The Weekly 'Latest on 2020'

Until the news calms down, I may have to do this more often than weekly.

-- For all Donkeys who tend to dismiss Glenn Greenwald.

This is a good answer from @SenGillibrand: a potent illustration of why people in general - not just in public life - should be encouraged, not scorned, when they grow, evolve and change *and it's sincere*. Not always easy to distinguish sincerity from tactics but we should try: https://t.co/I1Q9nQvIux

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 21, 2019

-- Flavor of the Kossack Week: Kamala.

You might recall that two weeks ago in the cycle's first sample it was Liz Warren on top.  The top five -- those two plus Beto, Biden, and Bernie -- shifted around a bit but remain at the lead.

Much has been written, broadcast, blogged and otherwise bloviated before and after the junior Cali senator's declaration.  It's a good thing I got my post about her up on Sunday; it looks like my (revised) prediction about her is accurate.  The reporting isn't all peaches and cream.

The Hillbots got on board with Harris long ago.  She'll be the first candidate to get a CNN townhall, this coming Monday.  In Iowa.  That's called a in-kind contribution, folks; earned media worth millions of dollars.  Her run-up to kickoff has been slick, almost too slick.  She's one of a handful of frontrunners who has some past tuff-on-crime issues in the Black Lives Matter era.

But so far it's all tailwinds and smooth seas.

-- When last we heard of Pete Buttigieg, he was losing the race for DNC chair a few years ago.  Now he's ready to lose again.  On the bright side, the gay white male millennial caucus has their candidate.  That's pretty close to all identity politics covered, although we might need a few LGBTQ POC in the race at some point.  Somebody check in with Moni at Transgriot now that Serena is out of the Australian Open.  There's always room for an angry black trans woman, I suppose.

-- Everybody heard enough about Beto's sabbatical in the wilderness?  I know I have.  Yes, there was good snark, here and  also here ...

... (O’Rourke), wandering the countryside after his loss to Senator Ted Cruz, threw it back to the classics with a little beat poetry. (Add that to the list of ways he’s eerily similar to your college boyfriend.)

“A lot of big trucks rolling down Pancake Blvd and there aren’t any sidewalks. Gloomy early morning sky in Liberal Kansas. Snow melt on the side of the road where I’m running,” he wrote on Medium.

Later, he visited a community college where students were learning to be wind energy technicians. “I looked up and imagined the courage it takes to climb out onto the face of these giant turbines, 250 feet up in the air.” He visited another college class and rambled, “Bring people together, over coffee, over beer.” Then, when the day was over: “I left and it was dark.”

Am I supposed to snap between paragraphs? Have you noticed that if you scramble the letters in Robert Francis O’Rourke, you can spell out “Beto Is Kerouac?” What’s going on?

After a few focused read-throughs, and a couple tabs of acid, we think we got the point: Wind energy is the future. Hey, is this Beto guy running for president or what? It’s not clear that he even knows the answer to that — “as is ever so on the road,” or whatever. But it got us musing about what we might hear if some of his potential competition went all beatnik on us, too.

... and there was shitty.

Let Beto live! And if it turns out he is actually doing this all as a stunt while his big-money consultants are putting together a manipulative, shallow campaign to attain the presidency by using regular people as props, we can all justifiably bury him in an avalanche of cynical snark and go back to the regular order of business: criticizing Hillary Clinton for being too focus-grouped and robotic.

How about the revelation that he is a public employee union buster -- sort of like Sylvester Turner?  (Grits seems to have found a silver lining to this episode.)

What I did not hear of was this.  I am so glad I didn't vote for Bobo last November, unlike a former friend of mine, who seems to have had the blue scales fall from her eyes at last.

Update: More strange Beto-band outfits, this time with video.