KJ

July was a busy time for me at work, and then I went on vacation, and as usual political events moved really quickly. It seems like years have passed since the last time I did one of these, although in reality it was just under a month. So it goes when you're on Trump time. But Congress is on its summer recess (mostly -- the Senate pulled a procedural trick to keep the chamber officially in session, so that Trump can't make any recess appointments; this isn't an unusual practice, though), and the big man himself is on a seventeen day vacation (because he's been SO HARD at work these last several months, you know), so maybe things will be a little quieter for a bit, and we can catch up.

It's nice to think so, anyway.

• The big story on Twitter this weekend is an anti-diversity memo making the rounds internally at Google. The full text was leaked to Gizmodo; I'm not going to link to it, since it's 1. easy enough to find and 2. the same tedious MRA/alt-right bullshit we've all seen a million times about how women are too emotional to be good coders and "meritocracy" and why Google's REAL diversity problem is not enough Young Republicans (although Anil Dash's short version is pretty entertaining). However, I will link to this ex-Google employee's response, which is excellent. I also direct you to Dr. Nerdlove's Twitter thread on why "at least it's promoting discussion" is exactly the wrong response.


• The Washington Post examines exit poll data from the last few president elections in search of "Trump Democrats" only to find that they basically don't exist. Most of the voters who switched from Obama to Trump were Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote for Obama. Yet another reason for the Democrats to stop chasing this demographic and focus on pleasing their actual base.


• Speaking of, yet again more nonsense about the DNC/DCCC giving money as support to anti-choice candidates. Stop. Just stop. It's never helped us before and it's certainly not going to help us now. I will never forget how anti-choice Democrat Bart Stupak almost derailed the passage of the ACA by pushing for anti-abortion provisions. I don't believe in ideological purity tests, and I know that not every regions of the country is willing to elect loud and proud abortion activists. Candidates and elected officials can believe whatever they want, and take more moderate positions on the issue. But when it comes down to it, if you are a Democrat, you support reproductive rights. The end.


• That said, I have a huge issue with purity politics in general. Bustle has a good article on why women politicians in particular are hurt by an insistence on ideological purity. I'm really ready to be done with circular firing squads now.


• On the lighter side, sort of, it recently came out that Trump considered buying the San Francisco Giants back in the 1980s. Sports writer Grant Brisbee reacts with the appropriate levels of existential horror.


• On the occasion of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller impanelling a grand jury, Vox presents a really handy explainer of the probe, what Mueller's authority is, and how the investigation might go.


• Hey, remember back when we thought Trump's real endgame for his campaign was to launch his own TV network? Well, would you take a look at that.


• Because of the time gap since my last post, I missed the rapid rise and meteoric fall of never-quite-officially White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci (aka "The Mooch"). He'll be a great trivia answer in about ten years. Anyway, Jay Smooth had a great take on the whole thing.


• The central topic of my last linkspam post was the Senate's continuing attempts to ram through some flavor of ACA repeal; as we all know, that didn't happen, in dramatic eleventh hour fashion. One of my favorite stories about that night comes from Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, who shared his view from behind the scenes.


• You may recall a senator with cancer who got a lot of attention for his last-minute no vote. I'd rather celebrate Senator Mazie Hirono, who flew to DC from Hawaii right after surgery for Stage 4 cancer, held the line on every vote, and gave a beautiful, impassioned speech.


• Speaking of credit where credit is due, let's not forget two other Republican Senators who have stood firm against ACA repeal, almost unwaveringly from the beginning: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.


• Here's an interesting report on the number of Congressional challengers who have already filed to run in 2018 and comparing them to other elections at this point in the cycle. It's worth reading the whole thing, but the upshot is that, in wave elections like 2006 and 2010, opposition party candidates file early in considerably larger numbers than those from the party in power, usually about twice as many. This year? It's an order of magnitude. (209 Democrats vs 28 Republicans.)


• In the interest of this post not being five million pages long, I'm not even going to get into the whole Donald Trump, Jr., saga, but I was amused in an eye-rolly sort of way by this report from The Hill that Junior is "miserable and can't wait for his dad's presidency to end". Join the club, kid. (Note, autoplay video at that link.). Also, from the BBC, an article on whether this might be the smoking gun, and whether a smoking gun is even enough anymore.


• Finally. this article is a little older, but it's from the man who coined the phrase white fragility, and it is a very good examination of the subject. Every white person should read this essay with an open mind and a willingness to learn.

This is it folks, this is the big one. I don't need to tell you that, I suppose, but here we are. Even in California, where my Senators are firmly No-votes and leaders in the resistance, there are things we can do to stand up and fight -- here's a short to-do list for anyone who lives in a state with two Democratic Senators.

A few links on healthcare:

• Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey went through the bill, line by line, to point out some of its more terrible effects.


• Politico reports that the Senate Democrats will be playing hardball. Placing our calls in support of this tactic is one of the important things that blue-staters can do.


• With the urgency of our desire to kill this bill, I've seen a resurgence of the desire to call Senators from other states. Here's a good Twitter thread on the importance of NOT doing that, tempting as it may be, especially when there's evidence of Astroturfing from the other side. I know it's scary, but this time, fighting fire with fire would do more harm than good.

And other things:

• The Brookings Institution put out a scathing editorial on voter suppression in the United States, a good overview of recent court decisions with some damning statistics.


• The Associated Press published a report on the effects of gerrymandering, and it's not pretty.


• It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that the Democrats lost the special election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, and in fact the narrow loss continues the trend of being competitive in districts that ought to be safe GOP, but given how much effort and money we poured into that district, it's also understandable that people were disappointed. But the rush of pundits and BernieBots to blame Nancy Pelosi for the loss is both a headscratcher, and almost unbearably stupid. Charles Pierce explains why.


• And maybe before you get too invested in demonizing one of the most powerful women in the Democratic party, maybe you should consider who is in the trenches, doing the actual work in places like the Georgia 6th.


• Meanwhile, another Congressional special election flew completely under the radar: the South Carolina 5th. The Republican won that seat as well, but by an even smaller margin. This is not a seat that any polls suggested ought to be competitive, and the Democrats spent almost no money here. This ought to scare the GOP; we'll see if they heed the warning.


• Maryland and the District of Columbia have sued Donald Trump for violations of the emoluments clause and other conflict of interest laws.

I'm sure no one really wants to think or talk about anything other than the House's narrow passage of the AHCA today, the bill that's intended to replace Obamacare and dismantle our entire healthcare system in the process. It's terrible, awful, and terrifying for a lot of people; I don't expect to be affected in the short term myself, but the ripple effects could be tremendous if this bill becomes law. It's hard to know what the odds of that happening are. The GOP got away with this in part by rushing the AHCA through before the CBO could prepare its report on how much the updated bill will cost, and how many people it will affect, and that report is expected to be ready before the Senate can vote. It's also commonly thought that the House bill is too draconian to pass the Senate as-is, but if the Senate softens it up too much, it might not survive another House vote. (Never forget: the GOP got this bill through the House by insuring fewer people. I think about that, and compare it to Obama's fruitless efforts in 2009 to win even one Republican vote for the ACA, and it makes me want to cry.) But never underestimate what this group of thugs, bullies, and fascists is willing to do. That said, if you are feeling defeated today, I recommend you to this Twitter thread, which I found a small beacon of hope on a dark day. Friends, we were dealt a setback today, maybe the worst one since January 20th; it's okay if you need a little time to rest and regroup. But I hope you come back refreshed and ready to fight another day. The marathon continues.

Some other stuff that happened:

• Lest we think the Democrats are perfect, in the last couple of weeks I feel like they've been ramping up their chase of the Great White Male vote, with everyone from Bernie Sanders (of course) to Nancy Pelosi (oh hell no) stating that lack of support for abortion rights ought not to be a disqualifying factor for Democrats to support a candidate for office. *rubs forehead* Look, I get that being loud and proud pro-choice isn't going to fly in every single district or community, and people can have whatever personal beliefs they want. But when it comes down to votes and proposing legislation, Democrats had better not get all wishy-washy. Single-issue anti-abortion voters left the Democratic party a generation ago; trying to lure them back is only going to alienate the current party base, which is women and people of color, particularly women of color. As I suggested above, I don't really expect anything better from Bernie right now, but from Nancy Pelosi it's like a knife in the heart. At least Tom Perez got with the program, recently stating that reproductive rights are a non-negotiable issue for the DNC (note, annoying auto-play Bernie video at that link) -- but only after a lot of pressure, mostly from women.


• Speaking of annoying auto-play Bernie, he has been everywhere lately, and I am tired of it. This article does a good job of summing up why.


• It took awhile, but United Airlines finally made what feels to me like an adequate response to the incident in April when a passenger was forcibly removed from an airplane. New policies announced include changes to their rules for when flights can be overbooked, and last-minute changes to move crew, greater employee discretion in offering incentives, and an absolute ban on removing someone who has been seated on a plane unless there's a clear security issue. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better, as long as they follow through. (I still hope the guy sues for all he can get, though.)


• Another day, another Trump appointee who wants to destroy the agency they've been tapped to run: Teresa Manning, who has been nominated to run the Department of Health and Human Services office that manages family planning, believes that contraception doesn't work. Perfect.


• The House Oversight Committee finally started doing its job and is investigating Michael Flynn for real. In a statement released on April 25th, Jason Chaffetz said, "I see no data to support the notion that Gen. Flynn complied with the law." So-- that means he broke the law, then? As in, committed a crime? How about that.


• Probably the stupidest "controversy" of the past few weeks is the handwringing over Barack and Michelle Obama getting paid to make speeches now that they are private citizens. Let me repeat that: as influential as they might be, they are PRIVATE CITIZENS. They don't hold public office, and Barack never will again (and I'd be surprised if Michelle went that route), so why the fuss? Oh right, because money is dirty, unless it's going to white dudes, in which case it's fine.


• One recent bright spot was Bill O'Reilly losing his Fox News gig, due to advertiser pressure over the sexual harassment allegations that have dogged him for years. But I'd be surprised if that were be the end of it, and in fact Sean Hannity is facing new allegations already. Vox has a good video on Fox's culture of sexism that goes way beyond just O'Reilly and Roger Ailes.


• Also good news: Morgantown, WV, recently swept a progressive city council into office. I also recommend this follow-up article on how they did it.


• Here's a report on automatic voter registration in Oregon and how it dramatically increased turnout. A model for more states to follow.


• The media has often tried to paint Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, as a moderating influence on the president, and this urge has only ramped up with the recent release of Ivanka's new book. Don't fall for it.

Today's fun link: The Sandwich Alignment Chart. "What is a Sandwich" is possibly my favorite low-stakes debate topic, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if we come back to this one.

I was mostly offline for a few days last week -- Wednesday through Friday. It turned out those were some pretty eventful days to be offline.

• Montana's probably-failed vote by mail bill is mostly notable for the state Republican party's opposition letter, in which they straight-up said that they opposed it because it made it too easy for Democrats to vote. They aren't even pretending to make it about voter fraud anymore, are they?


• This New Yorker article builds a compelling and terrifying case for how the White House halted the US House investigation into the Russian election shenanigans with the active help of US Rep Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats are making louder and louder calls for an independent investigation like the 9/11 Commission; it's pretty obvious that we're never getting to the bottom of this otherwise.


• This Twitter thread is a good explanation of how the GOP broke the ACA by refusing to fund the risk corridor (in which the federal government would help insurers with the cost of covering higher-risk patients). It also links to an article explaining what the risk corridor is and how it was supposed to work, as well as detailing the problems with it now. It's hard not to think that the GOP purposefully made the ACA worse to drive public opinion toward getting rid of it.


• Of course, we all know how well that worked out. We need to keep wary -- there's no doubt that Paul Ryan will try to kill the ACA again. But for now, we all live to fight another day.


• The other big story last week was the Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination. The Democrats are, as usual, weighing whether to fight or cave. Myself, I don't particularly care about Gorsuch or his politics; the person who deserves the first committee hearing and up-or-down vote is Merrick Garland. That Supreme Court seat is stolen, and I will never feel differently, and I am perhaps angrier at the Democratic party for letting the GOP get away with it than I am about anything else they've ever done, up to and including the loss of the 2016 presidential election. The Democrats need to consider that rolling over on Gorsuch will demoralize their unusually energized base. Can they afford to do that, when a victory in 2018 depends so heavily on voter turnout? Time will tell, but I still hope the Democrats stand their ground on this one.


• Here's an article on "blue lies" -- lies that are meant to reassure a group while being obviously false to people outside that group -- and how they might explain the rise of Trump. I think it explains a lot of other political phenomena, too; Bernie Bros come to mind, and climate change deniers.


• Men Just Don't Trust Women, and This Is a Problem: A thoughtful article by Damon Young looks at the ways in which men don't trust women to speak their emotional truth, and how this wreaks havoc not just in relationships, but throughout public life.


• In news that surprises no one, the cuts in the White House budget bring the most pain to the people they purportedly "help" by cutting taxes. Newsflash, GOP: most of the people helped by government social programs aren't the ones who make enough money to be paying a lot of taxes.


• This article on liberal transphobia was a hard read, but an important one, especially in the wake of the controversy sparked by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her comments about trans women. It's not always an easy issue for cis women to confront, but we need to get better at it. I also recommend Raquel Willis's response to Adichie. I want to make it clear that I admire so much of Adichie's work and think she is an important voice for the feminist community to support, but she got it very wrong here, especially in her attempts to respond to the criticism.


• For the "actors who were born to play their characters" file, Chris Evans lays out his feelings about the Trump presidency in an Esquire interview. Also, in case you missed it, it's worth checking out his Twitter fight with David Duke.

Today's fun is politics-related, but I couldn't not include a link to the best hashtag of recent weeks, #GOPDND, which re-envisions GOP politics as the worst Dungeons and Dragons campaign ever. The Mary Sue has a good roundup.

I probably need a catchier name for this project....

Not much this time because I actively avoided posting news and politics links while I was in Hawaii. A few gems, though.

• A quick rundown of the attempt of Congressional Republicans to defang House ethics rules and the almost immediate reversal. The two main takeaways: public outcry sometimes works, but we have to keep watching them like hawks.


• I found this Tweetstorm on this history of reconstruction from arthur_effect (Arthur Chu) to be both informative and thought-provoking, in terms of what might happen next in this national backlash to progress on civil rights issues.


• Another on the "Third Reconstruction," from Rev. William Barber, the leader of North Carolina's Moral Monday movement. Moral Monday is an excellent model for liberal resistance, and I hope more of us can adopt it.


• Very good takedown of the idea that Hillary Clinton lost "working Americans". It largely boils down to the media's limited definitions of "working" and "Americans" (i.e. white men in very specific kinds of jobs).


• From Brookings, a blueprint for what path the media should follow to cover the incoming administration.

I spent far too much time today posting to Facebook about the election. (I actually made a post apologizing to my friends for getting all up in everyone's notifications to yell about the Voting Rights Act.) But I also came across a few gems, which I would like to share here. Hopefully soon I will have brainspace to think about other things, but not yet.

• I'm a Coastal Elite from the Midwest: The Real Bubble is Rural America -- this flips the script from the usual media narrative, in a way that rings very true to me as someone who grew up in the small town Midwest (mostly Iowa) and then has spent the rest of their life on one of the coasts. This doesn't absolve us from reaching out to the bubble and learning more about the people inside it, but like empathy, it's gotta go both ways.



• California takes a stand against Trumpism in a strongly worded statement of action. My friend S talked to people who work for California legislators, and she was assured that this is not just a feel-good statement: they are actually moving forward with all of this. I love everyone in this bar.



• Don't Mourn, Fight Like Hell: another call to action, this one from Mother Jones. There's a bit of musing on how we got here, but the focus is on what to do next, which I appreciate.



• Thoughtful and caring advice on dealing with the Trump supporters in your life.



• Relatedly, readingtheend shares practical advice for white people calling out racism, based on her experience living in a red state and years of practice being the child of social workers.



• Stop saying 'This isn't my America.' Sorry, it is. Important reminder that this backlash to progress isn't new, and there were plenty of other manifestations of it, if you were paying attention.



• Some clear evidence that voter suppression laws played a real part in flipping swing states Trumpward.



• Never forget: like Al Gore before her, Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote. This doesn't mean anything in a practical sense (attempts to convince the electoral college otherwise aside -- and although I understand the impulse, I don't think this is a good idea; no election would ever go unchallenged again), but it does make me feel a little less despair about my fellow Americans and what they believe.

That's all for tonight. I shared a number of these on Twitter, which seems to be my main home for linkspamming these days. If people are interested, I'll try to do the occasional round-up, but for the latest-greatest, follow me over there at iamkj

I'm too deeply in shock to say much of anything yet. Maybe I'll be ready tomorrow.

Be kind to yourself for as long as you need. Then when it's time, we get up and keep fighting. The voices of hate and fear may have won today, but I'm never going to stop shouting back.

I have decided that I need a bit of a hiatus from election news. Though I haven't really talked about it here, I feel like keeping up with the presidential election has overwhelmed the rest of my media consumption, and is also really stressing me out. It's not like I can do anything about the latest update to the 538 forecast, or the false equivalences being drawn between the candidates, or the ten million ballot measures that I need to research and vote for. So I've started a 24 hour hiatus as of about 10pm tonight. Which means no Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook, no other news sites, no 538, no RSS feeds.

As soon as I made the decision this afternoon, I started to relax, so we'll see how it goes. And whether I'm able to stick to it. :)

You've probably noticed that I've written very little about this presidential primary season -- my last and so far only post on the subject was in November. That doesn't mean I don't have thoughts, of course. I've shared plenty on Twitter (by far my most active social media presence these days), and sometimes Tumblr posts as well, and it's all but taken over my Facebook feed (although I took a break from posting election-related content myself from about March through Clinton mathematically clinching the nomination). But my journal hasn't really seemed like the venue to share them. Until now.

Because there's no way I'm letting a milestone like this go by without marking it down for posterity. On Thursday night, July 28th, 2016, I had friends over to watch Hillary Clinton become the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major political party, giving her a very real shot to become the first female President of the United States of America. We cheered and we cried and we broke out a bottle of champagne. As I watched her speak, I thought about the generations of women who worked and fought and died for this moment. I watched women and men basking in the glory of a victory they may have never expected to see. I looked at the faces of girls in the audience, rapt with attention and brimming with possibility. I took it all in, and I relished it. Sure, it's not exactly a surprise -- this has been the anticipated outcome of the 2016 Democratic primary since at least 2008 -- and yet there's a part of me that couldn't believe it was happening, that still can't quite believe it's real.

I've always hoped to see a woman become president in my lifetime, but for many years I assumed that the first female president would be a Republican. My reasoning? It seemed more likely to me that a moderate Republican woman (think Elizabeth Dole, or Christine Todd Whitman) could attract support from moderate Democratic women than the other way around, and that such support would be necessary to offset the people who simply couldn't vote for any woman as president. Also, any viable female presidential candidate would need to project a tough image: in particular, be a strong supporter of the military. And until not so long ago, those were policy positions associated with the Republican Party. So I thought it made sense that a centrist Republican would be more likely to break through this particular glass ceiling.

And the truth is, I would have raised a glass to that theoretical Republican, too. Chances are I wouldn't have voted for her, but I still would've cheered her accomplishment. The fact of a woman, any woman, being poised to take the highest office in the land is a blow against sexism. A small one, to be sure, if the woman in question campaigned on a regressive platform. But a blow nonetheless. And whatever you think of Hillary Clinton, her policies, and the trajectory of her political career*, you cannot argue that she hasn't made promoting equal rights for women and girls a priority throughout her life.

This isn't the end of the battle, of course. Electing a female president wouldn't end sexism any more than Barack Obama's election ended racism. We need more women and people of color -- especially women of color -- at all levels of government, from local positions to the White House and beyond, before we can truly say that we've won anything. (I think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her vision of an all-female Supreme Court.) But just as Obama's candidacy was an important step along that path, so is Clinton's, and I hope we can hold this progress going forward.

*Which is not something I intend to argue about here. I'm happy to have substantive debate about Clinton as a politician and a candidate on another day, but that's not the point of this post. This is a moment to celebrate, for me and millions of others, and I intend to make the most of it.

Maybe so, but they got the wrong bums. The Republicans are cruising to an easy takeover of the Senate, and seem to have picked up a number of governorships as well. I'm not sure how much this changes anything on a practical level, though. Even if the GOP has a Senate Majority, it's not enough of one to get anything done, any more than the Democratic majority was before. Certainly not enough to override any presidential vetoes. And despite all the hand-wringing I saw on MSNBC about Republican governors in blue states as harbingers for 2016, it's not like New England and the Mountain West haven't had Republican governors before. Remember, it's not so long ago that Mitt Romney was the governor of Massachusetts.

I really do continue to boggle at the Democratic inability to capitalize on success, though. People like the Affordable Care Act! Why do you keep running from it?

Meanwhile, I did of course vote this morning. California is rather insulated from the national stuff because Jerry Brown was reelected in a walk, and neither of our US Senators were up this year. We also had slightly less of the proposition-related ridiculousness this year, although "less" is not "none". But it looks like almost nothing I voted against is going to pass, and nothing I feel strongly about is going to lose, so that's generally okay.

If only the midterms being over meant that we were done with election nonsense for awhile. But alas, it seems that will be with us always.