Lidia LoPinto and Winnie LoPinto I Was a Woman Pilot in 1945 Women Airforce Training Pilots November 2022, Independently Published.
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.
I was glad to have read this independently published book which shows only a few signs of not having been through a trade publishing process. It is fairly well written, although the writing could be livelier to make this a more engaging work. However, the book’s real impact is in the content, in particular the way in which this woman pilot, along with others, has a far different story from the ones I have previously read. I Was a Woman Pilot in 1945 is a worthy addition to the non-fiction books that have been written about this service, and the Marge Piercy novel, Gone to Soldiers, in which a fictional woman pilot endures some of the sexism that forms an important part of this account.
Sexism is not the only issue raised in the book, and indeed there are male heroes who also face challenges in relation to the service. Together their stories give a vastly different account of the way in which it operated. The economic advantages taken by some businesses connected to the women pilot’s training are a crucial point in the book. A point made well, without too much recrimination. Instead, the pilots whose careers were blighted, as portrayed by Lidia and Winnie LoPinto are remarkably resilient, move on with their lives and write movingly of their experiences.
I am pleased to have read I Was a Woman Pilot in 1945 Women Airforce Training Pilots as part of the information I have about the women ferry pilots.
Lidia LoPinto and Winnie LoPinto have made an important contribution to a familiar body of work.
Following articles: Amalfi Coast; American Politics – Bob McMullan; Meanwhile in America; Kamala Harris might have sealed the deal; Heather Cox Richardson; Iowa poll.
Amalfi Coast Trip Highlights
Pizza Demonstration
The hotel provided a dynamic pizza making session, where we ate some of the most well-known pizzas before, and the more elaborately flavoured after the demonstration.
Pasta demonstration
The pasta demonstration was accompanied by a feast of bread, cheese and jam with white wine while we watched. Much of the meal for that night was demonstrated – pasta, fish, tiramisu. The non-fish dish was artichokes which I understand were wonderful. I had the fish which was not nearly so nice as the clam and pipi pasta. The tiramisu was fantastic. One of the tour group assisted. The cream was a combination of whole eggs, egg whites, cream and mascarpone, with a dash of very strong coffee. It was great to see that the simple sponge fingers dipped in coffee were a feature of this elegant dish as well as the one I make. The soup was for another night – when we tasted it the necessity for cooking soup over a long period was made abundantly clear. It was delicious with a flavour that was mellow and developed with each mouthful.
American Politics
Bob McMullan
US election review at 29th October
It is definitely “white knuckle” time!
One week to go and the election is too close to call. There are definitely factors causing concern about the likely outcome as the possibility of a Trump victory looms on the horizon. There are also opportunities for Kamala Harris to win.
The main cause of concern is obviously the trend towards Trump in the polls. Some of the polling averages (e.g. 538 and Silver) have Trump winning Pennsylvania as well as the sunbelt states with the possible exception of Nevada. If this were the case Trump would win the Electoral College 281 /257.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Harris would need to win Nevada and one of Georgia or North Carolina to prevail in the Electoral College,
The narrowing of Harris’ lead in the national polls points to another area of risk for her. Should Trump overperform the published polls as he has in the last two presidential elections or if the Electoral College bias is as strongly in favour of Republicans as recent history would suggest then Kamala Harris would need more than her current 1-2% lead in the published national polls.
Conversely the most recent major poll, from the US ABC network gave Harris a 4% lead.
A fascinating part of the data from this poll is that it records Harris polling 56% amongst women. Combine this with the early polling statistics which suggest that women are turning out in larger numbers than men and you get the fascinating possibility that Trump’s great triumph of overturning Roe v Wade could be his downfall.
Furthermore, the Washington Post polling average, which is possibly the most rigorous in terms of focussing on the most credible polls, continues to show Harris leading in the same four states as previously, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada. If this is maintained, Harris would win 276/262.
Another variable in the US system which may help Vice President Harris is the “turn-out” factor. This tends to be determined by enthusiasm and organisation. Data suggests that the Democrats should do better in both these aspects, but it is far from certain.
Jen Psaki, the former Biden press secretary who is now an MSNBC commentator quoted some interesting statistics recently. She quoted polling which suggests that at this late stage Harris is doing better than Trump among those who have not yet decided or have only a loose attachment to their current choice. The New York Times Sienna poll showed 15%of voters as “not fully decided” with Ms Harris leading with that group 42/32. This suggests the late deciders may favour Harris.
Two other factors which may impact the outcome. First, recent history, particularly 2022, suggest Democrats are overperforming the polls rather than Republicans as has been the case in 2016 and 2020. The other is that analysis of the data suggests that the pro-Republican bias in the electoral college may be less this election. Harris only leads by 1-2% in the Washington Post average but would still win the college on their numbers. This may fit in with polling showing Trump narrowing the gap in New York, for example (although still losing the state).
There will still be unexpected events which may impact the outcome. Who knows what impact the Puerto Rico jokes at Trump’s New York rally will have on the 300,000 Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania.
So, to sum up, it is a very difficult election to predict, but the biggest factor may be the gender gap in support if it continues to be reflected in turn-out data. We will know in a week.
CNN
| November 1, 2024 Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose |
The world is watching Only Americans get to vote in next week’s presidential election, but whoever wins will have enormous power to influence the lives of tens of millions of foreigners. So it’s hardly surprising that tensions and emotions are rising across the globe as Tuesday looms. Always discerning Meanwhile readers are also weighing in, and some are expressing concerns that if Vice President Kamala Harris loses, part of the blame will lay with the US media. Some readers believe that Harris, who is running a largely reality-based campaign and the twice-impeached former President Donald Trump — a notorious purveyor of untruths who tried to steal the 2020 election — are being unfairly held to the same standards over performance and policy nuts and bolts. While Harris works for a president whose 41% approval rating could doom her campaign, some readers worry she’s not being given a fair go – including in our coverage. Christopher in Tasmania accused the American press of setting “an almost impossible task” for Harris by scrutinizing her talking points and platform while throwing up their hands at Trump’s idiosyncrasies. If Trump wins on November 5, he said, the question will be: “How did things go so badly wrong that the voters of the US elected a convicted felon, a four-times indicted criminal, a serial liar, a fascist … to the highest office in America, and arguably the most powerful position in the world?” “The answer is glaringly evident. Trump may be re-elected primarily because the national US media held Kamala Harris and the Democratic Campaigns to a completely different standard of scrutiny on issues of policy and character during the last six months,” Christopher concluded. Reader Paulette also took aim at media coverage of Harris, arguing that the vice president could still benefit from the momentum that swept Joe Biden to the Oval Office in 2020, when the Biden-Harris ticket won a historic number of votes. (Trump’s vote count in that election made him the second-highest vote earner in US history after Biden – although a combined swing of only about 77, 000 votes in the key battleground states could have kept Trump in the Oval Office). “How dare you write that she is part of an unpopular administration. They were elected by huge numbers!” Paulette wrote. And Maureen, an ex-pat living in Austria, argued that there’s too much focus on how Americans perceive the economy rather than its true performance. (For more on this, see CNN business editor David Goldman’s analysis of why the US economy feels cruddy for many despite strong jobs, GDP, consumer spending and paycheck metrics). Inflation is coming down “even if Bidenomics seems unpopular,” she said, pointing out that Harris has made promises to smooth the economic path forward for parents, minimum-wage workers, renters and other still-hurting groups. In contrast, Maureen argued, Trump “can’t even complete a sentence.” As CNN has previously reported, he’s calling for dramatic economic overhaul including steep new tariffs, tax giveaways and mass deportations – measures that have repeatedly been questioned by economic experts. Tension and worry are palpable in the United States ahead of the final weekend before one of the most fateful elections in modern American history. We’ll be back to report what happens next week. Keep the views, reactions and critiques coming to meanwhile@cnn.com. |
Kamala Harris May Have Sealed The Deal With One Of The Great Closing Arguments Ever
Kamala Harris didn’t just make a closing argument at The Ellipse. She may have sealed the deal.
Sarah Jones and Jason Easley , October 30, 2024
*The Daily is a reader supported newsletter that is committed to democracy and freedom. We are committed to truth, and if you would like to join us, please consider becoming a subscriber.
A Closing Argument For The Ages
The media often talks about candidates delivering their closing arguments, but if we are being honest, does anyone remember a closing speech from a candidate? Usually, presidential elections are so long that by the end all of the speeches melt together in the minds of voters.
The closing argument isn’t a real thing. Presidential candidates have always spent the final week making a mad dash to get out the vote in critical states. Speeches don’t normally stand out, but the 2024 election is not normal.
When President Joe Biden stepped aside and decided to finish out his term and not run again, Vice President Kamala Harris was placed into a mad dash of a campaign. Suddenly every moment and every speech came with intense pressure and scrutiny. Each time Kamala Harris has risen to the occasion and delivered.
With 75,000 or more people watching in Washington, D.C. VP Harris did it again.
*Three Important Quotes From Kamala Harris’s Speech
1). “Look, we all know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election that he knew he lost. Americans died as a result of that attack. 140 law enforcement officers were injured. And while Donald Trump sat in the White House watching, as the violence unfolded on television, he was told by staff that the mob wanted to kill his own vice president. Donald Trump responded with two words: “So what?” That’s who Donald Trump is.”
2). “I offer a different path. And I ask for your vote. And here is my pledge to you: I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your lives better. I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress. I pledge to listen: To experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table. I pledge to approach my work with the joy and optimism that comes from making a difference in people’s lives. And I pledge to be a President for all Americans. To always put country above party and above self.
* I am not a paid subscriber so have only two of the arguments – these should be good enough!
Heather Cox Richardson
Yesterday, in Time magazine, Eric Cortellessa explained that the electoral strategy of the Trump campaign was to get men who don’t usually vote, particularly young ones, to turn out for Trump. If they could do that, and at the same time hold steady the support of white women, Trump could win the election. So Trump has focused on podcasts followed by young men and on imitating the patterns of professional wrestling performances.
At the same time, he has promised to “protect women…whether the women like it or not,” and lied consistently about crime statistics to keep white suburban women on his side by suggesting that he alone can protect them. Today in Gastonia, North Carolina, for example, Trump told the audience: “They say the suburban women. Well, the suburbs are under attack right now. When you’re home in your house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison and he’s got, you know, six charges of murdering six different people, I think you’d rather have Trump.”
The crime rate has dropped dramatically in the past year.
Rather than keeping women in his camp, Trump’s strategy of reaching out to his base to turn out low-propensity voters, especially young men, has alienated them. That alienation has come on top of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Early voting in Pennsylvania showed that women sent in 56% of the early ballots, compared to 43% for men. Seniors—people who remember a time before Roe v. Wade—also showed a significant split. Although the parties had similar numbers of registrants, nearly 59% of those over 65 voting early were Democrats. That pattern holds across all the battleground states: women’s early voting outpaces men’s by about 10 points. While those numbers are certainly not definitive—no one knows how these people voted, and much could change over the next few days—the enthusiasm of those two groups was notable.
This evening, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll conducted by the highly respected Selzer & Co. polling firm from October 28 to 31 showed Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa 47% to 44% among likely voters. That outlying polling result is undoubtedly at least in part a reflection of the fact that Harris’s running mate is the governor of a neighboring state, but that’s not the whole story. While Trump wins the votes of men in Iowa by 52% to 38%, and of evangelicals by 73% to 20%, women, particularly older women, are driving the shift to favor Harris in a previously Republican-dominated state.
Independent women back Harris by a 28-point margin, while senior women support her by a margin of more than 2 to 1, 63% to 28%. Overall, women back Harris by a margin of about 20 points: 56% to 36%. Seniors as a group including men as well as women are also strongly in Harris’s camp, by 55% to 36%.
A 79-year-old poll respondent said: “I like her policies on reproductive health and having women choosing their own health care, and the fact that I think that she will save our democracy and follow the rule of law…. [I]f the Republicans can decide what you do with your body, what else are they going to do to limit your choice, for women?”
The obvious driver for women and seniors to oppose Trump is the Dobbs decision. The loss of abortion care has put women’s lives at risk. Within days after the Supreme Court handed the decision down, we started hearing stories of raped children forced to give birth or cross state lines for abortions, as well as of women who have suffered or died from a lack of health care after doctors feared intervening in miscarriages would put them in legal jeopardy.
As X user E. Rosalie noted, Iowa’s abortion ban also has long-term implications for the state. It has forced OBGYNs to leave and has made recruiting more impossible. As people are unable to get medical care to have babies, they will choose to live elsewhere, draining talent out of the state. That, in turn, will weaken Iowa’s economy.
That same process is playing out in all the states that have banned abortion.
It seems possible that the Dobbs decision ushered in the end of the toxic American individualism on which the Reagan revolution was built. When he ran for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan set out to dismantle the active government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. Such a government was akin to socialism, he claimed, and he insisted it stifled American individualism.
In contrast to such a government, Reagan celebrated the mythological American cowboy. In his telling, that cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for and to protect his family. Good women in the cowboy myth were wives and mothers, in contrast to the women who wanted equal rights and jobs outside the home in modern America. That traditional image of American women had gotten legs in 1974, when the television show Little House on the Prairie debuted; it would run until 1983. Prairie dresses became the rage.
Reagan’s embrace of women’s role as wives and mothers brought traditionalist white Southern Baptists to his support. Those traditionalists objected to the government’s recognition of women’s equal rights because they believed equality undermined a godly patriarchal family structure. They made ending access to abortion their main issue.
At the same time that the right wing insisted that women belonged in their homes, it socialized young men to believe in a mythological world based on guns and the domination of women. In 1980 the previously nonpartisan National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan, their first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate, and the rise of evangelical culture reinforced that dominant men must protect submissive women.
When federal marshals tried to arrest Randy Weaver at his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992 for failure to show up in court for trial on a firearms charge, right-wing activists and neo-Nazis from a nearby Aryan Nations compound rushed to Ruby Ridge to protest what right-wing media insisted was simply a man protecting his family.
The next February, when officers stormed the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Texas, whose former members reported that their leader was sexually assaulting children and stockpiling weapons, right-wing talk show hosts—notably Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones—blamed new president Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, for the ensuing gun battle and fire that killed 76 people. Reno was the first female attorney general, and right-wing media made much of the idea that a group of Christians had been killed by a female government official who was unmarried and—as opponents made much of—unfeminine.
When he ran for office in 2015, Trump appealed to those men socialized into violence and dominance. He embraced the performance of dominance as it is done in professional wrestling, and urged his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies. The Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted of sexual assault did not hurt his popularity with his base. He promised to end abortion rights and suggested he would impose criminal punishments on women seeking abortions.
And then, in June 2022, thanks to the votes of the three religious extremists Trump put on it, the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, stripping women of a constitutional right that the U.S. government had recognized for almost 50 years.
Justice Samuel Alito suggested that women could change state laws if they saw fit, writing in the decision that “women are not without electoral or political power.” Indeed, since the Dobbs decision, every time abortion rights have been on the ballot, voters have approved them, although right-wing state legislators have worked to prevent the voters’ wishes from taking effect.
In this moment, though, it is clear that women have electoral and political power over more than abortion rights.
The 1980 election was the first one in which the proportion of eligible female voters who turned out to vote was higher than the proportion of eligible men. It was also the first one in which there was a partisan gender gap, with a higher proportion of women than men favoring the Democrats. That partisan gap now is the highest it has ever been.
The fear that women can, if they choose, overthrow the patriarchal mythology of cowboy individualism that shaped the modern MAGA Republican Party is likely behind the calls of certain right-wing influencers and evangelical leaders to stop women from voting. For sure, it is behind the right-wing freak-out over the video voiced by actor Julia Roberts that reassures women that they do not have to tell their husbands how they voted.
The right-wing version of the American cowboy was always a myth. Nothing mattered more for success in the American West than the kinship networks and community support that provided money, labor, and access to trade outlets. When the economic patterns of the American West replicated those of the industrializing East after the Civil War, success during the heyday of the cowboy depended on access to lots of capital, giving rise to western barons and then to popular political movements to regulate businesses and give more power to the people. Far from being the homebound wives of myth, women were central to western life, just as they have always been to American society.
In Flagstaff, Arizona, today, Democratic presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz told a crowd: “I kind of have a feeling that women all across this country, from every walk of life, from either party, are going to send a loud and clear message to Donald Trump next Tuesday, November 5, whether he likes it or not.”
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Notes:
https://time.com/7171535/donald-trump-harris-young-men/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/politics/older-women-voters-kamala-harris-abortion-rights/index.html
https://www.inquirer.com/news/early-voting-women-seniors-pennsylvania-20241101.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/29/gender-gap-early-voting-00186155
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/31/trump-lagging-early-votes-seniors-pennsylvania-00186612
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/trump-women-voters-gender-gap-harris/index.html
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/voters/gender-differences-voter-turnout
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections
Associated Press, “18 Months in Jail for White Supremacist,” The New York Times, October 19, 1993.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473
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Acyn/status/1852817296441635094
Info_Rosalie/status/1852921217482621379
shannonrwatts/status/1850891818256445592
Robin's Room 