Here's a taste of the CAWP appearances, interesting news, and �� takes over the past two weeks:

With the "too close, Joe Biden!" scandal still in the news, Debbie Walsh told the AP that "There's a bit of 'not getting it' when it comes to the gender story here."

More from the 2020 Is Already Exhausting beat: Northeastern University's School of Journalism published a media sentiment analysis showing women candidates for the president are receiving less positive coverage than their male counterparts. One reason for that discrepancy might be, as Vogue points out, that male candidates get coverage of their favorite books, their musical talents, or the long, contemplative runs they take, but women candidates can't seem to get the same sort of stories out about their hobbies, pets, and passions. Peter Beinart writes in The Atlantic of one bizarre double-bind women face: the more competent they seem, the less they're seen as inspiring, while Jill Filipovic writes in The New York Times about another: "[Women] are seen as too young and inexperienced right up until they are branded too old and tedious."

In less headdesk news, The Lily put together profiles of six of the more under-the-radar new congresswomen among the record number of freshman women in the U.S. Congress, including the 116th Congress's sole new Republican woman. Speaking of which, freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar was interviewed by film director Ava DuVernay in Interview, where she talked about her path to Congress and her discomfort with being pigeon-holed as a historic "first." Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was honored by the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum with this year's Profile in Courage Award for her work in passing the Affordable Care Act and in shepherding in the most diverse Congress in history. Roll Call wrote about Republican Representative Susan W. Brooks, who is also the NRCC's recruitment chair, and how she's working to prioritize women and people of color in her efforts. Roll Call also spoke to CAWP's Kelly Dittmar about the better working environment for congressional staffers being fostered by virtue of the fact that more women are in office: "The extent that women are calling out gender biases broadly in the institution, and are just challenging stereotypes and ways in which women's power may be questioned within the institution, that may be helpful to all the women in that institution," Dittmar said.

After conservative media took comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar about post-9/11 profiling of Muslim-Americans out of context and created an enduring controversy out of them, including a front page New York Post story juxtaposing Omar's comments with the World Trade Center on fire, President Trump joined in with a pinned tweet displaying a video that similarly edited together footage of the freshman House member and the 9/11 attacks. Rep. Omar soon faced vitriolic and violent criticism online, and released a statement that said she had experienced a rapid increase in death threats in the immediate wake of Trump's tweet. The Washington Post detailed the controversy with an accompanying video describing how her comments were stripped of context. Charles M. Blow wrote in The New York Times about Donald Trump's proclivity for targeting minority women for his most demeaning and inflammatory criticism, from Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Frederica Wilson and Ilhan Omar; Blow sees this focus as a strategic decision to combine and amplify the potencies of sexism and racism. This incident calls to mind the research of Rutgers political scientist  Mona Lena Krook, who chronicled the rise of violence, harassment, and intimidation against women in politics, as well as a recent article by Maggie Astor in The New York Times about the online vitriol faced by women candidates above and beyond that aimed at their male counterparts. Another Times piece from just this weekend breaks down the ways that women in general face regular harassment online and how internet cultures and social media platforms contribute to this harassment and fail to provide women security in their online lives. In 2018, Vermont State Representative Kiah Morris left office because of persistent violent online trolling, and digital harassment is reportedly a factor that deters women from seeking office in the first place; unchecked, these sorts of targeted online harassment campaigns will remain a significant obstacle to women's full political participation.

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, along with Democratic colleagues Catherine Cortez Masto and John Tester, introduced a new bill, the Not Invisible Act of 2019, to help fight the epidemic of violence and trafficking faced by Native American women in the United States. Indigenous women are "being killed or trafficked at rates far higher than the rest of the U.S. population," and in some places the murder rate of indigenous women is 10 times higher than the national average. Read more at The New York Times.

Black women are three to four times more likely to die during childbirth than white women, and Black mothers are twice as likely to lose an infant to a premature death. To combat this startling epidemic, freshman Rep. Lauren Underwood and her House colleague Alma S. Adams co-founded the Black Maternal Health Caucus, which was quickly joined by other members including Ayanna Pressley and Elijah Cummings. Rep. Lauren Underwood is... 1. A woman 2. Black 3. A medical professional...and she's parlaying her background and experiences, her "identity" if you will, into a policy focus that addresses a crisis affecting American families. Representation matters. It isn't about platitudes. It's about policies.