.@KamalaHarris brought down the house again today at #EssenceFest —> “The fight of black women has always been fueled & grounded in faith & in the belief of what is possible…” ? @Essence @essencefest #ForThePeople pic.twitter.com/xnTqpRClgn
— Maya Harris (@mayaharris_) July 6, 2019
I haven’t seen any of the other candidates’ videos yet, but go ahead and post them in the comments if you come across them. I believe Warren, Bennet and Booker are there, too.
Michelle Obama speaks tonight, if someone finds a live feed, let me know and I’ll happily post it. I know Gayle King is going to interview her tonight and there will be an online stream:
How to Watch Gayle King interview Michelle Obama
- Date: Saturday, July 6
- Time: 10:40 p.m. ET
- Online stream: CBSN
Open thread
rikyrah
Black Women Views (@blackwomenviews) Tweeted:
The AKAs were rolling deep today to support Kamala but there was nothing but love from the Deltas as well! The Alphas were representing too! #TeamKamala #Kamala2020 #EssenceFest https://t.co/w2h2eflwTp https://twitter.com/blackwomenviews/status/1147607888891981825?s=17
Martin
This is why I back Kamala. This is how you get people to drop everything to canvas. Nobody is going to walk through fire for Biden or Hickenlooper or Gabbard, but there are a lot of voters that will walk through fire for Kamala.
rikyrah
Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) Tweeted:
This is an interesting point & reminder that @AOC’s generation doesn’t remember a more moderate Republican party that people my age remember. Because her views aren’t clouded by memories of a party that no longer exists, they may be more accurate. https://t.co/VhULTfQhpI https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1147277576710369287?s=17
chris
I…
zhena gogolia
I’m so happy she’s getting momentum. I put my bumper sticker on before the debate!
TaMara (HFG)
@chris: This is what happens when cousins marry.
JPL
@chris: oh just fuckem.
James E Powell
@rikyrah:
I am 35 years older than AOC and I don’t remember a moderate Republican party.
Gelfling 545
@chris: Unless someone in the department is a lunatic, I trust they’ll be doomed to disappointment.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@James E Powell: I’m a bit younger than you, I remember moderate Republicans; the party, however went right wing after ’64.
Eric U.
I would say the last reasonable Republican prez was GHWBush. And when I say reasonable, I mean I was always confident that he had the best interest of the country as a guiding principle. Not that he was always capable of telling what that was. I was taken by surprise when GWBush turned out to be something like a barely evolved College Republican.
There were liberal Republicans back when, and when I say that I mean Nelson Rockefeller. Sort of like the Susan Collins of his day. But that was before the hastert rule.
zhena gogolia
@Eric U.:
Two words for you:
Clarence Thomas
Steve in the ATL
@Eric U.: generally agree, though he spent an inordinate amount of time setting old scores from his CIA days (Noriega et al)
evodevo
@James E Powell: I’m 73 and it hasn’t been “moderate” (sane? less greedy?) since the late Seventies….
Immanentize
@James E Powell:
C’mon,
Nelson Rockefeller
John Lindsay
Margaret Chase Smith
Hell, Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court
All in your sentient lifetime if you are in your 60’s.
Eric U.
Well, if you think about how bad the Republicans were in the ’50s (excluding Eisenhower), then anything moderate we might have seen in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s was just an aberration. But there has been a significant realignment since then, concentrating all the nastiness in the Republican party.
hueyplong
From my perspective, the Ford-Reagan 1976 primary fight was the last time the far right failed to impose its will. There may have been an occasional dressing up of reality as something else since then (1000 points of light, blah, blah, blah), but the party has been a menace on a consistent basis in all the intervening years.
germy
@Gelfling 545:
https://dcist.com/story/19/07/05/d-c-police-officer-fist-bumps-a-proud-boy-after-clashes-in-front-of-white-house/
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m older than both of you and the only decent republican that I can remember was Eisenhower.
Baud
@chris:
I thought her crimes were Federal.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
You liked Kamala before it was cool!
Gelfling 545
@germy: Sigh. Yeah. But be that as it may I doubt they’ll want the pain in the ass it will bring them.
germy
@Ruckus: Wasn’t Eisenhower neither here nor there when it came to political parties? I remember reading somewhere he didn’t give a great deal of thought as to which party to join. I could be wrong, maybe what I read was bullshit.
Betty Cracker
Reagan was president when I was in high school and started acquiring my own opinions, which is why I’ve never voted for a Republican. That said, I do remember Republicans who weren’t snarling, hateful, anti-science loons. My 20-year-old daughter does not. They’ve gotten worse.
NotMax
@Ruckus
Jacob Javits? Lowell Weicker? Ken Keating?
Betty Cracker
Here’s Elizabeth Warren being right on busing way back when.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax:
Weicker is the only Republican I ever voted for, and I did so gladly.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Eric U.: The Republicans have always had a right wing(American First, Bob Taft…) but they didn’t dominate the party as they do now. There were moderate and even liberal Republicans. Part of it was the party switching by southern Democrats that started in the mid-60’s.
oldgold
What we need in 2020 are some Mugwumps.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Wait, past writings are fair game when you’re a candidate?
Uh oh.
germy
@Baud: We’ve got a thick binder full of your balloon-juice comments. Abandon your campaign now and they’ll stay in the binder.
JPL
@zhena gogolia: I voted for Gerald Ford. At the time I lived in Louisiana and was nine months pregnant. My due date was election day so I went to vote early. I had to swear that I was going to be out of town, so technically I voted fraudulently.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@oldgold: Why not, we already have the Know Nothings.
Baud
@germy:
Maybe WaterGirl will have an “accident” while performing the site upgrade.
JPL
@germy: Wait a minute, I thought what’s in the binder stays in the binder.
mad citizen
@zhena gogolia: I’ve had mine on for about four months. Haven’t seen another, nor has anyone said anything to me about it. It’s way early, but I thought I’d at least raise some name recognition for Kamala in my red state (Indiana).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: Binders full of
womencomments? Mitt?germy
@Baud: If you had Sirota on your team he could arrange it.
CaseyL
The golden age of Liberal Republicans was in the 1970s: Jacob Javitz, Lowell Weicker, John Lindsey, Lindy Boggs… it was mostly, though not entirely, a Northeastern phenomenon. (Washington State had some excellent liberal Republican governors.) They were largely gone by the mid-80s, with Reagan continuing Nixon’s work in rebuilding the GOP around racists and Christianists. Now the GOP is composed entirely of traitors, grifters, and racist scum.
Baud
@germy:
I’d rather lose.
germy
@CaseyL: I’m not sure it was Reagan doing the actual rebuilding. He was just the smiley face sticker covering the festering wound.
Kathleen
@germy: Just don’t let Snowald get a hold of them. He’ll “accidentally” pass them along to the FBI, who will promptly arrest Baud. Word.
germy
Maya Lakshmi Harris (author of the front page tweet) is the real deal.
Sister of Kamala as well as her campaign chairwoman, law professor, editor (she helped edit Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow.”)
CaseyL
@germy: True dat.
Citizen Alan
@James E Powell:
I was born 7 months into Nixon’s 1st term. There’s never been a moment of my life when the Republican party was a moderate force in this country. It’s been fascist for at least half a century.
ukko
Russia, if you are listening maybe you could help us find Baud’s 30,000 acid washed posts?
germy
@Kathleen:
All future Baud comments would come from the embassy in Ecuador. His only visitor would be Pamela Anderson.
dmsilev
@zhena gogolia: I voted for Bill Weld for governor. In my defense, the Democratic alternative was, somehow, John Silber.
Citizen Alan
@germy:
I have often wondered whether Eisenhower would have run as a Democrat in a 52 if truman had a lost to dewey in 48
Immanentize
@dmsilev:
John Silber was a bad bad man
?BillinGlendaleCA
@CaseyL: Liddy Boggs was a Democrat.
M31
@dmsilev: omg Silber, what a toxic fucker
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: @Citizen Alan: Seems to me I recall reading that Eisenhower was not a strong partisan, but thought that Republicans were both more business-friendly and more sympathetic to his rather conservative/conventional religious views– mainline protestantism nothing like today’s snake-handlers.
chris
@Baud:
Nah, man, that’s Deep State bull, only the sheriff has the konztitooshunal authority over such vile crimes. Whatever they are.
trollhattan
@germy:
We threw those out on accounta needing the binder for the wimmins.
Now I know why Cole gardens (from his Tweetings)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@M31: Got a good pic of you out at Joshua Tree.
Ruckus
@germy:
That’s what I remember as well, that he was actually fairly smack down the middle. He was rather concerned that D-Day would go wrong and a lot of men would die because of him. That really doesn’t sound very republican today does it?
germy
@trollhattan: Good fences make good neighbors.
Bill Arnold
@chris:
Hah. I have been in that police station a few times[1]. It serves a very wealthy low-crime area. The officer is keeping a very straight face at the resolution of the video.
[1] One of the times, a local notable’s son stole a mom’s friend’s car from the train station parking lot, drove it into the woods and lit it on fire. There was at least one witness but no charges were ever pressed.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
Yeah, compare and contrast Ike with MacArthur.
Thank goodness that bastard didn’t run for office.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That’s great. So much detail.
Jay
@JPL:
Another documentated case of ReThuglican voter fraud,
Another example of ReThuglican claims always being projection.
rikyrah
@chris:
??????
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Thanks; actually when I got the shots out of the camera, I thought they were a bit out of focus.
JCJ
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Hey! Did you get M31’s permission before posting his/her picture?
(Cool picture, though)
M31
@?BillinGlendaleCA: that is really nice
Martin
@Betty Cracker: So, the busing debate really needs to come front and center again because we’ve largely re-invented problems to all of the solutions it set out to solve. The fundamental problem is equity in funding and resources to schools. CA has two lasting effects from fighting that – one is Serrano v. Priest in 1971 – from the opinion:
And that both changed how school funding in CA takes place, and set off a chain reaction of other efforts:
1) Prop 13 which fixed the rate of growth of a homeowners property taxes. This was in effect a way to starve the state of those tax revenues that needed to be generated to provide equity in school funding.
2) The overall anti-tax movement that Reagan so generously brought from CA to the nation
3) The rise of private foundations to offer supplemental funding to specific schools, allowing taxpayers to feel confident in starving their own kids schools of tax revenue, because they’ll make it up though tax-free charitable contributions. My own kids schools had multimillion dollar endowments to provide music education and a ton of other things. Poorer districts don’t have that.
Education funding is one of the areas that Democrats haven’t really tackled in CA, in part because whatever they do people will hate, it will require unwinding a ton of other things that people might not hate but will be nervous about, and because most of the ideas offered up as workable so far are recognized as half measures and aren’t worth the pain to implement. Busing solved the problem in a fairly direct way. You can dick around with the taxes and foundations and whatnot all you want, we’ll just bus your kid to some random school so you have no way of knowing which policies to advocate for. It does solve the problem in a fairly elegant way, but holy shit do people hate it. My entire community was constructed in the 70s and 80s around having kids walk to school. We only have buses for special needs. Makes a busing policy really hard to introduce… Also saves a shit-ton of taxpayer money.
Anyway, public higher education has in effect re-implemented the busing solution. Virtually every public university I know of now does some form of eligibility in the local context. Basically, students are evaluated based on how they perform relative to other students in the same high school or maybe district. Schools get a rank from 1-10 based on funding, how well underrepresented students perform, and so on. If you went to a 10 school, you better show a hell of a lot more than a kid from a 1 school because that 10 means that your school had more money, more opportunities, and a zillion other things like AP courses and the like. If you didn’t take advantage of those, well, that’s on you and you probably won’t get admitted. The practical result of this is that if your kid is in the local superschool, and you want to get into Berkeley, your best shot is to move your kid to the local struggling school – they’re vastly more likely to get admitted.
Needless to say, parents fucking hate this, so mostly we don’t tell them. But that’s how it works. And now the College Board is adding the rough equivalent to SAT scores, called an adversary score. There’s a ton of criticism of the effort, and a decent amount of it is well deserved, but the intent shouldn’t be overlooked – it’s not just commonly accepted that schools are unfairly funded and supported, but it’s now commonly accepted that the universities need to proactively address the problem because nobody else fucking will. To the public schools, creating a system that provides equal access to all taxpaying communities is a much needed result. Now if the communities don’t like it, then volunteer to change the funding model so all kids get equal educational opportunities, and the whole system will collapse.
Busing may have been an imperfect solution to the problem, but the problem hasn’t changed. And it’s important to raise the issue again. That Biden so gracefully returns to the state’s rights argument without offering an alternative is really troubling to me. But it’s also a really difficult problem for Democrats to propose policy around. I think their best shot would be to tie federal education dollars to the states broad ability to equalize education opportunities. They could choose to do busing to solve that, or change how education dollars are allocated, etc. Alternatively, raise it as an issue, challenge the states to contend with it more directly, and simply allow the states that get it more right to reap the broader economic benefits.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JCJ: Permission to take and post a picture in a public place is not required.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JCJ:
@M31: Thanks.
Kathleen
@germy: Somebody needs to get him a cat.
JoeyJoeJoe
@CaseyL: According to the 1972 Almanac of American politics, going byADA (Americans for Democratic Action), the most liberal Senator in 1971 was actually a Republican, New Jersey Senator Clifford Case. He had a perfect liberal score. He eventually lost a primary in 1978. Republicans haven’t won a senate race there since
chris
@JoeyJoeJoe: Yes, and Lester Maddox, a Democrat, became governor of Georgia in ’71. It was a different world.
FelonyGovt
@CaseyL: John Lindsay will never be forgiven for not having the roads cleared in Brooklyn after the blizzard.
JPL
@Jay: It was pretty funny actually because I looked at my belly and said sure.
At the time, I was concerned about southern democrats.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
My take is that the only way anything got accomplished in politics was the back slapping, smiling and lying to each other. Which seems to be Joe Biden’s concept of politics. But because of that there were people who could see more than only their racism/conservatism. But even well before I was born, conservative republicans believed the same as they do now, they just didn’t say it out loud. Also we didn’t have Rupert Murdoch and friends on air to stir the shit pot and bend things in his bullshit direction. Politics really was glad handing to accomplish anything, we had to work together. Those guys that NotMax mentions were leftovers, not all the way gone. Look at fucking LBJ, either he truly believed in Vietnam or he was so willing to use it as a bargaining tool that he was willing to see large numbers of humans slaughtered to make politics work in the 60s. Also don’t forget that congressmen used to get favors for their constituents for working together. I seem to recall that the congressman from Alaska, Ted Stevens, was particularly good at this.
debbie
@JPL:
I too voted for Ford. There was something about Carter’s Playboy interview that just creeped me out.
Cameron
Surprised nobody’s mentioned George Romney in liberal Republican category.
Kent
@James E Powell: I’m 55. My earliest memories of GOP politics was Nixon and Watergate. Reagan was my president when I was in HS and college. What is this moderate GOP of which we speak? You need to go back to Eisenhower to find that and anyone who remembers Eisenhower is in their 70s or older.
Steve in the ATL
@Cameron: his son and grandsons have destroyed the brand
Kent
@JoeyJoeJoe:
My first election I voted for GOP Senator Mark Hatfield in Oregon because he opposed Carter’s saber rattling draft registration posturing in 1979 after the USSR invaded Afghanistan.
Cacti
@Betty Cracker:
Was she right about voting for Nixon too?
Kent
@CaseyL: Senators Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield as well as Governor Tom McCall were famously liberal GOP politicians from Oregon. Morse eventually switched parties and was famous for being the lone vote against the Vietnam War.
Jay
@Ruckus:
The US had been invested in the “anti-communist” project in IndoChina since late 1945.
The first US Military use of the term, “light at the end of the tunnel” in public was in 1952 regarding the upcoming, dry season, French Highlands Campaign, which was cancelled because of the Viet Mihn’s Summer Campaign against the Red River Delta.
Light at the End of the Tunnel was publically used by the US Military, 259 times, finally ending in 1973.
JFK visited Saigon, now Ho Chi Mihn City, in the early 1950’s, called it an unwinnable Colonial War, and noted that one could not travel outside Saigon after dark, ( 6pm) safely, nor could one sit in the outdoor patio of trendy French Cafe’s, safely.
Sunk Costs Fallacy.
The US Military to this day, ( and Vietnam Boosters) do not admit that the Viet Mihn, Viet Cong and RVN struggle was a nationalist, anticolonial struggle.
On the bright side, the US has only been at War in Somalia for 27 years, Afghanistan for 18 years,……
zhena gogolia
@JPL:
I thought you were a guy!
zhena gogolia
@dmsilev:
You did good.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Steve in the ATL: don’t forget the granddaughter, makes the Mittlets look like a pack of fine citizens
zhena gogolia
@Kent:
I not only remember Eisenhower, I saw him in person, and I’m not that old.
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wikipedia:
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay
@Kent:
It wasn’t saber rattling. Under Carter, the US had been arming, training and financing the Muj, alongside the ISI, Sawdi Arabia and the Petty Kingdoms, against the Government of Afghanistan, 6 months before the Soviet Intervention.
6 months before that, the US had been competing for influence in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union with money.
Jay
Betty Cracker
@Martin: Interesting — thank you!
Chetan Murthy
@James E Powell:
Amen to that, brother. I remember when I thought I was a GrOPer, and told my mom (this was during Reagan’s time). She disabused me by telling me how Medicare reimbursements for suspected heart attack hospitalization worked. [I may have the numbers wrong, but the relationship is accurate] Medicare paid for the first 24hr, unless metabolic signs of a cardiac infarction were detected. But it takes 36-48hr for that to show up in the bloodstream. So if you have money, you stay in the hospital 48hr, b/c hey, that’s what the doc would think wise. If you have only Medicare, you leave after 24hr unless the signs are already present. And maybe you die. And sure, I learned lots of other stuff after, including fucking Iran-Contra and massacres all over Central America. But that was the beginning.
They’ve been red in tooth and claw for my entire adult life, and hey, Nixon was no bouquet of roses either, the fucker.
burnspbesq
@rikyrah:
If Sen. Harris had shown up wearing pink and green, her sisters would have blown the roof off the joint.
rikyrah
Black Women Views (@blackwomenviews) Tweeted:
Had the best time volunteering for @KamalaHarris today at #EssenceFest. I just knew I would have time to make posts but shortly after this there were nonstop crowds of folks at our table for hrs! 1000s of buttons/signs & 100s of tshirts later, we have a box full of commit cards! https://t.co/6fUmApvQiA https://twitter.com/blackwomenviews/status/1147613970544640000?s=17
rikyrah
@burnspbesq:
Would have gone crazy ??
Origuy
I remember Pete McCloskey of California, who ran against Nixon in the 1972 Republican primary on an anti-Vietnam platform. After the Saturday Night Massacre, he was the first member of Congress to call for Nixon’s resignation. He finally switched to the Democratic Party in 2009.