This is getting ridiculous. On August 27, Trump staged a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, supposedly to commemorate the deaths of 13 soldiers in a suicide bombing that took place during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was not an official event, even though Trump tried to pretend it was. He was apparently invited to the private ceremony by 2 of the deceased soldiers’ families.
As we all know by now, a woman representative of the cemetery tried to stop Trump’s people from filming and photographing in Arlington’s Section 60, because federal law forbids it. Two Trump staff members verbally abused the woman and roughly pushed her aside. Later they claimed that she was mentally ill.
A report was filed with police, but the woman declined to prosecute because she feared reprisals from Trump’s goons and thugs. There are still many questions about this incident, chief among them: why has no reporter or other witness revealed the names of the staffers who attacked the woman? And why has the army refused to provide any further information?
Arlington National Cemetery
Now, a week later, Trump himself is claiming the incident never happened. David Kurtz from TPM’s Morning Memo: Trump: ‘It Was A Made Up Story.’
Since we last touched base on Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery fiasco, none of the big six outstanding questions have been answered – but Trump may have given himself a new self-inflicted wound.
With the Army declaring the case “closed” after the cemetery staffer in fear of MAGA reprisals declined to press criminal charges over the alleged incident and with a holiday weekend allowing attention to drift away from the story, Trump took the curious step of reigniting the firestorm by publicly issuing a complete denial Tuesday that any kind of altercation took place.
Not only did it not happen but the story was “made up,” Trump claimed, by “Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.” It was, in Trump’s telling, just a “BEAUTIFUL DAY OF HONOR” with “no fights or problems.”
Former President Donald Trump denied Tuesday there was a conflict or “fighting,” during his visit to Arlington National Cemetery last week, calling it a “made up story,” though Army officials said one of their employees “was abruptly pushed aside” by Trump campaign officials.
“It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad,” Trump posted on his Truth Social website using the sobriquet he has coined for Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. “She made it all up to make up for the fact that she and Sleepy Joe have BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS for the INCOMPETENT AFGHANISTAN Withdrawal – THE MOST EMBARRASSING DAY IN U.S. HISTORY!!!”
Back to David Kurtz at TPM:
So now we have a situation where the Trump campaign disparaged the cemetery staffer has having a “mental health episode,” said she shouldn’t be in her job, suggested she suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome – and now Trump himself is claiming nothing even happened.
At the same time, the Army seems desperate to make this all go away.
The Army is currently sitting on the police report filed by the cemetery staffer recounting her version of the incident where she was reportedly verbally abused and shoved aside by two Trump campaign staffers when she tried to enforce cemetery rules against political activities.
As of late last week, Democratic staffers on the Senate Armed Services Committee “have been directly communicating with Army officials about the incident, and are in the process of seeking and receiving the information in the report and about what happened,” according to Greg Sargent.
At the at same time, House Democratic staffers attempting to looking into the matter are “frustrated” about resistance from the Army they’re running into, Sargent reports:
“Meanwhile, senior House Democrats are privately pushing Army officials to say more clearly what laws or regulations they think may have been broken and to reveal more details about what happened, another aide says, noting that Democratic staffers are encountering resistance, leaving them frustrated.”
With Trump issuing a blanket denial of any incident even occurring, is the Army going to release the police report and provide more details about the incident or leave the cemetery staffer twisting in the wind?
Apparently, even the U.S. Army is intimidated by Trump.
….[D]espite a week of headlines, there’s one critical aspect to this story I feel is being ignored, even though it is central to the very essence of Trump’s warped campaign.
The people closest to Trump allegedly shoved and verbally abused a woman — because that’s what they do.
And when the woman complained in a formal statement to the U.S. Army, Team Trump gaslit her by accusing her of being a psycho — seemingly part of an intimidation campaign which was meant to scare the accuser from pressing criminal charges.
Steven Cheung
This blatantly sexist bullying of the Arlington employee has worked — just as it’s worked so many times for Trump himself during his decades-long trail of sexual abuse and harassment allegations, and just as violence and gross mistreatment of women hasn’t thwarted the careers of Trump’s male-dominated inner circle.
We shouldn’t let the other unseemly aspects of Trump’s behavior at one of America’s most sacred places obscure the fact that rank misogyny is the lifeblood of this authoritarian crusade to retake the White House, and that contempt for women saturates everything they do. It runs the gamut from taking away reproductive rights and ridiculing any female who doesn’t become a “tradwife,” to the inner circle’s 100% tolerance policies toward sexual harassment, to the ultimate goal of creating doubts that any woman — first Hillary Clinton, now Kamala Harris — is fit to lead the United States.
In the Arlington affair, the circumstances and setting are different, but the Team Trump response carries powerful echoes of practically every time Trump or his subordinates have been accused of misconduct involving women. Consider the best-known case: that of Manhattan writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department-store dressing room in 1996 and has won civil court judgments over both the assault — which the judge characterized as a rape — and the campaign of defamation surrounding it.
In both the Carroll case and the physical attack at Arlington, Trump insisted the woman was making it all up. And you can hear the echoes of what Trump and his lawyers falsely said about Carroll — that she was a lying political operative — in spokesman Steven Cheung’s outrageous claim about the cemetery employee that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and in campaign chair Chris LaCivita branding her as “despicable.”
These aggressive deny-and-defame tactics have enabled a billionaire-turned-president to brush off more than two dozen credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault over his career, and — in a demoralizing moment of clarity about the brute force of misogyny in America — defeat the first major-party woman nominee in 2016, even after he was caught on tape bragging about his propensity for grabbing female private parts.
Of course J.D. Vance fits in with this gang of woman-haters, as Bunch goes on to discuss.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres says “it’s going to be a challenge” for Trump to chip away at Vice President Harris’s big lead among women.
“The real challenge right now for Republicans is whether they can perform sufficiently well among men to overcome the deficit among women. Given the prominence of abortion in this year’s race and Trump’s past statements about women, the traditional gender gap could become a gender chasm,” he warned.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Sunday showed Harris with a huge lead over Trump among women, 54 percent to 41 percent, while Trump enjoyed a more modest 51 percent to 46 percent lead over Harris among men.
Especially concerning for Republicans, the ABC/Ipsos poll showed Harris’s standing among women had jumped significantly compared to before the Democratic convention in Chicago, when she led Trump by only 6 points among women.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Thursday also showed Harris with a 13-point lead among women, 49 percent to 36 percent, and Trump with a smaller lead among men voters.
Both polls showed Harris with a 4-percentage point overall lead nationwide.
Trump has tried to win over college-educated and suburban women by moderating his position on abortion and backing free in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments.
But those proposals are meeting a backlash from anti-abortion conservatives, and GOP strategists are skeptical about how much they will influence women who have already moved away from Trump….
“We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a video of him at Arlington National Cemetery speaking to the families of U.S. troops killed at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan, posted on TikTok, Aug. 28
This TikTok of Trump’s controversial visit to Arlington, where he marked the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan overseen by President Joe Biden,has been viewed more than 11 million times. Federal law prohibits election-related activities at military cemeteries, but Trump’s entourage pushed past a cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump’s aides from bringing cameras, according to the Army.
Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita
Those cameras appear to have recorded Trump saying these words to the Gold Star families. (The TikTok shows him talking to families as the words are spoken as a voice-over.) In his phrasing, it sounds as if no troops were killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency. That’s false, though as we will show, there was an 18-month gap with no fatalities across Trump’s and Biden’s combined presidencies.
The Facts
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to queries about why Trump says there were no fatalities over 18 months. Using the Defense Casualty Analysis System, we first reviewed every 18-month period in Trump’s four years as president, looking only at deaths in hostile action in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, not accidental deaths such as in a vehicle or helicopter crash. There was no such period.
Then we focused on the last 18 months of his presidency — July 20, 2019, to Jan. 20, 2021. That makes the most sense since Trump referenced Biden’s taking over. The Defense Department database showed 12 deaths from hostile action in that period. We double-checked with the news releases issued by the Pentagon in that period and confirmed the 12 names.
The last two deaths occurred on Feb. 8, 2020. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez of San Antonio and Antonio Rey Rodriguez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, both 28, werefatally ambushed by a rogue Afghan policeman. Trump, along with Vice President Mike Pence, flew to Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived in the United States.
Kessler also notes that Trump initially agreed with Biden’s withdrawal policy, and he (Trump) also bragged that he was the one who set up the process of withdrawal.
In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. “We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,” Trump told reporters at the time. “They’d like to cease violence also.”
Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.
Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,” he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.
At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. “I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,” he said. “Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”
A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Trump’s lawyers challenged the decision, filing a notice of appeal late Tuesday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump and his lawyers “will continue to fight to move this Hoax into federal court where it should be put out of its misery once and for all,” his campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.
Trump has been doing everything he can to avoid his upcoming sentencing in New York, with his attorneys filing a last-ditch motion last week to get the hush money case transferred to federal court. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith filed a new superseding indictment that adjusts for the Supreme Court’s landmark presidential-immunity decision.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
A few days later, Trump’s attorneys responded by proposing a timeline for resolving the Jan. 6 federal case that extends well beyond the November election.Last week, the former president’s attorneys filed a removal notice that requested that his hush money case be transferred to federal court and out of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s hands, about two weeks before his scheduled sentencing on Sept. 18.
This is the second time Trump’s defense team has asked to transfer this case; a district-court judge denied its first attempt earlier this year. However, this time around, Trump’s team has the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision to point to. In a 65-page notice, the lawyers argue that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was “flawed” and that he used evidence that should not have been admissible because it’s related to “official acts” covered by presumptive immunity.
“Post-trial removal is necessary under these circumstances to afford President Trump an unbiased forum, free from local hostilities, where he can seek redress for these Constitutional violations,” write Trump’s attorneys.Just three weeks ago, his attorneys also requested that Merchan delay Trump’s Sept. 18 sentencing. Trump has repeatedly tried and failed to get the judge to recuse himself from the hush money trial as well. On Tuesday, Bragg’s office responded to Trump’s removal request, noting that proceedings in state court can continue even as the federal courts consider the request.
That case appears to be decided, but apparently Trump is trying to appeal once again. Back to the Slate article:
The Special Counsel Files a New Indictment
The Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity decision was considered a big win for Trump, but Jack Smith isn’t giving up yet. Last week, the special counsel filed a new superseding indictment in his federal election-interference case against the former president.
The indictment raises the same four counts against Trump as the original did, including for obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge that could be affected by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Fischer v. United States. That decision narrowed the scope of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—it included a section that seemed to broadly outlaw any obstruction of an official proceeding, and the justices ruled that it should apply only to interference with official documents. Smith’s determination to keep the obstruction charges indicates he’s willing to risk litigating the issue further in court.
The superseding indictment also eliminated any mention of former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and cut back significantly on how much it discusses former Vice President Mike Pence’s role. (Trump’s conversations with former DOJ officials and advisers are now considered “official” acts that are covered by absolute immunity and thus cannot be used as evidence, while his conversations with Pence appear to be covered by presumptive immunity.) [….]
Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a hearing Thursday to determine the next steps in this case. Her biggest priority will be to conclude what portions of Smith’s indictment fall under core official presidential acts and what do not. In order to make those decisions, she could find that evidentiary hearings are necessary and require that witnesses testify, though Smith has reportedly been hoping to avoid this kind of minitrial….
The special counsel and Trump’s attorneys filed a joint proposal late last week that laid out two very different timelines for Smith’s federal election-interference case. The former president also indicated that he plans to file a series of motions challenging Smith’s superseding indictment and his appointment to special counsel.
Trump’s attorneys suggested a timeline in which Chutkan considers a series of motions through the end of this year—stretching well past November’s presidential election. Their timeline would have Chutkan considering a motion to dismiss based on presidential immunity in mid-December and pretrial litigation continuing through spring and fall 2025. The defense also acknowledges Smith’s new superseding indictment, arguing that it “correspondingly requires time to review the new charging instrument as [Trump] determines what steps and procedures to undertake regarding, among other motions, his Presidential immunity defense.”
We are going to have to get Kamala Harris elected if we want any chance of Trump finally facing legal accountability.
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.
Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”
Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.
Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”
Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.
After the call, First Liberty sent a recording of the 45-minute conversation to some of its supporters. ProPublica and Documented obtained that recording.
Have a nice Wednesday, everyone!!
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Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery scandal is still alive and kicking. This is unusual for Trump. The media generally works to normalize even his grossest violations of laws and norms. In fact, the major media have mostly ignored this episode too, but independent outlets and social media have kept it going. So I’m still reading, thinking, and writing about it.
Berlatsky’s argument is that we may not yet be at the point of being ruled by a dictator, but people are acting as if fascism is already here, because they are afraid of standing up to Trump. hey know he and his thugs will make their lives a living hell. Berlatsky writes that “Fascist vigilante harassment chills resistance.”
This week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump oozed orangely into Arlington National Cemetary to take a picture of himself standing over veteran’s graves with an oleaginous smile and a big thumb’s up.
You may think this is tasteless. And you’d be correct. It’s also illegal. It’s against federal law to campaign in Army National Military Cemeteries.
An Arlington official attempted to enforce the rules, and told Trump he couldn’t take his grotesque pictures there. Trump campaign thugs then verbally abused the official and pushed them. When the official filed an incident report, the Trump campaign issued a statement insulting them and claiming they were mentally ill.
The official decided not to press charges, because they were afraid that if they did, they would be targeted, harassed, and worse by Trump supporters, according to the New York Times.
Again, an Arlington official, doing their job, tried to enforce rules that are supposed to apply to all. They were roughed up and insulted. And they are afraid to stand up to Trump and his campaign because they know that if their opposition to Trump becomes public, their life will be destroyed.
This isn’t an idle fear. Trump has sicced his fascist dittohead minions on election workers whose only crime was refusing to throw the election for Donald Trump. They were doxed and harassed at their home, and one had to go into hiding. Trump also organized a violent coup, in which his supporters attacked the capital building, terrorizing representatives and workers, and five people died. News organization have found a list of incidents in which Trump supporters committed violence explicitly in his name.
Standing up to Trump is frightening. If he singles you out, his supporters will try to hurt you and your loved ones.
Trump and his campaign flaks are quite aware of this dynamic, and they use it to their advantage. The campaign said it could release video backing up its version of events. It hasn’t done so, probably because the video shows that the Arlington worker was in the right. But if the video shows the Arlington worker’s face, that worker will be tracked down by Trump supporters. “We have video” isn’t evidence; it’s a threat.
And Trump’s threats, implied and otherwise, worked. The official was scared to challenge the leader of a fascist movement for fear of fascist abuse.
Berlatsky argues that “the press is intimidated too.” Is that why the fact checkers have been bending over backwards to explain away Trump’s false claims? I hope you’ll read the rest at the Substack link above.
The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.
I like your hair, by Natalia Shaloshvili
Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”
The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him, and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”
She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”
For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”
But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer….
A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.
Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”
Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared with what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.
Once again, I have to ask why anyone would vote for this repulsive creature for any office, much less president?
Of course, Trump has taken no responsibility whatever for his disgusting behavior. In fact, yesterday he even claimed that he had no idea who posted the video ad on his TicTac account. He suggested that the gold star families who invited him may have done it–or maybe it was Vice President Harris’ campaign!
By Rakhmet Redzhepov
Rep. Jamie Raskin is now demanding answers about the events in Arlington Cemetery.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, demanded Friday a “full account” of a reported incident between Donald Trump and his campaign and their collective appearance this week at Arlington National Cemetery.
Trump and his campaign faced intense backlash following a reported physical altercation with a cemetery official and faced questions over whether they may have violated federal law banning campaign materials from being photographed or filmed in certain sections of the cemetery.
A TikTok video showed Trump in Section 60, where the altercation purportedly occurred, smiling and giving a thumbs-up. Trump has said the family of a soldier laid to rest in the section invited him, and his campaign has said they were allowed to ring a photographer.
“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” spokesman Steven Cheung said in the statement.
laws were violated.
In a letter to Christine Wormuth, secretary of the Army, Raskin referenced reports of a “verbal and physical altercation” between members of the Trump campaign and cemetery staff.
“It appears that the Trump campaign refused to abide by Arlington National Cemetery’s absolute prohibition on ‘filming for partisan, political, or fundraising purposes’ and ‘abruptly pushed aside’ Cemetery staff trying to ‘ensure adherence’ to these rules,” he said in the letter obtained by Punchbowl News.
In doing so, he asked the Army secretary to hand the committee an incident report and deliver a briefing on what happened, “including whether Trump campaign staff violated federal law or Cemetery rules and whether the Trump campaign informed the families of servicemembers buried at the Cemetery that their gravestones would be used in Mr. Trump’s political campaign ads.”
Here’s an example of how Trump intimidates the media. At a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday a Trump supporter actually broke down the barriers to the press area.
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A man at Donald Trump’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stormed into the press area as the former president spoke and was surrounded by police and sheriff’s deputies before eventually being subdued with a Taser.
The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz….
The man made it over a bicycle rack ringing the media area and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers.
The crowd cheered as a pack of police led the man away, prompting Trump to declare, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?”
Moments later police handcuffed another man in the crowd and led him out of the arena. It was not immediately clear whether that detention was related to the initial altercation.
At the time of the incident, Trump was criticizing the media for its coverage of his campaign and the election more broadly—and, in particular, attacking CNN’s recent interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris.
As the man was detained and removed from the rally, the former president quipped, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally?” per the Associated Press.
Trump is right to be worried about the Harris-Walz interview on CNN. It got great ratings.
It was a strong night for CNN, which has struggled recently to reach the ratings of Fox News or MSNBC. Although it’s a much lower audience rating than Harris and Walz’s big DNC speeches, it’s still a promising stat for the Harris campaign, continuing a trend of her events receiving higher viewership than those of her opponent.
When Trump gave a town hall on CNN in May 2023, one of his first proper campaign events of the 2024 election cycle, only 3.3 million viewers tuned in. And more recently, when Trump did his first joint sit-down with running mate JD Vance in July, they drew an estimated 4 million viewers. All of those cable ratings, however, still trail the average audience for the network’s nightly news broadcasts, which tend to bring in around 7-8 million viewers.
The Harris-Walz campaign can also boast a more popular national convention this year; 20.1 million people tuned into the third day of the DNC where Walz gave his speech, for instance, while only 17.9 million viewers turned in for JD Vance’s big moment….
The ratings gap seemed particularly disappointing for Trump, considering how much pride he openly took in his RNC ratings. After his speech this year, he posted on Truth Social that his ratings were the “best and most successful in history,” even though viewership was trailing behind both his 2020 and 2016 performance.
Meanwhile, Harris’ convention ratings actually outdid Joe Biden’s in 2020. It’s a performance that gives credence to the idea that the Harris-Walz campaign has more energy and enthusiasm behind it, whereas that long-speculated Trump fatigue might have finally started to set in.
Trump fatigue set in for me long ago. If only he would just disappear.
There are a couple of interesting articles on J.D. Vance today. I got into the NYT even though I cancelled my subscription, apparently because I clicked the link at Memeorandum.
Donald J. Trump knew that JD Vance could take a punch. But during their first week together on the campaign trail, the former president wondered just how many hits his new running mate could absorb.
The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.
A month later, polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Mr. Vance continues to grow — but Mr. Trump could not be happier.
The reason: Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside a campaign still shaken by President Biden’s sudden exit from the race.
Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.
But beyond Mar-a-Lago, early returns on Mr. Vance are less enthusiastic. Polls show that he effectively amplifies Mr. Trump’s political strengths but that he also magnifies his weaknesses. Mr. Vance’s approval rating improved by nearly double digits among the nation’s least educated and poorest voters since joining the Republican ticket — but plunged by even wider margins among college graduates and independent women, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.
How those conflicting opinions either resolve themselves or become further inflamed will help determine whether Mr. Trump ends the race in less than 10 weeks with a second presidential term or a second electoral defeat.
There’s more at the link, if you can get past the paywall.
Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.
The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.
Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.
In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.
Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.
Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.
Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.
On the newly found interview:
In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.
By Sharyn Bursiic
Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in [their] own community”.
At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.
Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.
“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”
“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.
I can see why Trump likes Vance. They both hate women. There’s more at the link, and The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
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Every day I wonder why any American would support Donald Trump. His first term as “president” was a disaster. Among other horrors, he mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic and allowed hundreds of thousands of our citizens to die unnecessarily. He alienated our allies and sucked up to Vladimir Putin and other dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, China’s Xi jinping, and Turkey’s Tayip Erdogan. He frequently demonstrated his lack of respect for members of our military who risk their lives to protect their country. And of course he brazenly committed numerous crimes as “president.” How can anyone vote for this man for any public office?
Yesterday Trump once again demonstrated his contempt for U.S. military members who sacrificed their lives in service to their country.
Two members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, where the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony, NPR has learned.
A source with knowledge of the incident said the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing in a section where recent U.S. casualties are buried. The source said Arlington officials had made clear that only cemetery staff members would be authorized to take photographs or film in the area, known as Section 60.
When the cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering Section 60, campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside, according to the source.
Trump participated in an event to mark the third anniversary of a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdrew from the country; 13 U.S. service members were killed in the attack. The Trump campaign has blamed President Biden and Vice President Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, for the chaotic withdrawal.
In a statement to NPR, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, strongly rejected the notion of a physical altercation, adding: “We are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made.
“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Cheung said in the statement.
A “mental health issue?” Why on earth was Trump participating in this event? He doesn’t hold any federal office. Apparently some relatives of fallen soldiers invited him.
Officials at Arlington national cemetery have filed a report over the behavior of members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff who reportedly shoved and verbally abused an employee during a “crass” photo opportunity for the Republican presidential candidate.
The officials confirmed that a confrontation took place at the Virginia cemetery on Monday after the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 US servicemen and -women killed in a 2021 suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan.
In a statement, Arlington acknowledged one of its representatives became involved in the altercation with two Trump staffers, telling them that only cemetery representatives were allowed to take video and photographs in Section 60, an area where recent US casualties mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried….
The staffers “verbally abused and pushed the official aside” as the person attempted to prevent them accompanying Trump into the section, according to NPR, which first published the allegation on Tuesday night.
Following the wreath-laying, photographs from his visit showed Trump grinning and flashing a thumbs-up sign as he stood at the graves of several of the fallen military members, imagery that drew swift rebuke.
“The hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery are the final resting place of our American heroes. Trump defiled Arlington National Cemetery by doing a crass campaign stunt over the grave of a dead hero. And his campaign staff acted like bullies,” the Democratic California congressman Ted Lieu posted to X.
Trump couldn’t care less about the men and women buried in Arlington Cemetery.
In other news from yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment of Trump in the January 6 case in the DC Circuit. As Andrew Weissmann pointed out last night on MSNBC, Trump has now been criminally indicted by 5 grand juries.
Special counsel Jack Smith Tuesday announced that a grand jury had reindicted former President Donald Trump on four charges related to his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt to honor the direction given by the U.S. Supreme Court in its July ruling holding that Trump was immune from criminal prosecution for “official acts.”
“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment,” Smith wrote in a separate filing to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is handling the case. “The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings.”
Trump’s first public reaction to the new indictment was to repost a message on Truth Social by Mike Davis, a former Senate lawyer who supports him, that ends with: “Bottom Line: There’s no chance this case goes to trial before the election. Trump wins. Jack Smith fired. Case closed.”
About an hour later, Trump personally responded with a five-post screed on his social media platform in which he called Smith “deranged” and claimed, without any evidence, that the prosecution was being directed by President Joe Biden’s White House. He also repeated his lie that Democrats had cheated to win the 2020 election.
He ended with: “PERSECUTION OF A POLITICAL OPPONENT!”
More on the indictment:
The “superseding” indictment, as it is known, charges Trump with the same four counts as in the original indictment that was filed a year ago: Conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to deprive millions of Americans of their right to have their votes counted.
It follows the same narrative structure, laying out how Trump spent months after losing his 2020 reelection bid laying the groundwork for the violent assault on the Capitol by his mob of followers.
“Despite having lost, the defendant ― who was also the incumbent president ― was determined to remain in power,” Smith wrote. “So, for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election [that] he had actually won. These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.”
But Smith’s new indictment does not reference Trump’s efforts to enlist federal government employees in the executive branch — who all technically report to him. For instance, the original indictment had mentioned a Department of Justice official whom Trump considered making his attorney general because of his willingness to tell state officials that voter fraud had occurred. The new indictment does not include the official as a co-conspirator, but does still include the other five individuals who were not in government.
The Supreme Court ruled in July that Trump had immunity from prosecution for “official” acts, and specifically cited the ability to hire and fire executive branch employees to carry out his wishes.
The revised indictment, now at 36 pages compared to the 45-page original, still centers on Trump’s scheme to have allies in key states won by Biden create fake Electoral College slates and send them to the Senate. The plan was for then-Vice President Mike Pence to use the fake Trump slates instead of the legitimate slates for Democrat Joe Biden and declare Trump the winner.
Special counsel Jack Smith defiantly re-injected the question of Donald Trump’s bid to steal the 2020 election into the intensifying end game of this year’s White House race.
By trying to rescue his case after his initial indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, Smith signaled that he is determined to bring the former president to justice — even though there will be no trial before Election Day.
“I think this is basically Jack Smith saying, ‘I still got this’” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a CNN legal and national security commentator, said after the special counsel on Tuesday filed a modified indictment endorsed by a new grand jury.
His move underscored the huge personal investment Trump has in winning the presidency in November: He not only would return to the nation’s top office, but would also gain the authority to halt this and another federal case against him and head off any sentences that could include jail time if he is convicted.
“This is a very big year, it is a very important election,” former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori told CNN’s Alex Marquardt on Tuesday. “This case is at stake in the election, because if Trump wins, it is going away. If Trump loses to Harris, this case is going to proceed to some sort of conclusion.”
The conservative majority’s ruling earlier this summer that Trump could be covered by immunity from criminal prosecution for some of his actions as president represented one of the most consequential moments in Supreme Court history and has massive implications for the US system of government. Many mainstream scholars blasted the decision as contrary to the spirit of the country’s founders in that it appeared to hand significant unchecked powers to the presidency.
The decision also sent shockwaves through an already tumultuous presidential race, since it appeared to offer an ex-president who already believed he was all powerful the chance to pursue strongman rule if he wins November’s election. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris criticized the decision in her convention speech last week: “Consider, the power he will have … Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States.”
Smith’s move also creates other profound political, legal, and constitutional overtones at a critical national moment, 10 weeks from an election that could profoundly reshape the country and that may again test its institutions to the limit.
In this Xitter thread, I went through everything that had been added or removed from the superseding indictment against Trump, based on this redline. The changes include the following:
Removal of everything having to do with Jeffrey Clark
Removal of everything describing government officials telling Trump he was nuts (such as Bill Barr explaining that he had lost Michigan in Kent County, not Wayne, where he was complaining)
Removal of things (including Tweets and Trump’s failure to do anything as the Capitol was attacked) that took place in the Oval Office
Addition of language clarifying that all the remaining co-conspirators (Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and — probably — Boris Epshteyn) were private lawyers, not government lawyers
Tweaked descriptions of Trump and Mike Pence to emphasize they were candidates who happened to be the incumbent
New language about the treatment of the electoral certificates
The logic of Blassingame is why Jack Smith included these paragraphs describing that Trump and Pence were acting as candidates.
1. The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was a candidate for President of the United States in 2020. He lost the 2020 presidential election.
[snip]
5. In furtherance of these conspiracies, the Defendant tried–but failed–to enlist the Vice President, who was also the Defendant’s running mate and, by virtue of the Constitution, the President of the Senate, who plays a ceremonial role in the January 6 certification proceeding.
As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s not clear that adopting the Blassingame rubric will work for SCOTUS, even though they did nothing to contest this rubric.
That’s because Chief Justice Roberts used Pence’s role as President of the Senate to deem his role in certification an official responsibility, thereby deeming Trump’s pressure of Pence an official act. Smith will need to rebut the presumption of immunity but also argue that using these conversations between Trump and Pence will not chill the President’s authority.
Read the rest at Emptywheel.
Another big story from yesterday: New video came out about Nancy Pelosi’s role on January 6.
Nancy Pelosi spent the duration of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack focused on ensuring Joe Biden would be certified president as soon as possible. Then she turned her attention to Donald Trump.
“I just feel sick about what he did to the Capitol and the country today,” Pelosi said as she slumped, visibly exhausted, in the back of her SUV in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 7. “He’s got to pay a price for that.”
Pelosi’s comment was included in about 50 minutes of unaired footage captured by her daughter, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, who was at the former speaker’s side at key moments on Jan. 5, 6 and 7 in 2021. POLITICO has reviewed the footage, which HBO turned over this week to the Republican-led House Committee on Administration.
Pelosi’s office on January 6
The panel is conducting an investigation aimed at undermining the findings of the Jan. 6 select committee, which found Trump singularly responsible for the havoc his supporters unleashed on the Capitol, and spotlighting the security failures that exacerbated the violence. The panel has reviewed video from various sources, including security footage and the clips from HBO.
It’s the most detailed glimpse yet of Pelosi’s rushed evacuation from the Capitol, showcasing her deep discomfort at being forced to flee from the rioters — who she feared would see the evacuation as a twisted victory — and her insistence that Congress return to finish certifying the election. It also showed how her focus quickly shifted to impeaching Trump for a second time, an effort that was ultimately successful, as well as preparing to fire Capitol security officials who she believed mismanaged the threats to the building….
As she moved, Pelosi immediately inquired as to whether then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had approved a request for the National Guard. Her chief of staff, Terri McCullough, responded that he had. Moments later, a security official at Pelosi’s side informed her the pro-Trump mob had “already breached the Capitol.”
At first, Pelosi scolded security officials for forcing her evacuation. “I did not appreciate this,” she said. “I do not support this.”
“If they stop the proceedings, they will have succeeded in stopping the validation of the presidency of the United States,” she added. Pelosi then lit into Capitol security officials for failing to anticipate the attack.
“How many times did the members ask, ‘Are we prepared? Are we prepared?’ We’re not prepared for the worst,” Pelosi continued. “We’re calling the National Guard, now? It should’ve been here to start out. I just don’t understand it. Why do we empower people this way by not being ready?”
Of course we now know that Trump loyalists prevented the National Guard from being deployed for several hours. There’s much more at the link.
Hours after a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and assaulted dozens of police officers in an attempt to reach members of Congress, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then the House speaker, referred to the then-president as “a domestic enemy.”
The comments came in video shot by documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, Pelosi’s daughter, that HBO recently turned over to Congress. NBC News on Tuesday reviewed more than 30 minutes of video from the roughly 48 hours surrounding the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, including video that showed Pelosi being led away from the building by her security detail as she pressed her staff members to get the National Guard to respond to the Capitol.
The newly surfaced remarks go further than the public ones she made on Jan. 7, when she said Trump had “incited an armed insurrection against America” and “instigated” an attack that would “forever stain our nation’s history.”
“We take an oath to protect our country from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” she said. “There is a domestic enemy in the White House. And let’s not mince words about this.”
The previously unaired video also shows Pelosi taking responsibility for not pressing law enforcement officials harder about their preparations ahead of the attack.
“Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” Pelosi asked. “They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepared for more,” she said as she was being escorted away by security on Jan. 6. “It’s stupid that we should be in a situation like this.”
Pelosi would not have had independent authority to summon the National Guard, and the Capitol Police Board is in charge of security for the U.S. Capitol. The head of the Capitol Police resigned shortly after the riot, as did the House sergeant-at-arms, and the video shows Pelosi in discussions with her staff about getting resignations from both officials.
“They thought these people would act civilized? They thought these people gave a damn? What is it that is missing here in terms of anticipation?” she added….
The comments also indicate that Pelosi was skeptical about the motivations of the law enforcement community, which is generally conservative-leaning. (A high-ranking FBI official, for example, was warned in the hours after the attack that many within the bureau were “sympathetic” to the Capitol rioters.)
“Shame on us,” Pelosi said as her security unit whisked her off to nearby Fort McNair, where several congressional leaders ended up on the night of Jan. 6 when the facility turned into a command center for those in the order of presidential succession. “Shame on us. I’m suspicious of them and their motivations, tell you the truth.”
That’s three big stories to chew on. What do you think?
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Piere Auguste Renoir, Sleeping girl with a cat, 1880
There’s not a lot happening in the news today, so I’m just going to give you some odds and ends, some some serious some humorous, some creepy or crazy.
First up, a few follow-ups to the exciting and successful Democratic National Convention.
The energy emerging from the Democratic National Convention and Vice President Harris’s hot streak is making Republicans increasingly nervous.
Thursday marked the culmination of what was unthinkable just a month ago: A coronation for a new party leader who Democrats are ardently behind.
Former President Trump and Republicans, meanwhile, are grappling with the whiplash of going from the predictions of a landslide just a few short weeks ago to surveys showing Harris has shaken up races up and down the ballot and closed the gap with Trump.
“In some of the swing states … people are becoming increasingly concerned that the momentum is moving in the wrong direction,” said one Senate Republican, adding that the nervousness among Republicans is “real” at this stage.
Just a month ago, Republicans were riding higher than at any point of the campaign after President Biden’s disastrous performance in a debate sent Democrats into a tailspin. Trump accepted the GOP nomination in Milwaukee, where lawmakers and delegates were bullish that the former president would not only return to the White House, but do so in a convincing manner — and polling backed them up.
Now that thinking is firmly out the door.
Democrats’ four-day gathering in Chicago prompted comparisons to the energy around former President Obama’s landmark 2008 presidential bid. It could also hand Harris another slight polling bump as the calendar turns to September after she closed out the convention with a fiery speech heavy on biography and history that also took the fight to Trump.
“They are beginning to realize this is a wrestling match. There’s not going to be any knockout punch and they’ve got to get the best grip they can find, and it’s all state specific,” the Senate Republican continued.
Kamala Harris just showed us the promise of a post-MAGA future. Now it’s up to the voters to decide to take us there.
In her rousing convention speech on Thursday, Harris offered many olive branches to right-leaning independents and Republican voters. She vowed toughness on immigration and crime. She promised to transcend the nation’s divisions. She vowed to govern for all Americans and transcend faction or party. She made numerous appeals to voters with decidedly right-leaning values.
But, in mulling what Harris means by all this, it’s crucial to appreciate what she did not do. Harris offered all this outreach to voters outside the core Democratic coalition without making serious concessions to the ideological preoccupations we associate with MAGA-style right-wing populism. There was no real accommodation with what might be called The World According to MAGA.
Instead, Harris treated Trumpism and the MAGA movement as forces that must be decisively repudiated—and unequivocally left behind.
How could Harris appeal extensively to voters on the other side—which by definition includes tens of millions of people who voted for Donald Trump—while insisting on a firm national renunciation of many MAGA voters’ apparent aspirations and beliefs? This tension, I think, helps explain why her appeals came across as so richly complex.
Harris extensively reassured swing voters on many fronts. For those struggling economically, she offered populist, broadly appealing policies to curb health care and housing costs. To those preoccupied with crime and the border, Harris recounted her history as a tough prosecutor and vowed stringent border security. Harris delivered extensive paeans to middle-class struggles and values like family, community, homeownership, and faith. As William Kristol notes, she even strongly endorsed American exceptionalism.
Yet Harris was also absolutely unsparing in her takedown of Trump. And it’s important to appreciate this criticism for what it really was. In numerous ways, Harris portrayed the broad MAGA worldview as something in need of comprehensive repudiation.
It’s a long piece. You’ll need to head over to TNR to read the rest of Sargent’s argument.
Black and White Cat II, by Muriel Mougeolle
Could the tide be turning on Republicans’ efforts to control what children read and think?
Republicans are confronting a decisive moment in the battle over public education: proving they can still win a culture war.
School board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a conservative vanguard whose members popularized restrictions on classroom library books, are losing elections in Florida and some swing states. Republican leaders who rallied against critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues recently faced recalls in red pockets of California.
And in the presidential race, Democrats are playing offense. This week’s party convention in Chicago featured liberals attacking conservative candidates as “weird” and denouncing so-called book bans.
Former President Donald Trump is expected to lean into school politics next week at a Moms for Liberty summit, making the case that culture war issues still resonate with core supporters. Republicans show no signs of changing their strategy. But the party faces new challenges from a Democratic agenda — embodied by vice presidential nominee Tim Walz — that is redirecting the divisive education issues promoted by conservatives during the pandemic into a vehicle for highlighting free school lunches and affordable child care.
“We’re in the middle of a cultural revolution in America, and one of the biggest battlegrounds is the schools,” Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said in an interview. “We didn’t start this fire, but we’re going to put it out.”
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said there is “a lot of mutual consensus” between the Republican nominee’s beliefs on education “and what Moms for Liberty stands for.”
But several Democratic National Committee speakers found ways to leverage social issues, including Walz, a former teacher who used them to pivot to a law he signed as Minnesota governor providing free school meals to all students.
“We made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day,” Walz said Wednesday at the DNC. “So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”
Read the rest at Politico.
Here’s the latest on Trump’s reaction to the changed political landscape.
Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office?
But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country.
While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.
Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead over Biden evaporated, with Harris opening up a clear, if narrow, lead. The vice-president’s tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.
Since Harris assumed the mantle of the presumptive Democratic candidate, Trump has claimed to be better-looking than the vice-president, questioned whether she is really Black and attacked her laugh as that of “a lunatic”.
The former president has also characterised Harris as both a communist and a fascist, and described Harris as “dumb” but then told CBS he didn’t mean it as an insult because it was “just a fact”.
“I don’t think she’s a very bright person. I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that,” he said.
This is a long article, so here’s a bit more:
Trump seems particularly obsessed with the size of the crowds at Harris’s rallies, drawing derision for falsely claiming she used artificial intelligence to fake the turnout.
When he’s not worried about size, Trump is vexed by Harris’s looks. After the vice-president appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Trump compared her appearance to Sophia Loren and his wife, Melania, before drawing a comparison with his own features.
By Pierre Bonnard
“I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he declared to an audience of thousands who were more amused than convinced….
At a rally in Pennsylvania a week ago, Trump went as far as rambling on about rambling.
“I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he told the crowd.
Even some of Trump’s most loyal fans were disturbed by that performance. Joan Long travelled from New York with her husband, Billy, to see the former president speak.
“I honestly can’t say I know why he starts talking about how to pronounce names. What does that have to do with the election?” she said. “And I wish he would stop talking about Kamala’s looks.”
There’s quite a bit more in this vein at the Guardian link. This is the kind of insanity from Trump that the NYT and WaPo ignore or try to normalize.
The supposedly big news yesterday was that Bobby Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump at a rally in Arizona.
In the spring of 2023, not long after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his chaotic presidential campaign, I asked him a straightforward question. What do you see as more harmful to America: another term of Joe Biden, or Donald Trump returning to power? “I can’t answer that,” Kennedy replied.
This morning, Kennedy finally stopped being cagey. He announced that he was suspending his campaign and throwing his support to Trump. During a rambling, nearly hour-long speech at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Phoenix, Kennedy shared that the two had been talking for more than a month, and that he had visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago. “In a series of long, intense discussions, I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues,” Kennedy said. He correctly noted that his announcement would cause “difficulty” for his family members. “Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and family hold most dear,” five Kennedys said in a statement this afternoon. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
Kennedy’s evolution from member of a Democratic dynasty to a soldier in the anti-democratic MAGA movement will no doubt confuse casual observers. Trump once called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of his famous family, and Kennedy once suggested that Trump was a sociopath. The main reason for Kennedy’s conversion may be pure desperation. This summer, Kennedy made overtures to both major-party candidates; only Trump reciprocated. But the Trump-Kennedy pairing makes a certain kind of sense. To be sure, Kennedy doesn’t share Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment, nor does he lean on white-identity politics or nationalism. Instead, it’s Kennedy’s conspiratorial, anti-establishment, burn-it-down ethos that makes him fit into the MAGA universe….
As Kennedy lashed out against the Democratic Party this afternoon, he sounded like a jilted lover searching for answers. He noted that he had attended his first Democratic National Convention at the age of 6, in 1960. And he attempted to draw a contrast between the party of his father and uncle, and today’s “shadowy DNC operatives” who staged “a palace coup” against Joe Biden. The Democratic establishment, he claimed, had weaponized government agencies against him and his campaign. He accused Biden of colluding with media companies to “censor” him and bemoaned his relative lack of cable-news interviews. He also sounded daft. “In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” Kennedy said.
Three key factors forced Kennedy’s withdrawal. The first and most obvious was money. Despite tapping Nicole Shanahan, the wealthy Silicon Valley businesswoman, to be his running mate, Kennedy’s fundraising had recently dried up. Recent FEC filings showed that his campaign had just $3.9 million on hand at the end of July. The second factor was ballot access. Nick Brana, the campaign’s ballot-access director, told me that, as of today, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket was certified in only 22 states. Kennedy was disqualified from the New York ballot after a recent court case, making the goal of all 50 states a virtual impossibility. The third factor was perhaps the most obvious: His core proposition had become moot once Biden dropped out.
All along, Kennedy’s pitch had relied on the fact that a sizable chunk of voters didn’t want a Biden-Trump rematch. But after Harris took Biden’s place as the nominee, she began to win back some of the disaffected Democrats, independents, and undecideds who had “parked” their support in the Kennedy column. Kennedy’s polling average had fallen to about 5 percent, from a 2024 high of about 10 percent.
Intellectual cat, Olena Kamenetska-Ostapchuk
There’s been some suggestion that Trump may have promised Kennedy a job in Trump’s prospective administration in return for Kenedy’s support. That would be a quid pro quo, and would be illegal. Of course Trump couldn’t care less. Kennedy also tried to strike a bargain with the Harris campaign, but they refused to meet with him. Harris, unlike Trump, obviously knows that would be illegal.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign reached out to Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign to arrange a meeting about a possible role in her administration if he drops out of the race and endorses her, a Kennedy campaign official and a Democratic official told CNN.
The approach from Kennedy’s team occurred last week, and no meeting between the two candidates materialized, the Kennedy campaign official told CNN.
The effort to meet comes weeks after Kennedy and former President Donald Trump met in person during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the two discussed a possible role for Kennedy in a potential Trump administration in exchange for an endorsement.
Kennedy campaign staff also attempted to reach out to intermediaries for Ron Klain, former White House chief of staff for President Joe Biden, but those efforts were fruitless, the Kennedy campaign official said.
Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy—as I’ve referred to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. since we met freshman year at Harvard—have always had many features in common as well. Both are entitled playboy sons of northeastern wealth; both (in Michelle Obama’s words) were “afforded the grace of failing forward” as misbehaving, underachieving adolescents admitted to Ivy League colleges thanks to “the affirmative action of generational wealth”; both were reckless lifelong adolescents, both attention-craving philanderers and liars, both jerks. And Kennedy’s hour-long speech today was nearly as meandering and filled with lies as any average hour of Trump.
On the subject of reckless-adolescent entitlement, I’ve got one Bobby Kennedy anecdote to tell. But it’s actually relevant to his endorsement of Donald Trump for president and his apparent expectation of joining a second Trump administration….
By Olga Sevorova
My Bobby Kennedy story involves pharmaceuticals—not the legal, lifesaving kind, such as the vaccines he’s made a career of lying about, but the recreational kind….
As a teenager in Nebraska, I’d smoked cannabis and dropped acid before I got to Harvard in 1972. Sometime during my freshman year, I tried cocaine, enjoyed it, and later decided to procure a gram for myself. A friend told me about a kid in our class who was selling coke.
The dealer was Bobby Kennedy. I’d never met him. I got in touch; he said sure, come over to his room in Hurlbut, his dorm, where I’d never been, a five-minute walk. His roommate, whom I knew, was the future journalist Peter Kaplan—with whom I, like Kennedy, remained friends for the rest of his life. He left as I arrived. I wondered whether he always did that when Bobby had customers.
“Hi. Bobby,” Kennedy introduced himself. Another kid, tall, lanky, and handsome, was in the room. “This is my brother Joe.” That is, Joseph P. Kennedy II, two years older, the future six-term Massachusetts congressman….
He poured out a line for me to sample, and handed me an inch-and-a-half length of plastic drinking straw. I snorted. We chatted for a minute. I paid him, I believe, $40 in cash. It was a lot of money, the equivalent of $300 today. But cocaine bought from a Kennedy accompanied by a Kennedy brother—the moment of glamour seemed worth it.
As soon as he got back to his dorm room, Anderson got a call from RFK:
“Hello?”
“It’s Bobby.”
“Hi.”
“You took my straw!”
I realized that I had indeed, and had thought nothing of it. Because … it was a crummy piece of plastic straw. But Bobby was pissed.
“There are crystals inside it, man, growing. You took it.” Growing? The residue of powdered cocaine mixed with mucus formed crystals over time? What did I know. It reminded me of some science-fair project.
“So … you want the straw back?”
“Yeah, man.”
I walked it back to his room. He didn’t smile or say thanks. It was the last time I ever bought coke from anyone.
A famous rich boy selling a hard drug that could’ve gotten him—or, more precisely, someone who wasn’thim—a years-long prison sentence. His almost fetishistic obsession with a bit of plastic trash. His greedy little burst of anger cloaked in righteousness. His faith that he was cultivating precious cocaine crystals. In retrospect, it has seemed to me a tiny illustration of the child as the father of the man he became: fantastical pseudoscientific crusader, middle-aged preppy dick who takes selfies with barbecued dogs and plays pranks with roadkill bear cubs he didn’t have time to eat.
This is painful. This is horrible and feels a bit like a betrayal. But I have no choice. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was my friend and co-author. We wrote stories together for Rolling Stone. Bobby introduced my New York Times bestseller and wrote a chapter for Billionaires and Ballot Bandits. And, with Jesse Jackson, we co-authored the Number 1 selling adult single issue comic book of all time, Steal Back Your Vote.
But then, Bobby lost his mind.
It was truly scary. In 2012, Bobby had arranged a press conference about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Eleven oil rig workers were incinerated in the blow-out of a British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Palast investigations team discovered that, 17 months before that oil rig blew out in the Gulf, British Petroleum suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea. The oil company—with the connivance of then-Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice—covered it up.
It was a hell of a story, which I broadcast on prime time in Britain and Europe. I wrote a book about it, Vultures’ Picnic.
Here’s where Bobby comes in—and it gets weird. On the second anniversary of the blow-out, Bobby, a professor of environmental law, arranged for a major press conference to expose this story of BP’s blood-encrusted perfidy.
But then, Bobby cancelled the press conference, saying he heard the story had been told previously. Well, yes it had. You told it. Bobby, I was on the radio with you for an hour discussing the blow-out and its cover-up. Bobby had a national radio/TV show, Ring of Fire. He reviewed my book about the story. And strangest of all, Bobby was on my Democracy Now! Report about the blow-out. That Bobby had forgotten all these things was frightening—as if Leonardo DiCaprio had forgotten he was in a film about the Titanic.
Our investigator Leni Badpenny was listening in and she began making frantic cut-off gestures, to end a call with him. End it now! “Something’s wrong with him, or he’s just a jerk. I don’t know. But something’s really wrong and you don’t want your reputation destroyed by standing next to him when it goes wrong in public. Promise me we will never work with him, never see him again. I think he’s dangerous. I really do.” [….]
This was not the first incident. Bobby was a strong guy in his late fifties talking like a 92-year-old in a nursing home trying to remember his first date.
Since then, we’ve found out that Bobby had a worm in his brain—a real, live physical critter that somehow got inside his skull. I’m not sure about the connection because I’m not a brain surgeon and I don’t speak worm.
You can read the rest at the link. It’s not paywalled.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
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I’m on the third day of a some kind of stomach thing, so this post may be brief. I’ve been sleeping a lot, and last night I dozed off and slept through most of Doug Emhoff’s speech and all of Michelle and Barack Obama’s speeches. I’ll have to try and watch them later on. I did watch the ceremonial roll call of the states, and it was a lot of fun. The DNC played “walk up” songs and the state-by-state speeches were upbeat and enthusiastic.
Sure, there were big speeches from The Obamas, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention last night. But Tuesday at the DNC in Chicago felt more like a dance party than a buttoned-up political event.
DJ Cassidy strode on stage in a bright blue double-breasted suit and spun tunes for every state during the event’s ceremonial roll call, as they nominated Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the Democratic presidential ticket. Minnesota got “1999” by native son Prince, Kansas got “Carry on Wayward Son” by, well, Kansas. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen played as New Jersey weighed in.
See the whole list at the link. Unlike the Trump campaign, the Democrats got permission from all of the featured artists. In contrast, the Trump campaign yesterday posted a video with Trump walking from his plane to “Freedom,” by Beyonce, who gave Kamala Harris exclusive permission to use that song.
Barack and Michelle Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, delivering back-to-back speeches that eviscerated Donald Trump and urged Americans to reject the Republican nominee once and for all.
The former first lady, in one of the most memorable speeches in convention history, called on Democrats to drop the “Goldilocks complex” and work hard to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala, instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected,” she said.
Then, the former president — in a speech that evoked memories of his emergence into the American political consciousness and his own winning campaigns — said that the “vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided.”
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse,” Obama said.
Their speeches closed a night during which Democrats had sought to introduce Harris in more personal terms to Americans who are only now learning about the vice president, just a month after she ascended to the top of the party’s 2024 ticket.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff told the story of their relationship and why his children call the vice president “Momala.” Maryland Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks explained how Harris came to be someone she considered a friend and mentor.
CNN also summarized speeches by Republicans who now support Harris/Walz:
Throughout the night, the DNC featured former Republicans making the case for independents and Trump critics to vote for Harris.
One of the prime-time speaking slots went to Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, a self-declared lifelong Republican who said the Biden-Harris administration had delivered results for his conservative community.
“I have an urgent message for the majority of Americans who, like me, are in the political middle: John McCain’s Republican Party is gone, and we don’t owe a damn thing to what’s been left behind,” Giles said. “So let’s turn the page. Let’s put country first.”
Giles’ speech capped off a series of appearances Tuesday by Republicans, or people who’d left the party, rallying support for Harris….
Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump White House press secretary and chief of staff to former First Lady Melania Trump, described herself as a “true believer” who spent her holidays at Mar-a-Lago. But she resigned on January 6, 2021, after Trump failed to immediately move to stop his supporters from attacking the US Capitol.
Grisham used her remarks to condemn Trump’s behind closed doors, telling that audience that he mocks his supporters in private and has called them “basement dwellers.”
“He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth,” she said.
The one sour note was Bernie Sanders, who apparently has no sense of humor and rarely if ever smiles. According to the BBC, he didn’t “feel the Bern” from the audience.
During back-to-back speeches, Barack and Michelle Obama mixed gags with serious exhortations to Democrats to get out and vote in November – pointing out that Ms Harris was in a close race with Donald Trump.
Mr Obama characterised the Republican presidential candidate as being selfish and dangerous, quipping that he was obsessed with crowd sizes.
And Mrs Obama mocked Trump for his use of the term “black jobs” on the campaign trail. She suggested that Trump might himself be seeking one of those jobs – in a reference to her husband’s previous tenure of the White House.
By contrast, Ms Harris represented “hope”, Ms Obama said, echoing her husband’s campaign messaging from 2008.
On Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders gave his own speech on Tuesday night – but the energy in the arena was described as “minimal” by the BBC’s North America correspondent, Anthony Zurcher. A murmur of people talking could be heard at the same time.
That is in contrast to the hero’s welcome that the veteran senator received in 2016, the year he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then, his supporters streamed into the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.
Eight years later, Mr Sanders could still be witnessed railing against oligarchs and corporate interests, but the atmosphere was very different.
One explanation was that the building was filled with delegates who originally supported Joe Biden – rather than the Sanders faithful. But it could also signal that the senator has no clear successor to lead the Democratic progressive left.
The first night of the Democratic National Convention averaged 20 million viewers across 13 networks, surpassing the audience for the initial day of the Republican National Convention, according to Nielsen.
The numbers are for the 10 p.m. ET to 12:30 a.m ET time frame, as the proceedings went way overtime, finishing with the address by President Joe Biden.
The DNC audience was greater than the first night of the party’s convention in 2020, when it drew 19.75 million viewers. But it was down significantly from 2016, when the DNC drew 25.95 million.
The first night of the DNC on Monday drew 15.32 million 55 and over, 3.51 million in the 35-54 demo and 851,000 aged 18-34, per Nielsen.
MSNBC topped the networks, drawing 4.6 million viewers, compared to 3.2 million for CNN, 2.8 million for ABC News, 2.4 million for Fox News, 2 million for CBS News and 1.8 million for NBC News. The figures are also Nielsen via MSNBC.
Harris and Waltz in Milwaukee last night
While the convention was taking place in Chicago, Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz appeared in Milwaukee a the same venue where the RNC was held–and it was packed to the rafters with an estimated 15,000 people. Harris gave her acceptance speech to both audiences simultaneously through a TV hookup.
Harris accepted the party’s nomination for president in Milwaukee after the roll call vote of delegates in Wisconsin’s neighboring state of Illinois at the DNC. It was the Democratic presidential nominee’s third visit to the state since she took over the top of the ticket in late July.
The Journal Sentinel had live coverage from both the Harris/Walz and Vance events on Tuesday. Below are all the highlights from the political events in Wisconsin today.
Since the screen just outside Fiserv Forum that was supposed to show a stream of the DNC was malfunctioning, rally goers migrated to screens in the nearby Drink Wisconsinbly bar and the screen outside the Mecca Sports Bar and Grill to watch second gentleman Doug Emhoff speak out of Chicago.
Gloria Boileau of Milwaukee said Harris brought “electric” energy inside Fiserv Forum. She spoke excitedly about the Harris-Walz ticket.“Knowing that they are the common people that we are and they will be in the White House representing us, that was electric,” Boileau said.
In a delicate balancing act, Harris and the parade of Democrats speaking on her behalf all week are looking to harness the exuberance that has swept over their party since President Joe Biden stepped aside while making clear to their supporters that the election will be a fierce fight and frustratingly close.
“So much is on the line in this election,” Harris said Tuesday in Milwaukee, where she spoke at a professional basketball arena in battleground Wisconsin as the convention continued 90 miles away in Chicago. “And understand, this not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are higher.”
And in Chicago hours later, former President Barack Obama offered his own caution: “Make no mistake, it will be a fight,” Obama said. For all the energy and memes and rallies that have defined the campaign since Harris became the nominee, Obama said, “this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.” [….]
And while the theme of Tuesday was “a bold vision for America’s future,” the disparate factions of Harris’ evolving coalition demonstrated, above all, that they are connected by a deep desire to prevent a second Trump presidency.
Convention organizers dubbed the theme for Wednesday “a fight for our freedoms,” a nod to the concept around which Harris has organized her campaign. She frames Trump as a threat to abortion rights and personal choices, but also to democracy itself.
Walz’s job Wednesday when he accepts the nomination is to introduce himself to Americans who had never heard of the Minnesota governor until Harris plucked him from relative obscurity to join her ticket. His goofy, folksy, Midwestern dad aura has endeared him to Democrats and balanced Harris’ coastal background.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ election effort has raised around $500 million since she became the Democratic presidential candidate, sources told Reuters, an unprecedented money haul that reflects donor enthusiasm going into the Nov. 5 election.
Four sources familiar with the fundraising effort told Reuters that figure had been banked for Harris in the four weeks since she jumped into the race on July 21.
Campaign cash is critical for advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts that help bring people to the polls and persuade undecided voters to swing a candidate’s way.
Harris entered the fray after President Joe Biden stepped aside from the top of the Democratic ticket, unleashing floods of funding that had dried up in the weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate against Republican Donald Trump.
Harris’ team raised $310 million in July, bringing the total amount of money raised by her and Biden before he dropped out to more than $1 billion, the most rapid crossing of that fundraising threshold in history, according to the campaign.
Trump’s campaign said it raised $138.7 million in July and had cash on hand of $327 million. The former president’s campaign outraised Biden in the second quarter.
The Harris-Walz campaign effort to calcify the renewed enthusiasm from their party at the top of the ticket is seeing their biggest week of mobilization of the entire election cycle as the party’s national convention charges on in Chicago.
Ahead of the convention, the campaign launched what they characterize as a “weekend of action,” where over 10,000 volunteers barnstormed battlegrounds, making near 900,000 calls and knocking on more than 100,000 doors, contacting in sum over a million voters, per details first shared with ABC News. The campaign says that they were able to recruit over 24,000 volunteers.
Yet the most ambitious investments in organization will come at the latter half of the week — with the campaign hosting its largest telephone banking night of the cycle Wednesday, planning to launch 4,000 volunteers to work the lines.
On Thursday, the campaign will host 500 watch parties across the country in every state as Harris delivers her formal acceptance speech as the party’s newly minted nominee, a process that has come together in the short span of a month.
The campaign also held volunteer trainings and launched organizing resources on Monday and Tuesday….
These efforts are part of the campaign’s new efforts to mine the honeymoon buzz around Harris and Gov. Tim Walz, moving on turning any energy into action; mission critical with what continues to be a dead-heat race between Harris and former President Donald Trump several major battleground polls. This also comes as several grassroots voter groups host large-scale virtual telethons of sorts drawing big celebrity names to recruit volunteers and entice hefty donations, often netting millions of dollars each call.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Here’s a bit 
A month later, 
“This is a very big year, it is a very important election,” former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori told CNN’s Alex Marquardt on Tuesday. “This case is at stake in the election, because if Trump wins, it is going away. If Trump loses to Harris, this case is going to proceed to some sort of conclusion.”
The newly surfaced remarks go further than 
I’m on the third day of a some kind of stomach thing, so this post may be brief. I’ve been sleeping a lot, and last night I dozed off and slept through most of Doug Emhoff’s speech and all of Michelle and Barack Obama’s speeches. I’ll have to try and watch them later on. I did watch the ceremonial roll call of the states, and it was a lot of fun. The DNC played “walk up” songs and the state-by-state speeches were upbeat and enthusiastic.
“I have an urgent message for the majority of Americans who, like me, are in the political middle: John McCain’s Republican Party is gone, and we don’t owe a damn thing to what’s been left behind,” Giles said. “So let’s turn the page. Let’s put country first.”
“So much is on the line in this election,” Harris said Tuesday in Milwaukee, where she spoke at a professional basketball arena in battleground Wisconsin as the convention continued 90 miles away in Chicago. “And understand, this not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are higher.”
Harris is also working to mobilize supporters to volunteer for the campaign. ABC News: 
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