Advice for Yoho and other boors like him: Don’t mess with AOC

I wrote before about Republican congressperson Ted Yoho’s appalling behavior towards Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and his pusillanimous non-apology on the floor of the House of Representatives. But you should really listen to all of AOC’s short speech because the excerpts or even the full transcript do not really do it justice. She shows how you can rebuke someone with grace and power and without resorting to foul language.

The most powerful moment for me was when she pointed out that when Yoho used that language towards her, he was giving permission to men to use that language against his own wife and daughter. So true.

You can read the responses to her speech in her Twitter feed.

Trump’s manifest insecurity about his cognitive abilities

Most people do not even think about whether they are cognitively impaired or not. It is only those who fear that there is a problem who may obsess about it. Seth Meyers looks at the way that Trump keeps boasting about the results of his ‘cognitive test’, a test that is not used to test how smart you are, as Trump seems to think, but to see if you are showing signs of dementia. (Note that he took this test back in 2018 and it was administered by his then White House personal physician Ronny Jackson who subsequently resigned amid allegations of misconduct and is now running for a Texas congressional seat on an ardently pro-Trump platform.)

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Trump bats 0 for 3 on Thursday

Yesterday was not a good day for Trump, which means it is a good day for the rest of us.

Trump finally caved to reality and canceled the big event in Jacksonville, Florida where hoped to receive the Republican party’s nomination before a huge adoring crowd. He had first, in a fit of pique, moved it from Charlotte, North Carolina when that city’s governor refused to lift restrictions on crowd sizes and insisted on safety precautions. Florida, with its Trump fanboy governor Ron DeSantis seemed to promise the kind of looseness he wanted.

But soon after, coronavirus cases in Florida started spiking and officials there started getting nervous. Even the Republican National Committee placed restrictions on the crowd size that would make the event look like the Tulsa, Oklahoma debacle with all the empty seats. Trump’s poll numbers in Florida are also sinking, with Biden opening up a huge lead in that state. So Trump’s decision to cancel was no surprise, though it must stick in his craw to back down.
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How and why the Mississippi flag got removed

Every state in the US has its own flag. The flag of Mississippi, adopted in 1894, was the only one that incorporated the confederate battle flag within it, in the top left. This has been a source of contention with many attempts to remove it, all meeting with failure. Mississippi is a deeply conservative Republican state. That party currently has supermajorities in both its house of representatives and the senate plus the governor is a Republican, all of whom strongly opposed any attempt to remove the confederate symbol. The people of Mississippi voted in a referendum 2001 to keep the flag as it was and the current governor Tate Reeves said that the only way to change it would be through another referendum. So proud were they of their confederate association that in just April of this year, the governor Tate Reeves proclaimed it as Confederate Heritage Month.
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Samantha Bee talks to Masha Gessen

Gessen, who came to the US from Russia and thus knows something about what an autocracy looks like, has long been very pessimistic about what is happening in the US. But they sees recent events such as the widespread protests as offering some signs of hope because many needed changes that would take ages in a time of stability have now become fast-tracked. Like me in my recent post, Gessen thinks that it is not enough that Trump loses in November but that he must lose bigly.

AOC does not let Yoho off the hook

Ted Yoho is a Republican member in the US House of Representatives and was known as a nasty piece of work even before the most recent incident where he used a slur against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

According to a reporter from The Hill, who overheard the initial remarks, Yoho came up to Ocasio-Cortez outside the House steps on Monday and sparked a conversation about her position on unemployment and crime in New York City. Yoho said she was “disgusting” and told her she is out of her mind, according to The Hill. Ocasio-Cortez said he was being rude, and Yoho said “f**king bitch” as he walked away.

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More on the government kidnapping squads

In his blatant attempt to ramp up the ‘law and order’ issue for the election, Trump has sent in federal security forces to trigger confrontations with protestors. These forces, who wear camouflage outfits that make it almost impossible to identify which government agency the belong to or who they are, have been driving around in unmarked vehicles, picking up people on the street and taking them to undisclosed locations and refusing, when asked, to say which agency they are from. This has started in Portland, OR and Trump said that he wants to send in forces to other cities like Chicago and Albuquerque, claiming that the Democratic mayors of those cities are not doing enough to stop violence and crime.
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The mysterious life of eels

I almost never thought about eels, dismissing them as somewhat boring snake look-alikes that live in the water. So I was intrigued by this article that says that these creatures are very mysterious and it took researchers a long time to figure out the basic facts about them that had stumped scientists from the time of Aristotle through to Sigmund Freud, the main mystery being that however many eels European researchers dissected, until very recently, they simply could not find their reproductive organs. And the reason was bizarre.
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