I recently switched the mechanism by which my blog posts make it out to my vast Twitter audience and now it’s just posting titles and nothing else. The internet is an idiot savant. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes dumb as a rock.
There’s a certain kind of peace that comes with a multi-neighborhood-wide power failure. Thanks, Michael. (Except for the people that need oxygen concentrators, etc. I hope they’re ok.)
https://twitter.com/laurenthehough/status/1050558096924393472?s=17
Moira Donegan, creator of the “Shitty Media Men” list is being sued by a man (one of the men on the list, I presume). I’ve been sort of marginally aware of this “controversy” for a while, and when I read about the lawsuit, the first thing that popped into my head was, “I hope someone sets up a GoFundMe for her legal expenses.” And now someone has. gf.me/u/muxxxy
Let the discovery commence! (Is that a thing for a lawsuit like this? Yes, right?)
Lauren Hough (@laurenthehough) Tweeted:
I set it up. It’s legit.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/hurricane-michaels-remarkable-run/572734/
«“Students in tropical-meteorology classes are going to be talking about this storm for 20 years,” says Colin Zarzycki, a tropical-cyclone scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
…
That meteorologists were even aware of this strengthening 12 hours before landfall was a testament to the Air Force Hurricane Hunters, the reserve pilots who fly over storms and drop weather balloons and other scientific gear through its layers. “I remember sitting in my office on Tuesday afternoon and looking at Michael,” Zarzycki told me. “And if you were to just look at a satellite image, the average hurricane forecaster would have said, this is a pretty serious hurricane. But it wasn’t until we saw the numbers from people flying through the storm that we realized how much it had intensified.”
……climate change is likely to make rapid intensification a far more common occurrence.»
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/us/politics/texas-beto-orourke-evangelicals-women.html
I don’t think Dems should write off white Evangelical women so soon. Consider the arc of Beth Moore.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/beth-moore-bible-study/568288/
«To Democrats nationwide, who have largely written off white evangelical voters, it also sends a signal — not just for the midterms but also for the 2020 presidential campaign — that there are female, religious voters who are open to some of their party’s candidates.
…
“How does my vote represent the little girl that I used to be?” she said. “The Republicans used to be the party of family, and morals and values, and now they are not.”
…
Unlike many other Democratic candidates ahead of the midterm election, Mr. O’Rourke is doing strategic, if limited, outreach to white evangelicals, especially women. On his way to his concert with Willie Nelson in Austin recently, he recorded a podcast segment with Jen Hatmaker, a Christian author whose prominent show “For the Love” is followed by tens of thousands of evangelical women. The episode is scheduled to air Thursday.
…
These evangelical women may seem invisible, Ms. Hatmaker said, but they dot the state, and reflect a broader dissatisfaction among some Christian conservatives that their faith has been politicized for what they see as an agenda that opposes what Jesus represents.
…
Beth Moore, an influential author and Christian teacher based in Houston, signed a letter urging Congress and Mr. Trump to protect Dreamers and reunite immigrant families. After the Senate confirmed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she tweeted to her nearly a million followers to not lose heart. [Ha! I started this post before I got to this point in the article. — John L.]»
The misuse of “neocon” here really bothers me.
This is a well-written piece, BUT I have two major objections. (1) I think the link between neocons and Trump is tenuous, and the paragraph I quote below, which is where the connection is made, seems pretty darn flimsy to me. (2) The use of “neocon” in the headline is the editor’s throwing around of an epithet that has a hazy definition in most people’s minds, and is generally taken to mean “Republican I don’t like, like Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush.” It has a very precise meaning (in my understanding).* Furthermore, the editor KNOWS it has that hazy meaning and is intentionally counting on that misinterpretation. (Or the editor’s an idiot, but I’ll give him or her the benefit of the doubt.)
«Perhaps the most notable part of Boot’s book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. “It is not nearly as easy to remake a foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003,” he writes. And he recognizes that the catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory [emphasis mine — John L.]. In listening to Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes “my callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be.”»
*(The precise definition of “neocon”, as I understand it: a person who believes that the world is thirsting for democracy and that sometimes “interventionist” methods should be used to bring it to various parts of the world, where “intervention” can run a wide range of options, including, for example, embargoes. I leave out the “free-market” part that others usually include because I don’t think, for example, that the original neocons really cared much about Britain’s VAT system or Sweden’s tax rate.)
Interesting tweet thread + replies. Fair number of cops don’t seem to think stop-and-frisk is any good atall.
I don’t think this is a gerrymandering problem. (Well, not JUST a gerrymandering problem.) It’s more a lazy-Dems-don’t-vote-in-off-year-elections problem. Or an unconcerned-liberals-think-3rd-party-voting-is-viable problem.
Yes, I called Dems lazy. 2010 was a disaster. “Demographics is destiny” did NOT help.
«Republicans currently control 33 out of 50 governor’s seats, which is just one shy of the record set briefly last year. That happened after West Virginia’s Jim Justice switched to the GOP but before Republicans lost in neighboring Virginia. Before the last few years, the GOP had never held more than 32 seats.
The GOP also holds complete control of the governor’s seat and the state legislature in 25 states (compared to eight for Democrats). That’s also just one off the record, set briefly last year for the same reasons as above. Before this decade, the GOP had never held more than two dozen.
The GOP controlled 4,104 out of 7,383 state legislative seats as of July, which was just a few dozen seats off its record, also set in recent years.»
Here, Read This 