Author: A.T.

Take two minutes to watch. And share.

Amazing.

He thinks she’s terrific.

He’s right!

Click here to vote, here to volunteer, here to contribute.  With your help, we just might get turn-out high enough to take back Congress, break the gridlock, and move the country into high gear.

Tomorrow: The truth about Obamacare. Plenty of room for improvement, but not NEARLY what Trump has been claiming.  (Surprise, surprise.)

Trump wants you to think Secretary Clinton’s on the wrong side of the “Syrian refugee” issue. I dare you to watch this “60 Minutes” report and agree. You will instead be relieved to know you are not at risk from these refugees; and proud that, in admitting them, America is being just who most of us want her to be.

And then there’s Trump’s rant over ninth-month abortions.  Like so much else in his campaign, it is ill-founded.  (If you doubt that, click here.)

He “stirs hatred and feeds self-vindication, and whether on paper it bears inspection for consistency, logic or soundness is immaterial.”

He’s “a past master at throwing up verbal smoke screens . . . knows the effectiveness of massive oratorical assaults . . . knows how to give pledges that will be broken . . . his crudity frequently borders on downright vulgarity.”

(Those quotes are not about Trump; they’re from the foreword to the 1941 book of Hitler’s speeches he kept by his bedside.)

Click here to vote, here to volunteer, here to contribute (yes, even now!) — and here to see what Republicans are saying about Trump and Clinton.  Help break the gridlock in Washington, elect a Democratic Congress, and see the things most Americans want finally enacted into law: massive job creation revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure; a higher minimum wage; the comprehensive immigration reform that passed the Senate 68-32; student loan refinancing — all of which would boost our economy and reduce inequality.  (And more: sensible gun safety measures; lower prescription drug prices; campaign finance reform; restoration of the Voting Rights Act.)

In case you missed this in Cosmopolitan (for whom I last wrote, on zoos, in 1971*), by Jules Barrueco:

When a fly landed on Hillary Clinton’s eyebrow during the second presidential debate, some took it as further evidence that she is, in fact, a robot. “She didn’t even flinch!” skeptics observed, fascinated, while tweeting screengrabs of the resting insect. They joyfully continued the she’s-not-even-human joke, a characterization born from her notoriously stoic and unlikable persona.

I, on the other hand, saw a woman who has perfected the art of looking unfazed at work, even when a small, bothersome pest converges on her. After all, the fly wasn’t the only small, bothersome pest who encroached on her personal space and failed to faze her at the debate that night.

With Election Day less than three weeks away, those who plan to vote for Hillary largely fall into two camps. Some voters, like me, genuinely want her to be president. Others find her deeply unlikable and will give her their vote with the same enthusiasm they furnish for a shot of antibiotics. They’re unhappy about it but believe it’s the only way to prevent a dangerous germ from destroying them.

As is often the case, my husband Al and I inhabit opposite camps. But on this issue, I can’t stop fighting to move him into mine.

To be sure, Al and I have a strong marriage filled with love, respect, and healthy disagreements. We rarely push our views on each other, a pointless exercise between two type-A lawyers with strong opinions about everything. Our differences usually make our marriage interesting, but not this one. This one has ruined romantic dinners, driven me to the couch with my pillow tucked under my arm, and caused me to declare –jokingly, of course! – that I will divorce him if he doesn’t vote for her. Despite Hillary’s famously low approval rating, my own husband’s disapproval of her feels personal. Because I too struggle to be a woman, a professional, and a human – the elusive female hat trick.

Like Hillary, I am not always the warm-and-fuzziest of women. In 2003, exactly 30 years after Hillary, I graduated from law school unaware of all the added hurdles that still exist for women. Over time, as I learned to navigate them, I became a better lawyer and less human person for it.

I learned, for example, that if your skirt is one millimeter shorter than the unwritten industry standard, women might talk about you. If you wear a conservative, loose-fitting pantsuit, men might ridicule you. I discovered that no matter how good you are at your job, there will often be a man who thinks you are his secretary. And no matter how good you are at your job, there will often be a secretary not willing to work for a woman.

I discovered that without an engagement ring, you could appear as an unstable flight risk. The day you show up with that ring, you could be labeled an uncommitted mommy-tracker with one ovary out the door. I found that many women delay motherhood until it might be too late so they can try to get ahead while they’re still contenders for promotions.

I discovered that if you are too nice, you are a pushover. If you are too demanding, you are a bitch. I learned that striking a balance is not always easy or possible, and I learned not to worry too much about that because the robotic bitch always gets the promotion. I’ve been promoted twice.

I found that some men did not stop doing disgusting, shocking things at work just because the 21st century arrived, and that you address those indiscretions at your own risk. I learned not to assume that a woman will take your side, because as it turns out, women are often the hardest on other women.

Basically, I learned that success is easy, as long as you don’t look too good or too bad, your makeup is neither too sparse nor too heavy, the pitch of your voice is neither too high nor too low, you’re neither too nice nor too mean, too well liked nor too hated, too emotional nor too robotic, as long as you appear to have no interests or commitments or life besides work, as long as you have a husband but no children, and as long as you have no complaints – about anything.

Is it any wonder that the only woman to make it this far toward the presidency is considered perhaps the most unlikable, least human of us all? We have, after all, watched Hillary at work for the last 30 years and interviewed her for the job of president for the better part of 10. It should come as no surprise that we don’t often see her softer side.

And yet, her likability continues to be an issue, and not just with Donald Trump – who called her “such a nasty woman” during the final presidential debate – or his supporters, or establishment Republicans. She is famously disliked across party lines. A New York Times columnist once described her as looking “less like a human being and more like an avatar from some corporate brand.” A New York magazine writer confessed she had, in the past, “often compared [Hillary] to Darth Vader – more machine than woman” – and referenced the difficulty she “has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being.” And Kate McKinnon, Hillary’s Saturday Night Live doppelgänger, garnered laughs when she mockingly described her fake-self as “lovable,” declared she was “made of steel,”and referred to her own “human” father. It’s funny because it rings so true.

I wish more people would see what I see: a woman behaving exactly how we are taught to behave at work. And although humans make mistakes, since Hillary doesn’t qualify as one, hers are not forgiven.

Here’s the other thing about professional women trained to suppress their humanity: Eventually, when you work enough hours in the day, days in the year, years in your life, you can start to strip yourself of human traits even after you leave the office. You forget there’s another way, accustomed to letting so little of yourself be seen. Soon your work face becomes your permanent face, and before you know it, your husband points out that even your Bitmoji avatar never cracks a smile.

“I just want people to like you,” Al said recently, after asking to prescreen an email I drafted about an unruly neighbor. He wanted to see which version of me shined through: his nice wife or “Miss Business”? A former law firm colleague gave me that name while pointing out my lack of human traits at work. I took it as a compliment of the highest order, flooded with relief that I was pulling the whole thing off.

Fortunately, I married my opposite. Al’s lightness and silliness come as naturally to him as my resting bitch face comes to me. He reminds me to snap out of it and helps me find balance. After five minutes together, he jolts me back into my alternate reality, my other life outside the office. I am warm and light and silly again. A likable woman. A human woman.

For all we know, Hillary and Bill might roast marshmallows over their gas stove, have spontaneous at-home dance parties, and cry while watching Zootopia together, like Al and I do. But we’ll never know that, and we don’t need to. Because when we see her,she’s at work. And we’re not interviewing her for the job of best friend, wife, or Girl Scout troop leader.

That is why I defend her to my husband. I still have a kind and funny and likable person buried beneath the surface, and I hate being judged for the woman I have to be at the office. I accept the endorsements of people who know Hillary and say she is warm and lovely when the cameras are off. And even if she’s not, let’s give her a break. Most of us will never know what she endured trying to succeed as a 1973 female law school graduate. We should assume the hoops were plentiful and the hurdles were high, perhaps explaining why she always wears pants.

Notably, after a series of recent missteps by her opponent, Hillary has seemed different, lighter, pumped up – and not just from her pneumonia medicine. “She’s so cocky lately!” Al said while we watched recent rally clips on TV. “I kind of like it!” Despite her unrivaled résumé, it was the first quasi-compliment he ever paid her.

Maybe, at this critical time in the last weeks of the election, she’s finally ready to give us a glimpse of the human side we’ve been waiting for. Maybe she will convince Al, and others like him, that she’s more than a robot reciting policy statements in a pantsuit.

But even if she chooses not to, or simply can’t because it’s all been stripped away, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe she will succeed – like she always has – in the face of not being conventionally likable. Because let’s not forget, the robotic bitch always gets the promotion.

*I even got to fly to Tucson for the zookeepers convention as part of my research — “I’ll trade you one male giraffe for a female emu and a crocodile.” Fun!

Peter Yarrow, of Peter Paul & Mary, has posted “Lift Us Up.”  “You will see my daughter Bethany singing this song surrounded by a bunch of folks sitting on the floor, the way we used to when we first sang folk songs — hearts bound together, asserting in song what we stand for as Americans and as ethical human beings.  PLEASE HELP ME SPREAD THIS SONG.”  Who can say no to that?

If you bought any GEC (the former UPIP), you have the right to buy more shares even cheaper.  (Call your broker if you have not already been notified.) Several of you have asked whether to exercise that right. Because I have money available that I can truly afford to lose (even after having lost a good chunk, on paper, as this stock has fallen ever further), I am doing so, fully — and oversubscribing for extra shares.

While one candidate is “on a presidential death march we’ve never seen before” — grotesquely coarsening and cheapening the national discussion, sowing dissatisfaction, division, and distrust (click that link if you have time) . . .

. . . the other — eminently qualified, serious, steady, compassionate — hopes to put Americans to work in good jobs revitalizing our infrastructure; boost worker dignity and consumer demand (and lower government subsidies) by hiking the minimum wage; boost the economy and improve millions of lives by enacting comprehensive immigration reform of the kind that passed the Senate 68-32; reduce the burden of student debt by allowing federal loans to be refinanced at today’s low rates; enact the sort of sensible gun safety measures 90% of Americans favor — and much more.

When they go low, we go high.  Not perfectly, perhaps; but there really is a contrast.

In that spirit, are you ready for two minutes of something actually uplifting? Watch this: “We are Democrats.”

The “email” stuff is wildly overdone.  Click here.

The Benghazi tragedy –scandal-wise — is entirely without substance:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Trump’s fraud claims are ridiculous. (Washington Post)

You can read Republican election lawyer Chris Ashby’s thorough explanation of how difficult it would be to rig an election. . . . Or you can look at studies tracking voter fraud, like the now-famous one in which a professor at Loyola Law School traced years’ worth of votes and found only a few sporadic instances of possible — but not certain — fraud. Specifically: 31 incidents out of 1 billion votes cast. . . . Or you can use common sense. How do you find hundreds of people to go vote multiple times in precisely the right places to throw the election? . . .

It’s hard enough to get folks to turn out to the polls once, let alone risk jail or deportation for voting more than once.

Trump’s “locker room talk” excuse is ridiculous. (Vox)

Dear Donald Trump: I played in the NFL. Here’s what we really talk about in the locker room.

. . .

So let me conclude with some advice for you, Donald. The next time you want to claim that something is “locker room talk,” take a moment to recognize the fact that were you in an actual locker room, you would be universally reviled as a cancerous, egotistical train wreck of a disgrace that no team could possibly find the time to employ and, honestly, would never even have on their draft board to begin with.

John McCain vows to defy the election results.  (Deadspin)  He doesn’t think Barack Obama should be allowed to nominate a Supreme Court Justice to fill Scalia’s vacancy — and if Hillary wins, he won’t allow her to fill it either.  (One more reason to unseat him.)

Hillary’s gay “nephew” tells you what she is really like. (Towle Road)

. . . Throughout my life, I have only known her as my mom’s most supportive and loving friend. Hillary took me on my first roller coaster ride when I was 12 years old. She spoke at my high school commencement ceremony and took photos with every single one of my classmates. The woman who signs her letters as “Aunt Hillary” congratulated me when I came out of the closet, when I got my pilot’s license, when I married my husband and when we adopted our baby girl. She checked in with my family regularly while my mom underwent surgery and treatment for breast cancer. . . .

. . . When you cast your vote for Hillary, I just want you to know you’re backing not only the most qualified presidential candidate in history, but a real person, a woman who values family, friendship and service to her fellow Americans above all else. You’ll be sending a message to my daughter that she can accomplish anything she sets her mind to. You’ll be electing a good girl.

Most important: 38 years later, the New York Times still likes my book.

Click here to vote, here to volunteer, here to contribute — and here to see what Republicans are saying about Trump and Clinton.

Apart, that is, from the extraordinary damage he’s already done — coarsening the public discourse and demeaning people; undermining confidence; retweeting white supremacists; stoking division, fear, and discontent; and just overall Debasing American Politics, as The Economist argues in its current cover story.

For one thing, he would widen the toxic inequality gap still further.  His tax plan — to the extent he has any real plans at all — would totally explode the deficit and provide a huge windfall for the wealthy.  The top tenth of one percent (those with income above $3.7 million) would pick up an extra $1.3 million a year — a nearly 19% tax cut. And for billionheirs?  He would eliminate their estate tax altogether, saving his own family $4.5 billion if his net worth is what he claims.  (It isn’t, of course, but just suppose.)

The Germans know a thing or two about running an economy.  Read this:  German Gov’t Thinks Trump Would Wreck US Economy.

The Washington Post takes a wider view. “How much damage could a President Trump do?” it asks. “We can only begin to imagine.”

Barbara Bush “doesn’t know how women can vote for” him, and Colin Powell calls him “a national disgrace.”  Not a single major newspaper, save the National Enquirer, has endorsed him. USA Today has never endorsed in a presidential race — until this one: Hillary.

He promised on tape in 2014 he would “absolutely” release his tax returns if he ran for president. He lied.

And lied that he couldn’t release his returns while they were being audited — of course he can.

And lied because his 2015 return — which was probably filed today if he waited until the last day — surely cannot yet have been selected for audit.

In one corner, we have a professional wrestler, playing crudely for the crowd; a Putin admirer who kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside; an entertainer who feeds off the adulation of his audience.

Mussolini meets Don Rickles — except Don Rickles was kidding.

In the other corner, a steady, brilliant woman, deeply caring and eminently qualified for the job — with a lifetime of serious work to make a better world.

I’m sorry if 30 years of vilification and eight Benghazi hearings have you feeling otherwise (and believing Gore said he invented the Internet, Kerry shot himself to get a medal, there’s no link between smoking and cancer, climate change is a hoax, Iraq was part of 9/11, Obama was not born here, or any of the other untruths tens of millions can be led to believe) . . . but the Republican-led Benghazi hearings wound up debunking the charges* . . . and while all including Secretary Clinton agree it was a mistake to have used a private server, the “email thing” is wildly overdone.  The three little “C’s” out of tens of thousands of emails amounted to nothing — and were arguably less telling than the scores of huge “C’s” affixed to Trump housing applications.

The frustrations both Trump and Sanders supporters feel are legitimate. But the solution is a Democratic Congress willing — where the Republicans were not — to put Americans to work rebuilding our infrastructure, to increase the minimum wage, to pass the comprehensive immigration reform that the Senate passed 68-32, and to allow refinancing federal student loans at today’s low rates. Those four things, taken together, would turbocharge the economy and — by continuing to improve people’s personal finances (median income rose a record 5% last year, after decades of stagnation) — gradually, I hope, assuage at least some of the anger and fear that, understandably, grip so many of our fellow citizens.

Click here to vote, here to volunteer, here to contribute (and here to see what Republicans are saying about Trump and Clinton).

*WASHINGTON (AP) — A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees. . . . “

If you’re on Adderall — as millions are — you’ve doubtless already read this. If you’re not but have kids, you’ll want to.

She’s not “the lesser of two evils,” argues the Washington Post in its clear-eyed endorsement of Hillary Clinton; “she is a choice Americans can be proud of.” Read why. It’s really good — and worth sharing.

I’m sure you’ve seen clips of Michelle’s truth-drenched New Hampshire speech.  Here‘s the whole thing.

And the President’s speech yesterday in Columbus.  It rocks.

Have a great weekend.

If you want to put millions to work revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure, just vote Democrat up and down the ticket next month.

(The Republican Congress blocked it.)

If you earn minimum wage and want a 40% raise — or you earn way more but want to see the economy boosted and inequality moderated — take a couple of hours to vote Democrat.

(The Republican Congress blocks it.)

If you want your LGBT friends to have the same protections you do — so they can’t be fired Monday when the boss finds out they were married Sunday — vote Democrat.

(The Senate passed ENDA 64-32 but House Republicans blocked it.)

If you want to enact the comprehensive immigration reform economists say would boost our economy, and that passed the Senate 68-32 — and that would improve millions of lives — vote Democrat.

(The Republican Congress blocked that, too.)

If you agree with these military experts that climate change threatens our national security — Trump and the Republican “science” chairs in the Senate and House believe it is a hoax — vote Democrat up and down the ticket.

If you want abortion to be rare — but safe and legal . . .

If you want to see sensible gun-safety laws enacted . . .

If you want voting to be made easier for people, not harder . . .

If you want to break the gridlock and get America really moving again . . .

. . . vote Democrat up and down the ticket.

Again: It’s not rocket science. And what an amazing outcome we could have.

Click here to vote, here to volunteer, here to contribute — and here to see what Republicans are saying about Trump and Clinton.

Jeffrey Marburg-Goodman makes millennials feel much better about “the emails” — here.

And about Libya — here.

Share his posts on Facebook?  Both before and after the debate?

Thanks!