We have much to do.
Showing posts with label political evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political evolution. Show all posts
Sep 27, 2026
Sep 14, 2026
Sep 3, 2026
Obituary
My thoughts on Gloria Steinem have always been kind of a mixed bag.
50 years ago, I projected onto her some of my resentment about my mom's political evolution, and what (in my mind) Steinem's influence was contributing to my parents' breakup.
Once I stopped blaming women for reacting negatively to being treated as the proverbial 2nd class citizens, I started to evolve my own thinking, gradually recognizing that I was a willing participant in "the patriarchy", and in need of some adjustment.
So I have to give some credit to both my mom and to Steinem for smackin' some sense into my fool head.
So goodbye, Gloria. And as my mom always said, "I wish you peace and cool water."
Gloria Steinem, lodestar of the modern women’s movement, dies at 92
“In my heart, I think a woman has two choices,” she said. “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”
Gloria Steinem, an organizer and activist who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped sustain the women’s movement through the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, through battles over reproductive rights, economic equality, sexual harassment and other issues that affect the lives of millions of women, died Sept. 2 at her home in New York City. She was 92.
Her death was announced by her foundation, Gloria’s Foundation, on social media. It did not provide a cause of death.
Few, if any, feminist leaders since Betty Friedan, the author of the 1963 manifesto “The Feminine Mystique,” matched Ms. Steinem’s influence on their cause. As a journalist and founder of Ms. magazine, and as a political activist, public speaker and ever-present figure in national affairs, Ms. Steinem became a symbol of second-wave feminism — the expansion of the movement beyond women’s suffrage into a broader campaign for equality in the workplace, in the home and under the law.
“In my heart, I think a woman has two choices,” Ms. Steinem once said. “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”
Ms. Steinem came of age at a time when, despite the advances made by her predecessors, women were severely limited in the jobs they could pursue, if they were encouraged to work at all; when Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that for generations enshrined the right to an abortion, had not yet been handed down; and when marriage, as Ms. Steinem once put it, was an institution serving “one-and-a-half people.”
With her willowy physique, her fashionable miniskirts and her straight, parted hair, she brought glamour as well as passion to her work, challenging the popular perception of feminists as bra-burning radicals. For years the movement’s most prominent spokesperson, she was credited with helping make feminism more representative of poor and minority women, many of whom had felt excluded from the cause.
Christine Stansell, a history professor at the University of Chicago, once wrote in Glamour magazine that Ms. Steinem “was to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights: the galvanizer.”
Ms. Steinem burst to the fore in the 1960s not as an activist, but as a high-flying freelance journalist for publications including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Vogue. She experienced firsthand the sexism that she would later fight on behalf of other women. Ms. Steinem recalled a taxicab conversation between the renowned writers Gay Talese and Saul Bellow, in which she said Talese remarked in her presence, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”
Through her insistence, Ms. Steinem overcame professional prejudices that limited most female journalists to covering topics such as fashion and courtship. Her ease around celebrities — she dated men including filmmaker Mike Nichols, profiled John Lennon, and spent a week with Lee Radziwill for an article on the jet-setting sister of Jacqueline Kennedy — made Ms. Steinem a sought-after celebrity in her own right. By the late 1960s, her name was mentioned in the same breath with writers Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag.
Ms. Steinem drew particular attention when she donned a cottontail to infiltrate the New York Playboy Club and expose the degradation and poor pay to which Hugh Hefner’s Playboy bunnies were subjected. Her account was published in Show magazine in 1963 and revealed the traits that would define Ms. Steinem in her later incarnation as an organizer: an enterprising spirit, a piercing concern for the vulnerable, and a formidable ability to draw attention to her cause.
For a period, she feared the article had damaged her career prospects by inviting less-progressive editors to see her as a bunny rather than as a writer. Already she fought the perception that she was — as Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire described Ms. Steinem in her journalistic heyday — “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.”
But Ms. Steinem ultimately concluded that the article was worth the grief it had brought on her. “After feminism arrived in my life, I stopped regretting” its publication, she wrote years later. She had realized, she said, that “all women are Bunnies.”
Ms. Steinem displays a mock-up of Ms. magazine outside the White House in 1977. (AP)
A turning point for her came in the late 1960s, when she covered a group of women who had gathered to discuss the indignity and physical danger to which they had been subjected when they sought abortions. Ms. Steinem had undergone an abortion shortly after college but never spoke of it because of the stigma long associated with the procedure.
The meeting, she later reflected, made her see herself as belonging to a victimized group in need of a megaphone, not only regarding reproductive rights, but in all other areas of life in which women were restricted.
“All my empathy and sense of identity had always gone to movements, whether Third World or civil rights,” Ms. Steinem told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. “I identified with the underdog or any discriminated-against group. Which I think happens to women all the time. But we don’t realize that we are one. At the same time, I couldn’t get an apartment” as a single woman, she continued, and “wasn’t being paid equally for a job, all these things.”
In 1971, Ms. Steinem helped start Ms. magazine, where she remained for years as an editor and editor emerita. The publication was previewed in New York magazine before debuting as a stand-alone in 1972.
Ms. Steinem credited Clay Felker, editor of New York, with giving Ms. its start. But even that relationship revealed the minefields professional women navigated at the time. Ms. Steinem gratefully acknowledged that Felker, when he was Esquire editor, had provided her “first serious assignment.” Felker, however, recalled meeting the aspiring journalist and thinking that “she had great legs.” (Her first story, he conceded, was “excellent.”)
The very existence of Ms., as a serious magazine written for women by women, was revolutionary at the time. One of the magazine’s most noted early articles listed prominent women — among them tennis player Billie Jean King and singer Judy Collins, as well as Ms. Steinem — who publicly declared that they had received abortions. “If one in three or four adult women shares this experience,” Ms. Steinem later told The Post, “why should each of us be made to feel criminal and alone?”
Beyond the magazine, Ms. Steinem was a driving force behind the founding of organizations including the National Women’s Political Caucus, which seeks to increase political involvement among women, and the Women’s Media Center, which aims to expand their visibility and influence in news media.
Rarely was she far from public view or unprepared for cultural combat. She condemned Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell as “an American ayatollah” for his hard-line conservative views on abortion and other issues, defended law professor Anita Hill when she accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, and twice championed Hillary Clinton in her White House bids.
The 2008 Democratic primary pitted Clinton, campaigning to be the first female president, against then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who ultimately became the first African American president. In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times that primary season, Ms. Steinem wrote that “gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.”
The article, which argued that a Black woman with Obama’s experience would not have been “a viable candidate,” seemed to reopen old antagonisms between the civil rights and women’s movements and angered many African Americans who perceived that Ms. Steinem was minimizing the pernicious effects of racism.
She replied that her argument had been taken out of context, writing in The Post that “masculine and feminine roles restrict most people — not necessarily more (or less) seriously than race or class or other distortions of individual uniqueness.”
“Racism and sexism are linked,” she observed, “and cannot be ranked except by individuals in their own experience.”
Until the end of her life, Ms. Steinem remained a lodestar for women’s rights activists. When President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, she said she was “not going to disobey the law,” but also would not “pretend he represents me.” She became an honorary co-chairwoman of the Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration.
In 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly five decades during which women were guaranteed the right to an abortion, Ms. Steinem joined other activists in vowing that the campaign for reproductive freedom would continue.
“Women have always taken power over our own bodies, and we will keep right on,” she observed. “An unjust court can’t stop abortion, but it guarantees civil disobedience and disrespect for the court.”
Early life ‘on the road’
Gloria Marie Steinem, a granddaughter of a suffragist, was born March 25, 1934.
Her father, whom she described as a “wonderful, kind, charming, utterly irresponsible man,” ran a dance pavilion in Clark Lake, Michigan, when he was not traveling with the family as an itinerant antiques salesman. Only at age 11 did Ms. Steinem formally enroll in school. She recalled bathing in bus stations and said that she gained from her father a tolerance for being away from home. She titled her 2015 memoir “My Life on the Road.”
Her mother, who had worked for a newspaper before she was married, developed a mental illness that, for a period, caused her to be institutionalized. After her parents divorced, Ms. Steinem was left to care for her mother, and the two lived in poverty in a vermin-infested house in Toledo. Ms. Steinem once suffered a rat bite, she told People magazine, that sent her to the hospital. “What I wanted most in life then,” she said, “was a cage to sleep in, so I’d be safe.”
Ms. Steinem eventually moved to Washington, where she lived with her older sister and graduated from Western High School in 1952. Four years later, she received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Smith College, her sister’s alma mater. She was traveling in London when she had an abortion.
“I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty,” she told Britain’s Observer newspaper in 2011. “But I never could! I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life.”
She told the Tribune that she always aspired to be a writer but that she “almost had never seen a woman journalist” and that “nothing in my life, no person in my life led me to believe that you could make a living from writing.”
Turned away by Time magazine, where she said she was told that female applicants were eligible only for research positions, Ms. Steinem received a fellowship to live for two years in India. She traveled through villages affected by caste riots, visited women’s centers and health clinics and studied Gandhian organizing, an experience that would inform her later work as a feminist activist.
In India, “I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time,” she wrote in “My Life on the Road.” “My becoming an itinerant feminist organizer was just a Western version of walking in villages.”
Back in the United States, Ms. Steinem was briefly employed by a student organization that received funding from the CIA to send young, noncommunist but liberal Americans to interfere with communist youth festivals in Europe. She later told The Post that the agency “was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.
“I found the CIA my best journalistic training,” she continued, “because the one instruction one receives from them is to be accurate, whereas publications tell you to find an angle.”
She worked briefly as an assistant to Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who created Mad magazine, before embarking on her own journalism career. Published in Esquire under Felker in 1962, her first bylined piece, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” explored changes in sexuality on university campuses. Felker later recruited Ms. Steinem to New York magazine, where her political column, the City Politic, and articles including 1969’s “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” helped launch her to greater prominence.
Her first book was 1963’s “The Beach Book,” a coffee-table volume that featured a sun reflector on the jacket and that she later self-deprecatingly dismissed as “in demand only by interior designers who want them for beach houses.” The introduction, incongruously, was written by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a friend, who remarked that he liked “the girl who put it together.”
Ms. Steinem’s later books — more representative of her work — included “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” (1983); “Marilyn” (1986), a biography of Marilyn Monroe with photographs by George Barris; “Revolution From Within” (1992); “Moving Beyond Words” (1994); and “Doing Sixty & Seventy” (2006). Obama awarded Ms. Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2013.
Ms. Steinem had romantic relationships with Ted Sorenson, the counselor to President John F. Kennedy; developer and media magnate Mort Zuckerman; and the writer Norman Mailer. For much of her life, she eschewed marriage. To women who chose otherwise, she admonished, “a liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
In 2000, Ms. Steinem married David Bale, a South African businessman and the father of actor Christian Bale.
“I didn’t change,” she told a reporter, explaining her decision. “Marriage changed. We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”
Bale died of brain cancer in 2003. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Throughout her life, Ms. Steinem could be relied upon for an incisive quip about men and women — although she denied authorship of the one most frequently attributed to her, the observation that “women need men like fish need a bicycle.”
When a reporter remarked on Ms. Steinem’s 40th birthday that she didn’t “look 40,” she dispatched the journalist with the retort, “This is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”
The line lived on, and when Ms. Steinem turned 80, she was celebrated at an event billed as the “This Is What 80 Looks Like” party.
“I’m old,” she had remarked several years earlier, “but the movement is young.”
Gloria Steinem, lodestar of the modern women’s movement, dies at 92
“In my heart, I think a woman has two choices,” she said. “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”
Gloria Steinem, an organizer and activist who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped sustain the women’s movement through the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, through battles over reproductive rights, economic equality, sexual harassment and other issues that affect the lives of millions of women, died Sept. 2 at her home in New York City. She was 92.
Her death was announced by her foundation, Gloria’s Foundation, on social media. It did not provide a cause of death.
Few, if any, feminist leaders since Betty Friedan, the author of the 1963 manifesto “The Feminine Mystique,” matched Ms. Steinem’s influence on their cause. As a journalist and founder of Ms. magazine, and as a political activist, public speaker and ever-present figure in national affairs, Ms. Steinem became a symbol of second-wave feminism — the expansion of the movement beyond women’s suffrage into a broader campaign for equality in the workplace, in the home and under the law.
“In my heart, I think a woman has two choices,” Ms. Steinem once said. “Either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”
Ms. Steinem came of age at a time when, despite the advances made by her predecessors, women were severely limited in the jobs they could pursue, if they were encouraged to work at all; when Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that for generations enshrined the right to an abortion, had not yet been handed down; and when marriage, as Ms. Steinem once put it, was an institution serving “one-and-a-half people.”
With her willowy physique, her fashionable miniskirts and her straight, parted hair, she brought glamour as well as passion to her work, challenging the popular perception of feminists as bra-burning radicals. For years the movement’s most prominent spokesperson, she was credited with helping make feminism more representative of poor and minority women, many of whom had felt excluded from the cause.
Christine Stansell, a history professor at the University of Chicago, once wrote in Glamour magazine that Ms. Steinem “was to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights: the galvanizer.”
Ms. Steinem burst to the fore in the 1960s not as an activist, but as a high-flying freelance journalist for publications including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Vogue. She experienced firsthand the sexism that she would later fight on behalf of other women. Ms. Steinem recalled a taxicab conversation between the renowned writers Gay Talese and Saul Bellow, in which she said Talese remarked in her presence, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”
Through her insistence, Ms. Steinem overcame professional prejudices that limited most female journalists to covering topics such as fashion and courtship. Her ease around celebrities — she dated men including filmmaker Mike Nichols, profiled John Lennon, and spent a week with Lee Radziwill for an article on the jet-setting sister of Jacqueline Kennedy — made Ms. Steinem a sought-after celebrity in her own right. By the late 1960s, her name was mentioned in the same breath with writers Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag.
Ms. Steinem drew particular attention when she donned a cottontail to infiltrate the New York Playboy Club and expose the degradation and poor pay to which Hugh Hefner’s Playboy bunnies were subjected. Her account was published in Show magazine in 1963 and revealed the traits that would define Ms. Steinem in her later incarnation as an organizer: an enterprising spirit, a piercing concern for the vulnerable, and a formidable ability to draw attention to her cause.
For a period, she feared the article had damaged her career prospects by inviting less-progressive editors to see her as a bunny rather than as a writer. Already she fought the perception that she was — as Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire described Ms. Steinem in her journalistic heyday — “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia.”
But Ms. Steinem ultimately concluded that the article was worth the grief it had brought on her. “After feminism arrived in my life, I stopped regretting” its publication, she wrote years later. She had realized, she said, that “all women are Bunnies.”
Ms. Steinem displays a mock-up of Ms. magazine outside the White House in 1977. (AP)
A turning point for her came in the late 1960s, when she covered a group of women who had gathered to discuss the indignity and physical danger to which they had been subjected when they sought abortions. Ms. Steinem had undergone an abortion shortly after college but never spoke of it because of the stigma long associated with the procedure.
The meeting, she later reflected, made her see herself as belonging to a victimized group in need of a megaphone, not only regarding reproductive rights, but in all other areas of life in which women were restricted.
“All my empathy and sense of identity had always gone to movements, whether Third World or civil rights,” Ms. Steinem told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. “I identified with the underdog or any discriminated-against group. Which I think happens to women all the time. But we don’t realize that we are one. At the same time, I couldn’t get an apartment” as a single woman, she continued, and “wasn’t being paid equally for a job, all these things.”
In 1971, Ms. Steinem helped start Ms. magazine, where she remained for years as an editor and editor emerita. The publication was previewed in New York magazine before debuting as a stand-alone in 1972.
Ms. Steinem credited Clay Felker, editor of New York, with giving Ms. its start. But even that relationship revealed the minefields professional women navigated at the time. Ms. Steinem gratefully acknowledged that Felker, when he was Esquire editor, had provided her “first serious assignment.” Felker, however, recalled meeting the aspiring journalist and thinking that “she had great legs.” (Her first story, he conceded, was “excellent.”)
The very existence of Ms., as a serious magazine written for women by women, was revolutionary at the time. One of the magazine’s most noted early articles listed prominent women — among them tennis player Billie Jean King and singer Judy Collins, as well as Ms. Steinem — who publicly declared that they had received abortions. “If one in three or four adult women shares this experience,” Ms. Steinem later told The Post, “why should each of us be made to feel criminal and alone?”
Beyond the magazine, Ms. Steinem was a driving force behind the founding of organizations including the National Women’s Political Caucus, which seeks to increase political involvement among women, and the Women’s Media Center, which aims to expand their visibility and influence in news media.
Rarely was she far from public view or unprepared for cultural combat. She condemned Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell as “an American ayatollah” for his hard-line conservative views on abortion and other issues, defended law professor Anita Hill when she accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, and twice championed Hillary Clinton in her White House bids.
The 2008 Democratic primary pitted Clinton, campaigning to be the first female president, against then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who ultimately became the first African American president. In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times that primary season, Ms. Steinem wrote that “gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.”
The article, which argued that a Black woman with Obama’s experience would not have been “a viable candidate,” seemed to reopen old antagonisms between the civil rights and women’s movements and angered many African Americans who perceived that Ms. Steinem was minimizing the pernicious effects of racism.
She replied that her argument had been taken out of context, writing in The Post that “masculine and feminine roles restrict most people — not necessarily more (or less) seriously than race or class or other distortions of individual uniqueness.”
“Racism and sexism are linked,” she observed, “and cannot be ranked except by individuals in their own experience.”
Until the end of her life, Ms. Steinem remained a lodestar for women’s rights activists. When President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, she said she was “not going to disobey the law,” but also would not “pretend he represents me.” She became an honorary co-chairwoman of the Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration.
In 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly five decades during which women were guaranteed the right to an abortion, Ms. Steinem joined other activists in vowing that the campaign for reproductive freedom would continue.
“Women have always taken power over our own bodies, and we will keep right on,” she observed. “An unjust court can’t stop abortion, but it guarantees civil disobedience and disrespect for the court.”
Early life ‘on the road’
Gloria Marie Steinem, a granddaughter of a suffragist, was born March 25, 1934.
Her father, whom she described as a “wonderful, kind, charming, utterly irresponsible man,” ran a dance pavilion in Clark Lake, Michigan, when he was not traveling with the family as an itinerant antiques salesman. Only at age 11 did Ms. Steinem formally enroll in school. She recalled bathing in bus stations and said that she gained from her father a tolerance for being away from home. She titled her 2015 memoir “My Life on the Road.”
Her mother, who had worked for a newspaper before she was married, developed a mental illness that, for a period, caused her to be institutionalized. After her parents divorced, Ms. Steinem was left to care for her mother, and the two lived in poverty in a vermin-infested house in Toledo. Ms. Steinem once suffered a rat bite, she told People magazine, that sent her to the hospital. “What I wanted most in life then,” she said, “was a cage to sleep in, so I’d be safe.”
Ms. Steinem eventually moved to Washington, where she lived with her older sister and graduated from Western High School in 1952. Four years later, she received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Smith College, her sister’s alma mater. She was traveling in London when she had an abortion.
“I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty,” she told Britain’s Observer newspaper in 2011. “But I never could! I think the person who said: ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament’ was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life.”
She told the Tribune that she always aspired to be a writer but that she “almost had never seen a woman journalist” and that “nothing in my life, no person in my life led me to believe that you could make a living from writing.”
Turned away by Time magazine, where she said she was told that female applicants were eligible only for research positions, Ms. Steinem received a fellowship to live for two years in India. She traveled through villages affected by caste riots, visited women’s centers and health clinics and studied Gandhian organizing, an experience that would inform her later work as a feminist activist.
In India, “I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time,” she wrote in “My Life on the Road.” “My becoming an itinerant feminist organizer was just a Western version of walking in villages.”
Back in the United States, Ms. Steinem was briefly employed by a student organization that received funding from the CIA to send young, noncommunist but liberal Americans to interfere with communist youth festivals in Europe. She later told The Post that the agency “was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.
“I found the CIA my best journalistic training,” she continued, “because the one instruction one receives from them is to be accurate, whereas publications tell you to find an angle.”
She worked briefly as an assistant to Harvey Kurtzman, the cartoonist who created Mad magazine, before embarking on her own journalism career. Published in Esquire under Felker in 1962, her first bylined piece, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed,” explored changes in sexuality on university campuses. Felker later recruited Ms. Steinem to New York magazine, where her political column, the City Politic, and articles including 1969’s “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” helped launch her to greater prominence.
Her first book was 1963’s “The Beach Book,” a coffee-table volume that featured a sun reflector on the jacket and that she later self-deprecatingly dismissed as “in demand only by interior designers who want them for beach houses.” The introduction, incongruously, was written by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a friend, who remarked that he liked “the girl who put it together.”
Ms. Steinem’s later books — more representative of her work — included “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” (1983); “Marilyn” (1986), a biography of Marilyn Monroe with photographs by George Barris; “Revolution From Within” (1992); “Moving Beyond Words” (1994); and “Doing Sixty & Seventy” (2006). Obama awarded Ms. Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2013.
Ms. Steinem had romantic relationships with Ted Sorenson, the counselor to President John F. Kennedy; developer and media magnate Mort Zuckerman; and the writer Norman Mailer. For much of her life, she eschewed marriage. To women who chose otherwise, she admonished, “a liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
In 2000, Ms. Steinem married David Bale, a South African businessman and the father of actor Christian Bale.
“I didn’t change,” she told a reporter, explaining her decision. “Marriage changed. We spent 30 years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”
Bale died of brain cancer in 2003. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Throughout her life, Ms. Steinem could be relied upon for an incisive quip about men and women — although she denied authorship of the one most frequently attributed to her, the observation that “women need men like fish need a bicycle.”
When a reporter remarked on Ms. Steinem’s 40th birthday that she didn’t “look 40,” she dispatched the journalist with the retort, “This is what 40 looks like. We’ve been lying for so long, who would know?”
The line lived on, and when Ms. Steinem turned 80, she was celebrated at an event billed as the “This Is What 80 Looks Like” party.
“I’m old,” she had remarked several years earlier, “but the movement is young.”
Aug 7, 2026
Another One Bites The Dust
And still, Trump-backed Republicans have fared pretty well so far.
His loss makes him the second Donald Trump-endorsed candidate to lose a primary this week.
Tennessee GOP Rep. Andy Ogles was ousted by a Republican challenger on Thursday, a blow to President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson who tried to boost his campaign in the final days.
Former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher won the GOP primary for the 5th District after outraising Ogles, receiving a late endorsement from GOP Gov. Bill Lee and seeing a flood of outside money on his behalf from a renewable energy super PAC.
What the hell's up with a Republican getting help from Green Energy?
Ultimately, that spending, coupled with a newly redrawn district that forced Ogles to reach new voters, helped end his reelection bid. Ogles has also faced a number of controversies since he was first elected in 2022.
He deleted a homophobic social media post that was denounced by members of his own party in June, and he drew severe backlash for another post in which he said “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” In 2024, the FBI searched Ogles’ phone during an investigation into campaign finance records, which came after a watchdog group filed an ethics complaint into his use of campaign funds. And in 2023, he faced scrutiny for false claims about his resume.
Ogles’ loss makes him the second Trump-endorsed candidate to lose a primary this week, after a Michigan House candidate who had the president’s backing fell to a challenger who had already dropped out.
Hatcher will face the Democratic mayor of Columbia, Tennessee, Chaz Molder, in November. Molder has posted strong fundraising hauls, while Hatcher will basically be starting from scratch.
But Republicans redrew the seat to favor Trump by 23 points after the Supreme Court severely limited the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, leaving Hatcher as the front-runner.
President Donald Trump's endorsement has remained one of the Republican Party's most sought-after political prizes during the 2026 election cycle, helping the vast majority of his preferred candidates secure victories in GOP primaries.
However, his winning streak suffered a setback on Thursday when Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee lost the Republican primary for the state's newly redrawn 5th Congressional District.
During Trump's first term, from 2017 to 2021, Ballotpedia tracked 305 endorsements. In 2026 alone, the president has made 312 primary endorsements, with 97 percent of his endorsed candidates winning their primaries through early July, according to the elections tracker.
Ogles lost to former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher despite receiving Trump's endorsement, becoming one of only a small number of candidates backed by the president to lose at the ballot box this year.
Trump-Backed Losses in 2026
Andy Ogles
Ogles entered the race with Trump's support after establishing himself as one of the president's closest allies in Congress. Trump has described the Tennessee congressman as "a Conservative Warrior."
Hatcher, who was backed by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, ultimately prevailed in the closely watched contest following the state's congressional redistricting.
Amir Hassan
Two days before Ogles' defeat, Trump-backed congressional candidate Amir Hassan lost the Republican primary in Michigan's 8th District to Thomas J. Smith.
The result surprised many observers because Smith had suspended his campaign weeks before Election Day but remained on the ballot, ultimately winning with 50.4 percent of the vote. Hassan, who had received Trump's endorsement in July, finished well behind Smith with 33.2 percent.
The upset represented one of the most unexpected defeats for a Trump-endorsed House candidate this cycle.
Phil Berger
North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger suffered one of the earliest high-profile defeats of the 2026 primary season when he lost the Republican nomination for the state's 26th Senate District to Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page.
Berger has been one of the state's most influential Republican lawmakers for more than a decade.
Burt Jones
Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones lost the Republican gubernatorial runoff in June, a significant setback for the president in a contest viewed as a test of his influence in the battleground state.
Brenda Wilson
Brenda Wilson, a Vigo County Council member, ran for election to the Indiana Senate to represent District 38 but lost in the Republican primary on May 5.
Bruce Borders
Fellow Indiana Republican Bruce Borders, who has held his seat in the state's House of Representative since 2014, also failed to win renomination.
The longtime state representative, who previously served in the Indiana House from 2004 to 2012, was another early casualty among Trump's endorsed candidates.
Sid Miller
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller's primary loss was notable because relatively few statewide incumbents backed by Trump have failed to secure another nomination. Miller has served in the role since 2015.
Representative Randy Feenstra of Iowa lost the state's GOP gubernatorial primary in a contest that drew attention as a test of competing Republican factions.
Pamela Evette
While South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette narrowly finished first in the state's Republican gubernatorial primary on June 9, she lost the runoff two weeks later—securing 31.4 percent of the vote to state Attorney General Alan Wilson's 68.6 percent.
Trump had initially endorsed Evette ahead of the primary, but he later issued a dual endorsement for Wilson days before the runoff.
Jon Maples
Earlier this year, Jon Maples ran in a special election to represent District 87—home to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate—in the Florida House of Representatives. Though he won the primary with more than 80 percent of the vote, he ultimately lost the general election by 2.4 percentage points to Democrat Emily Gregory.
Maples is now running in the regular election for District 87, with the Republican primary scheduled for August 18. If he wins, he and Gregory would again face off in November's general election.
Trump's Endorsement Record Remains Strong
Trump has endorsed hundreds of candidates running for congressional, statewide and legislative offices this cycle, and the losses remain the exception rather than the rule.
Still, Ogles' defeat adds another name to the short list of candidates who were unable to convert the president's backing into a nomination victory, providing a reminder that even the Republican Party's most influential endorsement is not a guarantee of success.
Ogles entered the race with Trump's support after establishing himself as one of the president's closest allies in Congress. Trump has described the Tennessee congressman as "a Conservative Warrior."
Hatcher, who was backed by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, ultimately prevailed in the closely watched contest following the state's congressional redistricting.
Amir Hassan
Two days before Ogles' defeat, Trump-backed congressional candidate Amir Hassan lost the Republican primary in Michigan's 8th District to Thomas J. Smith.
The result surprised many observers because Smith had suspended his campaign weeks before Election Day but remained on the ballot, ultimately winning with 50.4 percent of the vote. Hassan, who had received Trump's endorsement in July, finished well behind Smith with 33.2 percent.
The upset represented one of the most unexpected defeats for a Trump-endorsed House candidate this cycle.
Phil Berger
North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger suffered one of the earliest high-profile defeats of the 2026 primary season when he lost the Republican nomination for the state's 26th Senate District to Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page.
Berger has been one of the state's most influential Republican lawmakers for more than a decade.
Burt Jones
Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones lost the Republican gubernatorial runoff in June, a significant setback for the president in a contest viewed as a test of his influence in the battleground state.
Brenda Wilson
Brenda Wilson, a Vigo County Council member, ran for election to the Indiana Senate to represent District 38 but lost in the Republican primary on May 5.
Bruce Borders
Fellow Indiana Republican Bruce Borders, who has held his seat in the state's House of Representative since 2014, also failed to win renomination.
The longtime state representative, who previously served in the Indiana House from 2004 to 2012, was another early casualty among Trump's endorsed candidates.
Sid Miller
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller's primary loss was notable because relatively few statewide incumbents backed by Trump have failed to secure another nomination. Miller has served in the role since 2015.
Representative Randy Feenstra of Iowa lost the state's GOP gubernatorial primary in a contest that drew attention as a test of competing Republican factions.
Pamela Evette
While South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette narrowly finished first in the state's Republican gubernatorial primary on June 9, she lost the runoff two weeks later—securing 31.4 percent of the vote to state Attorney General Alan Wilson's 68.6 percent.
Trump had initially endorsed Evette ahead of the primary, but he later issued a dual endorsement for Wilson days before the runoff.
Jon Maples
Earlier this year, Jon Maples ran in a special election to represent District 87—home to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate—in the Florida House of Representatives. Though he won the primary with more than 80 percent of the vote, he ultimately lost the general election by 2.4 percentage points to Democrat Emily Gregory.
Maples is now running in the regular election for District 87, with the Republican primary scheduled for August 18. If he wins, he and Gregory would again face off in November's general election.
Trump's Endorsement Record Remains Strong
Trump has endorsed hundreds of candidates running for congressional, statewide and legislative offices this cycle, and the losses remain the exception rather than the rule.
Still, Ogles' defeat adds another name to the short list of candidates who were unable to convert the president's backing into a nomination victory, providing a reminder that even the Republican Party's most influential endorsement is not a guarantee of success.
Jun 24, 2026
We'll See
... but the times they are a-changin'.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani shook the Democratic establishment by helping drive three progressive candidates to victory.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies swept a series of congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday in a remarkable show of strength for the insurgent left that sent shock waves through the Democratic Party.
Mr. Mamdani’s candidates toppled a pair of incumbents backed by the city’s political establishment, including major labor unions and the House Democratic leader. Another candidate backed by the mayor won an open House seat, and a handful of democratic socialist challengers he supported were winning down the ballot.
For months, Mr. Mamdani threw himself and his energized political organization into the three marquee congressional contests, campaigning late into the night in the race’s final days and calling the election a referendum on the direction of the party.
All the winning candidates share Mr. Mamdani’s progressive economic platform, and they each ran campaigns that focused intently on ending American support for Israel, a sign of how far public opinion has shifted on the issue, even in New York.
Late Tuesday night, the mayor stood beaming at a victory party in Brooklyn, where supporters chanted “Free, free Palestine” and “D.S.A.” After embracing many of the same advisers who led his own successful campaign last year, he declared “a new chapter in our party’s history.”
“A year ago, it was not the end of a political movement,” he said. “It was the beginning.”
Mr. Mamdani’s deep involvement amounted to an audacious gamble for a brand-new mayor trying to lead an already fractious city. He alienated key allies along the way, but the payoffs were far-reaching.
At home, the outcome will now cement him as the unquestioned political kingmaker of the nation’s cultural and financial capital and the Democratic Socialists of America as a formidable force.
The results also shook the foundations of the Democratic Party far beyond the five boroughs. When they are certified, Mr. Mamdani, 34, and his movement will be on track to double the number of socialists in Congress from two to four. The outcome will also force a Democratic Party, already searching for its identity, to reckon with its ascendant, unapologetic left.
“It’s seismic,” said Jon Paul Lupo, a Democratic consultant who was a top adviser to the city’s last progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio.
The races do not necessarily suggest Mr. Mamdani has expanded his appeal. Each of the contests in which he endorsed took place in areas where the mayor won comfortably in last year’s election and remains deeply popular.
But Tuesday’s results showed two things about his young mayoralty. Mr. Mamdani has a high tolerance for political risk-taking, well beyond that of any of his modern predecessors. And, at least for now, he has the ability to transfer his high-wattage political brand onto other candidates in a way that only a few politicians in any office have been able to.
Brad Lander, 56, a close ally whom Mr. Mamdani urged to run for Congress, ran up a staggering 30-point margin in the affluent 10th District in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. He defeated Representative Daniel Goldman, a wealthy Levi Strauss heir who had opposed the mayor in last year’s elections and had close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby.
Claire Valdez, 36, a little-known state assemblywoman also recruited by Mr. Mamdani to run, ran up larger than expected margins for the open seat in the Seventh District in a gentrifying swath of Brooklyn and Queens so far left it has been nicknamed the “Commie Corridor.”
She defeated Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, who had far deeper roots in the district and the support of the popular congresswoman, Representative Nydia Velázquez, who is retiring; the left-leaning Working Families Party; and nearly every major labor union in the city.
And Mr. Mamdani’s allies even won in the predominantly Black and Dominican 13th District in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. In perhaps the night’s most surprising victory, Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, another democratic socialist who entered the race as a political unknown, narrowly knocked off Representative Adriano Espaillat, the influential chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Letitia James, the state’s progressive attorney general, who supported Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign but ended up opposed to him on Tuesday.
“Obviously, there’s some hurt feelings tonight, particular in communities of color,” she said, adding, “What we have to do is sit down and work with the left-leaning part of the party and see if we can come to some sort of understanding going forward.”
Where previous mayors have taken a wide berth around intraparty primaries, Mr. Mamdani dove in. Before he even clinched his own mayoral win, he began recruiting candidates to run for seats he felt were ripe for leftist wins. He headlined fund-raisers, appeared in ads and dispatched his top political advisers to run two of the campaigns.
In the race’s final days, Mr. Mamdani exhausted himself shuttling between events with Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier, who were in the closest races. Wherever the mayor went, large crowds seemed to materialize.
Mr. Mamdani’s aggressive interventions were not without collateral damage. His positions on some of the races put him at odds with the Working Families Party, prominent Black and Latino Democrats, major labor unions and members of the City Council, all of whom had supported his campaign for mayor and are now involved in his governing agenda.
He infuriated Ms. Velázquez, Mr. Mamdani’s first supporter in Congress, who believed the mayor should have deferred to her wishes about a successor. She came to accuse the D.S.A. in particular of trying to erase the contributions she and other progressives had made to pushing the city leftward for decades.
Others, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, were even more upset when Mr. Mamdani decided in May to endorse Ms. Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist activist and Ph.D. student, and break with Mr. Espaillat.
Mr. Espaillat did not back Mr. Mamdani in last year’s primary, but afterward, he quickly endorsed him and brought along Latino support. Mr. Mamdani had privately assured Mr. Espaillat at the time that he would reciprocate if he ever needed it.
The mayor never explained his change of heart in detail, but his advisers said he watched Ms. Avila Chevalier’s momentum and believed he could make a difference in the race. Supporters of Mr. Espaillat were furious, and said they could no longer trust Mr. Mamdani’s word.
The outcome on Tuesday could pose particular problems for Mr. Jeffries, the New Yorker in line to become speaker if Democrats reclaim control of the House this year. Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier have not committed to supporting Mr. Jeffries’s leadership bid and could become persistent thorns in his side.
Democrats aligned with Mr. Jeffries, who fought hard to defeat Ms. Avila Chevalier, have privately raised concerns about her victory in particular. They fear that Republicans will weaponize a trove of her inflammatory old social media posts, including her saying that “all deportations are wrong” and using crude language about Kamala Harris, against more moderate Democrats running in swing districts that will decide the fate of the House this fall.
Mr. Jeffries repeatedly sidestepped the issue during an interview on NY1 Tuesday night as the results came in. Others were less reluctant to register concerns.
“Republicans will very quickly seek to elevate, as they always do, the most radical voices in the Democratic Party,” said Howard Wolfson, a former head of the House Democrats’ campaign arm and a top adviser to Michael R. Bloomberg. “And after tonight, they will have more radical Democrats to choose from.”
Mr. Mamdani and his allies saw it very differently.
Gustavo Gordillo, a D.S.A. co-chair in New York, said that his organization was already casting its attention to next year’s budget fight in Albany and beyond.
“We’re going to start thinking about 2028 and what comes next,” he said.
Jun 20, 2026
Seems To Be A Trend
Practically my entire adult life training was all about not this Socialist shit!
It's hard for an old horse to learn how to just hang out with the herd and let the younger mustangs romp.
This is becoming a new world, and the old one is dying hard. But die it must.
The triumph of a democratic socialist in the D.C. mayoral race is the latest sign that younger urban voters are turbo-charging candidates who promise to go big on affordability and take on President Trump.
Why it matters:
While Washington joined New York and Seattle as the latest big city to elect a democratic socialist, Janeese Lewis George's victory was less about her political label than about punishing prices and anger at the president.
State of play:
State of play:
Lewis George, who handily defeated a moderate in the Democratic primary, marks a break from decades of business-friendly politicians running the nation's capital. Three trends explain her rise:
- Unhappiness with the city's direction stood at the highest level (55%) since Marion Barry's reign 28 years ago, per a Washington Post-Schar School poll. A lot of that disaffection was driven by Trump, but there was also a shout for change after three terms of Mayor Muriel Bowser.
- Washington's influx of white residents, who tend to be younger and more progressive, made winning that vote even more important, and Lewis George ran up the score in neighborhoods where they've settled. She also proved critics wrong by winning in majority-Black, working-class communities — the only place she lost was the city's wealthiest enclave, Northwest's Ward 3.
- Nearly half of D.C.'s registered Democrats have a favorable view of socialism, per the poll — so it's not a turnoff. Three other progressives led D.C. Council races, giving the presumptive mayor powerful allies.
Zoom in:
Lewis George appears to have broken through by:
- Echoing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, she made the cost of living her No. 1 issue. Her rival, Kenyan McDuffie, ran on public safety and called her soft on crime, even as violence was fading as a top issue.
- Assembling a potent get-out-the-vote machine that encompassed almost every major local union plus the Democratic Socialists of America's local chapter, which helped knock on what she says were 200,000 doors.
- Crafting a vibey social media campaign that might not have reached New York City-level cinematic appeal but attracted eyes, including on Gen Z's favorite hangout app, Partiful.
Lewis George's campaign rhetoric is about to collide with governing realities.
- The city's economic slump calls for business growth. Trump's slashing of the federal workforce has unemployment sitting at 6.3%, city data shows, and population growth is slowing. The city is dealing with a budget gap of up to $1.1 billion this year.
- Lewis George is already adapting to facts on the ground. She appeared to distance herself from a new wealth tax in an upcoming budget vote, and when asked if her pricey promise of universal child care is achievable in year one, she told Axios: "We will see."
- She'll also need Trump's help. Lewis George made two pitches to Washington's business elite: Rejuvenating empty federal offices downtown, and kickstarting a multi-billion dollar Union Station expansion. TBD if Trump bites.
For most D.C. voters, Lewis George's message hit all the right notes: Everything's expensive, and Trump is making life worse.
Nov 19, 2025
Jun 18, 2025
Apr 4, 2025
A Glimmer
If it happens, we won't see it happen, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
@friendlyhoneybadg5 They may even double down when their fears and doubts creep in. People often fear being wrong more than death.
♬ original sound - FriendlyHoneyBadger
Dec 17, 2024
Evolution Is Inevitable
So evolve already, dumbass.
I'm not in full agreement here. New for the sake of new - change for the sake of change - can be a really good thing. It can also be disastrous.
Plus - the energy and exuberance of youth is often overcome by the experience and treachery of age.
That said, I'm mostly with this guy because
this is a brick fight.
and you don't win
a brick fight
with a rule book
Dec 7, 2024
Kinda Shitty - But
... it's pretty much peak Rich Guy Privilege for CEOs to be suddenly all paranoid about the probability of getting shot down in the street.
You know - like school kids, and shoppers at Walmart, and folks at a country music concert, or just regular people watching the local 4th of July parade - or any random black guy driving the wrong car at the wrong time thru the wrong neighborhood.
These corporate pricks are so worried, that security firms are being inundated by phone calls from the bigger corporations, begging for protection.
Got some news for ya, fellas:
This is America. We have lots of guns, and a bunch of us are carrying a heavy dose of grievance, and we're constantly being encouraged to think about solving our problems with gun violence.
Do you get it now?
Are you thinking maybe the seal has been broken? ie: people see what they take as a little righteous retribution, so now there's a fair probability that some of us will assume it's open season on rich pukes like Brian Thompson?
Can we reasonably anticipate that certain attitudes of certain power-holders will undergo a sudden rapid shift?
I dunno. I'm just asking questions.
Sep 16, 2024
Hits Keep A-Rollin'
Out of 44 staffers and cabinet members who worked for Trump, 41 have either come out in support of Harris, or have directly refused to endorse Trump.
93% of the people who used to work with you are telling the company not to rehire you.
Basically:
When the whole world is calling you an asshole, one thing you should stop to consider is that maybe you're an asshole.
Seventeen former staff members of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan are endorsing the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a joint statement first obtained by CBS News, the staff members wrote that Reagan, if alive, would have supported Harris.
"President Ronald Reagan famously spoke about a 'Time for Choosing.' While he is not here to experience the current moment, we who worked for him in the White House, in the administration, in campaigns and on his personal staff, know he would join us in supporting the Harris-Walz ticket," the group writes. "The time for choosing we face today is a choice between integrity and demagoguery, and the choice must be Harris-Walz," the group added. "Our votes in this election are less about supporting the Democratic Party and more about our resounding support for democracy."
Over 230 former officials for Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have also backed Harris, in addition to campaign staffers for Republican presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney. Biden received a similar amount of GOP support in his 2020 run against Trump.
Former Reagan staff backing Harris includes Ken Adelman, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. arms control director under Reagan, as well as B. Jay Cooper, the special assistant and deputy press secretary to Reagan. Adelman had endorsed former President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, as well as President Biden's 2020 run. He backed Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, but was against Trump's 2016 run.
The list also includes Pete Souza, the chief White House photographer for both Reagan and Obama.
The group says they are looking to convince other former Reagan staffers to back the Harris-Walz ticket, calling it "the only path forward toward an America that is strong and viable for our children and grandchildren for years to come."
CBS News has reached out to the Trump campaign for reaction. Trump has gotten support from only a couple of Democratic officials who have since distanced themselves from the party, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who ran for president as an independent before ending his bid and endorsing Trump last month, and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who left the Democratic party in 2022.
In April 2021, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, launched a speaker series that featured several Republican presidential candidates who later ran against Trump in the 2024 Republican primary. The library did not invite Trump to speak and told Politico it was because he is a former president and they wanted speakers who haven't held that level of office.
Their backing of Harris follows a swath of endorsements from Republican officials, including several staffers during Trump's first term, as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
"We're not the only ones that are taking a stand here. You've heard it, many people who have worked for Donald Trump have said that they do not support Donald Trump coming back to the presidency. And I think that speaks volumes, because we know him," said Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, prior to Tuesday's debate between Harris and Trump in Philadelphia.
Troye, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger and former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan all had speaking slots at the Democratic National Convention in August.
The new endorsements arrive as the Harris campaign works to siphon support away from Trump in what remains a margin-of-error race in the battleground states, according to CBS News polling. Outside groups and the campaign have made a concerted effort to target battleground state voters who voted for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Republican primaries earlier this year.
CBS News polling of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this month indicates that only a small number of undecided voters remains. Harris and Trump have near total support with their party's voters, though Harris has a slight edge over Trump with the sliver of moderate voters in these states who say there's still time left to make a final decision.
"The choice between truth and lies demands support for Harris-Walz. The choice between freedom and suppression of freedoms means support for Harris-Walz. The choice between serving the people and serving the few leads us to support Harris-Walz," the Reagan White House staffers wrote in the letter.
In a joint statement first obtained by CBS News, the staff members wrote that Reagan, if alive, would have supported Harris.
"President Ronald Reagan famously spoke about a 'Time for Choosing.' While he is not here to experience the current moment, we who worked for him in the White House, in the administration, in campaigns and on his personal staff, know he would join us in supporting the Harris-Walz ticket," the group writes. "The time for choosing we face today is a choice between integrity and demagoguery, and the choice must be Harris-Walz," the group added. "Our votes in this election are less about supporting the Democratic Party and more about our resounding support for democracy."
Over 230 former officials for Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have also backed Harris, in addition to campaign staffers for Republican presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney. Biden received a similar amount of GOP support in his 2020 run against Trump.
Former Reagan staff backing Harris includes Ken Adelman, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. arms control director under Reagan, as well as B. Jay Cooper, the special assistant and deputy press secretary to Reagan. Adelman had endorsed former President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, as well as President Biden's 2020 run. He backed Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, but was against Trump's 2016 run.
The list also includes Pete Souza, the chief White House photographer for both Reagan and Obama.
The group says they are looking to convince other former Reagan staffers to back the Harris-Walz ticket, calling it "the only path forward toward an America that is strong and viable for our children and grandchildren for years to come."
CBS News has reached out to the Trump campaign for reaction. Trump has gotten support from only a couple of Democratic officials who have since distanced themselves from the party, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who ran for president as an independent before ending his bid and endorsing Trump last month, and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who left the Democratic party in 2022.
In April 2021, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, launched a speaker series that featured several Republican presidential candidates who later ran against Trump in the 2024 Republican primary. The library did not invite Trump to speak and told Politico it was because he is a former president and they wanted speakers who haven't held that level of office.
Their backing of Harris follows a swath of endorsements from Republican officials, including several staffers during Trump's first term, as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
"We're not the only ones that are taking a stand here. You've heard it, many people who have worked for Donald Trump have said that they do not support Donald Trump coming back to the presidency. And I think that speaks volumes, because we know him," said Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, prior to Tuesday's debate between Harris and Trump in Philadelphia.
Troye, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger and former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan all had speaking slots at the Democratic National Convention in August.
The new endorsements arrive as the Harris campaign works to siphon support away from Trump in what remains a margin-of-error race in the battleground states, according to CBS News polling. Outside groups and the campaign have made a concerted effort to target battleground state voters who voted for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Republican primaries earlier this year.
CBS News polling of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this month indicates that only a small number of undecided voters remains. Harris and Trump have near total support with their party's voters, though Harris has a slight edge over Trump with the sliver of moderate voters in these states who say there's still time left to make a final decision.
"The choice between truth and lies demands support for Harris-Walz. The choice between freedom and suppression of freedoms means support for Harris-Walz. The choice between serving the people and serving the few leads us to support Harris-Walz," the Reagan White House staffers wrote in the letter.
Statement from Reagan Alumni
President Ronald Reagan famously spoke about a “Time for Choosing”. While he is not here to experience the current moment, we who worked for him in the White House, in the Administration, in campaigns and on his personal staff, know he would join us in supporting the Harris-Walz ticket.
The time for choosing we face today is a choice between integrity and demagoguery, and the choice must be Harris-Walz.
The choice between truth and lies demands support for Harris-Walz.
The choice between freedom and suppression of freedoms means support for Harris-Walz.
The choice between serving the people and serving the few leads us to support Harris-Walz.
We join our friends and colleagues from the George W. Bush White House, his Administration, and his campaigns, and those from the McCain and Romney campaigns in supporting Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.
Our votes in this election are less about supporting the Democratic Party and more about our resounding support for democracy. It’s our hope that this letter will signal to other Republicans and former Republicans that supporting the Democratic ticket this year is the only path forward toward an America that is strong and viable for our children and grandchildren for years to come.
- Ken Adelman - US Ambassador to the UN & US Arms Control Director, Ronald Reagan Administration
- Carol Adelman - USAID Assistant Administrator
- Elizabeth Board - Deputy Assistant to the President for Communications, Director Media Relations Office, RonaldReagan
- John E. Bowman - Assistant General Counsel for Banking and Finance, Department of the Treasury (Reagan and George H.W. Bush)
- Gahl Burt - White House Social Secretary, Ronald Reagan White House
- B. Jay Cooper - Deputy Assistant to the President, Ronald Reagan; Deputy White House Press Secretary, George H.W. Bush
- Paul O’Neill - Advance Office, Ronald Reagan White House
- Ashley Parker Snider - Trip Coordinator White House Advance, Ronald Reagan; Office of Public Affairs Department of Housing and Urban Development, George H.W. Bush Administration
- Elizabeth Penniman - Research Assistant, Presidential Speech Writing, Ronald Reagan White House; Policy Analyst, National Security Council, Ronald Reagan Administration; Deputy Director, Presidential Transition, Ronald Reagan; Director of Communications, US Surgeon General, George H.W. Bush Administration; Speechwriter, McCain for President 2008 Wing Pepper Press Advance, Ronald Reagan White House
- Charles Sethness - Assistant Treasury Secretary for Domestic Finance
- Kathleen Shanahan - Staff Assistant, National Security Council, Ronald Reagan Administration; Special Assistant toVice President Bush, Ronald Reagan White House; Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney, George W. Bush Administration
- Nancy Sinnott Dwight - Campaign Director, NRCC (1979-1981); Executive Director, NRCC (1981-1983); RNC Delegate for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney
- Pete Souza - Official White House Photographer, Ronald Reagan White House
- W. Grey Terry - Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director, Advance Office, Ronald Reagan WhiteHouseRobert Thompson
Aug 27, 2024
Don't Make Me Look
I ask myself what it is I want done about "the homeless problem"?
- How do we house everybody?
- Can we house everybody?
- How do we identify the causes &/or the remedies?
- and and and
When I hear somebody either fretting about "those poor people", or spouting off about "lazy bums", I don't know if they want to do something positive about it, or if they just don't want to see it - like they want to sweep up "the undesirables" and dispose of them.
These problems of homelessness - and migration - and the cycle of poverty, ignorance, and crime are just going to get worse.
In fact, these problems are starting to accelerate as Climate Change picks up the pace.
And as the problems driven by migration due to Climate Change increase, so will the political desire for a "strong hand to keep it all in line."
Weirdly, as efforts to solve problems become more dependent on collective action, we get more resistance from the "rugged individualist" crowd, while at the same time, they push for a strong leader to bring us all together to make the bad things go away - or something like that. It's all very contradictory, and the harder I try to make sense of it, the more it hurts my brain.
Crisis is the surest way to get people to give up their individuality and knuckle under to top-down authoritarian rule.
Seems pretty clear that's why we hear Republicans telling us about
- Crisis at the border
- Crisis of crime
- Crisis of illegal immigrants
- Crisis of National Debt
- Crisis of inflation
- Caravans
- Fentanyl
- Cartels
- MS13
- Dangerous vaccines
- Antifa
- 5G mind control
- Weather weapons
- (go to #1 above)
We hear about nothing but one crisis for a few days, and then it's on to next, and then on to the next, and on and on and on, until the rubes are ready to start it over.
Enough of this crap already. I'm sick to fuckin' death of this attempt at Government By WWE Promo - we tried that - it's bullshit.
Given me calm, competent, believable leadership, along with an opposition party that can offer something other than cruelty, immiseration and death.
Paraphrasing Bill Clinton:
These are our problems.
Can you help us solve them?
These are our opportunities.
Can you help us seize them?
These are our fears.
Can you help us ease them?
These are our dreams.
Can you help us achieve them?
Jul 24, 2024
That Pritzker Guy
When someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society.
Gov JB Pritzker, D-IL
May 29, 2024
Consequences Schmonsequences
One thing I've learned in 50 years of watching and dabbling in politics is that even when it's over, it ain't over.
At least one of the myriad possible outcomes of all this Trump dictatorship / Plutocracy shit could in fact spell the "end" of our little experiment in self-governance. But even that won't mean it's all over. It just means that, as always, the evolution of the thing outlives us all.
This fight will outlive me, the same as it's outlived everybody before me. About all I can do is to go on trying to build a legacy of clear-thinking resistance to shitty authoritarian ideology, and in favor of good government that's appropriately regulated and balanced and flexible - that can be adjusted and improved as time and circumstance require. You know - that silly notion of a more perfect union.
No union was less perfect than the one we started with, but that union was a metric fuck-ton better than anything that had come before it.
I keep reminding myself that, in 235 years, this particular fight has already outlived hundreds of millions of us.
It'd be a little silly to stop fighting for something better now.
A guilty verdict for Trump in the New York trial would mean a mix of routine court processing and extraordinary logistical considerations, legal experts say.
Donald Trump has complained of the indignities of a cold, uncomfortable Manhattan courtroom during his hush money trial, which began jury deliberations Wednesday morning.
If convicted, Trump could face other conditions he may consider insulting, including a required inmate review by New York City’s Department of Probation.
The probation office on the 10th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse prepares presentencing reports for judges. There, Trump would be interviewed about his personal history, his mental health and the circumstances that led to his conviction.
Lawyers say the process is humbling.
“If you think the courtroom is dingy, just wait until you go to the probation office,” said Daniel Horwitz, a white-collar criminal defense attorney in New York and former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Former prosecutors sketched out a mix of likely experiences for Trump if he were found guilty of any charge in the case, which includes 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The case involves $130,000 in payments allegedly authorized by Trump to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter she says they had.
The routine processing of convicted felons into the New York criminal justice system would include the timeline of a potential appeal. There would also be extraordinary considerations — such as how the Secret Service would protect him if he were sent to prison and whether he would be allowed to travel to campaign events if sentenced to home confinement — given Trump’s standing as a former president and the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for the election in November.
Legal experts said incarceration appeared unlikely for Trump, 77, who has no criminal record.
The Class E felony charges are punishable by 16 months to four years in prison. Among the key issues to be determined if Trump were convicted would be whether he faces some form of incarceration, either in a government facility or a private location, or a less-restrictive experience through probation.
New York Mayor Eric Adams said this month that the city’s Rikers Island jail complex and Department of Corrections were prepared if Trump were ordered to serve time.
A conviction would not disqualify him from running for office or serving as president if elected, constitutional experts said.
During the trial, which began April 15, prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said Trump falsely recorded the payments involving Daniels as legal expenses and alleged they were improper campaign expenditures. Defense attorneys said Trump, who pleaded not guilty, made personal payments to protect his family from an embarrassing disclosure.
The jury, which heard closing arguments from defense lawyers and prosecutors Tuesday, must unanimously agree on a conviction or an acquittal, while a split among jurors could prompt New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to declare a mistrial. In that situation, Bragg could decide to retry Trump, who likely would paint the outcome as a victory in his efforts to discredit the prosecution as politically motivated.
Trump’s punishment if convicted would be up to Merchan, who would receive input from the prosecution and defense in the presentencing report. Though jail or prison are unlikely, the former prosecutors said, alternatives such as probation or home confinement would create logistical challenges and potential political concerns.
If he is sentenced to probation, for example, Trump would be required to clear any out-of-state travel — such as to campaign rallies and fundraisers — with a probation officer. If Trump were to serve home confinement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., New York authorities would likely have to work with counterparts in Florida to accommodate him, the experts said.
Such arrangements are not uncommon for convicted felons, experts said, but the details must be approved by probation officers.
“If you have a probation officer, you are not supposed to travel without permission. Your home is subject to random search because you don’t have a Fourth Amendment right to your home being private. You can get drug-tested, potentially. Travel outside the country is difficult,” said Matthew Galluzzo, another former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“That would be super awkward for someone on the campaign trail, but not impossible,” Galluzzo said. “If he had to go to a debate against Biden, he probably could go, but you’re supposed to make that request far in advance.”
Trump and Biden have agreed to two debates, the first scheduled for June 27 in Atlanta — which is likely to take place before any potential sentencing of Trump — and the second planned for Sept. 10 at a yet-undisclosed location.
Before a sentencing date were scheduled, Trump’s lawyers would likely ask Merchan to nullify the verdict, though the legal experts said the judge almost certainly would not do so.
Instead, the probation office would put together a presentencing report for Merchan. As part of that process, Trump would be required to participate in an interview with a probation officer who would produce a biography of him of about five or six pages, legal experts said. Such documents are confidential, intended only for the judge and the lawyers.
Trump has called his prosecution politically motivated and denigrated Merchan, Bragg and others, leading the judge to fine him 10 times for a total of $10,000 during the trial for violating a partial gag order. How Trump would react to questions from a probation officer about the case could get him into more hot water with the court. Legal experts said his lawyers likely would advise him not to discuss the case.
Convicts are “expected to tell the truth. If they are convicted and then say, ‘No, it’s a lie, it didn’t happen,’ that will go back to the judge. And that’s not good,” said defense attorney Jeremy Saland, who also served as a Manhattan prosecutor.
The prosecution and Trump’s defense team also are expected to submit recommendations about the sentencing.
Because he was charged with nonviolent crimes, Trump is an unlikely candidate to be detained in prison as he awaits sentencing, said the experts, who added that it is also unlikely that Merchan would impose bail as a condition for his release.
Trump’s team has 30 days to file notice of appeal and six months to file the full appeal if he is convicted.
A key question is whether the court would agree to stay Trump’s sentence pending an appeal, a process that is likely to last well beyond the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Former prosecutors suggested such a scenario is plausible given that any punishment of Trump could be short enough in duration that the sentence would be fully carried out before a legal appeal is litigated.
The legal experts said Merchan could grant Trump a conditional discharge tied to the requirement that he not commit another legal offense.
Merchan also could impose a financial penalty or require him to do community service or undergo counseling, some legal experts said.
If the judge were to impose a more onerous penalty, such as home confinement, Trump could still find ways to continue campaigning, even if he were not on the road.
“He could be confined but go to Mar-a-Lago and hold a news conference every day, be on TV, hold rallies remotely,” Horwitz said. “There’s a lot he can do as a candidate while under home confinement.”
Feb 10, 2024
In The Eyes Of The World
... if you're American, you're Mississippi.
The good news:
It's fairly probable that "Trump, but with brains" isn't a real thing.
The bad news:
That may be the point - because they really are looking for a guy with Trump's charisma (but with less debilitating emotional baggage), and just enough intellectual horsepower not to give the game away while also not getting any funny ideas about how he's actually in charge of anything.
Feb 2, 2024
The Needle Moves?
I'm really hoping the guys in these videos indicate a trend - that maybe some of the less rabid Republicans are beginning to see the glaring cynicism of the GOP - especially where Trump and his MAGA goons are concerned, and rebelling enough to get that party's shit together.
Like the first guy, I don't hold the Dems up as total paragons of civic virtue. They've got their share of manipulative assholes and smarmy characters too. And that's not to get all Both Sides-y or anything. I just always want to take some precaution against becoming too much of a fanboy.
Anyway, Tony Michaels is new to me, and he just popped up on my YouTube feed. I'll give him a try for a bit, but he's referred to as The Rush Limbaugh Of The Left, so I'm thinking I can prob'ly go without. We'll see.
Jan 19, 2024
Something Is Afoot
Jennifer Rubin
- VP Elise Stefanik? Kristi Noem? Marge The Impaler Greene?
- Press Poodles are missing the point (surprise surprise)
- Another special election (FL State House) flipped red-to-blue
- MAGA clowns keep shooting themselves in the foot
- The depth of a parent's agony
- Bibi's got bad problems
Jan 17, 2024
Fly Away Now
Why vote for Biden?
Jennifer Rubin
Cuz he beat Trump last time by 7 million votes, and he'll beat him again.
Trump has a strangle hold on the GOP. If there's any good news, it's simply that the Republican party is shrinking, so he has more and more influence over fewer and fewer people.
The MAGA GOP has entered its final Geejy Bird phase.
There is reason for hope
Nov 8, 2023
Coming Soon
Some interesting thinking.
- Watch Ohio
- Political shift
- The return of manufacturing
- Resurrection of Labor
- The new swing voter
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)