Sorry for the long silence on my end, but I’m back now! It’s not a particularly fun day to come back on – today is the 14th anniversary of the tragedy in New York – so before getting to the round-up, I’d like to share with you some personal thoughts about that day and the long years that followed.
I was in grade seven at the time. I was eating breakfast when my father called, telling me to turn on the news. When I did, I couldn’t quite process what I was seeing. Once at school, I found my friend and told her what had happened. She looked down at a button she happened to be wearing (she was fond of buttons), read the inscription (“None of this is real anyways”), and burst into tears.
The following years, it was tough being an anti-war, pinko unpatriotic Muslim-loving terrorist-loving terrorist (these are just a few of the descriptive, if unimaginative, words that were directed at my friend and me between 2001 and 2004). Our lives would have been made considerably easier if the Patriot Act had been referred to in the media as Statute-at-Large 115 Stat. 272 (2001). But something eventually changed – my classmates eventually began seeing the problem with curtailing our American values in pursuit of preserving American values – that fighting for peace is like [expletive deleted] for chastity.
We are now in the midst of deciding what we are going to do in response to other real threats around the world – ISIS, Syria, Iran. My hope is that it won’t take an unnecessary invasion plus time to relearn our lessons.
So on that uplifting note, here’s the week in review:
Bernie Polls Ahead: Yay! Yay! New polls show Bernie leading in both Iowa (with 41 percent, up from 33 percent in July) and New Hampshire (with 41 percent, again, up from 32 percent in July). Yay!
#WeWantDebate: DNC vice chairs have joined in calling for more debates. To recap: Under the Democratic National Committee’s current rules, the committee is only sanctioning six debates, and if candidates schedule debates outside that schedule, they will be penalized (the chair, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, has said they would be uninvited to future debates). Cheers to democracy.
And Yes, It Matters: If you dig deep into the RealClearPolitics polling data, you can see why this is a losing strategy: A week before the first Republican debate, McClatchy-Marist released a general election match-up poll in which Clinton beat every Republican by between 5 and 18 points. A few days after the debate, Public Policy Polling released a poll (from just Iowa, granted, so it is comparing apples to Iowa) in which she lost four match-ups, and in the ones she won, the most she won by was 4 percentage points.
Well, That Seems to Bode Ill: But here’s what you can do about it: Every Wednesday, call the DNC, send it an email, post on its Facebook page, tweet at it, send carrier pigeons – whatever your preferred mode of communication – and tell the DNC #WeWantDebate.
Speaking of Debates: The first one is October 13. Alameda for Bernie is sponsoring a great watching party at Michaan’s Auction’s Theatre – check it out here.
America’s Leading Newspaper to Stop Flagrant Violations of Ethics Code: I’m tossing this in the “win” pile. (For some context, here’s my letter to the NYT public editor on the Times’s lack of Bernie coverage.)
On the Other Hand: The NYT has had some solid Bernie coverage in the last few weeks, including this one on Bernie’s ground organization.
Shana Tova to All Our Right-Wing Christian Evangelical Friends: This Sunday begins the Jewish new year celebration, so of course Bernie Sanders, our progressive, humanist Jew candidate, will be speaking at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Politics makes strange podium fellows.
Well, that’s all for this week. Now that I’m back on track, make sure to check next week; we’ll be featuring a guest post, plus at least one angry, unhinged polemic from me.
The header image is adapted from “PDX Loves Bernie!” by Flickr user Joan Amero. It is distributed under CC license 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).