Hot tip to Susan Page: saying “thank you” over and over to try to get a man to shut up never works. They really think you’re thanking them. Tweet by former Congresswoman Katie Hill @KatieHill4CA… Not standing down. Not being silenced

Shoutout to the @AOC who thrust the Green New Deal onto the national stage and made it the framework for debate on climate policy within two years. That’s a hell of an Overton window shift by… “just a bartender.” A Tweet by Emma Vigeland @EmmaVigeland

The Green New Deal is and has been lied about nonstop, and yet is STILL popular. It’s a massive job-creation and infrastructure plan to decarbonize & increase quality of work and life. It’s okay to call the GOP out on those lies just as we call them out on all their other lies. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC

Misogynoir is misogyny directed towards black women where race and gender both play roles in bias. The term was coined by queerblack feministMoya Bailey,  Wikipedia.

Probably the best place to start is with The Fly. For me, the highlight of the debate was watching Kamala Harris react to The Fly landing on Mike Pence’s perfectly manicured hair. The fly landed just when Pence started on a tirade about Law & Order and I was so distracted that I missed most of what he was saying. Because Harris was making notes – probably something along the line of “Don’t lecture me on law and order, I was a Prosecutor, I was a Top Cop” – she didn’t see it land, so, when she looked over to Pence, there was The Fly, just sitting there on top of Pence’s head. Just like me, I don’t think she got it at first – I thought it was a fly in our home, on our screen – and then when she did get that it was a real fly, on HIS head, we could see the recognition crawl across her face, first her eyes and then just the faintest wisp of a smile.

This was Kamala Harris’ first time on the National Stage and she had the higher hill to climb. More realisticly, as a Black Woman, Harris started about as far down the pecking as one can get, so it is more accurate to say that she had the deeper hole to climb out of before even starting the hill climb part. She had to come across as strong but not too rude, or too loud, or too emotional, or too whatever, too something, anyway, while all Pence had to do was be his calm, white, superior, man-self. The Vice-Presidency is and always has been male, after all.

I thought Harris did just fine and, considering the hand he was dealt, I thought Pence did OK too. I know, he did continue talking over Susan Page while she was trying, ineffectively, to get him to stop, but, I’m learning the hard way, that is pretty normal for a white man. I would have been happier if Senator Harris hadn’t stressed, like three times, “We’ll let everybody keep on fracking” mostly because those unequivical statements can come back and bite you in the ass. Think George Bush the Elder saying “Read my lips, no new taxes!”. More importantly, it was unnecessary, nobody, who isn’t in the business really cares except people who are against fracking. But, actually, nobody won this debate, it was unwinnable. By now. almost all of us have chosen a side and the optimists think their side won (the pessimists probably think their side lost, of course).

The deeper problem is that the model is flawed, the model that Conflict Produces Truth. That, somehow, two sides fighting each other will reveal the otherwise hidden truth. It doesn’t, they don’t. It’s even more obvious in our Legal system. I don’t think that conflict as a sort of Universal Answer to everything – the war on terrorism or the war on cancer, even the war on poverty – is only American but we have embraced it whole heartily. I’m starting to think that the conflict model is out dated and is working to our determent. I think it is time to start thinking about what a cooperation model would look like.