Last night, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz held their biggest rally yet in Glendale, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. The crowd numbered around 15,000 people. Once again, the atmosphere was joyful and enthusiastic, with the crowd cheering lustily. Later last night, Trump spoke to a much smaller crowd, in a large venue with hundreds of empty seats. There was no joy at his sad rally.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rallied a packed arena outside Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday – drawing perhaps the largest Democratic crowd of the election cycle this year.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, her running mate and the local leaders who joined them on stage whipped up the crowd, discussing immigration, abortion rights and Indigenous sovereignty.
Noting the Indigenous leaders in the room, Harris also said: “I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination.” Indigenous voters are credited with helping deliver Arizona to Joe Biden in 2020; the state is home to 22 federally recognized tribes.
At one point during her speech, Harris was interrupted by protesters chanting “free, free Palestine” and other messages in support of Gaza. She stopped her speech to address the protesters.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we are hearing from. Let me just speak to that for a moment and then I’ll get back to the business at hand,” she said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.” Her statement represented a noticeable change in tone from her approach to Gaza protesters in Detroit on Thursday.
Harris and Walz took the stage at the Desert Diamond Arena, a venue that can hold 20,000 people. Although official estimates are not yet available, the Harris campaign confirmed that more than 15,000 people attended the Phoenix rally. On stage, in front of attendees waving signs that read “Coach!”, Walz said the rally “might be the largest political gathering in the history of Arizona”.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” he added.
Other Harris campaign events this week that have drawn crowds of up to 15,000, invoking the ire of Donald Trump, who claims to have “spoken to the biggest crowds”.
The Harris-Walz rally represents a renewed push to put the Sun belt back on the map for Harris’s still young campaign. Before Friday night, the state appeared to be leaning red, with Trump leading Harris by single digits in recentpolls. But by the evening of the rally, Harris and Trump appeared neck and neck in the state, with polling from FiveThirtyEight showing Harris’ 44.4% closely following Trump’s 44.8%.
Polls on Friday morning showed Harris narrowly leading Trump nationwide.
Vice President Kamala Harris drew on her prosecutorial background to make her first expansive pitch on immigration to border-state voters as she and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, attracted thousands to a campaign rally in Arizona during their tour of battleground states.
Harris, the former attorney general of California, reminded the crowd that she, as a law enforcement official, targeted transnational gangs, drug cartels and smugglers.
“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said in front of a crowd of more than 15,000 in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix. “So I know what I’m talking about.”
Harris promoted a border security bill that a bipartisan group of senators negotiated earlier this year, which Republican lawmakers ultimately opposed en masse at Republican nominee Donald Trump’s behest.
“Donald Trump does not want to fix this problem,” Harris said. “Be clear about that: He has no interest or desire to actually fix the problem. He talks a big game about border security, but he does not walk the walk.”
Trump won’t be happy with the latest swing state polls.
A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.
The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters in each state, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.
The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week that Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high school teacher, as her running mate for November’s Democratic ticket.
It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 82-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.
Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.
The findings, published on Saturday by the Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election….
While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.
The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.
Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to regain the White House.
A new poll of likely Nevada voters found Vice President Kamala Harris with a nearly 6 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump — the largest lead for a Democrat in any presidential poll of Nevadans this cycle.
While Nevada polls have been relatively scarce since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the vice president appears to have closed the gap that existed between Trump and Biden, who had not led Trump in a single public poll taken in the state since October 2023.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of Nevada in late July found Harris with a 2 percentage point lead in the head-to-head matchup — Democrats’ first leading poll of the cycle — and the Cook Political Report moved Nevada back into the “toss-up” category Thursday after previously categorizing it as “lean Republican.”
This latest poll, conducted by Decipher Ai’s David Wolfson, a pollster and Columbia University lecturer, sampled 991 likely voters across Nevada from Aug. 3-5 in a SMS/text-to-web poll on the presidential and House races. The statewide margin of error is 3 percentage points and between 6 percentage points and 7 percentage points for House races….
On the presidential ballot, Harris garnered 49.2 percent support while Trump received 43.6 percent. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received only 3.9 percent of the vote. Kennedy’s vote share is lower than the 8 percentage points to 10 percentage points he had been receiving, on average, when Biden was on the ballot. In an interview, Johnston said Kennedy’s polling fade reflects what typically happens to third-party candidates as the election nears.
Harris’ lead in this poll may be an outlier, but it mimics Biden’s position at this point in the cycle in 2020 when FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed he led in Nevada by about 6 percentage points. Biden ultimately won the state by about 2.4 percentage points.
Harris has received some major endorsements. From CNN:
Harris gains major endorsements: The nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket. It is the first time LULAC has endorsed a presidential. candidate in its almost 100-year history. Culinary and bartenders unions in Las Vegas also endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket Friday.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed Harris this week.
More than 13 percent of Americans, or roughly 41 million people, have worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at some point in their lives. That includes Kamala Harris, who worked at a restaurant for a summer while she was in college.
Harris mentioned her brief stint on the fryer when she joined the picket line with fast food workers in Las Vegas in 2019 and during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in April. (Her order? “Quarter pounder with cheese and fries,” and barbecue sauce for dipping if she gets McNuggets).
Now, the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign is nodding to her summer job to highlight her upbringing and a platform to boost American workers that stands in stark contrast to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who “has no plan to help the middle class — just more tax cuts for billionaires,” according to a recent ad.
McDonald’s is all over influential Americans’ resumes (former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also worked in McDonald’s restaurants), but service worker labor unions and fast food employees have been leading nationwide efforts to improve working conditions for lower-wage workers, including calls to boost the federal hourly minimum wage to at least $15.
They could soon have a powerful advocate in one of their former coworkers.
Harris — who has earned endorsements from several influential unions, including Service Employees International Union, which supported the nationwide Fight for $15 campaign — stood with striking McDonald’s workers and protesters as she was launching her first presidential campaign.
“If we want to talk about these golden arches being a symbol of the best of America, well, the arches are falling short,” she said from Las Vegas in June 2019. “We have got to recognize that working people deserve livable wages.”
“I did the french fries and I did the ice cream,” she told workers.
“There was not a family relying on me to pay the rent, put food on the table and keep the bills paid by the end of the month,” she added. “But the reality of McDonald’s is that a majority of the folk who are working there today are relying on that income to sustain a household and a family.”
But there’s also a very practical reason for Harris to avoid showing any support for that type of language: Any comments or signs of approval she makes could further delay or complicate the pending federal criminal charges Trump is facing. That includes the Jan. 6 and 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
If Harris wins the election in November, Trump’s Jan. 6 case — though weakened by the Supreme Court — will continue to move toward trial. As sitting vice president in the administration that appointed the attorney general with oversight of the case, any comments Harris makes related to the trial could be fodder for the former president’s lawyers to argue in court that her comments interfered with Trump’s due process rights. That includes any suggestion that locking up Trump would be an explicit goal (as Trump repeatedly said about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign).
When a “lock him up” chant broke out at a Harris rally in Wisconsin this week, she said to supporters, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that,” and used a similar line when the same chant broke out at another rally. “Our job is to beat him in November,” she said.
Harris, a former prosecutor herself, has been cautious in her references to the array of civil and criminal cases that Trump has faced in recent years. Harris is aware of the impact she could have on Trump’s pending federal cases and has surrounded herself with Justice Department veterans — including her brother-in-law, Tony West, a former top DOJ official, and former Attorney General Eric Holder, who vetted her vice presidential candidates.
This is important, because Trump’s DC case on January 6 and election subversion is active again and back in the capable hands of Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Late today, lawyers in the Special Counsel’s office and lawyers for Donald Trump filed the joint status report that wasn’t due until tomorrow in the Trump election interference case in the District of Columbia. The Special Counsel advised the court that it “continues to assess the new precedent” laid down by the Supreme Court creating the doctrine of presidential immunity and went on to ask the court for an additional three weeks to file “an informed proposal regarding the schedule for pretrial proceedings moving forward.” Trump’s lawyers didn’t oppose Jack Smith’s request. Now the timeline is up to Judge Chutkan.
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
Part of the answer comes in the pleading itself, where Smith relates that under the relevant portion of the special counsel regulations, he is required to consult with other components in DOJ before moving forward: “A Special Counsel shall comply with the rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies of the Department of Justice. He or she shall consult with appropriate offices within the Department for guidance with respect to established practices, policies and procedures of the Department, including ethics and security regulations and procedures. Should the Special Counsel conclude that the extraordinary circumstances of any particular decision would render compliance with required review and approval procedures by the designated Departmental component inappropriate, he or she may consult directly with the Attorney General.”
Here, the parties’ task is to provide the court with a schedule for moving forward, but it’s deciding what events belong on that schedule that is problematic. Smith has an indictment that consists of four counts, 45 pages of allegations, and a mountain of evidence.
Click the link to read the rest.
In Trump news, people are still talking about the former “president’s” so called “press conference.”
Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. His rallies and press conferences are rich sources of material, fountains of molten weirdness that blurp up stuff that would sink the career of any other politician. By the time they’re over, all of the attendees are covered in gloppy nonsense.
And then, once everyone cleans up and shakes the debris off their phones and laptops, so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what TheAtlantic’seditor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.
Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.
Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states. (When asked how he would vote in Florida’s abortion referendum, he dodged the question, which suggests that maybe not everyone is happy.)
He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30times hers at his rallies. Harris recently spoke to approximately 15,000 people in Detroit; 30 times that would be nearly half a million people, so Trump is now saying that he’s having rallies that are five times bigger than the average crowd at a Super Bowl—bigger, even, than Woodstock—and somehow fitting them all into arenas with seats to spare….
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said. And then, referring to the crowd that gathered at his behest on January 6, he compared it to the 1963 March on Washington: “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours: same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The March on Washington drew a quarter million people, almost six times the number that showed up during the attack on the Capitol. Trump agreed that official estimates said his crowd was smaller than King’s. He pressed on anyway: “But when you look at the exact same picture and everything is the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to go from Lincoln to Washington—and you look at it, and you look at the picture of my crowd … we actually had more people.”
Nichols goes on to recount Trump’s story about going down in a helicopter with San Francisco’s Willie Brown (Brown says this never happened.) and also the media’s attempts to make sense of Trump’s rambling rants. He concludes:
The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
The man who almost crashed in a helicopter with Donald Trump told POLITICO Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown — despite the former president’s repeated insistence it was Brown.
It was Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, who said in an exclusive interview late Friday that he remembers the near-death experience well. He and others believe it happened sometime in 1990.
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden, who is 95 years old, was in touch with Trump and his team during the 1990s when the flamboyant Manhattan developer was trying to build on the site of the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Holden represented the district at the time and supported the project.\
In the interview, Holden said he was watching Trump’s press conference on Thursday when the former president claimed that Brown was aboard during the white-knuckle helicopter ride.
In fact, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino. In the lobby at Trump Tower, Holden says he was greeted by several people as “senator,” salutations that miffed the host.
“He said, ‘You know I own this building but nobody seems to know who I am,’” Holden remembered the mogul saying.
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Head over to ProPublica to read the whole thing.
That’s it for me. What’s on your mind today?
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“The Mar a Lago Presser was one for the ages. Donald found his way out of his basement to assure the masses he was sharp as ever as he didn’t even nod off once.” John Buss. Repeat 1968
Today, I’m sharing the incredible number of actions being taken to ensure your vote does not count. One of the incredible recent patterns in national Presidential Elections is that Republican candidates cannot get the majority of the vote. This is why a few swing states get all the attention.
My undergraduate degree was your basic liberal arts degree with a Major in History and minors in Political Science and Economics. All three areas are essential to know what it means to be an American, to vote, and to recognize that a lot of our history, governance, and wealth distribution was built on protecting slavery, stealing land and lives from our Indigenous, and ensuring that entitled White Men are in charge. Some may be technically illegal now, but their impact and the dynamics remain.
I want to share some of the past to understand the immense wealth and effort put into play by billionaires Elton Musk, Harlin Crowe, and Paul Weyrick, which concentrates on political power by getting what they want through strategies that don’t include getting votes. This includes wining and dining the two most despicable Associate Justices sitting on the Supreme Court.
The Presidency is determined by a few states that move the Electoral Vote in one direction. I’ve written about this a lot. There are a lot of movements that would either reform or eliminate the Electoral College, which is a vestige of Slave owners making sure the primarily rural, unpopulated states could not be forced to free their slaves. It played a key role in the Adams/Jefferson election. This is a brief history of its impact from the Brennen Center. It was originally published in The Atlantic in 2020. The analysis of its historical importance is provided by Wilfred U. Codrington III.
Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.
In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.
That compromise was basically the one that ended the reconstruction. We all remember the crowning of Dubya Bush by the Supreme Court in 2000. All of these current movements are firmly rooted in what was called the Reagan Revolution. He was the first of modern Republican presidents unsuitable for the job. Reagan, however, won the popular vote.
The last republican President to win the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. He undoubtedly got a boost from his misguided war. The Electoral College has created some complex history and, at times, threatened our concept of being a democratic Republic. Okay, enough of history. 50 years ago, Nixon quit the job of the Presidency after his re-election effort was riddled with criminal activities. He was at least a crook capable of governing.
Let’s look at the goal of manipulating the election results put into play by right-wing Republicans who recognize that those swing states have to stay in their column for them to maintain power. I will rely heavily on information from Democracy Docket, although I will supplement it with current media coverage. Marc Elias is a lawyer who has fought in court to stop all voter suppression actions since 2020. You may have seen him on news programs.
Marc Elias is the Firm Chair of Elias Law Group, a mission-driven firm committed to helping Democrats win, citizens vote, and progressives make change. Marc is a nationally recognized authority and expert in campaign finance, voting rights, redistricting law, and litigation.
As a litigator, Marc has handled hundreds of cases involving politics, voting rights, and redistricting. He has successfully argued and won four cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as dozens of cases in state supreme courts and U.S. courts of appeal.
He has represented the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees, several presidential campaigns, as well as dozens of U.S. senators, governors, representatives, campaigns, and other Democratic and progressive organizations.
When Trump contested the outcome of the 2020 election, Marc met every futile challenge at the courthouse, notching over 60 legal victories against the former president and his allies during the post-election period, alone. He has also successfully represented several House and Senate candidates in post-election litigation, recounts and challenges. In 2024, Marc was named to Forbes’ inaugural list of America’s top 200 lawyers.
Marc is also the founder of Democracy Docket, the leading digital news platform dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections in the courts.
Marc is an alumnus of Hamilton College, Duke Law School and Duke Graduate School. He is a proud owner of a Portuguese Water Dog named Bode.
Okay, here we go. This is from Public Notice and written by Lisa Needham. The dateline is today. “Elon Musk tries to dismantle the foundations of US democracy’ From blatant election interference to ending the NLRB, he’s doing all kinds of damage.”
Let’s start with the NLRB.
It’s no surprise that Musk is no friend to labor. He doesn’t believe in unions, saying that they create “a lords and peasants sort of thing,” whatever that means. When workers at his Fremont, California, plant began an organizing campaign, he tweeted that they would lose their stock options if they joined the union. This sort of threat is extremely illegal, and the NLRB sided with the workers who brought multiple unfair labor practices charges against Tesla.
Tesla also prohibited workers from wearing t-shirts with union insignias, even though the right to wear pro-union clothing at work has been a legally protected activity for several decades. Then, of course, there’s the class-action lawsuit in California state court, where almost 6,000 Black workers at the Fremont factory recently got the right to sue Tesla for ignoring massive racism at that plant. How massive? Nooses at the workstations of Black workers massive.
Of course, why follow the law when the lower federal courts are now stuffed with anti-worker Federalist Society denizens and the Supreme Court just gutted the regulatory state? After the NLRB filed a formal complaint against SpaceX over its firing of several employees who wrote an internal letter critical of Musk, SpaceX made sure to find a friendly Trump-appointed judge in Texas, Alan Albright, to entertain its theory that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.
In late July, Albright issued an injunction blocking the NLRB from proceeding against SpaceX, saying that it is likely the company would prevail in showing that the NLRB, which was created by Congress nearly 90 years ago, impermissibly infringes on the president’s power. Members of the NLRB board and the Administrative Law Judges (ALJ) cannot be removed by the president. That insulation from removal, of course, is critical, as otherwise the NLRB would basically cease to exist every time a Republican president takes power.
“Some Twitter humor as Elmo hides likes on his platform.” @repeat1968, John Buss
You can read more about that one at the link. There is also this at the same link.
America PAC purports to help people register to vote. If you live in a state that isn’t a swing state, that’s what the PAC’s website does — sends you over to your state’s voter registration page. But if you live somewhere in play this November, the America PAC website asks you for detailed personal information, including things utterly unrelated to voter eligibility, like your cellphone number.
After all that is entered, the PAC doesn’t register you at all. It doesn’t even send the user to their state registration website. It just displays a “thank you” page.
So, swing state voters may think they’re registering, but they’re not. Instead, they’ve handed over their data to a PAC that is coordinating with the Trump campaign. While PACs are generally not allowed to work directly with campaigns, America PAC is a door-to-door canvassing group, and those, inexplicably, can work hand in hand with a candidate. However, pretending to register people to vote is probably a bridge too far.
The Michigan Secretary of State’s office is in the early stages of an investigation of the PAC. So is the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office, as in North Carolina, it’s an actual crime to say you’re submitting someone’s voter registration form and then not do so, which is pretty close to what Musk’s PAC is doing.
The problem here is the relative toothlessness and extreme slowness of American jurisprudence when it comes to election violations.
Here we are, 90ish days before the election, and the investigations are just starting. Sweet Lady Liberty, help us! Here’s a Max Boot editorial on the Washington Post. It’s from March of this year. I like this because Boot reminds us that Musk is a defense contractor and rakes in billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers.”Musk is a MAGA megaphone and a federal contractor. That’s a problem.” And he’s writing a biography on Ronald Reagan which is the last thing we need to read. But he’s also the broken clock on this one.
Like a lot of other people, I don’t use my X account much anymore. I prefer to post on Threads, because X (formerly Twitter) has become such a cesspool of hate speech and conspiracy-mongering. The problem became especially acute following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel when the platform was flooded with antisemitic and anti-Muslim misinformation. It’s like watching a once-nice neighborhood go to seed, with well-maintained houses turning into ramshackle drug dens.
What galls me is that, as a taxpayer, I wind up subsidizing X’s megalomaniacal and capricious owner, Elon Musk. His privately held company SpaceX is a major contractor — to the tune of many billions of dollars — for the Defense Department, NASA and the U.S. intelligence community. He is also chief executive of Tesla, which benefits from generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry.
Musk needs to decide whether he wants to be the next Donald Trump Jr. (i.e., a major MAGA influencer) or the next James D. Taiclet (the little-known CEO of Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor). Currently, Musk is trying to do both, and that’s not sustainable. He is presiding over a fire hose of falsehoods on X about familiar right-wing targets, from undocumented immigrants to “the woke mind virus” to President Biden … while reaping billions from Biden’s administration!
Now, we move to the complex legal landscape of voter suppression. First, I just want to list all the legal litigation that’s going on in Marc Elias’ work load. Five headline lines here, all in different states but all crucial to the election.
While Trump keeps screaming about the big lie, he’s actually trying to make it true for the Harris/Walz campaign. It’s also aimed at helping the Republicans regain the Senate and hold the House. Notice that all but one of the states are those big swing states and many went blue for the last elections. Montana is important because it could swing the Senate.
All these links lead to Democracy Docket. If you’re smart, you’ll visit it daily. Let’s also not forget that the Supreme Court has been setting this mess up with its awful decisions, like the one causing Dark Money (Citizens United) to empower all of this. That last link about Citizens United goes to the Brennen Center.
But first, let’s dive into Georgia. I’ve been following up with JJ for about a week since she lives there, and I’ve called Georgia voters from the Harris/Walz campaign phone bank. This is from NPR. “A new rule in Georgia could allow local election boards to refuse to certify results.” Remember Hang Mike Pence? Well, now they’re trying to change election certifications from simple clerical tasks to something that could stop votes from being counted and reported based on some weird feeling it might be ‘wrong.’
A new rule in Georgia could allow some local election boards to refuse to certify results, raising concerns ahead of November’s election in the crucial swing state.
It’s the latest partisan flashpoint in a battleground state over certification — a step in the election process that’s usually ministerial and routine.
Local boards confirm the number of voters who cast ballots matches up with the total votes. Legal challenges to results are heard in the courts.
But when it came to certifying the May primary in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, one board member refused.
“It’s time to fix the problems in our elections by ensuring compliance with the law, transparency in elections conduct and accuracy in results,” Republican Julie Adams said before abstaining from the vote.
Adams said she didn’t have access to enough underlying election records to verify the vote herself. Adams’ colleagues overruled her and the May certification went ahead.
But for some, it signaled a worrying trend. Adams is one of several local officials in Georgia who declined to certify results this year — and that number could grow.
The new state rule allows local boards to conduct “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results. The measure passed 3-2, backed by Republicans with the sole Democrat and nonpartisan chair opposed.
“If I’m going to ask a county election worker to sign their name on a legal document saying this is accurate, when in fact they may see there is some discrepancy, then we’re setting them up for failure,” says Janelle King, a Republican on the state board who voted for the rule.
But some election experts worry a local board member, driven by unsupported claims of election fraud, might refuse to certify if they argue they could not conduct that inquiry or say it turned up problems.
At his rally last Saturday night, Donald Trump praised three members of the Georgia State Election Board. Calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory,” Trump lavished praise and attention on these members of the obscure state agency — by name.
The odd exchange raised more than a few eyebrows. When I wrote about it earlier this week, I suggested that the least damning explanation was that the “three who Trump mentioned from the stage: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King have refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020.” We now know that the real reason for Trump’s support for the election officials was far more sinister.
Late yesterday, the board approved a new rule that seeks to expand the role and authority of county boards of election in the certification process. This new rule redefines the certification process to include “reasonable inquiry” into whether the results are “complete and accurate.”
The vote to adopt this new rule was 3-2, with the Trump-endorsed members commanding the majority. It seems that Trump was prescient when he said these three members would fight for his “victory.”
That this violates state law seems clear. The obligation of county boards to certify elections is mandatory and ministerial. Nothing in Georgia law permits individual members to interpose their own investigations or judgment into a largely ceremonial function involving basic math.
For Trump, these legal niceties are beside the point. He wants to be able to pick and choose which election results are accepted based solely on the outcome. This rule is a step in that direction.
If the new rule survives the inevitable court challenge, Trump will have another powerful tool in his election subversion arsenal. If it is struck down, which seems more likely, he will claim to be the victim of biased judges and an unspecified conspiracy.
And a final one here from Matt Cohen writing at Democracy Docket. These are the people who ultimately want to replace the 14th and other Amendments concerning who votes with something more agreeable for rich old right-wing white men. “Meet the Trump-Linked Think Tank Waging a Legal War on Elections.”
By all accounts, the May presidential primary election in Georgia went as smoothly as it could have. There were no reports of long lines or malfunctioning voting machines. “Virtually none, nothing I really can report on,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) told reporters when asked if there were any irregularities in the election. “So it’s been very, very quiet. So we’re pleased with that.”
But Julie Adams, an election board member in Fulton County — the state’s most populated county — wasn’t satisfied with the election process and refused to certify the county’s election results. Adams, who is a member of the controversial right-wing Election Integrity Network, said she wouldn’t certify because she was denied access to data and “key election information” that she claimed was necessary to see to sign off on the county’s election results. Her abstention didn’t matter, the other four board members voted to certify the election. But Adams soon filed a lawsuit against the board’s director, Nadine Williams, over the election certification process.
The lawsuit was filed on Adams’ behalf by America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a conservative think tank founded in 2021 by a handful of prominent Republicans with ties to former President Donald Trump. Although AFPI’s work spans the spectrum of right-wing policies and issues — like promoting free enterprise, immigration policy, foreign policy and other policies championed by the Trump administration — the Georgia litigation is one of several recent voting-related lawsuits that the group is involved with.
AFPI is hardly the first right-wing think-tank to get involved in election litigation. Groups like the Public Interest Legal Fund, America First Legal and Judicial Watch have made a name for themselves in the past few years for their legal assault on voting rights. But AFPI’s recent pivot to election litigation is part of a larger right-wing focus on rolling back voting rights and sowing discord in elections through the courts.
Given AFPI’s leadership ties to the Trump administration, it’s no secret that their litigation efforts in Arizona, Georgia and Texas are strategic legal moves that, should they prove successful, could have far-reaching implications in the 2024 election.
You may read more at the link. I recommend you make the site one of your daily visits. Also, you may support them and subscribe. This is one of those places where democracy matters and something is being done about it.
So, now that I’ve gone way longer than usual, I will turn the comments over to you.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I hope you were able to watch the Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia last night. It was so positive and uplifting. One famous quote that emerged from the event was vice presidential candidate Tim Walsh saying to Kamala Harris, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.” Harris, Walz, and the huge audience were joyful, enthusiastic, and loud. It has been a very long time since this country has seen a rally like this.
On Tuesday evening, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) began his speech by turning back to his new running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and said, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”
At the rally in Philadelphia, there was a Democratic excitement that was palpable. Despite the potential for disarray from President Joe Biden dropping out of the race, the party quickly assembled behind a candidate. One could see the common stereotypes of the Democratic voter outside the Liacouras Center at Temple University—even in shirt selection: a sea of union apparel appeared (most notably, dozens of people donning bright purple SEIU shirts); a few “Kamala is brat” ones; many women calling out Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) for his comments about “childless cat ladies.”
Most everyone I spoke with was very happy that Biden had dropped out. In fact, thrilled. But that did mean, for many, much more than standing the Democratic party as a whole with an easier candidate to back. Harris was still introducing herself to them as a candidate in 2024.
Michael Parella, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, saw Harris as a dramatic improvement over Biden, whose candidacy felt like a “losing ballot.” Parella had been a Harris supporter in 2020, when she was a contender in a crowded primary candidate. Now, he said, “the crowd is standing behind her.” [….]
Many of the young attendees with whom I spoke were excited by Walz’s selection. Makayla Speers, a student from Delaware, said that she felt Harris’ choice of Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was an indication that she’s listening to young voters—and that Harris may take more action regarding Israel’s war in Gaza. (As I previously reported, some critics knocked Shapiro for his comments on student protesters.)
Shapiro, who was reportedly the other finalist in the veepstakes, side-stepped the elephant in the room when he spoke, promising to help Harris win Pennsylvania. And Walz and Harris, who both have described Shapiro as a friend, took care to thank him in their remarks.
He’s so weird! He’s so weird!” the crowd chanted in a sing-song, taunting voice that echoed across Temple University’s packed basketball stadium Tuesday evening. Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Penn., was the first person to mention Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, to the crowd that had packed the overflowing Philadelphia rally for Vice President Kamala Harris, as she introduced her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn. The spontaneous chant cracked Shapiro up, causing him to pause momentarily before laying back into the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump’s “weird” and beardy running mate.
The chanters didn’t know the half of it. Hours earlier, I had been at a South Philly venue where Vance spoke briefly to about 200 supporters and a group of bored journalists. Vance’s event was small, mean, and yes, weird, featuring the unjustified sarcasm of the candidate and a desperate feeling reminiscent of the mood at a strip mall shot bar at 2 AM on “ladies’ night.”
Meanwhile, the Harris/Walz rally felt like a rousing speech by Coach Eric Taylor of “Friday Night Lights” combined with the front row at Coachella. The cheers were so loud that I regretted not bringing my earplugs. The mood was jubilant, even though folks had to wait hours in the heat and humidity to even get into the place. The campaign claimed over 12,000 people showed up, which is not an exaggeration. Even as Harris and Walz gave the final speeches of the evening, the line to get into the overflow room — just to watch the event on TV — went on for multiple city blocks.
Rythme, Joie de vivre, Robert Delaunay, 1930.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Walz said, to a thunderous reception. A simple line, but it brought the house down because of the plain-spoken truth Walz has swiftly become famous for. “Joy” was the word of the night. People in the stands practically vibrated with it. In the air was a visceral hope that this campaign would be the end of the long national nightmare that is Trump and the MAGA movement….
The crowd was so exuberant that Harris and Walz could have done shadow puppets and the place would have erupted. Even before they spoke, DJ Diamond Kuts had the crowd repurposing classic hip-hop lyrics into political chants, with the funniest being “move, Trump, get out the way” rather than the expletive used in the original Ludacris tune. But both brought their A-game. Harris drew ecstatic applause with her promises to end Trump’s criminal career. Walz has honed “Minnesota nice” into a deadly rhetorical weapon, both making his desire to help people sincerely felt while also making “weird” burn like Dorothy Parker’s ghost had insulted you.
Vance’s speech, on the other hand, wasn’t just underwhelming but a little uncanny. Despite using room dividers to shrink the space, the campaign could not hide that the crowd felt like a medium-sized wedding, albeit a pathetic one where no one cares for the couple. Vance, perhaps recognizing charisma isn’t his strong suit, spoke briefly before bringing up a series of local citizens ready to blame Mexicans for their familial tragedies of drug addiction. He spoke for a couple more minutes, before taking the reporters’ questions about cat ladies.
Even in his short speech, it seemed Vance — like the Trump campaign overall — is still struggling to accept that they are running against Harris and not President Joe Biden. It felt like the speechwriter had typed Ctrl-F “Biden” and replaced every instance with “Harris,” whether it made sense or not. Vance accused Harris of hiding from the press with a “basement campaign.” Never mind that Harris is now the young and spry candidate who can keep up with an aggressive schedule, while Trump is the tired old man who can barely campaign between naps.
J.D. Vance delivered a rally speech Tuesday in Pennsylvania with a backdrop that made it appear he was campaigning for his arch nemesis, Kamala Harris.
The unfortunate signage appeared to stem from the event’s advance team not accounting for its crowd blocking half of a gigantic poster that sat directly behind Vance, which appeared to read in full, “KAMALA CHAOS.”
For those watching on Fox News and other broadcasts, however, the only words clearly visible—in white text on a blue background, in all caps—was simply “Kamala.”
The apparent gaffe quickly went viral on X, where many joked that Harris’ VP choice in Tim Walz, which was announced just prior to Vance’s rally speech, had convinced Trump’s running mate to switch teams….
“Kamala Harris has been such a disastrous vice president of this country that everywhere she goes, chaos and uncertainty follow,” he said, leaning into what his backdrop’s full text read.
It appears the Trump campaign may be attempting to link Harris to the word “chaos” in the same way Democrats, starting with Walz himself, began characterizing Trump, Vance, and the MAGA movement as “weird.
WHYY, a local NPR station in Philadelphia, reported that Vance’s rally had about 200 attendees, which included local Republican leadership from around Philadelphia.
Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Tim Walz, as “the kind of vice-president America deserves” at a raucous rally in Philadelphia that showcased Democratic unity and enthusiasm for the party’s presidential ticket ahead of the November election.
Casting their campaign as a “fight for the future”, Harris and Walz were repeatedly interrupted by applause and cheering as they addressed thousands of battleground-state voters wearing bracelets that twinkled red, white and blue at Temple University’s Liacouras Center – a crowd Harris’s team said was its largest to date.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” a beaming Walz told Harris after she debuted the little-known Minnesota governor as a former social studies teacher, high school football coach and a national guard veteran.
“We’ve got 91 days,” he declared. “My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.” [Walz is a Warren Zevon fan!] [….]
Arriving on stage to Beyoncé’s Freedom, the newly minted Democratic ticket rode a weeks-long wave of momentum from an unusually exuberant party happy to be looking forward.
“He’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong and then inspires them to dream big,” Harris said. “That’s the kind of vice-president he will be. And that’s the kind of president America deserves.”
Walz shared more of his biography, casting himself as a politician who learned to “compromise without compromising my values” and a midwesterner who lives by the “golden rule” when it comes to personal choice: “Mind your own damn business.” Drawing a personal connection to one of the most searing issues of the election cycle, Walz said he and his wife had two children through in vitro fertilization (IVF) after years of struggling with infertility. “When we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope,” he said.
Then he turned to his Republican opponents, who he has branded “weird” in a line of attack that has resonated widely, especially among Democrats. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” he said, setting off a new round of whoops and cheers.
Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her runningmate is, in some respects, a standard, safe choice. Like most of her potential picks, Walz is a white man. He’s a popular Democratic governor with deep roots in the party. He’s by no means an odd or risky selection.
And yet, at the same time, Harris’s choice of Walz is unusual, exciting, and even inspirational. Over the last forty years, Democrats have generally used the VP pick to try to cater to centrist swing voters. Some of Harris’s leading choices, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, were in that mode.
Instead, Harris chose Walz — a candidate who has a good deal of potential bipartisan appeal, but who is also well-positioned to excite Democrats, and particularly progressives. As such, Walz’s rise is a promising indication that Harris plans to continue and expand upon the approach of President Biden, who’s embraced progressive ideas and legislation as a way to unify and inspire Democratic voters.
Au Temps d’Harmonie (La Joie de Vivre – Dimanche au Bord de la Mer), Paul Signac, 1895-96.
It’s easy to make the case for Walz as a safe, sturdy, and conventional pick for VP. He served in the National Guard for 24 years; he’s now the vice presidential candidate with the longest military career.
In 1996 he left the military to to work as a high school history teacher in Mankato, Minnesota. He ran for Congress in 2006, a strong year for Democrats, and defeated six-term Republican Gil Gutknecht. He held the rural district through 2010 and 2014 — two red wave years — and even held on in 2016, when Trump won the district by 15 points. In 2018, he ran for governor and won. He won a second term in 2022.
This is an impressive record, and one that seems almost custom-made for a vice presidential resume.
Walz’s military record should appeal to at least some conservative voters, who tend to value military service in candidates. His strong record in a rural Trump district also testifies to his ability to reach out to red voters….
On the other hand, Walz’s experience as a teacher should play well with educators — a core Democratic constituency — and with teacher’s unions. He’s also shown himself to be exceptionally skilled at attacking Republicans. After he called Republicans “weird” on MSNBC, Democrats as a whole seized on the word to define the abortion-hating, single-women hating, book-hating weirdos in the GOP.
Walz’s conventional qualifications and strengths have made him acceptable within, and popular with, the mainstream of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by the wave of enthusiasm from mainstream party leaders.
So what’s happening with stodgy old Grandpa Trump? Not much. He’s only making one appearance this week–in Montana–and it’s not a campaign event. He’s really freaking out about Kamala Harris and all the excitement around her candidacy.
Last Thursday the Harris campaign began offering tickets for a campaign rally in Detroit the following Wednesday (tomorrow, August 7th). Over the first 24 hours they received 47,000 requests for tickets. 47,000. That spurred a multi-day search for a Detroit area venue that could handle the demand to see the Vice President. As Donald Trump never grasped, there’s no straight-line connection between rally attendance and votes. But at that scale they signal enthusiasm and energy that neither campaign (Trump or Biden) has seen at any time in this cycle. They demonstrate a purchase into the larger popular culture that President Biden never had and Donald Trump, for all his greater currency on social media, doesn’t either.
The joy of life, by Henri Matisse, 1906
It’s that disconnect between the attention currency of the two campaigns that is driving Trump’s current meltdown likely much more than the polls which have shown Harris go from one or two points behind two weeks ago to two to three points ahead today. Trump’s approach to a political campaign is to grab hold of media dominance, dominate the attention economy and then try to maintain the initiative of the campaign from there. Media dominance doesn’t always work for him. As often as not, once he’s holding the national attention, he’s offending people and losing support. But without that, as a campaigner, he’s lost. He tried to get that back with his Black/Indian tirade at the NABJ conference. And it worked, until it didn’t, which was quickly. 36 hours later the attention had shifted back to Harris.
I don’t entirely understand it yet. But Harris’s campaign is reaching out beyond the ordinary political ecosystem, even the expanded one we know from the final months or a general election and into the broader popular culture. Some of that is energizing an array of celebrities, music artists and influencers who are adding excitement and attention to the campaign. But it’s not only that, not even primarily that. That’s more consequence than cause. Her campaign, at least for the moment, is operating in a much larger cultural space than conventional politics. Trump’s political magic has always been his ability to access a larger cultural space, even if it’s often negative attention. But Harris’s campaign is accessing something much larger. For the moment he cannot keep up.
Republicans are concerned that party leader Donald Trump is having a “public nervous breakdown” after he made a series of offensive outbursts about Vice President Kamala Harris as he slips behind her in the polls.
The former president has made a number of insulting personal attacks against his Democratic rival since she moved to the top of the ticket. Last week, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. Over the weekend, he accused Harris of having a “low IQ.”
New polls indicate Trump is slipping behind the vice president in the popular vote and races are tightening in battleground states.
“This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown,” Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump state department appointee, told Politico.
“This is a guy who cut through the Republican primary like a knife through butter. This is a guy who pummeled a semi-conscious president in a debate and literally out of a race. And now this is a guy who cannot come to grips with a competitive presidential race that would require discipline and effective messaging,” Bartlett continued. “And we’re seeing a candidate and a campaign absolutely meltdown.”
Chair of the Vermont Republican Party, Paul Dame, predicted that Trump allies will start to wane in their defense of the former president.
“I think we’re starting to see the old Trump that a lot of Republicans got tired of in 2020, got tired of defending him,” Dame told USA Today. “If the next three months is defined by more examples like this I think he’s going to see some of that soft centrist support deteriorate.
A JD Vance-introduced book by a leader of Project 2025, the vast and controversial hardline rightwing plan for a second Trump administration, will be delayed until after the 2024 election.
“There’s a time for writing, reading, and book tours – and a time to put down the books and go fight like hell to take back our country,” the book’s author, Kevin Roberts, told RealClearPolitics, which first reported the news.
“That’s why I’ve chosen to move my book’s publication and promotion to after the election.”
Roberts is president of the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right Washington thinktank. His book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, was due to be published in September. It will now come out on 12 November, a week after Donald Trump and Kamala Harris square off on election day.
As Project 2025 has attracted sustained fire from Democrats, over its 900-plus pages of plans for far-reaching government reform including attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, labor rights and other progressive priorities, so Roberts’s book quickly became a magnet for controversy of its own.
Trump and his campaign have sought to distance themselves from Project 2025 – efforts undermined when it became known Vance, the hardline populist Ohio senator Trump picked as his running mate, had written an introduction to Roberts’s book.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?
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Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough votes from delegates to become her party’s nominee for president, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said Friday.
The announcement was made before the online voting process ends on Monday, reflecting the breakneck speed of a campaign that is eager to maintain momentum after President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Harris as his successor less than two weeks ago.
Harris is poised to be the first woman of color at the top of a major party’s ticket, and she joined a call with supporters to say she is “honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee.”
“It’s not going to be easy. But we’re going to get this done,” she added. “As your future president, I know we are up to this fight.”
Harrison pledged that Democrats “will rally around Vice President Kamala Harris and demonstrate the strength of our party” during their convention in Chicago later this month.
The Democratic National Committee did not provide details of the delegate vote count, including a number or state-by-state breakdowns, during a virtual event that had the flavor of a telethon, with campaign officials keeping tabs on a delegate-counting process whose result is a foregone conclusion.
No other candidate challenged Harris for the nomination, and she swiftly solidified Democratic support in the days after Biden endorsed her.
Democrats still plan a state-by-state roll call during the party’s convention, the traditional way that a nominee is chosen. However, that will be purely ceremonial because of the online voting.
Multiple former senior campaign staffers for former President Obama are joining Vice President Harris’s campaign as she reshapes the organization following President Biden’s decision to end his candidacy.
The Harris campaign said it is retaining the leadership that ran Biden’s campaign until he dropped out roughly two weeks ago, with Jen O’Malley Dillon continuing to serve as the campaign chair and reporting directly to Harris. But there are several new hires and others who are getting expanded portfolios that reflect how Harris is making her election bid her own as she becomes the party’s nominee.
David Plouffe, who worked as a strategist on Obama’s 2008 and 2012 bids, will join the Harris campaign as a senior adviser. A source familiar with the matter said Plouffe would end his consulting work with TikTok and his podcast he’d started with former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway as he joins the Harris campaign.
Stephanie Cutter, who served as Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012, will join the Harris campaign as a strategic adviser.
Others joining or taking on expanded roles in the Harris campaign include Mitch Stewart, who led Obama’s grassroots efforts, and David Binder, who oversaw Obama’s public research operation.
Jennifer Palmieri, who did a stint as communications director in the Obama White House and worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, will join the Harris campaign as a senior adviser to second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
The campaign said Julie Chavez Rodriguez will continue in her role as campaign manager, and she will focus more on the sun belt states of Arizona and Nevada, as well as Latino voters. Polling has shown Harris is more competitive in those states than Biden was against Trump.
Woodcut by Kyoshi Saito
Harris has been challenging Trump to show up for the scheduled debate on ABC on September 10. Now Trump is pretending that the plans have changed and the debate will be on September 4 on Fox News, with Fox moderators, no fact-checking, and a large audience. But of course, didn’t bother asking Harris what she thinks. Here’s the latest:
Vice President Harris’s campaign painted former President Trump as too scared to debate her after his latest remarks questioning why he should participate in a debate.
Trump told Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo this week that he wants to debate his likely Democratic opponent, but added, “I mean right now I say, why should I do a debate? I’m leading in the polls. And, everybody knows her, everybody knows me.”
Harris for President co-Chair Cedric Richmond responded to the comments, saying Trump “needs to man up.”
“He’s got no problem spreading lies and hateful garbage at his rallies or in interviews with right-wing commentators. But he’s apparently too scared to do it standing across the stage from the Vice President of the United States,” Richmond said. “Since he talks the talk, he should walk the walk and – as Vice President Harris said earlier this week – say it to her face on September 10. She’ll be there waiting to see if he’ll show up.”
Harris remarked that Trump should “say it to my face” during a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday. She has been ramping up the pressure for Trump to debate, exchanging barbs with him over the past week about the prospects of a general election debate.
The Democratic National Committee announced it is launching a digital homepage takeover starting Saturday to slam Trump for being “afraid to debate.” The takeover will start in Atlanta and continue with newspapers across battleground states.
So now Trump is trying to change the ground rules without discussing them with Harris. He posted on Truth Social that he has “agreed to” a completely different debate. The New York Times reported this in their headline as if it were a fait accompli. I’m so glad I cancelled my subscription. Here’s a better headline and story from HuffPost: Trump Says He’s Agreed To Fox News Debate, In Apparent Attempt To Avoid Harris On ABC.
Former President Donald Trump said on social media late Friday that he’s agreed with Fox News to take part in a Sept. 4 presidential debate against Democrat Kamala Harris, before suggesting that the vice president hasn’t OK’d such a faceoff.
“If for any reason Kamala is unwilling or unable to debate on that date, I have agreed with Fox to do a major Town Hall on the same September 4th evening,” the Republican presidential nominee wrote in a since-deleted post on his Truth Social platform.
Trump — who has pushed for the next debate to take place on Fox News after Harris took President Joe Biden’s spot at the top of the Democratic ticket — later reposted his debate message on Truth Social, but without the talk of a town hall-style event….
The Republican nominee wrote on Friday that the ABC News debate has been “terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant.” He also cited an ongoing lawsuit against the network as a reason for the change, despite the fact that Trump was already engaged in litigation with ABC News in May when he agreed to the faceoff.
UPDATE, with Harris campaign comment: Donald Trump says he will do a Sept. 4 debate on Fox News, albeit at a different date than the network publicly proposed, while he’s declared ABC News’ plans for a Sept. 10 face off with Kamala Harris “terminated.” [….]
Fox News and ABC News have yet to comment on Trump’s post. The Fox News debate, Trump wrote, would be an arena event and held in Pennsylvania, a key swing state….
Harris has confirmed that she would participate in a Sept. 10 debate on ABC News, plans that Trump originally agreed to when Joe Biden was the nominee. But Trump has yet to recommit to that date, and Harris has hammered him on it.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris said this week, shortly after Trump had questioned whether she was really Black.
This morning, Harris’ campaign said in a statement that Trump was “running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out.” The campaign said that Harris “will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime time national audience.”
In April, Trump called for Biden to debate “anytime, anyplace.” “We’ll do it anywhere you want, Joe,’ he said.
That’s where it stands for now.
Yesterday, The Washington Post reported on a story that has been around for years–that Donald Trump may have received $10 million from Egypt to help his 2016 campaign. According to the WaPo, there was a secret DOJ/FBI investigation and it was shut down by Bill Barr.
According to the Post, five days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, an organisation linked to Egyptian intelligence services withdrew $10m from a Cairo bank.
“Inside the state-run National Bank of Egypt,” the Post said, “employees were soon busy placing bundles of $100 bills into two large bags.”
Four men “carried away the bags, which US officials later described in sealed court filings as weighing a combined 200 pounds and containing what was then a sizable share of Egypt’s reserve of US currency”.
According to the Post, US federal investigators learned of the withdrawal in 2019, by which time they had spent two years investigating CIA intelligence that indicated Sisi sought to give Trump $10m.
Such a contribution would potentially have violated federal law regarding foreign donations….
Woodcut by Fumi Yanagimoto
According to the Post, US investigators who discovered the $10m Cairo withdrawal “also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House toinject his campaign with $10m of his own money”….
While in office, Trump repeatedly praised Sisi, over objections from US politicians concerned about the Egyptian’s authoritarian rule.
As described by the Post, the US investigation which uncovered the Cairo withdrawal was questioned by William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general. Ultimately, a prosecutor appointed by Barr closed the inquiry without criminal charges being filed.
Later, as the 2020 election approached, CNN reported that a mysterious DC courthouse hearing in 2018 – involving prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election – concerned an Egyptian bank….
An anonymous government source told the Post: “Every American should be concerned about how this case ended. The justice department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads – it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not.”
If it involved any other politician, this story would be a bombshell. For Trump, it’s just another scandal to add to the hundreds of others.
A new report on mistakes by the Secret Service related to January 6, 2001, has become available and some powerful folks are not happy.
An internal watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security accused department leadership of attempting to suppress a highly anticipated report focused on the Secret Service’s response during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s accusation drew a sharp response from DHS’ top lawyer, Jonathan Meyer, who aggressively rejected the allegation, according to a previously unreported June 25 letter reviewed by POLITICO.
In the letter to Cuffari, Meyer wrote that the DHS watchdog “misread” their intentions. The department does not want to withhold the entire report from Congress but does intend to redact “security sensitive” information that might reveal aspects of the Secret Service’s operations, Meyer wrote.
Meyer also rejected the suggestion that there has been an internal clash between the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership.
It’s the latest twist in the long-running effort by the inspector general’s office to release a comprehensive report on efforts by the department — and specifically the Secret Service — to prevent violence on Jan. 6 and respond during the attack. The department played a role in intelligence gathering, security and overseeing the movements of then-President Donald Trump and his vice president, Mike Pence, on the day of the riot.
Other investigations, including by Congress’ Jan. 6 select committee, have raised significant questions about whether the Secret Service had adequately disseminated evidence of threats in Trump’s Jan. 6 rally crowd.
The dispute over the release of the report to lawmakers is another example of friction between Cuffari and DHS leadership amid intense scrutiny of the Secret Service’s handling of the Jan. 6 attack and other sensitive matters. That tension reemerged just as the Secret Service has faced a new and far more intense round of public examination following failures that led to the near-assassination of Donald Trump. Cuffari has also faced allegations of ethical lapses that he has strenuously denied.
More on the controversy at the link.
Woodcut by Kyoshi Saito
One very significant finding that I have heard about previously is that Vice President Kamala Harris could have been in mortal danger that day because of Secret Service failings.
The U.S. Secret Service faced an array of challenges — and made some potentially dangerous mistakes — while trying to protect the president, vice president and vice president-elect on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob supporting then-President Donald Trump violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, offers an official and detailed account of how Kamala Harris, then the incoming vice president, ended up within feet of a “viable” pipe bomb that had been planted in the bushes right outside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
“The pipe bomb had been placed near the building the night before, but … [a]dvance security sweeps by the Secret Service at the DNC building did not include the outside area where a pipe bomb had been placed,” says the report from inspector general Joseph Cuffari, which was shared with members of Congress on Thursday.
The report describes how two Secret Service canine teams assigned to sweep the building were “surprised” to learn the morning of Jan. 6 that more assets weren’t being provided to help with the sweep — but the report also notes that Secret Service policies and procedures at the time required fewer assets for protectees who had been elected to an office but not yet sworn in.
“[Harris], traveling in an armored vehicle with her motorcade, entered the DNC building via a ramp within 20 feet of the pipe bomb,” the report said.
According to the report, the pipe bomb was found an hour and 40 minutes after Harris arrived at the DNC building. The report suggests it took the Secret Service 10 minutes to evacuate her, saying that she spent a total of about one hour and 50 minutes inside the building.
The Secret Service has since updated its policies to include more assets for “‘elect’ protectees,” according to the report, which is heavily redacted.
Read the more about the pipe bombs and efforts to find the perpetrator at ABC News.
Trump’s January 6 election interference case is back with Judge Tanya Chutkan in DC. Maybe we will see some movement in the case now.
Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein, and Erica Orden at Politico:
The stalled criminal case against Donald Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 election is starting to move.
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on presidential immunity — a breathtaking legal victory for Trump’s bid to sideline his criminal prosecutions — had kept the election-subversion case on ice for months. Even after the July 1 ruling, the high court’s rules required a one-month delay to give prosecutors the chance to ask the justices to reconsider the outcome.
Patience,, by Iwao Akiyama
On Friday, that window closed. The case was returned to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which took just minutes to send the matter back to the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who has been in a holding pattern since December awaiting the outcome of the immunity fight.
On Saturday, Chutkan took her first steps in the case in months, setting an August 16 hearing to consider setting a new schedule. She has asked for prosecutors and Trump to offer their own thinking on the matter in writing by August 9. The court session won’t force Trump off the campaign trail, since Chutkan said she won’t require him to be present.
Still, the flurry of actions signals new life for the gravest of the four criminal cases against Trump — and it comes at a time when other Trump cases have stalled. Special counsel Jack Smith charged the former president in August 2023 with four counts, alleging a sweeping conspiracy to disenfranchise millions of voters and pressure government officials to overturn the legitimate 2020 election results.
There appears to be no real prospect of a trial in the case before the November election, but some Trump critics have been eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court’s ministerial action of returning the case to the trial court, hoping that it results in a series of swift decisions from Chutkan that could again put Trump on the defensive.
The Supreme Court ruled that former presidents have immunity from prosecution for many of their “officials acts,” and it said that some of Smith’s allegations in the election case must be tossed out. But it’s not yet clear how, or whether, the special counsel can proceed with other portions of his indictment.
Some Trump critics have urged Chutkan to hold a hearing to assess the effect of the immunity ruling on the evidence Smith intends to present. That proceeding could feature witness testimony from key figures in the case.
Trump opponents hope this “mini-trial” would showcase Trump’s ties to the violence that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, and remind voters of the most chaotic day of Trump’s presidency, even if it doesn’t carry the same stakes as a jury trial.
While the Wall Street Journal and the other “big” newspapers were busy writing about how President Biden looked so old and tired and ignoring the insane things Dotard DonOld was saying at his rallies, President Biden was busy negotiating a complex deal with multiple countries to get a WSJ writer and other hostages released from Russian Prison. There are so many amazing things about this series of negotiations that it’s hard to list. Still, one of the many amazing things was that there were no leaks of any ongoing processes, that included other countries, the CIA, the State Department, the Vice President, and other U.S. officials.
The Wall Street Journal is even being gracious today with its news and headlines about their freed reporter Evan Gershkovich, who is now in San Antonio for medical exams and has been reunited with his mother. They have even acknowledged the role Vice President Harris played in the Swap.
Vice President Kamala Harris played a role in negotiations with allies to secure the prisoner-swap deal. Harris met with both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob separately in intimate settings during the Munich Security Conference in February to urge both leaders to push the deal through, according to a White House official.
Harris’s meeting with Scholz was particularly critical to securing the exchange because releasing Krasikov was a key Russian demand. The two first had a normal bilateral meeting before Harris asked Scholz to stay back for a “restricted bilateral,” the official said. Harris asked everyone to leave except Scholz and one aide on each side.
“They had a back and forth about how to best move forward about that, but ultimately, she was pressing Scholz to take action on this,” the official said.
Harris has met Scholz previously on several occasions and had a “good working relationship with him,” the official said. That is “part of the reason why she was able to have a really good, frank conversation with him.”
Harris had never met Golob before the conference. Their meeting was the highest-level U.S. engagement at the time with the Slovenian government, which was holding two Russian nationals Moscow wanted released. That meeting was also restricted to just Harris, Golob and two aides.
Separately, Harris spoke to Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexey Navalny, on Thursday, according to a White House official. Russian political prisoners who had worked with Navalny were released as part of the swap.
The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on Thursday, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free.
Gershkovich, Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with dual U.S.-Russia citizenship, arrived on American soil shortly before midnight for a joyful reunion with their families. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris also were at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to greet them and dispense hugs all around.
The trade unfolded despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Negotiators in backchannel talks at one point explored an exchange involving Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but after his death in February ultimately stitched together a 24-person deal that required significant concessions from European allies, including the release of a Russian assassin, and secured freedom for a cluster of journalists, suspected spies, political prisoners and others.
I don’t care that some bad guys got sent back to Russia. That’s a type of punishment, even though Putin played them up as heroes. I can’t imagine they will be completely safe there. However, we brought the good folks home to thrive.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ team announced today that it raised $310 million in July. That would trounce the $138.7 million former President Donald Trump’s team said it raised last month. NBC News cannot verify those reports until Federal Election Commission reports for July are released.
Tara Sutter, reporting for The Hill, has this headline. “Pritzker says Trump ‘bewildered’ by Harris, new Dem excitement.” I’m getting trolled on social media whenever I produce my mini-report on what people say to me. On my Wednesday calls this week, I got to talk to seniors in places like Tennessee, Missouri, and Illinois this week. They are fired up and ready to go! They’re talking to their family and friend circles to pass a better world to our children and their children! I feel very positive. Some of these folks live in deeply red corners of their states. Yet, they’ve decided to talk about how excited they are about Harris to friends, family, and neighbors. One woman said she saw a woman wearing a Kamala t-shirt in a restaurant, which surprised her. She talked to the woman, and they said they would stand up for the future! The couple from Tennessee asked how they could volunteer! They said they knew they had to fight for the future. I guess I’m not the only granny for sanity.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said Thursday he believes former President Trump is “bewildered” by Vice President Harris and the excitement she has generated among Democrats.
“Kamala Harris is the perfect person at this moment,” Pritzker said on MSNBC’s “The Beat” to anchor Ari Melber. “We’ve got the kind of palpable excitement, the energy, that we really need in the party to carry us to victory in November, and of course Donald Trump is, I think, bewildered by it all. I don’t know that he has any idea how to handle the excitement that’s happening on the Democratic side, or Kamala Harris herself.”
Pritzker is among the many names floated as a possible running mate for Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee. His home state will also host this year’s Democratic National Convention later this month in Chicago.
“We’re planning a phenomenal convention here in Chicago. … the excitement is palpable,” Pritzker said. “The United Center, which is where the convention will happen, is being spruced up, lookin’ terrific.”
Besides Pritzker, other names on the vice presidential shortlist include Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Spoiler alert: he meant it. When Donald Trump claimed, on Wednesday afternoon, in a combative onstage interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, that Kamala Harris had adopted her identity as a Black woman in an effort to gain political advantage, he drew appalled gasps from the audience. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said. This was an inaccurate slur as well as a bizarre one. Harris has always been proudly biracial: she is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Black, Jamaican father, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. She attended Howard, a historically Black college, where she joined one of Black America’s most storied sororities. Nonetheless, Trump doubled down on this particularly Trumpian form of hate speech. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he wrote, “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!” That evening, in a rally in Pennsylvania, his campaign even projected an old news headline proclaiming Harris the first Indian American U.S. senator. Trump’s embattled Vice-Presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, joined in, too, calling Harris a “total phony who caters to whatever audience is in front of her.”
By Thursday morning, as the liberal commentariat feasted on its horror over his remarks and right-leaning pundits struggled to explain and excuse it, Trump mocked them all, posting an old photo of Harris alongside relatives on the Indian side of her family. He wrote, “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated.” In another post, he circulated the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer’s idea that, because Harris’s birth certificate says her father’s “color or race” is “Jamaican,” not Black, she is a “liar” who is “NOT black and never has been.”
How much clearer does it have to get? America, you are being trolled.
Laura Loomer probably holds the Guinness World Record for being the largest piece of shit ever. Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Atlanta rally Tuesday night. I got to stick around for some campaign insider stuff and a Zoom visit from the Vice President. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this hyped up to volunteer my ass off. This is from the Washington Post. “Harris events: Not your father’s campaign rallies (or Biden’s). If there was ever any indication of the head-snapping transition that Democrats have gone through, it was the one that occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta when 10,000 people danced and cheered to Megan Thee Stallion before Harris took the stage for a campaign rally.”
If there was ever any indication of the head-snapping transition that Democrats have gone through, it was the one that occurred on Tuesday night in Atlanta when 10,000 people danced and cheered to Megan Thee Stallion before Vice President Harris took the stage for a campaign rally to the strains of Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” Biden forecast this kind of a change four years ago when he talked about a bridge to a new generation, but that transformation didn’t take place until the past two weeks when heofficially relinquished his grip on the party.
In fact, Joe Biden never came up.
From the music to the outfits — and, most tellingly, the crowd size — it was clearer than ever that the shift to a new Democratic generation was complete.
By and large, it is the same campaign aides who were putting on Biden events that are now in charge of Harris ones. But the types of crowds interested in attending Harris events — and the musicians willing to perform at them — are very different. The new playlist, even if controlled by the same staffers who curated Biden’s soundtrack(a mix including Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love,” Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” and Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom”), has a certain Harris flair, and is put together based on her personal input.
Campaign aides say they are still thinking about how Harris events will be different, and they are determined to not only do large-scale rallies but want to put her in smaller settings as well. The coming days will provide more of a test case as Harris picks a running mate and launches a seven-state tour that will probably include a range of venues.
In Atlanta, the baton was fully passed to Kamala Harris. This was now her party. Her campaign. Her playlist.
Even though this headline comes with my usual admonition about trusting polls, it’s a good sign. “Kamala Harris Now Leads Donald Trump in Eight National Polls.” That’s eight data points, so that’s good. This reporting comes in Newsweek by Martha McHardy AND Andrew Stanton.
The new polls show the presumptive Democratic nominee is leading the former president by between 1 and 4 points.
RMG Research is the latest pollster to find Harris leading Trump in the national popular vote. The firm released a survey on Friday showing her with a 5-point lead (47 percent to 47 percent) over the former president. The poll was conducted among 3,000 registered voters from July 29 to July 31.
A poll conducted by Civiqs between July 27 and July 30 also showed Harris with a 5-point lead over Trump. Among 1,123 registered voters, Harris leads Trump 49 percent to 45 percent. Her lead is outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Harris is ahead of the Republican presidential nominee by 3 points in a poll by Leger conducted between July 26 and July 28. The poll, which surveyed 1,002 U.S. residents and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, showed she was leading Trump with 49 percent of the vote to his 46 percent. That represents a 4-point increase for the Democrat since Leger’s June poll.
When third-party candidates were included in the Leger poll, Harris’ lead over Trump grew to 7 points, to 48 percent, compared to the former president’s 41 percent.
Harris had a smaller lead of 2 points over Trump in four other national polls. These include a poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov, where the vice president polled at 46 percent among 1,434 registered voters—a lead within the poll’s 3 percent margin of error.
We just have to keep up the Momala Momentum. This is an interview from Elle on her role as stepmom to two young adults. To hell with J.D. Vance and his parade of stereotypes.
Cole and Ella could not have been more welcoming. They are brilliant, talented, funny kids who have grown to be remarkable adults. I was already hooked on Doug, but I believe it was Cole and Ella who reeled me in.
To know Cole and Ella is to know that their mother Kerstin is an incredible mother. Kerstin and I hit it off ourselves and are dear friends. She and I became a duo of cheerleaders in the bleachers at Ella’s swim meets and basketball games, often to Ella’s embarrassment. We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional.
A few years later when Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella, and I agreed that we didn’t like the term “stepmom.” Instead they came up with the name “Momala.”
Our time as a family is Sunday dinner. We come together, all of us around the table, and over time we’ve fallen into our roles. Cole sets the table and picks the music, Ella makes beautiful desserts, Doug acts as my sous-chef, and I cook.
So, that’s it for me today. We’re on our 4th heatwave and have perpetual Severe Heat warnings. I’m at the point where I just fill my soaking tub up with cold water and literally chill out. I’m watching the Tropical Storm headed to Southern Florida. The Gulf Waters are hot. This could become a big wet one; southernmost Florida is on the Dirty Side. CNN is calling it this way. “Tropical Storm Debby forecast to hit Florida this weekend with torrential rain and wind.” It’s going straight up the East Coast and could become a Cyclone Level Four. So, be safe if you’re on its path.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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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.
Harris also addressed immigration in her Arizona speech. AP: 
The findings, published on 
What does that mean, and why is the government asking for more delay in the case? Those are legitimate questions, but I would not be quick to criticize the Justice Department here.
He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he 
Finally, I want to highlight this piece in Propublica by Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey: 
That compromise was basically the one that ended the reconstruction. We all remember the crowning of Dubya Bush by the Supreme Court in 2000. All of these current movements are firmly rooted in what was called the Reagan Revolution. He was the first of modern Republican presidents unsuitable for the job. Reagan, however, won the popular vote.
Okay, here we go. This is from
Here we are, 90ish days before the election, and the investigations are just starting. Sweet Lady Liberty, help us! Here’s a Max Boot editorial on the 
Now, we move to the complex legal landscape of voter suppression. First, I just want to list all the legal litigation that’s going on in Marc Elias’ work load. Five headline lines here, all in different states but all crucial to the election.
So, finally, I will bring Marc Elias into the discussion.
And a final one here from Matt Cohen writing at
The German Chancellor and the Slovenian Prime Minister were key to the deal. 
I don’t care that some bad guys got sent back to Russia. That’s a type of punishment, even though Putin played them up as heroes. I can’t imagine they will be completely safe there. However, we brought the good folks home to thrive.
Democratic Governors are all speaking out with enthusiasm. They’re also nailing Donald and the guy who changed his name three times to the wall. DonOld is ratcheting up the racism and misogyny. 
Laura Loomer probably holds the Guinness World Record for being the largest piece of shit ever. Meanwhile, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Atlanta rally Tuesday night. I got to stick around for some campaign insider stuff and a Zoom visit from the Vice President. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this hyped up to volunteer my ass off. This is from the 
Even though this headline comes with my usual admonition about trusting polls, it’s a good sign. “Kamala Harris Now Leads Donald Trump in Eight National Polls.” That’s eight data points, so that’s good. This reporting comes in
We just have to keep up the 
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