Elizabeth Warren has a plan for responding to people who come up to her at rallies to say, “my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

The question came from an audience member, channeling a phrase often invoked by marriage equality opponents who, as he put it, describe themselves as “old fashioned.”

“Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that,” Warren deadpanned, “and I'm gonna say, ‘Then just marry one woman. I'm cool with that.”

Then she twisted the knife: “If you can find one."

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/lgbtq-town-hall-2019/index.html

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies have struggled for months to come up with effective ways to confront Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose steady rise in the polls put the lie to Mr. Trump’s boasts last spring that she was “finished” and “gone,” undone by her past claims of Native American ancestry. Republicans have tried to brand her as a socialist, attack her policy ideas and portray her as too left-wing for the American electorate. None of those arguments have diminished her political momentum, robust fund-raising or polling.

But in the past week, conservative news sites have challenged Ms. Warren’s story about how a public school principal forced her out of a teaching job in 1971 because she was “visibly pregnant,” and the Republican National Committee grabbed onto the issue to wage its own attack. In doing so, Republicans employed a tactic — questioning a female candidate’s authenticity — that is at once often a sexist trope in politics and a strategy used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Ms. Warren and her team, in turn, have confidently parried those attacks and used them to rally supporters. Rather than take a defensive posture, Ms. Warren has responded by offering her personal story as one of countless instances of pregnancy discrimination that have occurred in American workplaces, where it remains a widespread problem. In a video that has been viewed more than a million times across social media platforms, Ms. Warren read messages from women sharing their own experiences. Christina Reynolds, who was an aide on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and is now a spokeswoman for EMILY’s List, which supports female Democratic candidates who back abortion rights, said the Warren campaign’s move to solicit stories from people was a better response to the line of attack “than just saying, ‘No, it’s not true.’”

“I think it’s a really powerful thing that she’s done,” she said, “which is turn this into a learning opportunity for all of us as to what women have faced at past times, what they might still face and how can we do better.”

...Ms. Warren’s campaign demonstrated readiness for the attacks as news outlets began publishing articles in recent days about her public-school teaching career and pregnancy. Ms. Warren spoke with CBS News to go into greater detail about her story, and she and her campaign sought to shift the focus onto the broader issue of pregnancy discrimination. Her admirers praised her on social media and others offered support, including some rivals in the 2020 race, a sign of the protectiveness that many Democrats feel toward their candidates in the face of Republican attacks.

Jennifer Palmieri, who was the communications director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign, noted the extent of that unity around Ms. Warren. “This could have been something that really got pounced on by her opponents,” she said, “and that didn’t happen.”

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-fired-teaching.html#click=https://t.co/QBgcDGD7py

WASHINGTON — Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren released a plan Wednesday calling for environmental justice in responding to climate change, proposing steps to reduce what she called the disproportionate effect that pollution has on low-income and minority communities.

Warren, who has made the fight against climate change a key to her Democratic presidential campaign, said that a “just transition” to clean energy as outlined in the Green New Deal has to happen by “prioritizing communities that have experienced historic disinvestment.” She cited studies showing that toxic waste sites, landfills, congested highways and other sources of pollution hit harder in places such as predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.

Warren would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to extensively map which communities are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change so federal clean air and water rules can be adjusted and promised to hold an environmental justice summit within her first 100 days in office if elected president. She would also direct one-third of a proposed climate investment under the Green New Deal into communities most at-risk of adverse environmental impact, which she said would equal at least $1 trillion dollars over the next decade.

...In an effort to better understand the far-reaching impact of climate injustice, Warren said she recently visited what is considered Michigan’s most polluted zip code with Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Detroit and its suburbs. Warren toured a school located next to several industrial plants and a community center, where she talked to people affected by the high levels of pollution that has caused cancer among their family and friends.

“These big corporations have enough muscle with the government that they squeeze it to get tax breaks,” Warren said to community members outside the community center in a video released by her campaign. “So the cost of running these schools and keeping these roads paved falls disproportionately on you. So you’re not only paying the cost in terms of what you breathe, what your children breathe…you’re also paying the cost out of pocket.”

More at https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/10/09/elizabeth-warren-calls-for-environmental-justice-addressing-climate-change-part-new-campaign-proposal/NEwS5uF7skb2xd3JVJ2P3I/story.html

On the campaign trail, Elizabeth Warren often tells the story of how she was fired from her first teaching job in 1971 because she was pregnant, a pivotal moment that ultimately put her on a path to Harvard, the United States Senate, and quite possibly the presidency. But recently, several media outlets have questioned the veracity of these claims. In an exclusive interview with CBS News on Monday evening, Warren said she stands by her characterizations of why she left the job. "All I know is I was 22 years old, I was 6 months pregnant, and the job that I had been promised for the next year was going to someone else. The principal said they were going to hire someone else for my job," she said.

...In an interview that year at the University of California, Berkeley, Warren gave the first known public account of her time at Riverdale. "I worked in a public school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn't have the education courses, so I was on an 'emergency certificate,' it was called," Warren said in 2007. "I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, 'I don't think this is going to work out for me.' I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years."

Asked by CBS News why she told the story differently at Berkeley a decade ago, Warren said her life since her election to the Senate in 2012 caused her to "open up" about her past. "After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life and this was one of them. I wrote about it in my book when I became a U.S. Senator," she said in a statement from her campaign.

...Warren also told CBS News that she was, in fact, officially offered the job for the following year as the school board minutes indicate. "In April of that year, my contract was renewed to teach again for the next year," Warren said. She also said she had been hiding her pregnancy from the school. "I was pregnant, but nobody knew it. And then a couple of months later when I was six months pregnant and it was pretty obvious, the principal called me in, wished me luck, and said he was going to hire someone else for the job," Warren said. Asked repeatedly whether she meant she was fired when she said the principal showed her the door, Warren said, "When someone calls you in and says, the job that you've been hired for for next year, is no longer yours, we're giving it to someone else. I think that's being 'shown the door.'"

...Interviews with retired teachers who worked for the Riverdale Board of Education at the same time as Warren suggest that while they do not remember Warren or the circumstances of her leaving the school, the workplace culture at the time may have left Warren with no option but to move on when her pregnancy became apparent.

Two retired teachers who worked at Riverdale Elementary for over 30 years, including the year Warren was there, told CBS News that they don't remember anyone being explicitly fired due to pregnancy during their time at the school. But Trudy Randall and Sharon Ercalano each said that a non-tenured, pregnant employee like Warren would have had little job security at Riverdale in 1971, seven years before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed. ”The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn't tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn't know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer," Randall said. "But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant."

As the school board minutes show, no member of the Riverdale school board at the time was a woman. A full year after Warren's dismissal, the Associated Press wrote that a recent New Jersey State Division of Civil Rights decision meant that "pregnant teachers can no longer be automatically forced out of New Jersey classrooms."

More at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/warren-stands-by-account-of-being-pushed-out-of-her-first-teaching-job-because-of-pregnancy/

MOORHEAD — A West Fargo man is in jail after police say he threatened a woman with a handgun after getting into an argument on the road with her over her bumper sticker supporting Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.

About noon Monday, Oct. 7, officers were sent to the area of 24th Avenue and Eighth Street South in Moorhead for a disturbance call, according to a news release from the Moorhead Police Department.

A woman told police she was driving south on Eighth Street when a man pulled up next to her and yelled at her saying he disliked her bumper sticker supporting Warren.

Moorhead police spokesman Capt. Deric Swenson later said the man’s vehicle had a pro-Donald Trump sticker on it.

Police said in a news release that the man then pointed to his own political bumper sticker and talked about his different political views. Swenson said the woman had “engaged” with the man for about eight blocks before he drove past the woman's vehicle and held up a handgun.

Officers were able to locate the suspect inside a restaurant in the Brookdale Shopping Center and found a loaded handgun in his vehicle's center console, according to the release. Police said the passenger in the suspect's vehicle confirmed what reportedly happened.

The driver was arrested and identified as Joseph Schumacher, 27, of West Fargo. He was booked into the Clay County Jail. Police have requested that prosecutors charge Schumacher with felony terroristic threats and having a loaded handgun inside a vehicle without a permit, which is a misdemeanor.

More at https://www.westfargopioneer.com/news/crime-and-courts/4710059-Police-Trump-supporter-pulls-gun-on-Democrat-during-road-rage-incident-on-busy-Moorhead-road

It’s hard to believe that barely three weeks have passed since Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, issued a mysterious subpoena to the acting director of national intelligence, demanding that he produce a whistle-blower complaint filed by someone in the intelligence community. Since that subpoena was issued, the impeachment of Donald Trump has gone from implausibility to near certainty; I at least find it hard to see how the House can fail to impeach given what we already know about Trump’s actions. Conviction in the Senate remains a long shot, but not as long as it once seemed.

And the whole tenor of our national conversation has changed. It looks to me as if we’re witnessing the rapid collapse of a powerful faction in U.S. public life, one whose refusal to accept facts at odds with its prejudices has long been a major source of political dysfunction. But I’m not talking about the right-wing extremists who dominate the Republican Party. Sorry, but they’re not going anywhere. Most of Trump’s base is sticking with him, while the list of prominent Republican politicians willing to call out Trump’s malfeasance in clear language consists so far of Mitt Romney and, well, Mitt Romney.

No, I’m talking about fanatical centrists, who aren’t a large slice of the electorate, but have played an outsize role in elite opinion and media coverage. These are people who may have been willing to concede that Trump was a bad guy, but otherwise maintained, in the teeth of the evidence, that our two major parties were basically equivalent: Each party had its extremists, but each also had its moderates, and everything would be fine if these moderates could work together. Who am I talking about? Well, among other people, Joe Biden, who has repeatedly insisted that Trump is an aberration, not representative of the Republican Party as a whole. (Biden’s refusal to admit what he was facing may be one reason his response to the Ukraine smear has seemed so wobbly.)

Some of us have been pushing back against that worldview for many years, arguing that today’s Republican Party is a radical force increasingly opposed to democracy. Way back in 2003 I wrote that modern conservatism is “a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein declared that the central problem of U.S. politics was a G.O.P. that was not just extreme but “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

For a long time, however, making that case — pointing out that Republicans were sounding ever more authoritarian and violating more and more democratic norms — got you dismissed as shrill if not deranged. Even Trump’s rise, and the obvious parallels between Trumpism and the authoritarian movements that have gutted democracy in places like Hungary and Poland, barely dented centrist complacency. Remember, just a few months ago most of the news media treated Attorney General William Barr’s highly misleading summary of the Mueller report as credible...

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/opinion/republicans-trump-moderates.html

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Elizabeth Warren was greeted by Republican activists chanting “Stop impeachment!” as she strode toward baggage claim at a Nevada airport. There were more protesters at a Carson Center rec center where she spoke, including one atop hay bales yelling “Trump 2020” until he was hoarse. And during her speech, Warren was interrupted by a man screaming “you’re all socialists!”

Warren wasn’t in Manhattan anymore.

The Massachusetts senator has proven she’s popular in Democratic strongholds, perhaps most memorably when she filled New York’s Washington Square Park last month. But as she’s rising in the polls and sitting on a fresh pile of campaign cash, Warren is also frequently hitting places where she might be less welcome. That includes Nevada’s capital, a conservative area with a proud cowboy streak that’s a seven-hour drive from the glitz of Democrat-friendly Las Vegas.

...Her trip last week to Carson City gave reason for optimism. Warren drew more than 1,000 people on a Wednesday night. And some of the loudest applause followed Warren’s most progressive pronouncements, especially when she declared: “I don’t want a government that works for giant multinational corporations.”

“It’s easy to think everything here is Reno,” said Jonathan Byrnside, a 38-year-old federal employee who came to see Warren from nearby Silver City. He was referring to the better-known locale famous for casinos — and, in a bygone era, lenient divorce laws — about 25 miles away, where Warren’s airport run-in occurred. “But there are a lot of people with progressive values who live in rural areas.”

It was Warren’s third visit to northern Nevada and she’s not the only Democratic presidential hopeful venturing into Republican areas. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont came a few weeks ago, while former Vice President Joe Biden visited Reno the same night Warren was in Carson City. California Sen. Kamala Harris was on the campus of the University of Nevada at Reno the following day.

Still, Warren’s crowd was larger than any of the others. The complex’s floor was so full that some attendees dragged metal benches to climb atop for a glimpse of the distant stage.

More at https://boston.cbslocal.com/2019/10/07/elizabeth-warren-republicans-democratic-primary-nevada/

Last night on Saturday Night Live, Kate McKinnon's Elizabeth Warren stopped by Weekend Update to address a few recent items in the news about her campaign, in the most satisfying way possible.

When Colin Jost asked her about that CNBC story about how a bunch of Wall Street turds say they will support Trump if Warren is the nominee (which, by the way, is a compliment.), McKinnon's Warren said:

"You're kidding me? Whaaaaaa? The billionaires don't like me? Oh no! Look I'm gonna tell them the same thing my grandson told me when he took me to Avengers: Infinity War. 'This ain't for you. That's why you don't like it.' But, I don't know, then again, taking big checks from Wall Street worked out great for the last lady running for president. Let me just skip Wisconsin and change my name to 'Emails Benghazi' while I'm at it."

And in response to Jacob Wohl's accusation that she was having a BDSM affair with a 24-year-old Marine/male escort....

"That's Elizabeth Warren's vibe for sure. Transactional sex with a younger man. Look, rumors have power when they feel true. What has ever felt less true than any single part of that? If you think I'm in a room with a veteran and I don't immediately thank him for his service and then make sure he's getting his VA benefits, you're insane. Also, also 24! Look, any man younger than me by more than one day is my grandson. But part of that is true. I am into BDSM – 'Bank Destroyin' and Savin' Medicare.'"

https://www.wonkette.com/snls-elizabeth-warren-is-into-bdsm-bank-destroyin-and-savin-medicare