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Pence faced an impossible task in the VP debate Wednesday night – defending Trump’s inaction on the pandemic; but Kamala Harris also faced challenges: she couldn’t be an angry black woman. Harold Meyerson comments.
also: Ohio SenatorSherrod Brown talks politics and history, and the lessons Biden should learn from his recent reelection in Ohio, where he won by 8 points in a state Hillary lost by 6.
plus: “Totally Under Control” is Alex Gibney’s powerful new documentary on Trump’s Covid-19 failures – Ella Taylor comments.
Finally, we remember John Lennon – tomorrow, Oct. 9, would have been his 80th birthday.  10-8-2020

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Trump made no attempt in the first debate to win over undecideds- so what WAS his plan? And what is to be done to make future debates more bearable? Harold Meyerson comments.
Plus: Ella Taylor on women in politics on TV this week: “Mrs. America” with Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly; “The Glorias,” with Julianne Moore as Gloria Steinem, and “All In,” a voting rights documentary featuring Stacey Abrams.  1-01-2020

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Trump’s rush to fill the Supreme Court vacancy will help Biden in several ways, Harold Meyerson says–first of all, by making the Republican threat to Obamacare an urgent issue. Harold is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.
Also: Refugees—after World War II in Europe, and today. Historian David Nasaw explains—his new book is The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons, from World War to Cold War.
Plus: Hacking your mind: We make many of our decisions, including political ones, NOT on the basis of what we “think,” but rather on feelings, intuition, and habits. New work by social scientists helps explain how this works for Donald Trump — that’s the argument of a new series on PBS called “hacking your mind.” Ella Taylor has our review. 9-24-20

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We are in “one of the most perilous and fraught moments for American democracy since the mid-nineteenth century,” says Chris Hayes; what’s hopeful is that “the movement we’ve seen in the streets is the largest protest movement in American history.” Chris of course hosts “All In” weeknights on MSNBC; he’s also editor-at-large of The Nation, and he spoke recently with Katrina vanden Heuvel at a Nation magazine online event.
Plus: Covid-19 is the disease that reflects all our social and economic illnesses: that’s what Manuel Pastor says, he’s director of the Equity Research Institute at USC. He reports on who’s got the dangerous jobs and who’s unemployed, which kids have computers and internet connections for at-home classes, and which don’t, and whether Trump’s effort to recruit Latino voters in key states might work.
Also: Russian efforts to interfere with our elections – that’s the subject of a new HBO documentary by one of our favorite documentary makers, Alex Gibney. He’s got footage from inside Russian “troll farms” and videos unearthed from the Russian deep web to reveal the “agents of chaos” who were key players in our elections. Ella Taylor has a review – she’s our resident TV critic.  9-17-20