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

America’s leading public health expert Anthony Fauci has confirmed what the record figures are telling us – the US is sliding backwards on its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are going in the wrong direction,” Fauci just told the Senate.

Last week the US saw a new daily record of 40,000 new coronavirus cases in one day.

Fauci just said, in testimony before committee, that he fears that the rate will rise dramatically.

“I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around.”

Fauci added about death and infection rates going forward: It’s going to be very disturbing … it could get really bad.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/jun/30/russian-bounty-payments-donald-trump-briefing-afghanistan-live-updates?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

ST. LOUIS — A man and a woman pointed guns at protesters who marched through the Central West End Sunday night to call for Mayor Lyda Krewson to resign.

Videos from the protest showed the man pointing a semi-automatic rifle and a woman pointing a pistol at the crowd marching down the street. The videos circulated widely on social media Sunday night.

The protest, which was organized by Expect Us, started near the intersection of Maryland Plaza and North Euclid Avenue, and stopped at Krewson's home before heading toward the Delmar Loop.

The protest came two days after a Facebook Live news briefing in which Krewson read the names and street addresses of protesters who are calling on the city to defund the police department, a move which the ACLU called "shocking and misguided" and resulted in online backlash. An online petition started over the weekend calling for her to resign has more than 40,000 signatures.

https://twitter.com/xshularx/status/1277398234055483393
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/couple-points-guns-at-protesters-st-louis/63-915a4a2f-071f-4f01-b5b8-398790d615ca

New York held its primary elections this week. Even before the absentee ballots are counted and the results certified, we know one thing about the political landscape. It is fundamentally changing in the state as a new generation uproots the establishment. It is a realignment based on demography, diversity, and disposition.

... First, demography. The older generation of Members of Congress has, well, gotten older. The networks of support that elected and reelected them are being replenished by new, younger networks. I saw it for myself, when I ran my final campaign for Congress in 2014, and realized that my own electorate was aging out and the growth was among young voters who were newborns in my first election and, as voters, had little idea who I was.

Second, diversity. Safe blue seats remain blue, but the voters are of richer and more diverse colors. New York’s African Americans population increased 5.9 percent between 2000 and 2019; the Hispanic or Latinopopulation increased 30.3 percent in the same period.

Third, disposition. Congressional seniority yields to political intensity. The old rules - wait your turn, pay your dues - are rightfully cast aside by a resistance to Donald Trump that does not believe we can afford to wait. Once upon a time, newly elected Members of Congress were keen on “going along to get along.” On Tuesday night, Bowman told his supporters that he couldn’t wait to get to Congress to “cause problems.”

There are mitigating circumstances worth noting...Jerry Nadler convincingly beat back his opponents. I have written before that Nadler is an underestimated street fighter. He never left the streets of his district, providing constituent services and attending local events even as he led the impeachment of President Trump. There is a lesson in that for incumbents worried about future primaries.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/504528-new-york-primary-elections-signify-next-generation-of-political-leaders