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Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.

In the category of:  Everyone has an Uncle Joe

There’s a split among Democrats on #MeToo and more. Biden might have picked the losing side.

Joe Biden is betting on the past.

The former vice president, who formally announced his candidacy on Thursday but has been a frontrunner in the polls for months, recently called himself an “Obama-Biden Democrat,”evoking a repeat of 2008. His supporters have long held that he can connect with the white working-class voters who switched from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in 2016.

And when he responded, earlier this month, to allegations that he touched women inappropriately, he cast himself as a man innocently following the mores of an earlier era.

“Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted,” he said. “The boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset.”

To some, statements like that — along with his lack of an actual apology — signal a man out of touch with the #MeToo movement and America today. But Biden is betting that there’s another, bigger group out there — a group that thinks #MeToo goes a little too far, and maybe norms have changed a little too fast.

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In the category of: Wag the dog

Omarosa Confirms the President Has a List of Crazy Policy Ideas He’ll Leak to Distract From Bad Press

Omarosa Proctor Manigault Newman Foster Brown Johnson, the former aide to the president and the only black woman allowed to come through the front entrance at the White House during Trump’s presidency, has confirmed what we’ve all long suspected: the president has a list of crazy policy ideas that he rolls out to distract from the plethora of White House scandals.

On Thursday, Omarosa came out of hiding for an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and there she told the host—the white guy that dates or is married to his co-host, or whatever—that Trump, current White House aide Stephen Miller (aka Big Bigen Shawty) and former top political strategist Steve Bannon, the perpetual wearer of a Barbour duck-hunting coat, all sat together and came up with a list of what Omarosa called “shocking” policy ideas they could unleash whenever the news coverage surrounding Trump was negative.

“They have these lists of shocking proposals and they would just keep them on the side,” she explained, Raw Story reports. “Whenever they needed to throw a hand grenade to blow up the press or take over the front covers of the newspaper, they would pull out one of these very shocking proposals.”

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In the category:  Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia puts to death 37 people in the largest mass execution in the past three years 

Saudi Arabia said Tuesday it had executed 37 people convicted of terrorism-related offenses, bringing the number of executions there in the first four months of the year to 105, according to the Saudi interior ministry and Reprieve, a human rights group that tracks the use of the death penalty in the kingdom.

 It was the largest mass execution in Saudi Arabia since early 2016, when 47 people were put to death, also on terror-related charges. The vast majority of those executed on Tuesday were members of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite Muslim minority, according to Shiite activists.

 Those put to death included at least three people who were minors at the time of their alleged crimes and confessed to prosecutors’ charges under torture, according to Reprieve, which said it provided assistance to five of the people executed.