Josh Marshall/TPM:
I’ve been reading through all your emails that I asked for last night and I was struck that one moment came up again and again: the Trump/Clinton debates, specifically the town hall style debate on October 9th, in which Trump seemed to stalk Clinton around the stage, getting into her space, looming over her. Reader after reader invoked that moment and said Harris clearly wouldn’t let that happen.
I don’t know if she or her strategists specifically were thinking of that moment. But as I wrote last night, her physical energy, body language and assertion of mastery and power were her biggest message of the evening. It was meant for last night but just as much, I think, Trump. She was telling voters clearly that she would put up with nothing from Trump.
Jonathan Allen/twitter or consolidated:
You’re trying to figure out this whole busing thing, whether you should care and what, if anything, it says about Joe Biden. I’ll try to help.
The first thing to understand is that Biden was, for a senator, a moderate on civil rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Like many of his fellow moderate Democrats, he had a mixed record then that is far to discriminatory side of how any senator would vote now.
The actual record and what Biden has presented since he started eyeballing the presidency for real 30+ years ago — right up through last night — are very different.
…
Three things to keep in mind for the rest of the thread:
1) This wasn’t about busing
2) Biden didn’t just block busing
3) Biden has spent a long time obfuscating on his record — including last night, when he said things that were at least very misleading
David Perry/Pacific Standard:
HOW TO FIGHT 8CHAN MEDIEVALISM—AND WHY WE MUST
White supremacists are co-opting the Middle Ages in the name of ethnic cleansing. Fighting back requires the rigorous advancement of better, fuller stories about the period.
Simple stereotypes about the Middle Ages, though, aren't just wrong; they have become weapons for white supremacy. As the great spire of Notre Dame fell, I knew the disaster, whatever the cause turned out to be, would fuel incendiary anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories based on white supremacist reconstructions of Western European history.
The discipline of medieval history, like all history, has always been political. For many scholars and fans of medievalism in fantasy or other genres (Renaissance festivals, architecture, European martial arts), this simple truth remains uncomfortable. As the New York Times recently reported, a large faction of academics—most of them white, in my experience—dismiss the notion that white supremacists' use of the Middle Ages should influence how we teach and study the past. Such skeptics argue that these medievally minded murderers are a rarity—and moreover that these young men don't know much about history. The bigots place medieval symbols next to Pepe the Frog memes or racist YouTube videos, thus (according to the skeptical faction) pulling the medieval content outside of time, creating an ahistorical iconography that historians need not bother about too much, beyond periodic fact-checking.
Kasey Faust and Jessica Kaminsky/USA Today:
Call in disaster response teams to help migrant children. They're trained for this work.
Why are we courting moral and public health disasters? We have the people, money and skills to do better. Get them to the border and save these kids.
Call in professionals to handle migrant care
The disaster response community knows how to house people quickly and decently. Although their usual mandate is post-disaster events, the human needs are the same. Shelter, water and sanitation are on top of this list. For example, international organizations such as UNICEF and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees maintain warehouses of kits that can be assembled to provide decent housing as well as medical care, education, water and wastewater treatment.
USA Today Opinion editors (one liberal and one conservative, who don’t agree on a lot) agree on Harris:
Mastio & Lawrence grade the 2020 Democratic debates: Kamala Harris at the head of the class
Kamala Harris
David's grade: A. The California senator showed she could stand toe to toe with Biden. That alone makes the night a win for her. She showed fire on guns, climate change and immigration, which will broaden her appeal even as she turned her prosecutorial experience into a plus on a debate stage where it could have been her downfall.
Jill's grade: A. She showed she’s fearless — taking on Biden on his “hurtful” race comments, former President Barack Obama on his deportation policy and, less directly, Buttigieg on his policing problems (as California attorney general, “I was very proud to put in place a requirement that all my special agents would wear body cameras and keep those cameras on.”). She also signaled she’d run against the Trump economy because he is measuring its greatness by the stock market and jobless numbers, which leaves out people who don’t own stocks and are working two and three jobs. Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, offered some relatable glimpses of her life but it was her embrace of confrontation that will stick.
Charles Blow/NY Times:
America needs to give these women, and the accusations they’ve brought forth, the full attention they deserve
Don’t just keep reading. Don’t just think that you’ve heard this before. Don’t just think that this kind of “behavior” is baked into how people feel about Trump. Go back and read that last paragraph. Read it slowly. Place yourself — or your mother, or your wife, sister, daughter, cousin, girlfriend or friend — in that dressing room. Imagine the struggle. Imagine the violation. Imagine the anger.
And now remember that the alleged perpetrator is now the president. And, remember that Carroll is by no means alone; a chorus of other women have also accused Trump of sexual misconduct.