"Kellyanne Conway announces she's leaving the White House and George Conway is stepping away from Lincoln Project."

CNN reports.

"I will be transitioning from the White House at the end of this month. George is also making changes," Kellyanne Conway said in a statement. "We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids. Our four children are teens and 'tweens starting a new academic year, in middle school and high school, remotely from home for at least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids 'doing school from home' requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times."

George Conway tweeted minutes earlier that he was withdrawing from The Lincoln Project -- a group formed by anti-Trump Republicans -- to "devote more time to family matters."...

One of the Conways' high school-aged daughters has generated attention on social media about her family and their political views over the last several months.

Here's yesterday's post about Claudia Conway's social-media cry for help.

ADDED: For once, it's believable that somebody left their job to spend more time with their family.

AND: Congratulations to the girl for putting out such an effective cry for help.

ALSO: "Look what I did. Look at what I did, ladies and gentlemen."

At the Sunday Night Café...

... you can write about whatever you like.

"To those who stand in judgment of her for getting a dog from a breeder instead of a shelter, why don't you shame her too, for having her own biological children rather than adopting a homeless teenager."

"She has 2 kids and a small living space with no yard, so they likely wanted a dog that's small, with no behavioral problems, one they can train, and not a ten year old, 100 lb German Shepherd with behavioral issues. So why don't you go shame someone else, rather than a mother doing her best to provide comfort to her family during a pandemic."

That's the second-highest-rated comment on "I hated dogs, but I hated the pandemic more. Would a puppy help? So what if he chews the furniture and shreds my papers. He opened up our locked-down world" by Lara Bazelon (WaPo).

I love the commenter's question, because I was just wondering the exact same thing. Why don't the people who think you should get a "rescue" dog when you want a dog also think you should get a "rescue" child when you want a child? In fact, isn't the argument for adopting an older child with special needs even stronger than the argument for adopting an older dog that hasn't had the advantages of a loving home and careful training? After all, many dogs are euthanized, but we strive to keep all our children alive even when they have terrible behavioral problems. And dogs are kept under the control of owners all their lives, while children become adults and are allowed to move about freely in the world even when they are quite dangerous. It's therefore especially important to take great care of all of the children who have been born into this world.

People will say that they want their own biological offspring, but what makes you think what you have to give genetically is so wonderful? Dog breeders have much higher standards selecting which dogs to use for breeding. People just decide to use themselves. When you have your own biological children, you're picking yourself because you are yourself. I'm not saying that's wrong. In fact, I think it's quite beautiful, making something out of your own body and the body of a person you love. So I'm beginning to see the answer to my question. When you have your own child, you're not being a eugenicist, looking for the ideal baby. You're accepting the randomness of who you happen to be and who you've found to love. The baby grows out of that is more like a rescue dog than a breeder's dog.

"This establishment is not black-owned, but you're stealing black culture... Trap Tea... You're thieves, Asian people, stealing black culture, once again...."

"You’re thieves! Asian people stealing black culture once again.”

A strong, black Muslim woman went inside the new Trap Tea business in Aurora, Colo. on Friday and confronted the staff. A black customer tries to defend the business & is called a racial slur by her. pic.twitter.com/uejQ6nC8cr

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 23, 2020

I had to look up "trap" in the Urban Dictionary. I see the top-voted definition is a type of anime character, but there's also a secondary meaning, a place where drugs are sold.

The slur the woman uses against the black man who intervenes is "coon": "When used by blacks its describing an uncle Rukus type character. A black person who is ignorant to white discrimination and unknowingly suffers with self hatred."

ADDED: Here's their logo, which uses a font that I would characterize as an effort to signal Asianness:

"I am a woman of color running in a state that has no women in any elected federal or statewide offices."

"But you have now twice, without ever having met or interviewed me, attacked and mocked me on your opinion page ('Is Kim Klacik running for Congress, mayor or chief Trump enabler?' Aug. 19). What gives? Not that it should matter, but I’m a moderate Republican.... As for my commitment to Baltimore, for nearly a decade, I have run a nonprofit, Potential Me, based and operated out of South Baltimore, which helps predominantly inner-city Black women prepare for careers, providing them with business attire and interview prep. But, you are right, I do not live in Baltimore. I have a young daughter I love and would not dare subject her to the blight, soaring crime, broken schools and low expectations of the city. You know who else would not? The tens of thousands of Black families who have moved from the city — half of my district — to the Baltimore County and Howard County half. I presume you’ve written me off because President Donald Trump has brought unsolicited attention to my race and Baltimore’s ills. I agree with some of his policies; I disagree with others.... How many corrupt, failed leaders have you failed to vet and, over and over, even endorsed?"

Writes Kim Klacik in "What gives, Baltimore Sun editorial board?," published in The Baltimore Sun.

Klacik has received some very high-level attention, and the ad is quite viral (and hard to refute):

Kimberly will work with the Trump Administration and we will bring Baltimore back, and fast. Don’t blow it Baltimore, the Democrats have destroyed your city! https://t.co/PDdjgxbIHu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

Sunrise, 6:14.

Imagine some member of your family talking to you about one of your siblings — talking for 15 hours — and secretly recording it then picking out the worst things you said and publishing it — with audio!

I'm reading "In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he has ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him'" (WaPo).

In response to a question from The Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with [Maryanne Trump] Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book....

15 hours of secretly recording her aunt!

At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”...

How many siblings do you have? How would you like to hear the worst things your sister said about you and have it made public just days after the death of a brother you loved very much.

Scott Adams plays with the idea of a deeper, darker conspiracy about the Charlottesville incident.

I wonder why we haven't sifted through these ideas before. Why were the people who marched — the supposed Nazis and white supremacists — never identified and interviewed in the press? They were visible and unmasked in clear video. Who were they? Adams observes that they were nice looking, well dressed young people, not the sort of people you'd ordinarily picture as Klansman. Why did they do something openly that would ruin their own future? But then they were not pursued in the media. Isn't that strange?

Adams doesn't come out and say he wonders if the event was staged and the participants were fake, and he's so upset about the basic Charlottesville hoax — the idea that Trump called Nazis and white supremacists "fine people" — that he may just want to stir up a rival hoax to shake things up and get some action in the hoax-fighting arena.

Anyway, if the Charlottesville marchers were genuine, why haven't we seen more marches like that? They were ostensibly rallying around the idea of preserving traditional statues, and we've had all these protest/riots that have attacked and pulled down statues, so why has the Charlottesville type of pro-statue marcher — replete with torches and anti-Semitic chants — never shown up again?

Biden invites us to "watch" him and Kamala Harris and to "look at... what we control."

I'm reading "Biden to ABC's David Muir on Trump's attacks on mental fitness: 'Watch me, Mr. President'/Biden, Harris' first joint interviews air tonight at 8 p.m. ET on ABC." I just hope it's a serious interview that is arms-length and challenging. The question ABC is teasing for us this morning is "[Trump's] campaign has called you ‘diminished.’ And, I'm curious how you’d respond to that."

Biden's answer is:

“Watch me. Mr. President, watch me. Look at us both. Look at us both, what we say, what we do, what we control, what we know, what kind of shape we're in.... I think it's a legitimate question to ask anybody over 70 years old whether or not they're fit and whether they're ready. But I just, only thing I can say to the American people, it's a legitimate question to ask anybody. Watch me”...

On the one hand, that's a completely empty answer, which probably only reflects the complete emptiness of the question. What did you expect him to say?! Why did Muir devote time to that? What potential was there to bring out anything significant?

But Biden did say one interesting thing there, seemingly by accident: "what we control." What's that about? If he's talking about political power, it sounds sinister, but the question is about the decline of old age, so maybe he's referring to his bodily functions. What am I supposed to "look at"?

Also in the teaser: Biden answered "Absolutely" to the question whether it's possible that he will seek a second term. I suspect that's to reinforce the assertion that he's in fine shape to begin serving a 4-year term now.

ADDED: If Muir actually wanted an answer to the question whether Biden is "diminished," he wouldn't ask Biden directly, the way he did. He would ask hard questions about specific issues — probing into Biden's past actions and assertions — and give us a chance to see whether Biden could perform at the high level that's needed. If you want to find out if someone's drunk, do you ask them if they're drunk, or do you give them a sobriety test?

"Left-leaning Claudia [Conway] has been openly feuding with her parents on TikTok and Twitter all summer, bashing them for their conservative views."

"At one point she urged progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to adopt her. Saturday’s tweet ['I’m officially pushing for emancipation'] came alongside many more in which she penned her frustration over her [mother Kellyanne Conway's] work for the president, and over recent praise of her father, George Conway, for his work as co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a Republican anti-Trump group. 'As for my dad, politically, we agree on absolutely nothing. We just both happen to have common sense when it comes to our current president. Stop "stanning" him,' Claudia tweeted.... 'My mother’s job ruined my life to begin with,' she wrote. 'Heartbreaking that she continues to go down that path after years of watching her children suffer. Selfish. It’s all about money and fame, ladies and gentlemen.'... 'I’m a savage lol I’m aware,' read her last tweet...."

From "Kellyanne Conway’s daughter Claudia 'officially pushing for emancipation'" (NY Post).

I see she got a response — a wise response — from Marianne Williamson:

I don’t agree with your mother politically, Claudia, but she’s still your mom. I promise you your life ahead will be better if you handle your issues with her privately. I’m sure she’d go to counseling with you, if you don’t already. Love has got to trump politics. It just has to

— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) August 23, 2020

Claudia sounds like she is what she is — a 15-year-old kid. She's saying things that would only be shouted around the house if it weren't for social media and that would go nowhere on social media if her parents weren't famous.

At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can write about whatever you like.

Social media didn't care about Kamala.

From "Michelle Obama won the Democratic convention" (Axios):

The political eye.

It’s been ruined. https://t.co/zHGsR0ognR

— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) August 22, 2020

"Former Vice President Joe Biden saw no immediately measurable increase to his substantial lead over President Donald Trump following this week’s largely virtual Democratic National Convention..."

"A new Morning Consult poll of 4,377 likely voters conducted Friday found Biden leads Trump by 9 percentage points, 52 percent to 43 percent, statistically unchanged from a Monday survey of 4,141 likely voters, when he led the president by 8 points."

The NYT is running an article titled "Is the ‘Convention Bounce’ a Thing of the Past?"

"In a society that respects science, expertise confers power.... Illegitimate political power can be disguised as expertise...."

"In late February, [Italian philosopher Giorgio] Agamben began... to criticize the 'techno-medical despotism' that the Italian government was putting in place through quarantines and closings.... The emergency declared by public-health experts replaces the discredited narrative of 'national security experts' as a pretext for withdrawing rights and privacy from citizens. 'Biosecurity' now serves as a reason for governments to rule in terms of 'worst-case scenarios.' This means there is no level of cases or deaths below which locking down an entire nation of 60 million becomes unreasonable. Many European governments, including Italy’s, have developed national contact tracing apps that allow them to track their citizens using cellphones.... [The term 'social distancing']... 'appeared simultaneously around the world as if it had been prepared in advance.'... His point is that social distancing is at least as much a political measure as a public health one, realized so easily because it has been pushed for by powerful forces....  'For fear of getting sick,' Mr. Agamben writes, 'Italians are ready to sacrifice practically everything — their normal living conditions, their social relations, their jobs, right down to their friendships, their loves, their religious and political convictions.' In fact, 'the threshold that separates humanity from barbarism has been crossed,' Mr. Agamben continues, and the proof is in Italians’ treatment of their dead. 'How could we have accepted, in the name of a risk that we couldn’t even quantify, not only that the people who are dear to us, and human beings more generally, should have to die alone but also — and this is something that had never happened before in all of history from Antigone to today — that their corpses should be burned without a funeral?'"

From "Meet the Philosopher Who Is Trying to Explain the Pandemic/Giorgio Agamben criticizes the “techno-medical despotism” of quarantines and closings" by Christopher Caldwell

Agamben uses the word inoperosità  — which translates to idleness —to refer to "instances of common customs or historic institutions getting emptied out of their long-held meanings... that can generate new systems of belief and new dangers." We imagine that we are hanging back from a life to which we can return, but we will never go there again. Something new is coming into being.

"Mr. Biden is far better known than Mr. Dukakis was and he has shown a resilience to caricature that Mr. Dukakis did not have."

"Mr. Trump is viewed unfavorably by a big swath of voters. His lack of credibility with many Americans has undercut his ability to deliver an attack. The nation is more pessimistic than it was when Mr. Dukakis faced Mr. Bush, who as Ronald Reagan’s vice president was effectively running as an incumbent.... 'This is going to be tricky for them: Biden is a pretty well-known quantity,' said Susan Estrich, who was Mr. Dukakis’ campaign manager. 'The way you usually burst balloons is paint the other guy as a risk.' Mr. Dukakis, proud and disdainful of politics, refused to believe these kind of attacks would hurt them, and did not heed the advice of his staff that he fight back. He allowed Mr. Bush to define him before Labor Day.... His opponents even raised questions about Mr. Dukakis’s mental fitness, decades before Mr. Biden faced the same. Conservative groups were circulating rumors, with no substantiation, that Mr. Dukakis was hiding the fact that he had been treated for depression. As the summer came to an end, Mr. Reagan was asked if Mr. Dukakis should release his medical records. 'Look, I’m not going to pick on an invalid,' he said. Mr. Reagan later said this was a failed joke, but by design or not, it succeeded in thrusting the rumor to the center of public attention. Mr. Dukakis called a news conference to say he had never struggled with mental illness."

From "A Glimmer of Hope for Trump? How Bush Mounted a Comeback in 1988/For Biden, a cautionary tale. For Trump, a search for his own Willie Horton" (NYT).