When Ivanka walked by Melania, and Melania’s beaming smile seemed to curdle into a look of pure hatred as soon as Ivanka had passed.
https://twitter.com/DGComedy/status/1299171443905761280
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/opinion/rnc-best-worst-trump-night-4.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

Washington (CNN)House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has endorsed Rep. Joe Kennedy in his effort to unseat Sen. Ed Markey in an upcoming Massachusetts Senate Democratic primary. The move puts the California Democrat squarely in the middle of a closely-watched fight and could deliver a boost to Kennedy ahead of the September 1 primary election where he is challenging Markey, who served alongside Pelosi for decades as a member of the House of Representatives.

...A Kennedy has never lost Massachusetts. But Markey, 74, has countered the shine of the Kennedy name by projecting the power of some of the party's stars, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who have fundraised for the senator. Progressives, who have spent the last five years on the attack, trying to win seats from moderate incumbents in the House, have put their full weight behind Markey's campaign, and view the defense of his seat as one of their most important fights of the cycle.

... Progressives -- including Ocasio-Cortez -- reacted to the news with frustration. Party leadership has been aggressive in seeking to defend its incumbents against primary challengers, but Pelosi's endorsement, they argued, came in defiance of that rule. "No one gets to complain about primary challenges again," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, punctuating the sentence with a happy emoji, before addressing the House Democratic campaign arm. "When can we expect you to reverse your blacklist policy against primary orgs?," she asked. "Because between this & lack of care around @IlhanMN's challenger, it seems like less a policy and more a cherry-picking activity."

...Justice Democrats, the group that has drawn Pelosi's ire for launching and supporting progressive primary campaigns against members of her caucus, accused the Speaker of hypocrisy and "using her power to undermine the next generation of Democratic voters and the progressive champions we choose to believe in. For two years, Democratic Party leadership has endorsed incumbents over progressive primary challengers claiming it is their policy to always back incumbents -- even when the incumbent was anti-choice and endorsed by the NRA," Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas said.

More at https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/pelosi-kennedy-endorsement-massachusetts-senate-race/index.html

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1296498853517176832

Julian Bream, the English musician who pushed the guitar beyond its Spanish roots and expanded its range by commissioning dozens of works from major composers, and who also played a crucial role in reviving the lute as a modern concert instrument, died on Friday at his home in Wiltshire, England. He was 87.

His representatives at James Brown Management announced his death in a statement but did not give a cause.

Mr. Bream was the most eloquent guitarist of the generation that came of age soon after Andrés Segovia carved out a place for the guitar in the mainstream concert world.

It could be argued, in fact, that Mr. Bream, even more than Segovia, established the guitar’s credibility as a serious solo instrument. He updated the technical standard of classical guitar playing and replaced the Romantic, rubato-heavy phrasing that Segovia preferred with a more modern style. And he undertook a significant renovation of the repertory.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/arts/music/julian-bream-dead.html

After serving as dean of women at Florida State University in the late 1960s, Katherine B. Hoffman said that her biggest accomplishment had been abolishing her own position.

Bringing female students under the same administrators as men belonged to a larger agenda: creating greater gender equity at the school. As dean, Ms. Hoffman also eased the dress code for women and abolished their curfew.

“They had to wear essentially what were like trench coats,” Norris Hoffman, Ms. Hoffman’s son, recalled. “F.S.U. still thought that the cars in which women were riding would turn into pumpkins at midnight.”

Ms. Hoffman, who spent 88 years connected to the university, died on July 18 at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare. She was 105. Her son said the cause was Covid-19.

...Katherine, known as Kitty, arrived at Florida State College for Women, which later became F.S.U., in 1932. It was the Depression, and her father paid part of her tuition with bundles of oranges.

She hoped to earn a medical degree from Duke University, but declined to attend on principle after she learned the school ordered female students to sign a pledge not to marry during their studies. Instead, she obtained a master’s in chemistry from Columbia University in 1938 and married her high school sweetheart, Harold Hoffman, who also became a chemist and was Florida’s assistant commissioner of agriculture.

...Well into her 90s, Ms. Hoffman was known to tootle around in a pink Cadillac driven by a fellow nonagenarian. While her son fished for largemouth bass in the Wakulla River, Ms. Hoffman rowed their boat. She hauled gallon jugs of water for the pine trees they had planted.

... Norris Hoffman also became a chemistry professor, teaching at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He retired in 2013. During Mr. Hoffman’s boyhood, he and his mother planted seedlings on the family tree farm. “We would talk about the elements, their names and their properties in the periodic table,” he said. “She was brainwashing me for chemistry.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/obituaries/katherine-hoffman-dead-coronavirus.html