Senator Franken?

Actually, 2008 makes a lot more sense to me. He'll get to participate not just in the Senate race, but also the Presidential one, in a key region.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070201/ap_on_el_se/franken_senate_5

that's quite some low you're talking about.

-- nabisco (--...), February 1st, 2007 10:36 PM. (nabisco) (later)

roffles!

http://www.linternaute.com/television/actualite/06/que-sont-ils-devenus/croisiere-s-amuse/gopher.png

"I am not a lawyer. I've been frozen in ice for thousands of years. Cars scare me, and I don't know what electricity is. But even I can see that ..."

xp yeah it's always a great idea to antagonize your co-workers

i love how ppl constantly take issue w/ things i haven't said

someone said he made fun of gays

everyone should

I guess he is gay

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/251090-israeli-newspaper-calls-sen-al-franken-gay

yeah it's always a great idea to antagonize your co-workers

He'll do it for the right joke:

"I like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz."

Cmon, Ted Cruz doesn't count

nevermind xp

okay lol

But his grasp of anatomy!
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, February 10, 2005

Prescient!

https://www.vox.com/2019/7/22/20703617/al-franken-jane-mayer-resignation

I haven’t yet read the mayer NYer article, but the case that yglesias makes here strikes me as flimsy and specious, resting heavily on the convenience of hindsight. and assuming for the moment for the sake of argument that the allegations are unfounded, I am not sure that political expediency is our ideal justification for removal of someone from office when the facts are still very much in question. but maybe I’m naive and that’s part of the contract you sign when you enter willingly into electoral politics

The facts were in question? I haven't read the article, but Franken was right to resign when eight women accused him. Being in the Senate isn't a job, and Chuck Schumer ain't his boss: he resigned because he knew one or more or all those allegations were true. If you wanna be cynical, we wouldn't have won the Alabama seat had Franken stayed. Finally, Tina Smith has been a fine senator. He was expendable.

The story persists because assholes wanna keep talking about it (I'm not shading you, k3vin).

the article = Yglesias

by the time i actually read the jane mayer piece i'd seen about 10 ppl on twitter blasting it, so i was surprised to find it...i don't know, pretty reasonable? at least compared to what i was expecting. she was obviously sympathetic to franken but she clearly talked to plenty of ppl who were critical of him, it struck me as a fairly balanced piece.

I read the NYer article and I thought it made a pretty convincing case that Franken was a Joe Biden style clueless old guy who is huggy in a non-sexual way and too oblivious to realize that he's making other people uncomfortable, rather than a perv using his position to hit on women. Still right for him to resign under the circumstances though.

the facts are still very much in question

some of what Leeann Tweeden said seems to be inaccurate but otherwise there doesn't really seem to be much disagreement over the actual facts - it's stuff like Franken putting his arm around someone, them later saying it made them uncomfortable, him saying that there was no bad intent - there's nothing to indicate that an investigation would have made things much clearer

honestly I’d forgotten exactly what had happened with franken, it seems like eternities ago

like I said I haven’t read the mayer article yet, I was just sort of bristling at yglesias’s ethical case, which rested not so much on resigning being the right thing to do morally (though there was some of that) but politically usefully

idk it read like a closing argument in the defense's case in trial. Even admitting to the weakness of Tweeden's evidence, seven other accusations are out there, and Mayer doesn't use her considerable power to explore them.

someone on The Corporatist Gay Dem blog was mourning Al as "the leftmost senator," and I just laughed and laughed.

npr interview implied unwillingness of accusers to go on record prevented her from pursuing those stories. does she not deal with anonymity ever?

hmm pretty sure some others did go on the record already:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/i-believe-frankens-accusers-because-he-groped-me-too/547691/

I knew of one assgrabbing campaign event incident before the Tweeden stuff came out. And of course who doesn't want their entire life overturned for sharing someone else's bad behaviour.

Why would anyone break their anonymity for the sake of an article defending the guy who groped them?

To undercut the defense?

are they giving him his job back or something?

How do you undercut the defense by giving them the power over your story?

I assume Mayer, a respected journalist, did not pitch the story as a defense, but who knows what kind of story she would have written (or if she would have written or published it at all) if more people went on the record. I don't know her standard.

Seeing as she didn't do that much with the majority of the accusers who actually are on the record, I think it's honestly fairly easy to know what story she would write with a few more.

Yeah, I dunno. I haven't had a chance to read it yet because my issue hasn't arrived yet. It's just out of character for her, isn't it? She didn't sound like she was on a mission this morning, though she did acknowledge the piece was like kicking a hornet's nest.

I assume Mayer, a respected journalist, did not pitch the story as a defense

Why would you assume this?

iirc Mayer worked on the Weinstein story, afaik she doesn't have a reputation for protecting or justifying bad-behaving men.

the stuff about how the allegations moved through the conservative media world was interesting. Like I didn't know that Hannity knew about the USO photo back in 2006. And how O'Reilly was telling people years ago that Franken would be going down.

Didn't she also write a or the definitive Anita Hill book?

iirc Mayer worked on the Weinstein story, afaik she doesn't have a reputation for protecting or justifying bad-behaving men.

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Tuesday, July 23, 2019 11:23 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

right, the assumptions being thrown around seem a little careless

Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing, and yes. Also: Dark Money.

Kevin k, did you read the piece President Keyes linked?

Mayer writes about Dupuy's story a bit, but mostly just quotes one of Franken's people calling it dumb

This piece encapsulates my feelings on the whole Franken thing pretty well.

Jane Mayer is a great journalist — in my view she’s the best investigative journalist in America — but I think she got tripped up a bit by a couple of endemic risks to doing long-form investigative journalism.

The first is the tendency to make something more of a story than it really is because you’ve put so much time and effort into it.

...

The second is made up of the many powerful incentives to focus on a subject for reasons that have no justification beyond the purely pragmatic and commercial judgment that people want to read about it.

The Al Franken story gets 12,000 words in the New Yorker because its subject is Al Franken, former SNL star and beloved figure among the donor class, rather than former Sen. Joe Smith from Flyover who Nobody Who Matters has ever even really heard of.

...

Yet a third factor is that, as a stand-alone piece, Mayer’s story can be read as a sympathetic-towards-its subject yet ultimately descriptive, rather than normative, comment on that subject’s relation to a particular social moment. But again, the imperatives of the genre more or less require a kind of social media meta-framing in which the story is an expose of the grave injustice done to Al Franken, even though Mayer’s own story doesn’t really support that framing. (I.E. why am I supposed to read 12,000 words about this guy again?).

why am I supposed to read 12,000 words about this guy again?

one could choose not to, i suppose

are they giving him his job back or something?

^ this otm

Lawyersgunsmoney guy is correct to point out that the editorial decision to print this as 'investigative journalism' elicits a tacit understanding on the part of the reader that, by exhuming a story that reached a clear conclusion a year or more ago, the story in some way must dispute or contradict the way the story was told in the media back then. Otherwise, why bother to bring it back up at such length?

But the real reason it got printed is because people will read it, no matter whether it says anything new or worthwhile.

Yep. Starting the story with Franken at home padding around on stocking feet is not the way to go.

A comment:

Al Franken won a close election in '08, and was a good Senator. Better than was expected from a former SNL writer and performer.

Al Franken won a second term in '14, and he was a better Senator, better than expected from a former SNL writer and performer.

Al Franken resigned the Senate in '18, and was replaced by Tina Smith, who has been a good Senator, despite not being a former SNL writer and performer.

... and today, that is all that there is to this story.

The Al Franken story gets 12,000 words in the New Yorker because its subject is Al Franken, former SNL star and beloved figure among the donor class, rather than former Sen. Joe Smith from Flyover who Nobody Who Matters has ever even really heard of.

so it got 12,000 words because its subject is...uh, newsworthy, as opposed to some hypothetical senator who didn't do anything of note?

a senator resigning because of a scandal is a fairly rare event, and arguing that the new yorker shouldn't have run it because it supposedly wasn't newsworthy or interesting to anyone is pretty disingenuous

as far as i know this is the first time franken has spoken to anyone on the record about what happened since resigning, so opening the story with that coup is understandable even if mayer's description of him errs on the side of too sympathetic*

*: or maybe not, i did laugh when she described his mouth as "froglike"

The senators quoted in the story regretting their roles in ousting Franken sound like such idiots

Mayer writes about Dupuy's story a bit, but mostly just quotes one of Franken's people calling it dumb

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Tuesday, July 23, 2019 4:56 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've read Dupny's own account and I honestly can't see what Franken is supposed to have done wrong there, she says she asked him to take a photo with her, he put his hand around her waist and that's it? this makes me feel crazy because it seems like everyone else who has read it comes away with a different impression. if multiple women are saying they felt uncomfortable after interactions like this with him then obviously he is/was doing something that he needs to change and needs to be more aware of other ppl's physical boundaries - but I don't understand how Dupny gets "he knew exactly what he was doing" and "He wanted to cop a feel and he demonstrated he didn’t need my permission" from her own description of the incident

she says in that article that she doesn't even let her husband put his arm around her in public, which uh puts it in some context i guess. my feeling is that dupuy's story would not have gotten published if there hadn't already been other accusations against franken.

This was a huge crazy news event that occupied the entire country for like 2 weeks, overlapped with two of the defining stories of the era (the appointment of Mueller & #MeToo), and then everybody moved on to the next thing and mostly forgot about it. Setting aside Mayer's motives & approach, Franken's guilt, whether or not you agree that theres 'unfinished business' to the story or not, etc etc, the commentary that this isnt a topic that "deserved" to be written about is silly to me. Stuff like that is p much exactly what I'm looking for in longform journalism & serious weekly magazines - taking news events that are out of the headlines but still in the recent past and spending a little more time on them than when they were the big headline of the moment. Whether or not you agree with where Meyer went with it, saying stuff like it was only greenlit bc Franken is "beloved by the donor class" or just got printed bc its salacious and "because people will read it" like its some kind of #slatepitch hot take is bad faith imho.

The Al Franken story gets 12,000 words in the New Yorker because its subject is Al Franken, former SNL star and beloved figure among the donor class, rather than former Sen. Joe Smith from Flyover who Nobody Who Matters has ever even really heard of.

In addition to the reason J.D. pointed out, this is also offtm bc the NYer writes shit like that all the time.

We posed for the shot. He immediately put his hand on my waist, grabbing a handful of flesh. I froze. Then he squeezed. At least twice.

It's the squeezing that's completely out of bounds.