August 11, 2024

Sunday, August 11, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

---

Kamala needs a BlueSenate. Kamala needs a BlueHouse.

https://t.co/YWOq0kA82E

Candidate of the Day. Donate. Volunteer.Share.

Jon Tester, Democratic Senator from Montana.

Montana is a very red state. Trump won it by 16.4% in 2020.

Jon Tester is a third-generation dirt farmer who still farms the same land just outside of Big Sandy that his grandparents homesteaded over 100 years ago. He has represented Montana in the United States Senate since 2007, after being elected in 2006. He has been re-elected 2 times, in 2012, and 2018.

Tester was on Capitol Hill for the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. He was in his office in the Hart Senate Office Building when the Capitol was breached. Along with his staff, Tester was evacuated to an undisclosed location for safety. He called the storming a "despicable and dangerous attack on our democracy" and "a coup by domestic terrorists", and blamed Trump for instigating it. (source. Wikipedia).

Senator Tester has become the subject of a revenge campaign by Donald Trump as one of the leaders that came out against Ronny Jackson aka Mr. Candyman, as the nominee for Secretary of the VA in 2018.

Here is Trump on Tester on Friday in Montana.

Tester’s re-election may mean the difference between a Blue and a Red Senate in 2025.

One more thing.

---

Kamala is always busy.

Kamala spoke to pro-Palestinian protesters again, this time in Arizona on Friday.

She spoke in support of a cease fire deal, that brings the hostages home.

---

Republicans speaking truth.

Finally, Pence decides to speak again.

Trump former lawyer, Jenna Ellis, signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors in Arizona, who in turn agreed to drop pending criminal charges against her.

Friday she posted this.

One more thing.

Fox News even joined them.

---

Are we seeing a new masculinity in the Democratic campaign?

Remember who the Republican men are.

Trump walked into the convention center at the Republican National Convention to James Brown’s “It’s a Man, Man, Man’s world. We watched him in the Access Hollywood tapes. He has been found guilty of rape in a civil law suit.
He boasts that he made the end of Ro possible, and has said he would sign a national abortion ban. Demeaning and Insulting women is his stock and trade.

J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has made clear he sees women as valuable only as child-bearers.

We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.

Meet the men of the Democratic Party through the eyes of feminist writer, Rebecca Traister.

Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left

What a split screen,” Doug Emhoff said to a crowd at a private fundraiser on the coast of Maine in the last days of July. The Second Gentleman was referring to Donald Trump’s remarks that afternoon to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, where he berated Rachel Scott of ABC News for being “nasty” and suggested that Kamala Harris had only recently “turned Black.” Emhoff appeared gobsmacked by the raw vulgarity. “The contrast could not be clearer,” he said.

Since Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, the loudest contrast in the presidential race has been between the elderly white man at the head of the Republican ticket and the younger Black and Indian American woman on the other side. But a disparity of the intragender variety has also come to the fore: the difference between how the men of the right and the left define masculinity.

On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.

The new Democratic man is embodied by Harris surrogates like Emhoff, whose first solo public appearance since his wife became the de facto nominee was at a Planned Parenthood in Portland, Maine, and Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, the former National Guardsman and football coach whom the right has taken to calling “Tampon Tim” for passing a law in his home state of Minnesota requiring public schools to stock free menstrual products in all school bathrooms.

This is not to suggest that these Democratic guys represent some perfect specimen of evolved masculinity. But taken as a whole, as male Democrats fall over one another in an effort to elect a woman to the presidency, they are presenting a different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation and full civic participation and all but declaring it a new norm.

That Trump is terrible toward and for women hardly needs repeating. But the Republican convention in July was nevertheless a startling window into just how wholly unconcerned the GOP is about its abysmal reputation. Speakers included Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler accused of domestic abuse, and Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO who was once filmed engaging in a physical altercation with his wife. There were right-wing misogynists like Tucker Carlson, who lost his job at Fox News amid sexual-harassment allegations and has called women “extremely primitive and basic,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, who has been accused of having sex with a minor and has called reproductive-rights activists “odious on the inside and out.” Where Harris’s walk-out music is Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” both Trump and running mate J. D. Vance have been using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”

Trump and his buddies’ hoary views of women as either sexualized objects or pigs are almost old hat. What’s new is the way the contemporary right is practically vibrating with the creepier energies of the online manosphere, which tells young men that women have robbed them of their power. It’s the worldview of men like Andrew Tate, who has been arrested for human trafficking and rape and who tweeted in April, “Dear white men you’re fucked. You’re being replaced because none of you have children.” Elon Musk, who is a vocal supporter of Trump’s campaign (and has also been accused of harassment), has echoed this natalist version of the Great Replacement Theory, saying that “birth control and abortion” have put civilization at risk and suggesting that childless people should not be able to vote.

While the ideas that these men espouse have become common currency across the right, they remain somewhat foreign to the political mainstream. That’s why the discourse this summer was dominated by bewildered responses to unearthed remarks by Vance, who has described childless women as “deranged,” “sociopathic,” and “childless cat ladies” and argued that parents should get extra votes. Republicans’ recent obsession with overturning no-fault-divorce laws is also informed by incel culture and online sexist outrage. Vance has bemoaned the fact that people can more easily leave marriages, even violent ones, “like they change their underwear.”

This is not about ensuring that more babies are born. If it were, Republicans would be supporting child tax credits, federal paid-leave legislation, affordable housing, subsidized day-care programs, and maternal-health-care bills. They would not be imperiling IVF treatments. It’s about the domination of women and the reinscription of patriarchal power.

Then, on that split screen, there are the men of the Democratic Party. Emhoff takes care to emphasize, in a way that is new for Democratic men, that reproductive rights is “not just an issue for women,” it’s “an issue for all of us.” In Portland this summer, he described a “post-Dobbsian hellscape” in which “you can’t get a Pap smear; you can’t get basic care.” That’s right: Men in the post-Biden Democratic Party can comfortably say Pap smear.

As Harris weighed the decision of who would be her running mate, it was understood that she would be seeking a white man to balance out the historically disruptive nature of her candidacy, and the nation got a glimpse of an array of guys who seemed eager to serve a female boss. They were masculine in a lot of traditional ways: veterans and astronauts and high-powered lawyers who could talk about guns and fixing cars but also child care and parenthood. This is a version of masculinity that is open and optimistic and appears to really love women. To many of us, this winds up reading as a lot more manly than, for instance, Vance’s half-hearted attempts to defend his mixed-race marriage from white-supremacist criticism.

It is thus poetic that Harris encountered Walz, who as governor had signed a series of expansive protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, at a Planned Parenthood in St. Paul in March, the first visit by any sitting vice-president to a facility that provides abortion care. Walz, 60, looks like a beardless Santa Claus and has the vibe of a neighbor who will fix your lawn mower. His lightning-strike audition for the veep slot was accompanied by photographs online showing him snuggling dogs, cats, and piglets and being embraced by groups of happy children after he signed new child-care-benefit laws. Walz speaks often, including at his first campaign rally with Harris in August, of the IVF struggles he and his wife, Gwen, experienced.

It is invigorating to see Walz’s traditional form of public masculinity — “big dad energy,” as Axios put it — in service of a party that seems finally to be taking women’s rights and liberation as a central moral concern. Just a few decades ago, that stance would have gotten Democrats derisively labeled “the mommy party.”

But this is where Walz’s great rhetorical contribution to the campaign comes in: his use of the word weird to describe the backward, bizarre positions of the opposition. It’s not just that weird is an effective descriptor that drives Republicans up the wall. It’s that it also reflects its inverse: normal. For while the right has been terrifyingly successful at rolling back laws and rights, it seems to be having a tougher time altering what have become new gender norms. When Vance describes child care as “class war against normal people,” it sounds weird. When Fox News’ Jesse Watters suggests that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman,” it sounds really weird. And when Democratic men speak of women as their partners, friends, colleagues, and bosses, when they make it clear that people need Pap smears and tampons and abortion care, when they show themselves willing to work for a woman to become president, they sound, well, normal. (New York Mag).

One more thing.

From the classy candidate who likes name-calling and especially likes misogynistic words.

Bitch seems to be a particular favorite.

Report: Trump calls Harris a "bitch.”

👇 Touch and Listen for yourself. Also listen to him pronounce Kamala’s name properly.

---

The more we learn about Walz, the more we admire him.

---

More proof of Trump’s confused mind.

NYTimes: Yes, Trump Was in a Scary Helicopter Ride. But Not With That Politician.

Donald J. Trump was doubling down on Friday about his story of nearly crashing during a helicopter ride once with Willie Brown, the notable Black California politician.

He was so adamant that it had happened that he threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting that the story was untrue, then posted on his social media site that there were “‘Logs,’ Maintenance Records, and Witnesses” to back up his account.

“It was Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump, who spent much of the last year hoping to make gains with Black voters, posted. “But now Willie doesn’t remember?”

Mr. Brown, 90, who was mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, gave several interviews on Thursday and Friday saying such a trip never occurred.

Turns out, however, that there was a Black politician from California who once made an emergency landing in a helicopter with Mr. Trump. It just wasn’t Mr. Brown.

Nate Holden, 95, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said in an interview with The Times that he had been on a helicopter ride with Mr. Trump around 1990 when the aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.

Recounting an episode that he had described earlier on Friday to Politico, Mr. Holden said Mr. Trump had been seeking to develop the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when it was part of Mr. Holden’s district. Mr. Trump wanted him to see his Taj Mahal casino, Mr. Holden said, so on a visit to Manhattan, he rode with Mr. Trump from his Midtown skyscraper to a helipad, where the two took off for Atlantic City, accompanied by Mr. Trump’s brother Robert and by his executive vice president of construction and development, Barbara Res.

“He was trying to impress me,” Mr. Holden said. “We start flying to New Jersey. He said, ‘Look at the skyline! Look at how beautiful it is! And I’m part of it!’”

Mr. Holden said he wasn’t impressed. “I grew up in New Jersey,” he said. “It ain’t nothing new to me.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “we start flying to Atlantic City. He’s talking about how great things are. And about 15, 20 minutes in, the pilot yells, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”

The hydraulic system had failed, he said. “Donald turned white as snow,” Mr. Holden recalled. “He was shaking.”

Mr. Holden said that as the helicopter’s crew worked frantically to set the aircraft down safely, his own thoughts ran to a helicopter crash in 1989 that had killed three senior executives of Mr. Trump’s casinos over Forked River, N.J.

“I just thought, how the hell do you let your staff not maintain your aircraft after you just had a crash that killed some of your staff? How could you let this happen again? I thought, if we go down, this is your fault.”

The helicopter ultimately landed safely in Linden, N.J., Mr. Holden said.

Ms. Res wrote about the episode in a memoir and corroborated Mr. Holden’s account in a brief interview late Friday. Ms. Res, who also spoke to Politico, recalled that Mr. Trump liked to say that Mr. Holden had “turned white” from fear, but that it was actually Mr. Trump whose face was ashen.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Mr. Holden said he was in his living room watching Mr. Trump’s news conference on TV on Thursday when the former president told of experiencing a brush with death on a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.

“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’” Mr. Holden said. “‘Was he in two near-fatal helicopter crashes? He didn’t fix those damn helicopters yet?’”

Mr. Holden said that he called Mr. Brown to compare notes. Mr. Brown told him he had never been in a helicopter with Mr. Trump.

“I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’” Mr. Holden said. “And I told him, ‘You’re a short Black guy and I’m a tall Black guy — but we all look alike, right?’”

Mr. Holden gave his own height as 6-foot-1. “Willie has to be about 5-foot-6. Maybe 5-foot-5. He comes up to about my shoulders. And he’s bald. And I’m not bald.”

Mr. Brown, he said, “just laughed and laughed.”

Mr. Holden, summing up his assessment of Mr. Trump’s recollection, said: “I just think he makes things up. That’s what I think. He never thought anybody’s going to check.”

Mr. Trump told the story about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Mr. Brown after a reporter at Thursday’s news conference asked him a leading question about Vice President Kamala Harris’s long-ago relationship with Mr. Brown and whether it helped her career trajectory.

The two dated in 1994 and 1995 when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and Mr. Brown was the Assembly speaker. Mr. Brown appointed Ms. Harris to two state boards before she ended their relationship.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Mr. Trump responded. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him.”

He recounted how the two had a close brush with death — “We thought maybe this was the end” — and that Mr. Brown used the frightening ride to tell him “terrible things” about Ms. Harris. “He was not fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump had previously told the story, saying it was Mr. Brown on a helicopter with him, in his book, “Letters to Trump,” which was published in 2023.

Reached again Friday night, Mr. Brown reiterated that he had never flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and that he had not denigrated Ms. Harris to the former president because he admires and respects her.

“Those are the two things I am certain of,” he said. “All the rest of this is amusing.”

Asked if Mr. Trump might have confused the two California politicians because they are both Black, Mr. Brown said, “I wouldn’t want to conclude that he can’t tell Black people apart, because I’d hate for him to think that I’m Beyoncé.”

And then he burst out laughing. (New York Times).

---

Your daily reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

---

Olympics update.

Today’s Highlights - Final Day.

Team USA Women’s Basketball Gold Medal game v. France is at 9:30 EDT.
Closing ceremonies for the 33rd Olympics today at 3:00 EDT.

Saturday’s standout results.

Team USA Men’s Basketball won the gold, for the 5th consecutive time, defeating France 98-87.

Steph Curry, LeBron James.

Steph earned the right to tell France nite-nite in the gold medal game - with 24 points and eight 3-pointers, including four in the final minutes of the game.

Team USA Men’s Basketball visit with the Vice President before leaving for France clearly brought them good luck.
https://x.com/flywithkamala/status/1822382661329166734

Relay Gold.

American men won the 4 × 400 meter relay, an Olympic record. American women won the 4 × 400 meter relay too, an American record.

Music of the Olympics.

For your pleasure!

Celine Dion closed the Opening Ceremonies, Paris Olympics, 2024. “Hymne à l'amour.”

John Lennon at the Closing ceremonies, London Olympics 2012. “Imagine.”

---