Live-blogging the second 2020 Democratic debate (second night)

I'll be live-blogging the Democratic debate in this post. Keep reloading this post for more updates!

[Here's the debate transcript.]

It starts at 8 Eastern, and you can watch it online on CNN's website.

Again, I won't be able to pause or rewind when I'm blogging live, so the quotes in this post might not be verbatim, but I'll try to keep them fairly accurate. (I also might correct things later.)

My mom, Ann Althouse, is also live-blogging. (Maybe not very much, but she's doing it!)

These are the 10 candidates for tonight:

former Vice President Joe Biden
Sen. Kamala Harris
Sen. Cory Booker
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard
former Secretary Julián Castro
Mayor Bill de Blasio
Sen. Michael Bennet
Gov. Jay Inslee
Andrew Yang

8:04 - I didn't quite hear what Kamala Harris and Joe Biden said to each other when Harris came out to Biden (the first two to walk onto the stage), but it sounded like Harris said, "Are we good?" and Biden said: "We're good."

8:14 - Bill de Blasio brags about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour — "Yes, it can be done!" Yes, it can be done in New York City, the most expensive city in the country. That doesn't make it a good idea to set the same wage in a poor area where that policy could take away jobs.

8:16 - Michael Bennet says in his opening statement: "Mister President, kids belong in classrooms, not cages."

8:18 - Kirsten Gillibrand seems to be implicitly responding to the candidates last night who focused on being pragmatic and having policies that are politically feasible: "When are civil rights ever convenient?"

8:21 - Castro: "We're not going back to the past. We're not going 'back where we came from.' We're moving forward."

8:22 - Andrew Yang: "We need to do the opposite of what we've been doing now. The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian math nerd. So let me share the math…" This segues into explaining how he'll give all Americans $1,000 a month.

8:25 - Something's wrong with the audio from Kamala Harris's microphone.

8:26 - Joe Biden focuses on the diverse group of candidates on the stage. "Mister President … we are stronger and great because of this diversity, not in spite of it."

8:28 - Kamala Harris is asked about the Biden campaign's attacks on her health-care plan for being "confusing." "They're probably confused because they've not read it."

8:29 - Biden on Harris's 10-year projections for her health plan: "If someone tells you something good will take 10 years, you should ask why it'll take 10 years.… You'll lose your health insurance." Harris says that's "simply inaccurate," and counterattacks: "Babies will be born into my plan.… Your plan, by contrast, leaves out 10 million Americans." When Biden emphasizes the costs of Harris's plan — $30 trillion, according to Biden — Harris shoots back: "The cost of doing nothing is far too expensive."

8:33 - Kirsten Gillibrand worries that the people watching right now will "lose the forest for the trees" on health care. Gillibrand calls out the candidates whose health-care proposals depend on private insurers: "I'm sorry, they're for-profit companies! … They have fat in the system that's real, and it should be going to health care." Kamala Harris takes Gillibrand's side against Biden: "I couldn't agree more."

8:36 - The moderator asks Cory Booker how he can square various different statements he's made about health care, but he doesn't answer the question. He just wants them all to get along: "The person who's enjoying this debate the most right now is Donald Trump, as we pit Democrats against each other."

8:39 - Kamala Harris says that Biden's health plan, which doesn't cover everyone, is "without excuse." Biden says: "It will cover everyone." But then he badly trips over his words — for a while there I wasn't sure he'd ever finish his sentence. Once he finally gets back to speaking coherently, he stops mid-sentence the instant the moderator cuts him off — the second time that's happened to Biden tonight.

8:42 - Kamala Harris raises a very serious problem: "I have met so many Americans who stick to a job they don't like … simply because they need the health care that employer provides." She and Bennet proclaim their friendship with each other and accuse each other of lying. Bennet says Harris would make private health insurance "illegal." Harris seems exasperated at Bennet: "You gotta stop!"

8:44 - Jay Inslee: "There's no reason we should distinguish between your physiological and your mental health."

8:45 - Yang says when he told his wife he wanted to run for president, her first question was: "What are we going to do about our health care?"

8:46 - Bill de Blasio: "I don't understand why Democrats on this stage are fear-mongering about universal health care."

8:47 - Bennet says, "This has nothing to do with a Republican talking point," except he sounds like Bill Murray playing a drunk guy, so it really sounds more like: "This has nothing to do wih' Repu'lin talling poin'."

8:49 - Biden mocks Bill de Blasio and Harris Kamala: "I don't know what math you do in New York! I don't know what math you do in California!"

8:51 - Biden gets mad: "We should put some of the insurance executives who don't like my plan in jail for the millions of opioids they put out there!"

8:54 - Now we're in the immigration section, which I'm less interested in — not because I don't care about the issue, but because I don't expect them to say much new. But Kamala Harris has a strong moment describing what she saw when she and Castro went to a facility for children. The security guards wouldn't let her in, so she went across the street, climbed a ladder, and looked inside.

8:56 - Audience members have been yelling over the candidates. The moderator tells Biden to keep talking over them. But earlier, the moderator had Cory Booker stop until the loudmouths were done, and they went on a long time. I don't see why the policy about how to deal with these losers keeps changing.

9:00 - Yang says Democrats shouldn't only be talking about the most "distressed" immigration stories; they should talk about people like his dad, an immigrant who got a lot of patents in the US.

9:02 - Biden says America is so great because "we've been able to cherry-pick the best from every culture." He means that to be a strong pro-immigration statement, but it might not go over well with progressives to suggest that the US should "cherry-pick" the "best" people — that sounds restrictive.

9:04 - De Blasio asks Biden if when he was vice president, he resisted President Obama's massive numbers of deportations. Biden refuses to answer, making a procedural argument about confidentiality: "I keep whatever I said to him, private." Booker practically laughs in Biden's face for trying to "have it both ways": he talks about Obama more than any other candidate does, but won't answer de Blasio's question about Obama. Booker uses Trump's infamous phrase "shithole countries," without getting bleeped!

9:13 - Biden says people in prison "should be learning to read and write, not just learning how to be better criminals." Biden has a better habit of cutting off the ends of his own answers by saying things like: "Anyway!" He sometimes seems to be almost throwing his hands up at himself!

9:14 - Biden accidentally calls Cory Booker "the president," but catches himself, good-naturedly grabs Booker's arm, and says: "Excuse me, the future president here!" Booker looks delighted: "I'm glad he's already endorsed my presidency!"

9:16 - Biden criticizes Booker for his record on crime in New Jersey — "stop and frisk" and hiring a former Rudolph Giuliani staffer on crime. The way Booker starts out his response gets a big reaction from the audience: "If you want to compare records … and I can't believe you do …"

9:18 - Inslee says we "need to ban the box," meaning forbid employers from asking applicants about their criminal records. Does he know that this leads to more racial discrimination, because employers use people's race as a proxy for their criminal records?

I avoid writing on the internet about actual or alleged crimes in New York City.

9:23 - Moderator Jake Tapper asks Kamala Harris if Biden is right to say their position on federally mandated busing is "the same" — they're both against it. Harris says: "That is simply false.… On that issue, we could not be more apart."

9:26 - Biden tells us to Google: [a thousand people freed kamala harris].

9:27 - Tulsi Gabbard is "deeply concerned" about Kamala Harris's record on criminal justice. Gabbard says Harris put a lot of people in jail for marijuana but then laughed when asked if she had used marijuana, "blocked evidence" that could have freed wrongly accused people on death row, and "kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor." "When you were in a position to make a difference in these people's lives … you did not." Harris's response to this serious attack is weak; for instance, one of the things she says is that she's "personally" opposed to the death penalty, but that doesn't really respond to any of Gabbard's points. I'm interested to see if Harris's inability to respond to Gabbard's attack causes progressives to start rethinking Harris.



9:31 - Bennet, again, seems less like he's running for president and more like he's auditioning for the role of "drunk man."

9:33 - Yang is asked why he'd be the best president to heal racial divides. Shockingly, Yang's answer is … he'd give everyone $1,000 a month.

9:38 - Confession: I'm not really listening to Inslee. I don't take a candidate seriously when they make their campaign all about one issue. No matter how important that issue is, the presidency is about more than one issue.

9:43 - Gillibrand has possibly the weirdest line of the night: "The first thing I'm going to do if I am president is I will Clorox the Oval Office." Gillibrand is getting very peppy: "Why not have a green energy race with China?"

9:46 - Booker: "Nobody should get applause for rejoining the Paris climate accord. That is kindergarden!"

9:49 - Biden is asked how he'll energize progressives enough to get the turnout he'll need to win Michigan in the Electoral College. Biden lists things the Obama administration did for Michigan specifically, e.g. the bailout of car companies helped Detroit. He missed the opportunity to address the broader question about why progressives (in any state) should be excited about voting for him.

9:54 - Harris on Trump: "He has done nothing except beat people down instead of lift people up. And that's what we want in the next President of the United States." That was poorly worded!

9:59 - Dana Bash asks Castro: wage growth is up, and Castro proposes to raise taxes — how can he guarantee that won't hurt the economy? Castro says Trump shouldn't take credit because the same thing was happening under Obama. What he doesn't tell us that the trajectory has been better lately than under Obama:

employee compensation has increased by $150 billion more in the first six months of 2019 than all of 2016. Compensation increased 42% more during the first two years of the Trump Presidency than in 2015 and 2016. This refutes the claim by liberals that the economy has merely continued on the same trajectory since 2017 as it was before.

10:03 - The debate's been going on for 2 hours now. I don't know if I can keep paying attention enough to write this. It's been pretty boring.

10:08 - Kamala Harris tells a blatant lie that hurts women: that women are systematically paid only about 80 cents on the dollar. If people are tricked into believing that lie, that will encourage people to stick to traditional gender roles by deterring women from participating in the labor force. No matter how progressive a spin you put on it, you can't change the economic rule that if people think they're going to get less of a reward, they'll be less motivated to do it.

10:12 - Gillibrand accuses Biden of saying that women who leave the home and work in the labor force are harming society. Of course, Biden denies ever saying or thinking that.

10:15 - Booker on Trump: "I will not do foreign policy by tweet. A guy who tweets out that he's pulling troops out of Afghanistan, before his generals even know about it, is creating a dangerous situation for our troops in Afghanistan."

10:16 - Tulsi Gabbard has a particularly serious moment talking about what she saw when she was deployed to Iraq in 2005.

10:20 - Biden is asked about his vote to authorize the Iraq War. Predictably, he says: "I did make a bad judgment trusting the president…" Gabbard agrees: "We were all lied to."

10:22 - Kamala Harris on the Mueller report: "I've read it. There are 10 clear incidents of obstruction of justice by this president. I've seen people go to prison for much less."

10:23 - Booker and Castro call for impeachment proceedings against Trump. De Blasio suggests that if people keep hearing about impeachment whenever they turn on the TV, they'll feel like no one's talking about how to make the economy better. "The best impeachment is beating him in the election." Bennet argues that impeachment would "play into [Trump's] hands," since the Senate would be sure to acquit Trump, who'd then declare victory. Castro makes the opposite argument: if Trump isn't even impeached, he'll declare that as a victory.

10:32 - De Blasio uses his closing statement to talk to Trump: "Donald, you're the real socialist! The problem is: it's socialism for the rich."

10:36 - I don't know who the best candidate is, but I know who the boringest candidates are: Inslee and Bennet.

10:37 - Gillibrand asks us to reject the false choice of thinking we need either "a progressive with big ideas" or "a moderate who can win Obama voters." She'll be both.

10:41 - Yang goes meta: "We're up here with makeup on our faces, saying prepared attack lines, playing roles on a reality TV show."

10:43 - Booker: "People are saying the only thing they want is to beat Donald Trump. Well, that is the floor, not the ceiling!"

10:45 - Kamala Harris uses her closing statement go after Trump: "Donald Trump has a predatory nature… The thing about predators is: by their very nature, they prey on people they perceive to be weak … and predators are cowards." Her point is that as a former prosecutor, she's perceptive about bad guys and will be able to "prosecute" Trump in the election.

10:47 - Biden ends his closing statement by saying (while seeming confused as if he's struggling to read a cue card): "If you agree with me, go to Joe 30330." I don't know what that means.

And that's the end of the debate — after almost 3 hours! Yeesh, that was a long slog.

My mom's take:

The best of the night? Tulsi Gabbard. A brutal attack on Kamala Harris. Excellent deep, strong voice. Well-grounded seriousness.

I agree that Gabbard was good.

Now, who wasn't good? Joe Biden.

Biden doesn't have the passion, the fire, the relentless drive you need to run for president. He kept stumbling over his words and cutting off his own answers before he was done. He's the only candidate who instantly stops himself mid-sentence as soon as the moderator signals his time is up. He couldn't manage to deliver his prepared closing statement telling people where to go to support his campaign. He looked tired and defeated. Biden simply isn't up to the task.

Winners: Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker

Losers: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, CNN (your debates are too damn long!)

Live-blogging the second Democratic debate of 2020 (first night)

I'll be live-blogging the debate in this post. Keep reloading this post for more updates!

[Here's the transcript.]

This is the first of two nights for the second 2020 Democratic debate (counting each two-night broadcast as one debate). The debate in Detroit starts at 8 Eastern, and you can watch it online on CNN's website.

As usual, I'll be doing this without the benefit of a pause or rewind button. So any quotes in this post might not be perfect word for word, but I'll try to keep them reasonably accurate. (And I might go back later and make corrections.)

My mom, Ann Althouse, is also live-blogging.

These are the 10 candidates for tonight:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Mayor Pete Buttigieg
former Rep. Beto O'Rourke
Sen. Amy Klobuchar
Gov. John Hickenlooper
former Rep. John Delaney
Rep. Tim Ryan
Gov. Steve Bullock
Marianne Williamson

The first two to walk onstage are Bernie Sanders and then Elizabeth Warren — she greets him very warmly: "Good to see ya!!!" This signals they won't be attacking each other tonight, as progressive frontrunners. Hickenlooper comes out a while later and has to walk around a lot to shake everyone's hands.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" is sung, and all the candidates put their hands on their hearts — except Tim Ryan. Amy Klobuchar looks like she's having fun singing along. Pete Buttigieg, the only military veteran on the stage, has an extremely serious expression.

8:14 - Steve Bullock, the only candidate on the stage who wasn't in the last debate, trashes "that last debate": the candidates were more interested in "scoring points" than in speaking to everyday Americans. "I won 3 elections in a red state" — Montana.

8:17 - John Delaney starts his opening statement with a direct attack on "Senator Sanders and Senator Warren" for their "bad policies" like "Medicare for All." "My platform is about real solutions, not impossible promises."

8:18 - Tim Ryan's opening statement does a twist on President Donald Trump's catchphrase: "America is great, but not everyone can access America's greatness."

8:19 - John Hickenlooper, like Delaney, starts his opening statement with an explicit attack on Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, saying their approach was not supported by any of the 40 Democrats who flipped House seats in 2018. "I share their progressive values, but I'm a little more pragmatic."

8:20 - Amy Klobuchar joins in the same tone as Hickenlooper: "Yes I have bold ideas, but they are grounded in reality. I can win this. I'm from the Midwest."

8:22 - Pete Buttigieg says the problem is bigger than Donald Trump — we have to ask how he even got "within cheating distance of the presidency."

8:23 - Elizabeth Warren says any of the Democratic candidates would be much better than Trump, and she promises to work her heart out to support whoever it is.

8:24 - Bernie Sanders: "Half of the American people are living paycheck to paycheck, and yet 49% of all new income goes to the top 1%."

8:26 - Bernie Sanders is asked what he says to Delaney, who says supporting Medicare for All will just reelect Trump. Sanders: "You're wrong!" Sanders notes that they're close to Canada (they're in Detroit), and "when you go to a hospital in Canada, you come out with no bill at all." Delaney's dry rebuttal: "It'll underfund the industry."

8:29 - Elizabeth Warren chimes in: "We are Democrats! We are not about trying to take away health care from anyone! That's what Republicans are trying to do, and we should stop using Republican talking points to talk to each other about what to do with health care."

8:31 - Warren sums up the problem with private health insurance: "Their model is: take as much money as you can in premiums, and pay as little as possible in health care coverage." Bullock dismisses Warren's policy as "wish-list economics."

8:32 - Buttigieg splits the difference, saying we don't need to "speculate" about which health-care policy is best, because "we can put it to the test with my Medicare for All Who Want It plan."

8:33 - Beto O'Rourke says Bullock is offering a "false choice," which hands Bullock a chance to talk more. I don't feel like Beto got much of a chance to speak to his views on health care, since moderator Jake Tapper constantly interrupted him.

8:36 - Klobuchar: "We need the public option. That's what Barack Obama wanted!" She says Bernie Sanders inconsistently called this immoral after supporting it last year, while CNN cuts to Bernie nervously gulping from a mug.

8:37 - Bernie Sanders attacks Jake Tapper for giving a "Republican talking point" to drug companies that they'll probably use in their ads during the debate tonight!

8:38 - Delaney boasts that he's the only candidate on the stage with experience in the health-care business, and "I don't think my colleagues understand the business." Bernie Sanders: "It's not a business!"

8:39 - The moderate Hickenlooper wants health-care reform to be "an evolution, not a revolution."

8:40 - Marianne Williamson says that while she admires Warren and Sanders on the health-care issue, she also hears what some of the more pragmatic candidates are saying: "I do have concern about what the Republicans would say." Buttigieg disagrees with Williamson: "It is time to stop worrying about what the Republicans are going to say," since Republicans are going to call the Democrats "a bunch of crazy socialists" even if they completely agree with Republicans.

8:43 - After Bernie Sanders lists specific things that'll be covered for "senior citizens," including "hearing aids," Tim Ryan cuts in: "You don't know that!" Bernie shoots back: "I do know it! I wrote the damn bill!!!"

8:45 - Tim Ryan has another dry criticism of Bernie Sanders's health-care plan: "His math is wrong. That's all I'm saying. It's been well-documented." Then Ryan goes for the jugular: "I'm starting to think this is not about health care — this is an anti-private-sector strategy!"

8:47 - After a long discussion of health care, onto immigration. Buttigieg says he wants illegally crossing the border into the US to be a crime only "if fraud is involved."

8:48 - Beto strikes a conservative note on immigration: "I expect that people who come here follow our laws, and we reserve the right to criminally prosecute them if they do not."

8:49 - Warren would "decriminalize" border crossings "to take away the tools that Donald Trump has used to break up families."

8:50 - At one point Klobuchar slurs her words so much I can't understand what she's saying. This is unfortunate given how little time she's getting to speak.

8:52 - Bullock says: "The biggest problem that we have with immigration is Donald Trump." Even if that's true, it seems like a weak argument for a candidate to make, since that doesn't tell us how he'd be better than any other Democratic president — none of them would be Donald Trump. Oh, I see when he gets another chance to clarify: he's saying that's why we don't need to decriminalize border crossings. Elizabeth Warren comes back: "So what you're saying is: ignore the law!"

8:55 - Tim Ryan stakes out the center on immigration: "If you want to come into the country, you should at least ring the doorbell!"

8:56 - Bernie Sanders brings back health care in the immigration context: "When I talk about health care as a human right, that applies to all people in this country."

8:59 - Onto guns. After Buttigieg's answer, Hickenlooper makes a seemingly bold statement — "This is the fundamental nonsense of government!" — but I'm not clear on what he's referring to. I don't know if he's attacking Buttigieg or agreeing with him.

9:02 - Gov. Bullock of Montana is asked how we can trust him on gun control when he just flip-flopped to a more liberal position last year. "Like 40% of American households, I'm a gun owner." But his nephew was shot to death on a playground.

9:04 - Bernie Sanders: "Nobody up here is going to tell you they have a magical solution to the crisis" of shootings. But didn't Beto just say he ... has a magic solution?

9:06 - On guns, Marianne Williamson says "we need a constitutional amendment," presumably to repeal the Second Amendment. And she doesn't trust the other candidates on the stage — we need to "start over with people who have not taken donations from any of these corporations."

9:12 - After a commercial break, Hickenlooper is saying Bernie Sanders's platform would be like Fed Ex-ing the election to Trump. Instead, the focus should be on Trump's incompetence: "Donald Trump is malpractice personified." Bernie Sanders points out that he won the 2016 primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin — 2 of the 3 states that ended up being decisive in electing Trump.

9:15 - Beto tries to shift the focus in the electability discussion: "There's a new battleground state: Texas."

9:17 - Elizabeth Warren denies that when she says she's "a capitalist," she means to imply she'd be more electable than Bernie Sanders.

9:19 - Elizabeth Warren has a memorable retort to Delaney's pragmatic line: "I don't understand why anybody goes to the trouble of running for the President of the United States just to talk about what we can't do and shouldn't fight for!" [ADDED: The New York Times asks if that's the "line of the night."]

9:20 - Bernie Sanders is the only one talking about the city they're in: "Detroit was almost destroyed by awful trade policy."

9:22 - Klobuchar: "We are more worried about winning an argument than winning an election."

9:24 - Delaney seems to have been getting more time to talk than the more popular Beto O'Rourke. Are the moderators feeling sorry for Delaney because of rumors his campaign is on the verge of collapse?

9:30 - I hope when I'm 77 years old, I'm vigorous and energetic enough to be yelling at the top of my lungs for 2 hours like Bernie Sanders. (When I was in the middle of writing that, Tim Ryan told Bernie: "You don't have to yell!")

9:33 - Bernie Sanders gets down to earth: "Ain't nobody in Congress who's more pro-worker than I am!"

9:35 - Amy Klobuchar on water contamination in Flint, Michigan: "I was just in Flint, and they are still drinking bottled water, and that is outrageous." On infrastructure, "you need a voice from the heartland."

9:39 - Beto calls out President Trump for racial rhetoric: "It is changing this country. Hate crimes are on the rise."

9:42 - Buttigieg is asked about the perception that he has problems with racial issues. He starts with what seems to be a carefully prepared line: "As an urban mayor serving a diverse community, the racial divide lives within me."

9:45 - Beto gets energized on the issue of race. He talks about how America has the world's strongest economy because it was "built on the backs of slaves who were brought here against their will," and he says he supports "Sheila Jackson Lee's reparations bill."

9:47 - Marianne Williamson, who supports reparations, is asked how she'd figure out what "assistance" should be given. She rejects that framing: "It is not 'assistance.' It is payment of a debt that is owed."

9:53 - Tim Ryan says the problem with Trump's approach to China is Trump has a "tactical" approach while China has a "strategy." China thinks 20 or 30 years in advance, while we're focused on a 24-hour news cycle.

9:57 - Beto says Trump's tariffs are "a huge mistake — they constitute the largest tax increase on the American consumer, hitting the working class and the working poor especially hard."

9:59 - Hickenlooper: "There is not a single example where a trade war had a winner. Trade wars are for losers." It seems like he has a plan for if he ever gets to debate Trump: tell Trump his policies are for "losers."

10:01 - I don't like when Buttigieg frames his policy views in terms of Christianity. He suggests Republicans are being un-Christian to oppose raising the minimum wage. That isn't the way to think rationally about economic policy.

10:04 - I'm inclined to agree with John Delaney that it would be better to increase the capital gains tax than to follow Elizabeth Warren's plan for a new "wealth tax." Delaney says the wealth tax would be challenged by lawsuits for years, and countries that have tried a similar policy have abandoned it. Warren has a weak response: she merely says it would be just a 2% tax on rich people's wealth over $50 million, which doesn't address Delaney's concerns about how it would actually work (or not work) in practice.

10:11 - Klobuchar is against some of the more extreme proposals to forgive student debt, which "would pay for wealth kids, for Wall Street kids, to go to college." She'd let people refinance their student debt.

10:12 - Bernie Sanders is asked how he's different from President Trump when they both say the US "shouldn't be the policeman of the world." Sanders on how he's different: "Trump is a pathological liar — I tell the truth!"

10:17 - Pete Buttigieg promises to leave Afghanistan in the first year of his presidency. "We are close to the first casualty in Afghanistan who was not yet born on September 11."

10:20 - Elizabeth Warren says we should announce a policy that the US will never be the first to use a nuclear weapon. Steve Bullock disagrees: "I wouldn't want to take that off the table." Warren looks stunned! Bullock then makes an emotional appeal to the city they're in: "I don't want to say, well, Detroit has to be gone before we would ever use that."

10:23 - Don Lemon asks Pete Buttigieg about the fact that he's the youngest candidate at age 37, and he's standing next to the oldest candidate, Bernie Sanders. (What about 89-year-old Mike Gravel?) The question is: "Does age matter?" Buttigieg has often talked about how we need "generational change," but he dodges the question: "I don't care how old you are. I care about your vision." For his part, Sanders says he'd help younger generations by making their student debt go away.

10:30 - Now onto the closing statements. Bullock seems a little drunk.

10:32 - Delaney says he has "big ideas like national service." Delaney has talked so much about being pragmatic and avoiding policies that are so extreme they'll turn off voters in the general election, but then he proposes this horrible idea.

10:36 - Hickenlooper's closing argument: "I'm as progressive as anybody up on this stage, but I'm also pragmatic. And I've done these things that other people have just talked about."

10:39 - Buttigieg says he has "good news and bad news." "First the bad news": "GDP is going up, and life expectancy is going down." Wait, is it bad that GDP is going up?

10:41 - Elizabeth Warren uses her closing statement to talk about going to a $50-a-semester college, which she ends up connecting to how her campaign is based on small donations.

10:42 - Bernie Sanders tells us about an unusual experience he had just two days ago: he took 15 people with diabetes from Detroit to Canada, and they bought insulin for a tenth the price they had been paying.

Wanna feel old?

Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind is older today . . . than the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single was . . . on the day Nirvana released Nevermind.

Dog who knew over 1,000 words dies

The New York Times reports:

John W. Pilley, a professor emeritus of psychology at Wofford College, taught his Border collie to understand more than 1,000 nouns. . . .

For three years, Dr. Pilley trained her four to five hours a day: He showed her an object, said its name up to 40 times, then hid it and asked her to find it. He used 800 cloth animal toys, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and an assortment of plastic items to ultimately teach Chaser 1,022 nouns.

Chaser died on Tuesday at 15. She had been living with Dr. Pilley’s wife, Sally, and their daughter Robin in Spartanburg. Dr. Pilley died last year at 89. . . .

“What we would really like people to understand about Chaser is that she is not unique,” [John Bianchi’s daughter, Pilley Bianchi, who helped him train Chaser,] said. “It’s the way she was taught that is unique. We believed that my father tapped into something that was very simple: He taught Chaser a concept which he believed worked infinitely greater than learning a hundred behaviors.”

Ms. Bianchi said that her father’s experiment was “uncharted territory” in animal cognition research, pointing to news media coverage calling Chaser “the world’s smartest dog.”

“Her language learning is very high-level, powerful science,” she said. . . .

If Chaser had 30 balls, Ms. Bianchi said, she would be able to understand each one by its proper-noun name and also as a part of a group of objects. “She learned the theory of one to many and many to one, which is learning one object could have many names and many names can apply to one object or one person,” she said.

Greg Nelson, a veterinarian at Central Veterinary Associates in Valley Stream, N.Y., said humans were learning that animals have a deeper understanding of the world around them.

“People have always been under the belief that animals respond to commands based on a rewards system,” he said. “Learn limited commands and tricks, then get a treat.”

But “they do have a language among themselves, spoken and unspoken,” he added. “And it’s apparent that they can understand the human language probably in much the same way as we learn a foreign language.”

You can say the communication in this video starting at 2:08. At first I thought she could be responding to Dr. Pilley's nonverbal cues, as when the owner would move in the direction of the frisbee while asking her where the frisbee is. But then she really does seem to be understanding language when he says: "Chase, to Powderpuff [a doll's name], take frisbee."



Dr. Pilley says in the video:

These kinds of findings definitely show that lower animals, especially dogs, are not just machines with blood. They have emotions, they have mental processes.

There's a better demonstration here, as a seemingly skeptical Neil deGrasse Tyson asks Chaser to find certain toys that are all out of Tyson's view (after 2 minutes in). "I asked Chaser to find 9 toys, and she got every one right. And . . . I chose the toys from this huge pile; neither John [Pilley] nor Chaser saw which ones I picked." She also made a logical inference: when Tyson asked her to find a doll she had never heard of before, "Darwin," out of a group of 9 toys, she chose the only toy she had never seen before.



So I think those videos prove the dog really did understand the words. In the past, I've been willing to call BS on claims of animals with supposedly sophisticated language understanding that seem like scams, as I did with Koko the gorilla (see my last comment in this Facebook post, quoting a skeptical Slate article).

With these kinds of claims of an animal understanding language, there are always going to be those who question whether the animal really has that linguistic understanding, or if what's really going on is the animal is picking up on other cues from the owner. So it's important to take that skepticism seriously and address it directly, in order to show people how much the animal understands.

The speech we would have heard if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin couldn't return from the moon

50 years ago today, July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked on the first-ever trip to the moon, where they would land days later, on July 20, before returning to earth on July 24.

Because they were risking their lives, a speech had to be prepared for President Nixon to read in the event they got stuck on the moon with no way back.

Here's the full speech, written by future New York Times columnist William Safire. The last sentence ... oh man! 😢

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

(Photo credit: Universal History Archive/UIG/SH. Photo via Variety.)

Conan O'Brien improvises a whole episode when his only guest cancels at the last minute

"So much TV today is pre-programmed, worked out ahead of time . . . but that's not this show tonight! . . . We're figuring it out as we go. . ."

My 20 favorite Seinfeld episodes

The pilot of Seinfeld first aired 30 years ago today, July 5, 1989.

Here are my 20 favorite Seinfeld episodes (with the season number in parentheses):

1. The Pez Dispenser (3)

2. The Fix-Up (3)

3. The Opposite (5)

4. The Red Dot (3)

5. The Soup (6)

6. The Soup Nazi (7)

7. The Outing (4)

8. The Junior Mint (4)

9. The Deal (2)

10. The Invitations (7)

11. The Big Salad (6)

12. The Limo (3)

13. The Contest (4)

14. The Bizarro Jerry (8)

15. The Cartoon (9)

16. The Hamptons (5)

17. The Library (3)

18. The Stall (5)

19. Male Unbonding (1)

20. The Reverse Peephole (9)

And the winner is … season 3, with 5 of the 20 episodes, including the top 2.



(Image from "The Pez Dispenser.")

Why we hear about gay pride and not straight pride

If you’re straight, and you’ve told everyone all you want about how great your spouse/marriage/relationship is without worrying you might be ostracized over it, then you don’t need to ask: Why can’t I take pride in my sexual orientation? You’ve already enjoyed the freedom to express your pride, without having to feel the burden of simultaneously representing not only yourself but also a lot of other people in a fight against discrimination. And if you’ve only thought of straight pride as a rhetorical response to gay pride rather than as a genuine response to a real need, that stands in contrast with gay pride, which is not just a talking point but a way to counteract how people have been shamed and attacked for being gay.

Sad days for Mad magazine

The fold-in magazine is folding.