imagine all the stops and starts!

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, you thought the interruptions were bad when they were in the same room!

sarah: Yeah, Trump really doesn’t seem to like debates, he skipped some in the primaries in 2016, too. But this brings us back to the original question: Trump is really far behind Biden in the polls, and Biden just got some of his best polls of the campaign this week. His margin over Trump is growing. What — if not a debate –- is going to shake things up for Trump?

nrakich: If Trump is going to shake up the race without the debates, he needs something external to happen — for example, a major Biden gaffe or crisis. There is some evidence that politicians in trouble try to stir up international conflict to create a rally-around-the-flag effect. Or there could be a Comey letter redux; the Department of Justice just changed its policies to allow prosecutors to continue their investigations even close to an election.

sarah: Nate, Trump is losing a little ground each day in our forecast if his standing in the polls doesn’t improve, right? Tell us more about that, and what that means for Trump’s ability to close the gap between him and Biden at this point.

natesilver: Trump’s chances are at 15 percent in our forecast now, but my guess is that he’d be at something like 5 percent if the election were held today.

He’d need a VERY large polling error to win if Biden is up 10 points nationally and 7 points or so in the tipping-point states. So most of his comeback chances still stem from being able to turn the race around somehow, and debates are one way to do that … maybe the best way at this stage.

geoffrey.skelley: Right, in terms of predictable events, things you know are coming, the debates are really it.

sarah: On that note, in the unpredictableness that is 2020, do we actually think Trump actually pulls out or is this just a publicity stunt? Something our colleague Perry Bacon Jr. had mentioned in our chat Wednesday before the VP debate, was how he was skeptical that the CPD could stop Trump from participating in a debate if he wanted to. Do you think Trump is just trying to negotiate the terms of the second debate?

nrakich: I think he’d actually pull out. Our colleague Kaleigh Rogers said something smart in our office Slack this morning, so I’ll just quote her: “Trump knows the last debate didn’t go well for him and this is a way for him to not participate while saving face with his base.”

geoffrey.skelley: Well, there is a little bit of precedent for presidents threatening to withdraw from a debate in order to change their terms.

President George H.W. Bush refused to debate under the commission’s plans in 1992. But he eventually agreed to some debates.

In September 1992, the first scheduled debate was canceled when President Bush rejected the commission’s plans. Hecklers dressed as chickens began showing up at his rallies, and Bush would occasionally engage them: pic.twitter.com/kAhK1Vj9DW

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) October 8, 2020

And Jimmy Carter refused to participate in the first debate in 1980 because it included independent John Anderson. I would say, though, in both the 1980 and 1992 cases, neither incumbent was rewarded for their intransigence.

natesilver: How’d that go for Jimmy Carter?

geoffrey.skelley: Exactly.

nrakich: Either way, I don’t think we will get an in-person debate. I think if Trump successfully negotiates them back to an in-person debate, I think Biden will be the one to say he won’t attend.

geoffrey.skelley: The commission is in danger of losing face in any of these situations, but I’d think holding an in-person event with Trump fresh off of COVID-19 (or still suffering lingering effects) would be pretty terrible.

Now, in 1980, Ronald Reagan debated just Anderson at the first debate. Does Biden get to hold a solo “debate” with Trump not participating? I assume it would just be canceled.

nrakich: Interesting. The town-hall style does make that easier. …

sarah: What do Americans think about holding the debate next week? As we’ve said before, there just aren’t that many undecided voters this year, so is it possible that many Americans don’t need the debates to help them make their decision on how they’re going to vote?

nrakich: Two polls conducted before today’s announcement actually had contradictory findings about whether Americans think the rest of the debates should go forward. Reuters/Ipsos found that 59 percent of Americans thought that the debates should be postponed until Trump recovers. But Americans told CNN/SSRS, 59 percent to 36 percent, that the debates should be held.

But regardless of whether people want to see more debates, I agree that it’s unlikely to change their votes. Our polling with Ipsos has shown that most voters are either absolutely positive they’re going to vote for Trump or absolutely positive they’re going to vote for Biden.

geoffrey.skelley: What format the debate should take seemed to really affect how people responded, too. Pluralities have told pollsters that they wanted the next debate if it was virtual.

sarah: Yeah, and with a split screen … it wouldn’t necessarily feel all that different than if Biden and Trump were in the same room.

geoffrey.skelley: 100 percent. Look, a presidential debate has been held remotely before. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s third debate in 1960 took place with the candidates in different studios. Kennedy was in New York City, Nixon was in Los Angeles.

natesilver: I don’t know about that. The conventions produced very little in the way of bounces this year, which could be evidence that virtual vs. in-person matters.

nrakich: How do we tease that out from polarization, though, Nate?

To be honest, I feel like if the conventions in, say, 1988 had been virtual, they’d have still produced pretty big bounces.

Maybe just not as big as they were.

natesilver: Well, we got a decent-sized bounce from the Democratic convention four years ago. McCain/Palin got a pretty big one in 2008. They can still happen.

nrakich: But there were also more undecided voters in 2016. Everyone already has an opinion of Trump and Biden this year.

natesilver: The virtual conventions were well-produced, but fairly boring and I’m not sure why people tried to pretend otherwise.

nrakich: “Well-produced but fairly boring” kind of applies to every political convention, though!

At least if you’re watching from home.

natesilver: More boring than usual.

natesilver: Ratings were down. The polls didn’t move. In person matters.

nrakich: Eh. I’m not convinced. (There are other reasons the ratings might have been down, like people switching their viewing habits from network TV to online streaming.)

natesilver: The thing, though, is that you like politics and I don’t, despite covering it for a living. So I’m more like a typical American in those ways.

nrakich:

sarah: OK, final thoughts — it sounds as if we all agree on this one — the case for Trump skipping the debate next week … doesn’t hold a lot of upside for him?

geoffrey.skelley: Skipping the debate isn’t likely to help Trump, although it’s unclear if it will hurt him. At the same time, not knowing Trump’s current health condition in the wake of his COVID-19 diagnosis, means it’s possible he’d have had a bad showing at the virtual debate and hurt his standing more. In other words, the move to a virtual debate may have given him the out he was seeking because of that — or he just doesn’t want to debate anymore.

But I do think if he skips the debate and holds a rally instead, it could end up damaging him, considering how many voters don’t think he’s taken the coronavirus seriously enough. Such an event would seem to play right into that narrative.

nrakich: Yeah, Sarah, I think skipping the debate would be the latest in a long line of poor political decisions by Trump. Although to Nate’s point, I’m not sure he would be able to take advantage of the debate to turn his numbers around anyway.

It’s just increasingly hard to find any political upside for Trump.

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feedbaylenny · 6 years

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This is my 90th blog post and like most journalists, I identify mistakes all over and somehow — often through publicity — try to get them fixed. But not on this milestone. There’s too much good to write about.

I also want to point out the page CohenConnect Headlines Sitemap has a list of all the blog posts I’ve written and published over the past 3+ years, in chronological order. Nobody — early readers nor myself — can remember everything I’ve done and there hadn’t been a place to look. The right side of what you’re reading (or bottom on mobile) just show the past 10 and the most popular. A regular “sitemap” of category words is well below, on the bottom of the right side (or the bottom on mobile). But the “search” box also works very well, contains both categories and tags, and maybe more.

So staying positive, let’s honor some heroes with this post. These days, there are too few and far between. I remember years ago, while working at WCAU in Philadelphia, Larry Mendte saying on the air with such certainty, “Heroes never admit they are,” or something to that effect.

I’ll start by setting something straight. Two survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Florida posed for a picture with the caption Prom 2018, but they won’t be going together.

https://twitter.com/cameron_kasky/status/988454056615202817

That’s despite what Pink News in the UK reported Tuesday, to the disappointment of Cameron Kasky and David Hogg’s many fans.

The publication describes Kasky “lovingly hugging Hogg, who contrasts Kasky’s sloppy smile with a stair which pierces your soul.”

Monday, Kasky posted the picture on Twitter. Click here for that original article, which may not be true, but contained a lot of positive reaction from hopeful supporters.

Yesterday, the Miami Herald wrote,

“Rebecca Boldrick, Hogg’s mother, told TMZ.com that Hogg has another date for the prom. “Jeff Kasky, Cameron’s dad, told TMZ, ‘Cameron and David love each other very much, as do the 20 or so other kids that are part of their group, but not in a romantic type of way.’”

Then, Cameron’s mother, who has been a friend for about 40 years, posted a picture of the two of them titled “My date” Tuesday night. I’m not naming her because she has not put her name out in the public.

You watched Kasky dress down Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in a CNN town hall for refusing to refuse contributions from the National Rifle Association. In fact, what it took for Cameron to try to get a simple “yes” or “no” answer to his question from a sitting U.S. senator and former presidential candidate from his own state was amazing!

Fellow survivor Hogg also became a gun control advocate and activist against gun violence, but he has been more controversial. New to Florida — his family moved from L.A. at the start of high school — he chose to attend Stoneman Douglas because of its TV production classes.

Hogg may be most famous for what The Washington Post called his “dust-up with Fox News host Laura Ingraham,” who used this tweet to “make fun of the teen’s public lament about being rejected by colleges to which he had applied.”

https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/979021639458459648

(It really won’t matter because he plans to take next year off after high school to campaign in the midterm elections.)

The next day, Ingraham apologized to Hogg but not anybody else she’d put down over the years, including LeBron James, and by then it was too late.

https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/979404377730486272

https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/979404540754657280

So, knowing how TV and news are businesses that revolve around money (Where have you heard that multiple times before?), he urged his 700,000+ Twitter followers to boycott Ingraham’s advertisers.

https://twitter.com/davidhogg111/status/979168957180579840

The Washington Post noted, Hogg called the apology an insincere “effort just to save your advertisers.”

Then, “In a matter of days, Ingraham lost more than a dozen advertisers, including Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Hulu, Jenny Craig, Ruby Tuesday and Miracle-Ear.”

https://twitter.com/LibertyMutual/status/979811276003205121

That weekend, Hogg told CNN,

“It’s disturbing to know that somebody can bully so many people and just get away with it, especially to the level that she did. … No matter who somebody is, no matter how big or powerful they may seem, a bully is a bully, and it’s important that you stand up to them.”

He even went as far as to compare the tweet and Ingraham’s criticism of him, saying they “were in line with bullying statements she had made about others: a conflict with gays while she was at Dartmouth in 1984 and, recently, responding to LeBron James’s political statements by saying that the NBA star should ‘shut up and dribble.’”

“I’m glad to see corporate America standing with me and the other students of Parkland and everybody else. Because when we work together, we can accomplish anything.”

Then Ingraham took a week off. Fox claimed the vacation had been planned.

Hogg, now 18, has already made political change.

When Leslie Gibson, who was running unopposed for the Maine House of Representatives, described fellow Parkland student Emma González as a “skinhead lesbian,” Hogg called for somebody to challenge the Republican. He got not one but two other candidates, and Gibson dropped out of the race in response to public reaction critical of his comments.

Today, a little more controversy. The conservative network The Blaze is reporting,

“The Zionist Organization of America is calling on Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg to change the name of his forthcoming book, as it believes that the title shows ‘shocking insensitivity to Holocaust survivors.’ “Random House publishers announced Thursday that David and his sister Lauren had penned a deal with the publishing house to release a book, #NEVERAGAIN: A New Generation Draws the Line, June 5.”

Lauren is a freshman survivor.

https://twitter.com/davidhogg111/status/986682645814956032

According to The Blaze, Random House said it plans to make a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety.

The Blaze also reports the book is being described as

“a statement of generational purpose, and a moving portrait of the birth of a new movement.” “In times of struggle and tragedy, we can come together in love and compassion for each other,” David told Entertainment Weekly. “We can see each other not as political symbols, but as human beings. And then, of course, there will be times when we simply must fight for what is right.” Sister Lauren added, “It’s amazing to see that so much love can come from so much loss. But from our loss, our generation will create positive change.”

But I’ve had an issue with using the phrase “never again” since it has always referred to one event: the murders of 6 million Jews and millions of others in the Nazis’ organized extermination campaign during World War II. Personally, I think the book title should be changed, and don’t think the phrase should be used in any other matter, but don’t doubt Hogg’s sincerity about the gun issue.

The ZOA said in part,

“By co-opting ‘Never Again’ title for his book opposing guns, David Hogg trivializes the holocaust” and the Hoggs’ book title “offends Holocaust survivors, Jews, and all human rights-loving people.”

Those are sections the Glenn Beck-founded network chose to highlight, due to its own agenda.

Click here for the complete press release issued yesterday, which also said,

“This statement should not be construed as in any way lessening our shock, outrage and pain regarding the Parkland school shooting. ZOA completely sympathizes with the loving, bereft families and all the infinitely precious victims of the Parkland shooting, all other school shootings, and all other shootings. All affected by these tragedies are in our hearts and prayers. … “It is an expression that should never be politicized or co-opted by anyone, regardless of political affiliation. … “The Holocaust was unique and unprecedented, in that: it involved a ‘final solution’ designed to murder every single Jewish man, woman and child; Jews were the only people killed for the ‘crime’ of existing; the murder of Jews was an ‘end in itself’ rather than a means to some other goal; and the people who carried out the ‘Final Solution’ were primarily average citizens ‘just doing a job.’ None of the other terrible slaughters and genocides this world has witnessed share all these characteristics.”

We’ll see what happens.

A third of the 20 founding members of the group Never Again MSD is activist Emma González, who has also had to deal with criticism of her bisexual orientation, hairstyle and more, including this.

The Washington Post reported,

“A doctored animation of González tearing the U.S. Constitution in half circulated on social media during the rally, after it was lifted from a Teen Vogue story about teenage activists. In the real image, González is ripping apart a gun-range target.”

I guess you could say desperate liars were targeting her because they had nothing better.

The group was promoting the March 24 “March for Our Lives” rallies in which even the president’s daughter, Tiffany Trump, supported. I traced how this posting came to be.

https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/status/977696844187885569

Kasky, Hogg and González — along with fellow students Jacqueline Cohen and Alex Wind — even made Time magazine‘s list of the 100 most influential people in the world for becoming prominent activists, organizing protests, and speaking out publicly to demand stricter laws on gun control.

Time wrote in an article, How we chose the 2018 TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people: “Barack Obama, who has said that his greatest frustration as President was the failure of commonsense gun-safety laws, draws inspiration from the Parkland, Fla., teenagers who organized the March for Our Lives: ‘They have the power … to reject the old constraints, outdated conventions and cowardice too often dressed up as wisdom.’” Click here for the Time article about the Parkland 5.

Mashable went back further, writing the former president…

https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/966704319658647553

and first lady…

https://twitter.com/MichelleObama/status/966483852834287621

“both tweeted support for the Parkland teens following the deadly shooting, and wrote them a handwritten letter in praise of their ‘resilience, resolve and solidarity.’”

Notice the dates on everything. The attack took place on Feb. 14.

Mashable included a typed version of the letter, for those of you having trouble with Mr. Obama’s handwriting, and also a look at celebrities joining in at the March for Our Lives.

https://twitter.com/mic/status/976502415376703488

Even former NFL placekicker Jay Feely needs a lesson on seriousness, after The Sporting News showed a tweet he posted. It showed a “photo of him holding a gun while standing between his daughter and her prom date” that was intended to be a joke.

https://twitter.com/jayfeely/status/987853794221350912

Feely should know better. He’s from Florida, grew up there and spent a year with the Miami Dolphins. The next day, he clarified what had happened.

https://twitter.com/jayfeely/status/988067986115149824

On a more positive note, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports the prom will be an “over-the-top” party with a touching tribute, and students promising the best prom ever, after 17 people were shot to death at their school on Valentine’s Day. Four seniors were killed. So were seven freshman (that will be some prom in three years), plus three other students and two adults.

Eventually, the prom committee wanted to recognize the tragedy that’ll mark their high school memories. There will be a memorial near the entrance to the ballroom. It’ll also include two members of their class who died in 2016 of cystic fibrosis and suicide. The memorial will be surrounded by couches and designated as a quiet place to sit and think.

Inside, the prom will be stopped by 17 seconds of silence.

It also won’t be expensive. The cost: Just $30 per ticket, and $50 for non-seniors. The hotel, DJ, florist, decorator, and other vendors are donating their services for free or at cost, and the hotel is giving families of the senior victims a free weekend of their choice.

Good for all of them!

Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivors, along with high school students from around the country, were not even born 19 years ago during the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colo.

(I remember it like yesterday. I had returned from vacation, was working at WCAU, and our news anchor Renee Chenault happened to be from Littleton. She ended up going there to report from her hometown, but being local news, did not get the publicity of Katie Couric for touching the hand of a victim’s father on the Today show.)

There were an estimated 150,000 students protesting on Friday’s anniversary at more than 2,700 walkouts, according to organizers.

The Chicago Tribune, in an Associated Press article published Friday afternoon, said,

“In a new wave of school walkouts, they raised their voices against gun violence. But this time, they were looking to turn outrage into action.” The students, “turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took the stage to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers.”

Activists behind a March 14 protest, a month after Stoneman Douglas, estimated it drew nearly 1 million students.

(I find it interesting The Chicago Tribune used an Associated Press article, while I learned Chicago’s Fox TV station asked the other Fox stations for a story they could post on their website, because they were apparently unable to write one of their own. Were there no rallies anywhere near Chicago? Probably plenty, considering the numbers above! At minimum, I would’ve shown the big one around town and then another in a zip code they wanted to target for ratings. Even chopper video would’ve done the job except for hearing the students tell their reasons for walking out, firsthand. But we know how Fox stations operate with sharing web articles. It seems at this point, they’ve become dependent on their sister-stations rather than even try to do the work. I love how so many of today’s young people are the opposite of this kind of corporate laziness!)

The Washington Post noted, “Critics have questioned whether … the high school students demanding that the nation’s gun laws be strengthened are mature enough to understand the complex policy positions they have staked out.”

Isn’t this exactly what we want from our young people? To think, investigate and reconsider if necessary? And don’t these particular students who experienced what they did have unique insight on the issue? Yet some people feel the need to criticize them. Maybe it’s because they need to be heard. Maybe because these grown-ups really have not grown up and are jealous. Or maybe because “the kids are alright” and and it simply bothers them because they have issues of their own.

How much are they bothered?

Click here for “Ted Nugent says Parkland students ‘have no soul,’ calls them ‘mushy-brained children’” (The Washington Post, March 31, 2018).

Nugent, perhaps the NRA’s most outspoken board member, told a San Antonio radio station, “These poor children, I’m afraid to say, but the evidence is irrefutable. They have no soul,” after discussing with the host their belief the teenagers have been manipulated by left-wing ideologues.

“The lies from these poor, mushy-brained children who have been fed lies and parrot lies,” Nugent said. “I really feel sorry for them. It’s not only ignorant, dangerous and stupid — it’s soulless. To attack the good, law-abiding families of America when well-known, predictable murderers commit these horrors is deep in the category of soulless.”

Click here for “How the Parkland teens became villains on the right-wing Internet” (The Washington Post, March 26, 2018).

If ardent NRA supporters don’t lose now, or in this year’s midterms, or even the 2020 presidential election, they should absolutely know the demographics of this country are changing. Eventually, they will lose to people who have felt real pain and others of that generation. It’s going to happen, whether they’ll consider themselves martyrs, or if they’re even alive to feel any suffering from their defeat.

Wikipedia

Also a hero: Last week, the pilot of Southwest Airlines flight 1380, Captain Tammie Jo Shults, landed her plane calmly and successfully, on just one engine, here in Philadelphia. She saved 148 lives.

The trouble on the flight from New York to Dallas started when one of its engines appeared to explode in midair. The only person killed was passenger Jennifer Riordan who was partially sucked out of a broken window. That was extraordinary despite the tragedy.

https://twitter.com/SouthwestAir/status/986788359350751232

https://twitter.com/SouthwestAir/status/987487170947637248

YouTube

According to The Guardian, “Those present recalled that after the plane had landed, Shults walked through the aisle to talk to them, to see how they were doing.”

Talk about responsibility AND customer service!

Turns out, The Guardian continued,

“Shults was one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Navy and was elite enough to fly an F/A-18 Hornet. She flew training missions as an ‘enemy pilot’ during Operation Desert Storm, as women were then still excluded from combat missions.”

Also not to be forgotten is the heroism of Waffle House diner James Shaw Jr. Early Sunday morning, outside Nashville, he was sitting with a friend at the restaurant counter when police said a gunman wearing nothing but a green jacket opened fire outside.

As CNN reported, “Glass shattered, dust swirled and Shaw said he saw a man lying on the ground.”

Four people were killed.

https://twitter.com/MNPDNashville/status/988000352741003264

CNN continued, Shaw

“bolted from his seat and slid along the ground to the restroom, he said. But he kept an eye and an ear out for the gunman. And the moment the shooter paused, Shaw decided to ambush him … before more lives were lost.”

He charged at the man with the rifle. They fought. Finally, Shaw said he managed to wrestle the barrel of the rifle from the gunman, tossed it behind the counter and the shooter escaped.

https://twitter.com/MNPDNashville/status/988055742363193344

“The gun was hot and he was naked but none of that mattered,” Shaw said, with a burn on his hand a wound on his elbow where a bullet grazed it.

He told reporters,

“I figured if I was going to die, he was going to have to work for it. … I was just trying to live.”

https://twitter.com/MNPDNashville/status/988476776316841984

Travis Jeffrey Reinking, 29, was arrested Monday, after a 34-hour manhunt.

https://twitter.com/MNPDNashville/status/988916197411508224

NBC News pointed out he went from wearing only a green jacket to a green “suicide smock — a padded gown made from heavy-duty polyester that is held together with Velcro strips.”

If you are of a certain age, you remember Schoolhouse Rock! from ABC on Saturday mornings. The jazz musician who was instrumental in that cartoon series died Monday in Mount Bethel, Pa., 92 miles and an hour-and-a-half drive from Philadelphia.

Bob Dorough was 94.

Wikipedia

Simple Wikipedia

Schoolhouse Rock! ran from 1973 to 1985. The cartoons, including “My Hero, Zero” and “Three is a Magic Number,” (the first in the series) were written and performed by Dorough.

His biography says he “entertained and instructed unsuspecting children.”

Schoolhouse Rock! came back for another five years in the 1990s and its 40th anniversary was marked with a DVD edition of the entire five subject series.

Has a Schoolhouse Rock! tune ever helped you on a test? Do you have a favorite? I especially liked how a bill became a law (“I’m Just a Bill”) and “Conjunction Junction.”

Wikipedia

Finally, there’s the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, site of last night’s Sixers playoff game where they eliminated the Miami Heat. Actually, the topic is replacement names, and Wells Fargo is not a very good corporate citizen.

I have always been against companies buying names for stadiums and liked it when NBC Sports, before losing the NFL in 1998, made it a point of not referring to the names of stadiums but just the city, unless there was confusion between different stadiums.

Philly.com says its readers suggest either Wilt Chamberlain, Sam Hinkie or Ed Snider.

Wikimedia Commons

The stadium, where the Flyers played hockey until their season ended earlier this week, is named for Wells Fargo which is a big bank in Philadelphia and many other cities. Before that, it was named Wachovia. Before that, First Union. FU Center had something special to it. And before that, CoreStates. Just shows you how banks take each other over and waste money having to change the names on every branch and piece of real estate, including the ones they sponsor or use to advertise.

Speaking of money, Wells Fargo was in trouble yet again for what the website called “scams that targeted its own customers,” specifically its mortgage and auto insurance practices. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency made the accusations and ordered the bank to make restitution, plus pay the regulators $1 billion in fines. Wells Fargo did not admit or deny any allegations.

Just two years ago, Wells Fargo’s employees recused of secretly opening more than 2 million deposit and credit card accounts to meet their sales targets and receive bonuses. The bank had to pay $185 million to settle those allegations. It also fired about 5,300 employees for doing what may have been their jobs. In that case as well, Wells Fargo did not admit or deny allegations.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo has been the nation’s third largest bank by assets.

Wikipedia

FYI, the late Wilt Chamberlain played for the San Francisco/Philadelphia Warriors and the Philadelphia 76ers, and is widely considered one of the greatest and most dominant players in NBA history. He still holds the single-game scoring record, having scored 100 in one game. It happened March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pa. against the New York Knicks. The Philadelphia Warriers moved west to San Francisco after that season.

Twitter

Sam Hinkie was General Manager and President of Basketball Operations of the Philadelphia 76ers. He graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and led the Sixers to some lousy seasons, but the team rebounded from what he left behind. In 2015, ESPN named Hinkie’s Sixers as the major professional sports franchise that had most embraced analytics.

Wikipedia

And the late Ed Snider helped build the Spectrum and owned the Flyers, the Wells Fargo Center and a lot more. Wikipedia noted, “In a 1999 Philadelphia Daily News poll, Snider was selected as the city’s greatest sports mover and shaker, beating out legends such as Connie Mack, Sonny Hill, Bert Bell, and Roger Penske.”

Click here for several other readers’ thoughts on new names, some more serious than others!

Please, if you like what you read here, subscribe to CohenConnect.com with either your email address or WordPress account, and get a notice whenever I publish.

Who says everything I write is negative, but correct? This is my 90th blog post and like most journalists, I identify mistakes all over and somehow -- often through publicity -- try to get them fixed.

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johannawriteson · 7 years

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Notes on Two Tele-Town Halls

It’s all the rage these days with representatives who don’t want to actually talk to their constituents or risk—gasp—disagreeing with them in public. You’ve heard of it. You probably also think it’s a weird idea. It’s…the tele-town hall.

Here in Colorado, where our votes lean purple, this newfangled concept appears to be becoming popular. You can see why the tele-town hall would be a win-win for many senators and congresspeople. You get to tell people you’re listening to their concerns, but you don’t have to stand in front of a crowd of people which, odds in Colorado being what they are, is at least half-filled with people who are not happy with the way you’ve been representing them.

And so on a Wednesday night, March the 8th, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seventeen, I found myself on not one but two tele-town hall conferences with folks who allegedly represent me in Washington. I say “allegedly” because for as much as I’ve been calling them, my requests seem to be heard and taken into consideration approximately .09% of the time. Still, I have nothing but good things to say about the aids who have now spent hours of their life on the phone listening to me, and I believe in civic involvement and strong public discourse. So I charged up my cell, signed up for the tele-town halls of Congressman Scott Tipton and Senator Cory Gardner (both Republicans), and went into the experience with a relatively open mind.

Here’s what I learned:

1. Dialogue is not so much a thing in a tele-town hall.

This is most assuredly the Achilles heel of the tele-town hall concept: there’s no real opportunity to respond. A constituent asks a question, the representative answers, and then the rep moves onto the next question. That’s it. No chance for follow-ups, no opportunity for real response or debate. The representative is guaranteed the last word, even if they largely avoided addressing the real concerns the constituent has brought forward.

2. Time is also not so much a thing in a tele-town hall. And technology will always let you down.

The technology side of things went fairly well with Congressman Tipton’s call. I signed up, got a call approximately two minutes after the event was supposed to start, and I was immediately able to hear the in-progress town hall. I pressed the button indicating I wanted to ask a question, gave my information and question topic (Tax returns! Tax returns! Tax returns!) to someone, and waited for my name to be called.

Only it never was. In the hour-long phone call, Representative Tipton answered maybe twenty questions—not bad, all things considered. But given that there are 700,000 people living in the third congressional district, it seems Congressman Tipton would have to hold these things on a nightly basis in order for them to give him a real understanding of where we are on the issues.

Then it was time for Senator Gardner’s town hall. Here something must have broken down technologically, because though I signed up for the call hours in advance, I didn’t receive my call from the Gardner system until forty minutes after the start time of the town hall. Until then, all I was able to do was listen to it over the internet and type my questions into a box on Senator Gardner’s website. Needless to say, none of my questions were addressed. Again, the Senator was able to answer approximately twenty questions—which is problematic when you consider that he represents over 5 million people.

3. That was two hours of my life I can never have back.

Hanging up the phone after my final tele-town hall, I was left with one lingering thought: I missed Modern Family for that?

I hadn’t heard much that was new—just the same tired talking points I’ve already been given by staffers over and over again. There had been no real opportunity for people to respond to invalid or incorrect statements made in those talking points. I still have no answers as to why my reps aren’t pushing for Donald Trump’s tax returns to be released, or why my reps couldn’t have just worked across the aisle to make the Affordable Care Act better rather than trying to rip it up and potentially displacing millions of people from the health care system. But I’m sure Congressman Tipton and Senator Gardner were satisfied with the experience. They got to put up charming Facebook messages about what a wonderful opportunity it was to hear from people, they didn’t have to actually engage in a dialogue with anyone who disagreed with them, and they didn’t have to risk showing up on CNN looking like they, you know, aren’t listening to their constituents.

All in all, the whole experience left a sour taste in my mouth. Luckily it seems Scott Tipton may have also seen the many downsides of the tele-town hall, as he just scheduled several in-person town halls for April. Yay for Representative Tipton! I hope to soon see Senator Gardner do the same, because these tele-town halls just aren’t cutting it.

#politics #cory gardner #scott tipton #tele town hall #town hall #Colorado #political post

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firedupreadytogousa-blog · 7 years

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2/8 Day 20: TIME TO DO WORK. DON’T JUST HATE, PARTICIPATE!

Apologies for the long pause. I’ve had to undergo knee surgery, which means I am currently pissed off and on pain killers, so posts might not be as frequent.

- RESISTANCE IN TRUMP TIMES -

With the election of Betsy DeVos as the head of US Education for the next 4 years, it is extremely crucial to not only keep an eye on #PresidentBannon and his puppet Donald, but to also keep tabs on those that are complicit in the dismantling of American values and institutions designed to protect and ensure the rights of those in our country who are the most vulnerable—The GOP. They have clearly showed where their priorities lie, which concern profits, big donors, and corporations, NOT the people who elected them. Just look at the voting record thus far.

In fact in the last few days there have been 12 pieces of legislation introduced that are made to benefit these donors and corporations and not the people. All are listed below, but some gems include:

Allowing coal mining companies to dump pollutants in rivers

Eliminating the safeguards in Dodd Frank requiring advisors had to work in the best interest of clients.

Terminating the EPA & The Department of Education. Just terminating it.

Allowing companies with history of workplace violations to issue contracts again

Allowing oil companies to legally conceal any foreign payments they make to governments

Not to mention DAPL and Keystone XL being rebooted again, despite the massive leaks that just happened in Iowa and Yellowstone last month.

Voting to eliminate the department that makes sure voting machines do not get hacked.

And the list keeps going. So there can only be 1 of 2 things going on here; either The GOP is wildly obtuse and blissfully ignorant concerning their constituents and what they want, OR they just DGAF… And based on what I’ve seen concerning their behavior, I’m going with the latter. Thank you GOP, can’t wait to book you all for the “Bye Felicia” 2018 Midterm Election Tour.

I know how you are feeling… OMG WTF are we going to do about this?! We cannot kick these charlatans out until 2018 and even then, the majority of the Senate seats are not up until 2020… But do no fret. There are plenty of things we can be doing right now to fight back and start reshaping the government to work for We the People, once again. Because the government serves at the consent of the governed, and the majority of this country DOES NOT give their consent to this.

1. Start with Your State Government Officials

Having a state government that is ready and willing to combat Trump’s horrific national agenda and stand up for you is a major key to fighting all this bullshit coming out of Washington. The State Government has its own executive (Governor), legislative (State Senators & Assembly men/women), and judicial branch (Chief Judge & Associates) as well. And with the GOP aiming to leave more issues to be solely regulated by the states, it’s more important than ever to ensure you have home court advantage where you can.

STEP 1: Assemble Your Squad! Get to Know Your State Elected Officials

Find out who your officials are. Look them up on Open States

While on the Site, check out their voting records and their websites to judge where they stand on issues.

Questionable Votes (like a YES on DEVOS?) Make a list to ask them about. This is where WE the people hold them accountable

STEP 2: Look Up When Your Next Local Elections Are Taking Place

Spoiler Alert! Some are happening in 2017!

Review the candidates, voting records, and their stance on issues

Save the dates in your calendars to remember to vote. REMINDER you can also request an absentee ballot if think you will be out of town

STEP 3: Attend Town Halls and Public Events Your Officials Will Be Speaking At

These are open to the public! And in the current climate you will not have to go alone! Find a local group to join at the meeting or bring a friend

This is where you and others can publically demand answers for previous actions they’ve taken and demand they support their constituents.

Speak Up and Speak Out at these meetings. Pre-write your statement if you need to

If the schedule is not posted online, call their office to receive the dates of town halls or public appearances

STEP 4: GET INVOLVED!

There are tons of political groups that are very active and help keep you organized with everything that is going on. Ya just have to Google it.

Some groups doing this now: Rise and Resist in NYC, United Thru Action, Indivisible Queens, moveon.org.

2. Make sure you get involved with groups working on issues specific to your interests.

There are SO many areas of concern this election it will make your head spin! Breathe, and think to yourself, what is most important to me and assert your efforts there. I joined a 2018 midterm elections group because I’m on the “I’ll be damned if this ever happens again” train right now, but maybe for you it’s making sure public education? Or law enforcement? Or immigration. No matter what the issue is, there’s an activist group for that. Get Started with the Resistance Manual and then Move on to Indivisible guide to find a group!

3. #StayWoke #FactsMatter!

Spread Truth and debunk lies. Stay informed and do not settle for BS Whitewashed excuses that try to defend the indefensible! Keep a log so you won’t forget. Sir Francis Bacon was not lying when he coined the term “Knowledge is Power!” Twitter is a great resource to help you keep up with all the info swirling around, following folks like: @cnn, @jaketapper, @NPR, @Indivisibleguide, @AP, @Ananavarro and also follow your Senators!

Most importantly you have to REMEMBER that there are millions across the country just like you. Heck I am one of them. I’ve never been involved in politics or local government, but in light of recent events, complacency is just not an option!

- #STAYWOKE 2017: THE CROOKED GOP IS FAST AT WORK –

1) Introduced House Bill to- TERMINATE THE EPA… not a joke, that is the name of the Bill. Because being blissfully ignorant about the sea levels rising and 2016 being the hottest year in history EVER will just make it go away.

2) Executive Order removing the safeguards from Dodd Frank meant to protect people from another financial recession like 2008. You know the part that says advisors must work in the best interest of their clients as not to take advantage of them? Gone. All this because Trump must take care of his rich “friends” who are having a hard time getting loans. Ya, I’m sure this was a core concern of the rural Americans who voted for you Trump.

3) The House voted to remove another safeguard that would forbid contractors with a history of workplace violations from receiving new contracts. Again, this will protect the Trump base for sure.

4) Republican controlled statehouses are putting forth bills designed to place limits on the rights of protesters everywhere! Moveon.org with petitions to stop this.

5) Senate voted to repeal the law requiring oil/energy companies to have to disclose payments they make to foreign governments which was a SEC Transparency Rule. This happens hours after Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobile, friend of Putin/Russia, was confirmed as our Secretary of State.

6) Introduced bill to eliminate the department of education, hours after Betsy DeVos is sworn in. Which might have been their goal all along by giving us the most unqualified and frankly uneducated of candidates (save maybe Ben Carson) to lead education.

7) South Dakota GOP voted to repeal a grassroots effort that created anti-corruption and ethics guidelines for their elected officials. Again, this was passed by VOTERS and now the GOP has REPEALED IT!

8) Arkansas Law now allows Husbands to sue their wives if they get abortions, even in the case of rape.

9) GOP has repealed the law that prohibited Coal companies from dumping waste into streams. Because Fuck it, it’s just water right?!

10) The House GOP voted today to eliminate the Federal Agency whose job is to ensure voting machines cannot be hacked.

11) The nominee for the FCC intends to fight net neutrality. What does that mean? The less complicated version is the government can charge you MORE for watching/streaming/visiting content Trump finds disrespectful to him at a much SLOWER speed than those he deems fair and honorable to him. Tis a MUST READ!

12) The hysterical Rep Sean Duffy (R-Wisconsin) who wants us to look at the “good” that came from the Charleston shooting and we should be more worried about ISIS than what happened in Canada. SMH. Add him to the list on Officials on the 2018 “Bye Felicia” tour.

- THINGS TO WRITE YOUR REPS & SENATORS TO SUPPORT-

1) DEMs standing untied and pulling all nighters to protest Trump’s unacceptable cabinet picks of Devos (confirmed yesterday) and Sessions (vote today!). They deserve a Thank You for this. This site makes it easier to Write to Congress.

2) Bill introduced in the House to block people like #PresidentBannon from just appointing themselves on the National Security Council. Which he has no business being on.

3) 935 companies have dropped advertising from Breitbart. Visit Sleeping giants twitter to help join the fight!

#resist #resisttrumptuesdays #crookedgop #theresistance #nobannowall #nodapl #notoneinch #presidentbannon #stoppresidentbannon

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