Is the GOP trying to alienate women?

It looks like GOP trash talking of women is not limited to just weird JD Vance. Listen to what Ohio Republican senate candidate Bernie Moreno, currently in a tight race with incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, said.

We don’t have to engage in such thought exercises after Friday, when Moreno was filmed dismissing suburban women’s focus on abortion rights at a town hall (the local NBC affiliate first published the footage Monday): 

“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … Okay. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”

The campaign furiously backpedaled, telling NBC4 that he was “clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke” about the left thinking that it’s the only issue women care about.

Ah, yes, the old “I was just joking” defense, often rolled out after someone says what they really mean that turns out to be offensive.
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How could Mark Robinson be so stupid?

By now, pretty much anyone who follows political news is aware of how Mark Robinson, the current Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for the post of governor, was found to been a frequent visitor to porn sites where he made all manner of posts in the comments section that would cause his religious supporters to wince, to put it mildly. He had already publicly made incendiary comments about women and the LGBTQ community as well as denying the Holocaust.

While I was aware of the story and posted about it last week, I had not paid much attention to how the reporters managed to identify him as the source of all the comments.

Seth Meyers describes how he was identified and I could not believe how mind bogglingly stupid he was.

The Cybertruck in the wild

There has been a lot of buzz about the benefits and dangers of the new generation of AI software but one thing is clear is its potential for humor. The closest I get to nature are the excellent documentaries put out by David Attenborough and so I really enjoyed this short clip of ‘David Attenborough’ describing the behavior of the Tesla Cybertruck.

Apparently there is a whole reddit section devoted to hating on the Cybertruck.

The morning after the debate

The reviews are in and the general consensus supports my own immediate reaction last night which was that Kamal Harris cleaned creepy Donald Trump’s clock in the debate. At many points she was openly laughing at his nonsense.

Stephen Colbert gave his hot take soon after the debate ended and did a pretty good job at identifying the key points.

Jon Stewart also gave gave his hot take but it was not as good as Colbert’s.


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The power of anger when channeled through joy

The Daily Show‘s Desi Lydic had a conversation with Rebecca Traister (an excellent writer whom I used to read and link to before her publication New York magazine went behind a paywall) and Brittney Cooper, and they both had very interesting insights into the current race for the presidency and the gender and masculinity dynamics at play, with Republicans appealing to the manosphere in an especially icky way while Democrats have become able to comfortably speak about traditionally feminist issues. They also talk about how anger is being channeled by the Harris-Walz campaign in a joyful way.

Well worth watching.

Seth Meyers had a lot of catching up to do

The last three weeks have been a political whirlwind but the late night talk show that he hosts has been on hiatus during that time. They must have thought this was a good time to plan their break. It is the summer doldrums, the Republican convention had just ended, the Olympics were going to dominate the news for two weeks, and they would come back just before the Democratic convention

But things have been so crazy that when he returned on Monday, he had a lot of catching up to do and it was worth watching his summary to be reminded about how things have changed so dramatically.