Democrats in this cycle are clearly lacking the wave leadership like Rahm Emanuel once provided in 2006

Case in point, TX-23, discussed here at length by The Other McCain:

The Republican incumbent there scarcely fits the stereotype of a right-winger. Will Hurd is the only black member of the Texas GOP congressional delegation, a former CIA officer who has held the seat since 2014. The largely rural district, which stretches all the way from the suburbs of San Antonio in the east to El Paso in the west, is majority Hispanic and the congressional seat has changed hands five times between Republicans and Democrats since the 1990s. Hurd won re-election two years ago by a margin of barely 3,000 votes and was obviously a vulnerable target in this year’s midterms, but Democrats appear to have fumbled away their chance of winning in TX23 by nominating a pro-abortion Filipina lesbian as their candidate.

Gina Ortiz Jones was recruited into this campaign by Democrats at a time when feminist rage over Trump’s 2016 election was a fresh wound in the Left’s collective psyche, and it appears they didn’t bother asking whether she was a good match for the district. Jones has made a point of using her mother’s maiden name with the slogan “One of Us, Fighting For Us” in her campaign. However, she’s not Hispanic. Her mother immigrated from the Philippines and her white father (who never married her mother) was a drug addict. While she used “Ortiz” to play the identity-politics game with Texas voters, she used a similar message to solicit support nationally from Trump-haters, promising to become the “first Filipina-American and first out-lesbian to represent Texas in Congress, and she’ll be the first woman to represent her district.” She was endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. She is campaigning on an agenda that includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Well, good luck selling that to voters in rural Texas, ma’am. Anyone with a lick of common sense could see the problem with trying to run such a campaign in TX23, but Democrat voters in the five-way March primary paid no heed to common sense and, after she defeated Rick Trevino in a May runoff, Ms. Jones became a darling of her party’s liberal donor base. By the end of September, she had raised more than $4 million, but it now seems all that money has gone to waste. 

AM radio's incessant propagandists for women and LGBTs of the Ad Council lied in 2012 that they created Rosie the Riveter

And their lie remains on the record, here at HuffPo, because, you know, women can never lie:

“Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.” “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” “Take a Bite Out of Crime. “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” You’ve heard these slogans, right? Whether you’re old enough to remember them or they’re familiar because they’ve seeped through our popular culture (Rosie the Riveter paraphernalia is everywhere these days), they ring a bell. They’re memorable and iconic. And they were created by the Ad Council. ... You know about Rosie the Riveter, but did you know that she helped recruit over two million women to join the workforce during the war?

But this so-called Rosie the Riveter isn't Rosie, and wasn't created until 1943, and not by the Ad Council but by Westinghouse's artist, a man, J. Howard Miller, for internal use only and was little seen:

"We Can Do It!" is an American World War II wartime poster produced by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as an inspirational image to boost worker morale. The poster was very little seen during World War II. It was rediscovered in the early 1980s and widely reproduced in many forms, often called "We Can Do It!" but also called "Rosie the Riveter" after the iconic figure of a strong female war production worker. The "We Can Do It!" image was used to promote feminism and other political issues beginning in the 1980s. ... [D]uring the war the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder. ... No more than 1,800 copies of the 17-by-22-inch (559 by 432 mm) "We Can Do It!" poster were printed. It was not initially seen beyond several Westinghouse factories in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the midwestern U.S., where it was scheduled to be displayed for two five-day work weeks starting Monday, February 15, 1943. ... During World War II, the "We Can Do It!" poster was not connected to the 1942 song "Rosie the Riveter", nor to the widely seen Norman Rockwell painting called Rosie the Riveter that appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of the Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1943. The Westinghouse poster was not associated with any of the women nicknamed "Rosie" who came forward to promote women working for war production on the home front. Rather, after being displayed for two weeks in February 1943 to some Westinghouse factory workers, it disappeared for nearly four decades.

False accusations of rape occur at rates 2 to 6 times higher than for other false accusations, over 40% of accusations recanted

From SEX, LIES, AND RAPE:

It is a primary tenet of “feminist jurisprudence” that women never lie when complaining of sexual abuse. This delusion is as ludicrous as the notion that all women think alike.

Any man who states the obvious, however, puts his career at risk. Even liberal Law Professor Alan Dershowitz was accused of sexual harassment just for discussing in class the possibility of false rape allegations. In 1993 Dershowitz told author David Horowitz that he began videotaping classroom lectures on the subject for his own protection, and that other experts in the field stopped teaching rape law rather than take the risk.

According to a report of the Defense Department Inspector General released in 2005, approximately 73% of women and 72% of men at the military service academies believe that false accusations of sexual assault are a problem. But military officials keep pretending that the problem does not exist. 

Christine Ford is Emma Sulkowicz, still carrying around a bed under her arm from 36 years ago

From the post here:

“We now have feminism that should be a movement of freedom and empowerment, but it has become an instrument of repression. I always identify very strongly with people like Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, or those figures from the last century who were very anti-bourgeoisie. That minister of justice of yours is just a bourgeois voice, it has nothing to do with the liberation of women. It is repression, shutting down the mind. But your mind must be completely free – expression must be completely free. Women should read great literary works. Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, for example, Dostoevsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, to understand something about men. Instead of: “We need to reform men.” Stop it. Feminists discourse of sex and gender has become hopelessly careless and naive, okay, it is a self-cannibalizing ideology without reference to important research on human nature and other cultures.

“There are a lot of neurotic women who have clung to that feminist discourse, take Emma Sulkowicz, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University who spent nearly a year on campus with a mattress under her arm because she had allegedly been raped in her own bed by a fellow student. She received an award from the ‘National Organization of Women‘ because she is a ‘hero’. It was sick and neurotic behavior. That woman lied and every attempt to find out what happened was thwarted by herself, her story was inaccurate. But neurotic behaviour is apparently celebrated. The only thing that it accomplishes is that it alienates men even more from women. We are back in the fifties!”

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Jessica Valenti: The snowflake/safe-space phenomenon is all the fault of feminism

And darn it, it just hasn't spread far enough.

The tantrum against intractable human nature continues.

Here:

One of feminism’s biggest successes was creating an alternative culture for girls and women seeking respite from mainstream constraints. Girls worried about unrealistic beauty standards, for example, can turn to the body positivity movement. Those of us who find traditional media’s treatment of women unappealing can read feminist blogs and magazines; female college students who have critical questions about how gender shapes their lives can take women’s studies classes.

From social media campaigns to after-school equality clubs, feminism has birthed dozens of online and real-life spaces where girls can find alternatives to the sexist status quo.

But boys and young men who are struggling have no equivalent culture.

Americans' problem with Hillary is her naked quest for power, and she just demonstrated why they were right to reject her

In the good old days office seekers framed themselves as servants of the people, but not Hillary.

To her, it's all about women qua women achieving power qua power. Hard to imagine anyone but a feminist ideologue talking like that.

Quoted here in Australia:

"There is this fear, there is this anger, even rage about women seeking power, women exercising power and people fall back on these attacks like you're a witch or you should go to prison. It's not a majority, thank goodness. It's not. But it's a very vocal minority at least in my country and sometimes these tropes are very much part of the press coverage," Clinton also said.

Wow, if this is true USA Today sucks even worse than I thought it did

Reported here:

Consider the experience of writer Ijeoma Oluo, who last week said that USA Today asked her to write a piece arguing a feminist position against due process.

She says an editor there told her, “[...] They want a piece that says that you don’t believe in due process and that if a few innocent men lose their jobs it’s worth it to protect women. Is that something you can do?” 

They were asking her to say feminists are happy to harm individual men for the good of the cause, and not interested in distinguishing innocence from guilt. She refused. That’s not who she is and not who feminists are.

Laugh of the Day: Cokie Roberts admits all the women in media knew not to ride in the elevator with Conyers

Once again, feminism bows to party.

"Forgiving Al Franken: Feminists tighten their grip on the hot stove"

Here.

"Thank God for me"

Laugh of the Day: "I'm not afraid to call myself a moderate"

Only in election season.

Senatrix Claire McCaskill, Missouri's arch feminist, here.

Real earnings of men are still lower than in 1973: Was feminism worth it, darling, seeing that you are up ten grand but spend it on daycare?

The average cost of daycare is $11,666.

Jonah Goldberg knows a thing or two about self-hatred

In "Behind the monument wars is a plague of self-hatred", Goldberg calls self-hatred a "Western disease". Gee, where'd we catch that?

The mobs of students — and their enabling professors and administrators — renaming buildings and bowdlerizing the language are still products of Western civilization. Even the poseurs who think Googling a few phrases from Karl Marx and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt make them anti-colonialists are disciples of Western thinkers. Where does Mark-Viverito think her mother’s feminism came from? The Arawaks? For centuries, to the extent that educated Muslims talked about the Crusades at all, it was to boast about how they emerged victorious from them.

But Osama bin Laden and his ilk read too much Noam Chomsky and caught the Western disease of victimization and resentment. That’s the plague sweeping the land now. And tearing down some statues and renaming some streets isn’t a cure, it’s a symptom.

Laugh of the Day 3.0: Norwegian feminist feels guilty his Somali rapist was deported after serving his sentence

“I am afraid that no girls want me and that other men laugh at me. Afraid that I'll be perceived as anti-feminist when I say that young men who are struggling should get more attention."

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Stockholm obviously exports its syndrome. I wonder how much they make off that? Good thing they're not in NATO or they'd enervate the entire alliance, not just Norway.

Feminists aren't just emotional, they're so emotional they're redundant

Jessica Valenti for The Grauniad, here:

When so many of us feel powerless, seeing the extraordinary power of one woman felt like a cathartic release. A reminder of what is possible, and of what our daughter – and ourselves – deserve.

So emotional are such feminists that saying "felt like a catharsis" isn't good enough. It has to be "a cathartic release".

And which catharsis isn't a release? And which catharsis isn't felt?

Where is Camille Paglia when we need her? Or is she so old now that she too succumbs to such nostalgia for emotion?

Powerlessness knows no sex. Just ask any old couple married for forty or fifty years. Or a baby, if it could talk.

Feminist actress Pat Arquette obviously never read an Employment Situation Summary from the BLS

Here:

"We have 60% of our families now with female breadwinners".

In December 2016 women who maintained families numbered 9.998 million out of 71.43 million women aged 16 and over employed (not seasonally adjusted), or about 8% of all US households, 14% of the women employed, and 6.5% of the total employed.

Upset about a private Trump vulgarity 470,000 feminists prove they're infinitely worse than him

Tina Brown asks us to imagine the agony experienced by Hillary Clinton having to endure 15 months of "grandstanding and gladhanding"

The horror. The horror.

Here.

David Brooks, the sneering elitist Jew cuckservative at the NYT thinks globalization, massive immigration and feminism have been good for America

As long as by America you mean not whitey, otherwise known as the majority of the country.

Here:

DAVID BROOKS: So we had a lot of good things over the years that were really good for America. I think globalization has been really good for America. I think the influx of immigrants has been really good for America. Feminism has been really good for America. But there are a lot of people who used to be up in society, because of those three good things, are now down, a lot of high school-educated white guys. And they have been displaced.

Hillary present at the debacles: Housing bubble, Great Recession, Iraq War, Surrender to Iran, Doubling of the Debt, puny GDP . . .

Conrad Black, here:

Hillary Clinton, though she would probably be an improvement on the recent past, represents continuity of what has been the most catastrophic 20 years of misgovernment in American history. She was there, as first lady, senator, secretary of state, or candidate, for the housing bubble and Great Recession, the terrible drain of Middle East war that delivered most of Iraq to Iran and produced a colossal humanitarian tragedy, the doubling of the national debt in seven years to produce one per cent annual economic growth while 15 million people dropped out of the work force, and the terrible fiascoes of the abandoned red line in Syria and the cave-in to Iranian nuclear military ambitions with a fig leaf of (unverifiable) deferral. But she is an able person, still carrying the torch of feminism, and she isn’t Trump.