Jeff Bezos writes on Medium:

Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.

Good for you, Mr. Bezos.

John Eligon reports in the New York Times:

Some white students said that nothing seemed out of the ordinary when their white classmates wore blackface. It was typical at costume parties or at talent shows, said Dr. William Elwood, a retired family physician who is white and who graduated in 1984, the same year as Mr. Northam.

Dr. Elwood worked on the yearbook that year, laying out pages, he said. For their personal pages, students would submit their own photos to the staff, he said. The designers would lay them out on the page, he said, and mark where each photo was to be placed. The photos were then put into an envelope, which was attached to the page where they belonged and sent to the press to be printed.

I am not condoning racist, but time has changed and 30 years ago was much different than today. Eligon concludes:

The gap between black and white, Dr. Randolph said, was why he felt that white classmates probably would not have blinked at the offensive image on Mr. Northam’s yearbook page.

“That was the norm,” he said. “That’s what people did.”

Democrats need to chill the hell out. No one is perfect. We already lost Al Franken in the Senate. Let’s not allow a Republican to take over the Virginia governor.

Here we go again. My wife and I had another argument over politics. It was about Rashida Tlaib’s remark: “Impeach the motherfucker.” She was mad when I said I don’t see any issue with that. Will I let my kids use that type of language? Well, it depends on how they use it. Đạo and Đán already know the word fuck. I am fine if they use it for emphatic effect or to convey emotion. If Đán comes to me and says, “Daddy, the instant noodles you just made is fucking delicious.” I am cool with that.

In Ms. Tlaib’s case, she was using it for linguistic effect as well. I am so fed up with the double standard in politics and media. A woman gets chastised for using a curse word while men said and do worse things and they get elected to be the president of the United States and justice of the Supreme Court.

“Impeach the motherfucker” is nowhere near “Grab them by the pussy.” The latter is a brag about sexual assault. The distinction is clear. It is all about the context. So go right ahead and impeach the motherfucker.

I knew if I kept arguing with my wife, I would just get myself in more trouble so I just use this blog to express how I feel. Come to think about it, arguing with her makes our lives and marriage more engaging. Otherwise, I am quite a boring motherfucker. She is not only the love of my life, but also the inspiration for me to write all these blog posts.

Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker:

Sometimes what doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger; it makes everyone sick. The more adversarial the press, the more loyal Trump’s followers, the more broken American public life. The more desperately the press chases readers, the more our press resembles our politics.

The problems are well understood, the solutions harder to see. Good reporting is expensive, but readers don’t want to pay for it. The donation-funded ProPublica, “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” employs more than seventy-five journalists. Good reporting is slow, good stories unfold, and most stories that need telling don’t involve the White House.

An informative read. The audio version is also great for driving and listening.

Zoe Tillman reports in BuzzFeed News:

In pieces reviewed by BuzzFeed News that Rao wrote between 1994 and 1996 — she graduated from Yale University in 1995 — she described race as a “hot, money-making issue,” affirmative action as the “anointed dragon of liberal excess,” welfare as being for “for the indigent and lazy,” and LGBT issues as part of “trendy” political movements. On date rape, Rao wrote that if a woman “drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice.”

Yes, she is one of our finest faculty members. Then again, it will be sexist if she won’t get the nomination for the DC Circuit because the guy who she’s going to replace had done worse and still got the seat on the Supreme Court.

Mai Lynn Miller Nguyễn writes in Elle:

If the Trump administration succeeds, thousands of people could become eligible for deportation to Vietnam, a country where they may not have lived for decades. Trump’s move puts at risk those who either never got permanent legal status or citizenship or those who were convicted of a criminal offense. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has said that removing “criminal aliens” from Vietnam to their “home country” is a priority.

The problem is that the home country of these people is now the United States. After enduring the incredible trauma of war and flight, they built new lives and created new families, both biological and metaphorical. They may still long for the homeland they lost in 1975, but the Vietnam of today is not their country. They are American, in spirit, even if not on paper. They were promised residency in this country, an acknowledgment of the U.S. role in the brutal conflict that pushed so many Vietnamese to seek safety on other shores. And, once again, many will live in fear of being forced from their home.

When I read Vietnamese-American media, they all showed their support of him. They argued that voting for him will save Vietnam from the communist. This is absurd beyond fake news, yet most Vietnamese American believed the media. They supported him. In return, he deports our fellow Vietnamese Americans. Let that sink in for a minute. I hope they learn their lesson.

Daniel A. Gross writes in The New Yorker:

Sear Un, a forty-one-year-old father who has lived in California since he was seven, was arrested by immigration authorities in September. Twenty years ago, he was convicted of felony residential burglary.

Sad!

Robert Draper writes about Nancy Pelosi in The New York Times Magazine:

Pelosi is something of a paradox in the world of politics. A Gallup poll five months ago found her favorability rating to be at a dismal 29 percent, and yet — unlike other unpopular political figures such as Trump and Hillary Clinton — her 31 years in public life have been free of scandal. She has been excoriated from the right as the quintessence of California limousine liberalism. But she is also a practicing Catholic whose first career was as a stay-at-home mother of five children, with little in common with — and at times little patience for — the new generation of activists in her party, to whom she sometimes refers as “the lefties.” Pelosi — who with her husband, the investor Paul Pelosi, owns a large house in San Francisco’s upper-crust Presidio Heights as well as a Napa Valley vineyard — is indeed rich. But 29 members of Congress, 18 of them Republicans, are richer.

What sets her apart from other legislators of her stature is her gender. Pelosi has been known to say: “No one gives you power. You have to take it from them.” The leitmotif of her three-decade ascent is that of a woman wresting power away from a male-dominated political machine, until one day the machine discovered she was its master.

Pelosi is tough, smart, and talented. The Democrat should be thankful for her leadership.

The 2018 midterm election marks a historic victory for women who have ran to rebuke Trump. Mad props to the diverse group of Congresswomen including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Deb Haaland, Sharice Davids, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Abby Finkenauer, Ayanna Pressley, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia, Angie Craig, Marsha Blackburn, Jahana Hayes, Young Kim, Kristi Noem, and Janet Mills. For my home state Virginia, Jennifer Wexton unseated an NRA-backed candidate.

Although Democrats took over the House, the Senate is still run by old white Republicans. We still have to put up with the antediluvian Mitch McConnell. I really wish the Democrats took over the Senate as well so that we can make that orangutan in the White House a living hell.

At least we have the women to reign him in. He’s not going to get away with his bullshit anymore. The next two years won’t be great, but they will be better than the previous two.

He’s not a dictator. He’s a dicktator. He needs attention and he says outrageous shit just to get you outrage. The angier you get the more coverage he gets. The media needs to stop focusing on him. I don’t give a fuck how many lies he told. I am tired of reading how dangerous his rhetoric has become. I am sick of seeing his tweets being quoted like they are some prose shit.

We fall into his trap every time he makes a ridiculous comment. After two years, we should know by now. We need to ignore his stupidity and focus on the real policy. If he doesn’t get the attention he craves, I am sure he would go crazy. Imagine no one is paying attention to an incompetent president?

In a way, the Republicans are brilliant at ignoring him and just focus on their agenda. They know damn well he’s a fucking moron. They just don’t say it to his face or in public. They just use him as a mouthpiece to distract the public from paying attention to the laws they want to pass.

The shits he says don’t surprise or shock me anymore. I don’t need the media to remind me his non-sense. Calling him out on his stupid tweets and keeping track of his lies are not working. He continues to get away with them. From grabbing women by the pussy to shooting someone to praising the white supremacists, nothing he said could sink his presidency.

What we can do is ignore his dumb shit and vote him the fuck out starting next Tuesday. I can’t wait to see the turnout and the takeover. I still have faith in America. We can’t let a dicktator run our great nation.