August is usually when we try to get one final vacation in, find fun ways to beat the heat, and take our last licks of summer. But this year, August is different. For those of us who have school-aged children, the potential return to class hangs over us; we count down the hours before the realities of a viral pandemic test us where it matters most.

The month feels both too long and too short — at once a giant chasm of unknowns during which everything can change, and an insufficient amount of time to prepare for such a daunting enterprise.

Since schools closed in March where I live, life has been a giant adjustment for my 5-year-old. It marked the end of classrooms, playgrounds, recess, singalongs, field trips, swim lessons, sports, fairs, camps, playdates and almost every other great thing that kids look forward to doing together.

Learning continued at home, but it was different, difficult and far less fun. We managed some responsible outdoor get-togethers with family and close friends that, because of distancing, proved more frustrating for him than enjoyable. He misses his friends and his teachers and is desperate to return to school.

But he won’t be returning to school as he knew it. And as I contemplate what life will be like for him if he does, I’m not so sure it will actually be better for him.

Schools around the country are putting in place their plans for reopening, many of which include things like daily temperature-taking, hourly handwashing, all-day mask-wearing, six-foot distancing, “isolation rooms” for kids who appear symptomatic, social interactions through plexiglass and teacher-led anxiety management exercises.

While all of that is well-intended and likely necessary to keep schools COVID-safe, it also frankly sounds like a dystopian hellscape that will make learning a terrifying if not wholly un-fun experience for my soon-to-be kindergartener.

Right now, we don’t talk much about COVID at home. My son knows people are sick and that’s why things are closed, but he’s never once feared that he or we will get sick. The virus is still very much, in his mind, a faraway villain.

But I worry that school, and its attentiveness to symptoms and safe practices, will bring fears about catching coronavirus right to his mental and psychological doorstep, where every interaction he has is fraught with awful possibilities.

Weighing that against the well-known psychological benefits to going to school (as well as the economic and social upsides) is an impossible and unanswerable exercise. While the CDC advises, “Important social interactions that facilitate the development of critical social and emotional skills are greatly curtailed or limited when students are not physically in school,” the school experience they are advocating now is one no school-aged child in America has ever been through.

Those unknowns are why some psychologists are worried.

Anne Glowinski, professor of child psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, is less concerned about kids navigating the new rules than she is the adults adding to their anxieties.

“Kids can find games in everything,” she said of wearing masks and social distancing rules. “But what kids are most sensitive to is whether the adults around them are uncertain and scared. So when teachers get sick, or if some feel forced to be there, or when parents are overly worried, and adults just aren’t at their best, kids can react to that. All they want to know is that they will be okay and their family will be okay — and we aren’t sure about that.”

As hard as we’ve worked to physically keep COVID away, we’ve worked equally hard to keep it away from our kiddo’s psyche, which seems an impossible task once he goes back to school and it’s everywhere.

It’s good that states and school districts are implementing rigorous health and safety measures to reduce the risk of COVID spread in the fall. But what we just don’t know is whether keeping kids safe at school will actually make some of them unhealthy.

​#Covid19 #CovidThoughts

Great column about having a family (or expanding) during a pandemic. S.E. expressing aspects of feminity. A very personal and emotional subject, elegantly written.

​Enjoyed reading the article

Source: CNN

"There's never a good time to start a family," as the saying goes. 

It's meant to reassure anxious would-be parents that there's rarely a feeling of confident preparedness that precedes having children -- and there isn't. But the aphorism takes on a new meaning in the age of a pandemic, in which life has radically changed and the future is uncertain.

The questions are weighty and limitless: How would coronavirus and the strain on hospitals affect my pregnancy? Will we have enough money to afford kids when this is over? Will we have jobs? Would growing a family add to or alleviate some of the anxieties of life in the time of corona? Is loneliness a good enough reason to have a child?
There are also less existential, but nonetheless important, questions, like: Will adding a screaming baby to a 900-square-foot apartment just ensure my marriage's untimely demise?

Family planning in the time of a pandemic is a complicated, unmanageable Pandora's box, an endless stream of unanswerable what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. And with so many unknowns and a continual stream of unsettling coronavirus news, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose to have a child now.

And yet, these things are hard to rationalize.

I have a 5-year-old, and after wrestling for years, practically since the day he was born, with whether or not we'd have another, we decided just this past summer that our family felt complete.

We came up with all the good reasons not to do it. The time when adding to our family would have given our son a playdate had passed -- they'd be a full six years apart, and what 10-year-old wants to play with a 4-year-old?

I am also approaching an increasingly risky age to have a healthy child, not to mention an age when the prospect of 2 a.m. feedings, potty training, and nap battles feel no less challenging than climbing Mt. Everest, and no more rewarding than eating a cat hair casserole. 

And finally, we like our work-life balance. We both enjoy working full-time, and still get to spend plenty of quality time together and with our son. Why would we disrupt this admittedly enviable situation?
Being stuck at home (I know, I know ... "safe at home") with my husband and son has been challenging in the predictable ways. Working from home with a five-year-old requires a lot of discipline, creativity and, as it turns out, bribery.

A longing sneaks up
My husband and I are learning fun new things about each other. He's handier at building projects than I knew. I'm better at cleaning than he knew. And conversely, there are new questions. Have I always been this impatient? Has he always breathed this loudly? And, whom did he delight with 1,000 questions a day before all this started?

But despite these adjustments, all this family time has had one unexpected consequence. I find myself suddenly longing for a second child.

I shared this alarming thought with a friend, who also has one child a little older than ours. And he said that he too, for the first time ever, questioned whether they should have had another.

I've decided that this could be due to a unique and unprecedented set of circumstances that's physiologically influencing my biological clock -- I'm calling them corona hormones -- in ways only this moment in time could.

For one, fear can make a mother preternaturally focused. When confronting the reality that some, perhaps many, people around us will die, procreating becomes an evolutionarily appealing act of rebellion. While the smallness of our family feels thrifty and well-suited to hunkering down in a pandemic, it also somehow feels too small for the scope of it. Strength in numbers seems the better biological approach.

That primal rationalizing is coupled with a more emotional sense of urgency. I've loved stripping away the non-essential and indulgent concerns of pre-corona life to the immediate concerns of right now. We always said nothing's more important than family, but this experience has practically turned that into a dare. I find myself mentally bargaining with coronavirus, saying, "Take anything you want from me -- money, comfort, convenience -- just leave my boys alone." If family is everything, why wouldn't I want more of it?

Oddly, the obstacles that we routinely cited earlier feel less important now, even though their validity hasn't diminished at all. Can we afford another kid? Are we physically up to the challenge? Can we cut back on work? Can we do it all again? Pre-corona me was worried sick about these questions. Post-corona me feels unrealistically and undeservedly brave.

Corona-hormones?
I wonder if I'm alone. In the early weeks of coronavirus spread, a rash of headlines about an inevitable baby boom infected the internet. Some experts suggested that the increase in forced intimacy would naturally lead to actual intimacy.

Dr. Sheri Jacobson, clinical director at Harley Therapy, a clinic in London, told The Times, "Lack of sex is a common problem between overworked couples, and remote working often has the benefits of accommodating other activities. In this early period, staying home might feel like a break from the norm, creating a short holiday effect. Couples could also be bonding over the unfolding trauma."

But sex out of boredom or opportunity isn't necessarily the same thing as desire for a bigger family. And in fact, others are predicting the coming baby boom will only look like a small blip.

In The Washington Post, Richard W. Evans, director of the Open Source Economics Laboratory, suggests that the highly contagious nature of coronavirus could stifle intimacy urges in many cases, leading to no more than a 2% increase in births this winter. Hardly a boom.

It's unlikely we can predict how coronavirus will impact family planning on a global or even national scale. So much of what is happening now is unprecedented.

So, I spoke to some of my friends to get a sense of where they were, mentally and emotionally.

Alyssa is a 34-year-old, single PR and marketing executive in Washington, DC. When we were younger, we often talked about our ambivalence toward marriage and family, but now she says the pandemic has "made me feel my desire to start a family more acutely."

Don't you feel relieved, though, that you're not dealing with kids on top of everything else right now, I ask?

"I have had plenty of moments of gratitude that I'm the only person I have to worry about ... it makes things relatively simple that way," she says. "But the flip side of that has also been something I've had to process; the isolation can feel extra isolating as a single person who lives alone, and it's hard not to notice the space that could be filled with a family."

Tim, a single, gay 41-year-old tech professional in Palo Alto, CA, echoed the conflicting sentiments. "I feel exhausted taking care of myself and calming myself down during this time of pandemic," he admits, and "I worry about the responsibility of having to do it for others. But I also understand that having to care for someone other than oneself can be mentally beneficial. I do find myself yearning for my own crew during this lock-down."

Urgency ... and worry
While fear and anxiety have prompted an urgency in me to have another child, it's also an understandable impediment for others. Pamela, a 30-year-old unmarried communications professional in New York City, had hoped to start a family soon. 

Now, she says, she has new fears. "I'm scared of the unknown and what this means for us all weeks, months or even years from now. I can't imagine starting a family in the midst of all this, considering the financial responsibilities." When I ask how she'd feel if she found out she was pregnant right now, she says "bittersweet" -- "blessed, but concerned." She feels connected to her nieces and nephew more than ever.

Others didn't have the luxury of planning around coronavirus. One friend who has a child already and another on the way, says she would like to have waited to have her second kid until after there was a readily available coronavirus vaccine.

For others, the road to pregnancy hasn't been easy to begin with, and coronavirus is another complicating layer.

Meghan McCain, a co-host of The View, is expecting her first child at age 35. Last year she suffered a painful miscarriage and admits that the path to motherhood "was by no means a straight line -- physically, emotionally, in all ways."

Now, the stress is even more acute, she told me. "I have had to bump back scans and appointments because they were scheduled at a big hospital in the city and I didn't feel comfortable going there right now," she says. "I don't know when I will be able to shop for anything baby-related, let alone get a nursery ready. I was really worried about the pharmacy running out of prenatal vitamins. Things like that make it very difficult."

But being pregnant during a pandemic has also awakened a maternal instinct in Meghan, when it came time to decide to work from home instead of going into a New York City studio every day for her show. "I had to think of the health implications, not only for me but my child. It really is the first time I have made a career choice thinking of someone other than myself."

And for some, still, coronavirus has had little impact on family planning. Brooks and his husband already have the two young children they always wanted. While the challenges of the pandemic have made them feel more connected to and grateful for the community of Sunday school teachers, pre-school teachers, and friends that they relied on as parents before social distancing, he says they feel "blessed where we are," and have no plans to add to their family. 

As for me, I'm still assessing. It's hard to trust my feelings right now.
​
It seems like the rule about not making big decisions while hormonal and pregnant probably applies during the emotionally charged and mentally fraught time of corona.
​
To that end, we are leaning toward expanding our family at least in one way -- we've applied to adopt a shelter dog.

Elizabeth Warren is making the promises she cannot keep, writes S.E. Cupp.

Analyzing from 3C's perspective (Cost, Constitution, and Congress), S.E. further gives details on why Warren's plans will probably never come to life.

Source: NY Daily News

This is easily one of the top notch articles from S.E. Cupp. A very detailed article objectively discussing tribalism. A must read. Simply brilliant!!

Source: CNN

SE Cupp is a CNN political commentator and the host of "SE Cupp Unfiltered." This piece has been adapted from her Saturday evening show monologue. The views expressed in this commentary are solely hers.

Oh, the arrogance.
​
I was recently talking to one of my friends, a former Bill Clinton operative, about the unique properties a special category of people have in common. The category is Humans Who Run for President of the United States. The unique properties are, in a word, an outsized sense of self.

A level of arrogance is, by definition, required. Imagine believing you can solve unwieldy, complex, centuries-old, systemic problems that others heretofore have not, that your singular genetic and experiential alchemy makes you the best person to lead a nation, that you can in fact defeat dozens of other capable and qualified candidates to be the last man or woman standing.

Then imagine thinking all that, while being one of the most divisive politicians to run for president -- and fail twice, once to a member of your own party and once to Donald J. Trump. Welcome to Hillary Clinton's mind.Clinton, once again, refused this week to rule out a 2020 presidential bid, insisting she was hearing from plenty of people who wanted her to jump in.

"I, as I say, never, never, never say never," she said in a radio interview Tuesday. "I will certainly tell you, I'm under enormous pressure from many, many, many people to think about it." This echoes other flirtations, including a tweet warning Trump, "Don't tempt me."

Good grief.

This Democratic field of candidates is the most diverse in the history of the presidency. There's not only a racial and ethnic diversity of backgrounds, but a diversity of experience -- there are senators, congressional members, past and current mayors, governors, businessmen and even a self-help guru. There's also a diversity of ideas, from far-left progressive policies to more moderate and incremental views of how to fix broken systems. There's a diversity of age and geographical appeal.

If voters can't find something they like from this field, it likely doesn't exist.

And it's finally begun to consolidate, with voters lining up behind a handful of frontrunner candidates. This is the way it's supposed to go -- the process is working just fine, despite the anxieties of Democratic donors who believe a late entrant like Hillary Clinton or Michael Bloomberg is needed to save Democratic voters from themselves.

But Clinton, especially, isn't the answer. While she won the popular vote in 2016, she's hardly popular. According to an October Fox News poll, 54% of registered voters have a negative opinion of her. Only 41% have a positive opinion.

Over the course of the yearlong election, her unfavorable ratings went up -- starting at 51% unfavorable in November 2015, and ending at 54.4% unfavorable in November 2016, according to Real Clear Politics' poll average.  In short, the more people saw, the less they liked.

As polarizing as Trump was and is, so too was Clinton. In May of 2016, as FiveThirtyEight noted, both Clinton and Trump were more strongly disliked than any nominee at that point in the past 10 presidential cycles.
You'd think that nearly three years of Trump's divisive rhetoric, his utter incompetence, his embarrassing foibles on the world stage, would have put a fresh coat of paint on Clinton's reputation. You'd think wrong.

Even now, she is outpolled by her fellow Democrats in the primary, all of whom are more popular now than she was in 2016. If this doesn't sound like a recipe for success in 2020, well, you must be people not named Hillary Clinton, who still seems to think she could be what the nation is clamoring for. But that's not because the nation is thinking -- a whopping 75% of Democratic voters are satisfied with the current field.

More likely, nostalgia for what could have been is clouding the judgment of those who wish she were running now, including, perhaps, Clinton herself:

"Look, I think all the time about what kind of president I would've been and what I would've done differently and what I think it would've meant to our country and our world," she said Tuesday.

Imagine wondering what you would have meant to our country and our world -- and then you won't have a hard time imagining Hillary Clinton imagining herself running for president again.

Article Courtesy: Tribune Content Agency

S.E. CUPP NOVEMBER 7, 2019

While Democrats are celebrating a number of significant local electoral victories in unlikely places this week, Republicans are left struggling to keep the political shrapnel from grazing their cult commander, President Trump.

And not doing it particularly well, either.

Don Trump Jr. was on Fox News Tuesday night working hard to insist that Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin’s loss to Democrat Andy Beshear wasn’t related at all to his father, who just this week had tweeted that he is a “GREAT” governor.”

Trump also delivered one of his signature 11th-hour rallies in Kentucky to push Bevin over the edge, calling him “maybe the greatest (governor) in the history of this state.” The president put no finer a point on its importance than this: “If you lose … it sends a really bad message … you can’t let that happen to me.”
Despite this, Don Jr was adamant: “Matt Bevin has picked some fights, but this has nothing to do with Trump. (Republicans) swept the rest of the ticket, did great in Mississippi … the two don’t really have that much to do with each other.”

That, apparently, wasn’t approved messaging, however. Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale released a statement explicitly tying the president to Bevin: “The President just about dragged Gov. Matt Bevin across the finish line, helping him run stronger than expected in what turned out to be a very close race at the end.”
He shouldn’t be surprised if Republicans don’t see the silver lining in Bevin’s loss.

And that wasn’t the only alarming contest for Republicans. In Virginia, Democrats turned the swing state blue, winning majorities in the commonwealth’s House and Senate, giving full control to Democrats for the first time in two decades.

And a blue wave took over a number of longtime Republican strongholds in Pennsylvania, including all five seats of the Delaware County Council.

This is all very bad news for the Republican Party.

And Democrats are absolutely right to tie these losses to Trump. It’s impossible to extricate him from even the most local election when he was personally involved in some of them and has singularly remade the GOP in his image. There’s little left of the Republican Party that Trump hasn’t torn down and rebuilt like one of his garish hotels.

Further, when historically Republican strongholds turn blue for the first time in years, it’s a good idea to ask why. It’s natural to look at the guy who has inserted himself into our daily lives in some unprecedented ways, from his obnoxiously invasive social media presence, to wading into NFL race politics and televised dance competitions, to imposing anti-farmer tariffs and punitive policies for minorities and immigrants.

When the goal has been a cultural takeover, its failure in even the friendliest of places is more than noteworthy. The Republican Party could lose big in elections all across the country in 2020.
With all that said, a final word of caution to Democrats who also believe all this is proof the president will lose his own race next year.

Trump was philosophically on the ballot in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, but not actually. When it’s Trump versus a Democratic nominee who may support truly unpopular, radical, impractical policies, who is telling the very people who considered Trump the last time that they’re backward and racist, and who says anyone who disagrees with their progressive agenda just doesn’t get it, Trump will look a lot more appealing to a lot more people.

Trump’s campaign adviser, perhaps unintentionally, spelled it out in clear language last night on Twitter, in attempting to re-explain why a Democrat managed to win in a state Trump won by nearly 30 points in 2016, the largest margin of any Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972.

“The Democrats nominated a moderate, who’s (sic) dad was a moderate, who didn’t talk about impeachment of Trump, and who acts like a Republican,” wrote Parscale.

Talk about giving Democrats the 2020 blueprint for how to beat Trump.
​
(S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.)

Source: NY Daily News

Whichever side you are on, this is a refreshing perspective from S.E.

S.E. Cupp Quote: 

Reacting to Howard Schultz who was floating the idea of running for President as an independent S.E. writes that it is not established parties that get to decide if Schultz deserve to make a case, instead it should be us "We the People"

Source: NY Daily News

Source: Tribune Content Agency

In this article, S.E. writes that social media mob rule should not determine Kavanaugh's fate.

Citing slippery slope statements from Senators Chuck Schumer and Mazie Hirono ignoring  traditional right of presumption of innocence or guilt, S.E. tries to instill sanity with her compelling arguments.

​




   In one of the rare occasions where she wrote about a peer journalist, S.E. Cupp says to Megyn Kelly

"Walking away from this mess (politics) is a luxury Megyn Kelly cannot afford if she wants viewers to trust her and continue to watch her on a new platform.
​
Nor should she want to. She’s uniquely skilled at skimming through partisan talking points to get to the heart of a matter. She’s preternaturally unafraid of powerful people. And she’s tough without being mean-spirited or smug."

Now looking back this quote in a hindsight in 2019, how prophetic those words were. Megyn's strength is in covering politics. Her soft-political show at NBC fell short of her potential

Full article below:

Source: Chicago Sun Times

On a day dominated by political headlines — President Trump’s continued war on the NFL anthem protests, the Republicans’ failing health-care efforts, a new travel ban, saber-rattling from North Korea, an important election looming in Alabama, and I could go on and on — Megyn Kelly launched her much-hyped eponymous fourth hour of the “Today” show on NBC Monday by explaining, “The truth is, I am kind of done with politics for now.”

It’s a nice thought — I have it daily. But unfortunately it isn’t reality. If she wants to succeed at the peacock network — and I sincerely hope she does — she’ll need to reconsider.

OPINION
If you caught Kelly’s 9 a.m. debut, you might find yourself nodding along with the critical consensus that the former Fox News anchor known for sparring with liberal opponents and asking then-candidate Donald Trump tough debate questions seemed out of place in the new hug-plagued environs where tears are heartily shed and celebrity guests are heartily cajoled.

I have no desire to join the pile-on of Kelly. So I’ll be the first to point out that this isn’t totally fair.

For one, left-leaning media and industry critics were never going to be truly objective. While each may acknowledge she’s a talented broadcaster, they still see her as tainted by Fox and all that represents to them — the “fanatical” far right, a bevvy of unserious “anchor babes,” unchecked office sexism, and a culture of sexual harassment.

While that perception of Fox is arguably unshakable at the moment, it also isn’t fair to Kelly, an eagle-eyed former defense attorney whose rigorous journalism and willingness to hit back against powerful Republican men like Trump, Newt Gingrich and even her boss Roger Ailes set her apart from others at the network.

Meantime, NBC viewers, and in particular “Today” show viewers, are fiercely protective of the brand and, thanks in large part to the current popularity of its cable arm MSNBC, of its left-leaning bona fides. Giving the former Fox News host a chance is a tough ask of people who were told nightly by MSNBC’s primetime stars that Fox News viewers were backwards, racist conspiracy theorists.

It also didn’t help that in the run-up to Kelly’s debut, the network gave her a Sunday night show in which she interviewed big-name political figures, from Alex Jones to J.D. Vance to Vladimir Putin, and covered topics like Russian collusion and coal miners-turned-computer-programmers. This was hardly the way to prepare 9 a.m. audiences for her new off-politics morning-show endeavor.Much of this is out of Kelly’s control. But what isn’t is what she chooses to cover. And here’s where I’ll be brutally honest with Kelly, precisely because I think we need her more than ever and I want her show to thrive.

Believe me, I get up every morning hoping that I won’t have to spend the full hour of my own show covering politics. But as this weekend illustrated, politics is now in everything, from football to hurricanes to the Emmys to the opioid epidemic. To ask an audience to put politics aside for an hour a day is downright nostalgic.

It’s also kind of irresponsible. In some part because of cable news and those of us who’ve made it our home these past years, the country is more polarized than ever. Walking away from this mess is a luxury Megyn Kelly cannot afford if she wants viewers to trust her and continue to watch her on a new platform.

Nor should she want to. She’s uniquely skilled at skimming through partisan talking points to get to the heart of a matter. She’s preternaturally unafraid of powerful people. And she’s tough without being mean-spirited or smug.

In addition to adding some lighter fare, Kelly can cover politics and the important stories that matter differently than she did at Fox, and even differently than her new colleagues do in primetime. But she can’t not cover them at all.

Calmly guiding her new viewers through this frenetic, chaotic and often unsettling political reality we’re living in isn’t just her talent, it’s her duty.
​
Cupp is host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on HLN.