Informed

Reading Time: 6 minutes The more successful Pelosi is—the more she outmaneuvers and dominates her male adversaries—the more threatening she becomes. And the easier it becomes to tar the male Democratic candidates who would serve under her as emasculated yes-men. Which makes it harder for Democrats to retake the House.

It would be comforting to think that Pelosi is alienating because she’s a rich liberal Democrat from San Francisco—not because she’s a woman. Yet despite attributes that should make her endearing to cultural conservatives—she is a Catholic Italian American grandmother of nine who entered politics only after staying home to raise her kids—many Americans greeted her rise with, in the words of the Yale researchers, “contempt, anger, and/or disgust.” It was the same for Hillary Clinton: Her deep religiosity, career-long focus on child welfare, and insistence on keeping her family together in the face of near-unimaginable humiliation didn’t spare her in the 2016 presidential election.

Reading Time: 3 minutes My open plea to the Dems is that they choose leadership who is prepared to fight. My deepest request to the DNC is that they install a Chairperson who has four stars on a uniform and knows how to do one thing, at any cost, which is winning a war.

At any cost might sound overly-dramatic, unrealistic, or even unwise. However, just because we won the House doesn’t mean we’re aren’t still fighting to save our democracy.

For now, the voting is over. We’ve done our part. Now it’s their turn to do what we elected them to do – and it has nothing to do with impossibly non-productive conversations about wages, immigration, health care, or infrastructure. We hired them to save our democracy. We need to be prepared to support them in doing a lot of things that won’t look or feel like politics as usual.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know. In the category of:  Broken hips are no big

Reading Time: 2 minutes The challenge with making a movie that does a man like Freddie Mercury justice is he was bigger and more complex than something that fits on a screen. Rami Malek, playing Freddie was really good, but not great. At times it felt like he was playing more of a one-dimensional concept of Mercury. Often it felt like his attempts at catching Mercury’s genius turned him into a meme of Freddie Mercury feeling more gratuitous than genuine. I’m not sure who could have done it better than Remi Malek, but it wasn’t quite sharp enough. If I was a lifelong Mercury super-fan, I can imagine I might not have enjoyed the performance.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.     Confluence Daily is the one place

Reading Time: 7 minutes At the end of the day, you are going to come around and come back to me, and folks like me, for solace and comfort because you will not know how to handle stuff when the crap hits the fan in your orbit. As much as the drama of the world creates resilience in us and helps us live, you are not cultivating this same skill and so you will need me.

But there is one thing you can do so it does not get to that point. You can take the Schlack off your “Love and Light” and vote. Vote for candidates with values that are not obscured by “Love and Light” thinking. Vote for candidates that actually want to bring Love and Light to the world by protecting the human rights of as many people as possible. Please don’t vote for those that want to keep things exclusive for those who have been exclusive. That is not Love and Light!

Reading Time: 6 minutes HERE’S ONE THING we know: Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is not a Mexican version of Halloween. Though related, the two annual events differ greatly in traditions and tone. Whereas Halloween is a dark night of terror and mischief, Day of the Dead festivities unfold over two days in an explosion of color and life-affirming joy. Sure, the theme is death, but the point is to demonstrate love and respect for deceased family members. In towns and cities throughout Mexico, revelers don funky makeup and costumes, hold parades and parties, sing and dance, and make offerings to lost loved ones.

The rituals are rife with symbolic meaning. The more you understand about this feast for the senses, the more you will appreciate it. Here are 10 essential things you should know about Mexico’s most colorful annual event.

Reading Time: 5 minutes We do not live in normal times, but rather in an age of morally compromised leadership. The Trump administration is preparing to send 5,000 U.S. military personnel to the United States’ southern border. There is no legitimate military purpose for this operation. Border crossings are near historical lows, and the so-called “caravan” of hungry, frightened migrants poses no risk to U.S. national security.

Instead, this operation is a political stunt. The administration aims to leverage the military’s credibility in support of its hysterical anti-immigrant propaganda campaign, which is itself a component of a partisan mid-term electoral strategy.

Junior military leaders thus begin in a morally hazardous position which will only grow worse with time.  The purpose of this piece is to outline those hazards and to advise junior military leaders on how best to respond.