Aaron Rupar and Stephen Robinson at Public Notice: 
While appearing before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, Wray 
Yesterday, 
And that’s because this incident involved a woman. And she was asking for it.As it became clear on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris is the front-runner to replace President Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, pro-Donald Trump conservatives went on TV to fiercely condemn her position on sipping devices.
“I mean, heck, she wants to get rid of plastic straws, for goodness sake,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to former President Donald Trump’s campaign, told NBC. “Whereas Joe Biden was renting some of the territory on the more extreme left, Kamala Harris owns it.”
In a lengthy monologue on Sunday, Fox News host Sean Hannity said Harris would “be the single most radical major party candidate to run for election.” He went on to condemn her environmental record, including her previous support for ending the oil and gas drilling practice known as fracking and, of course, reining in the use of plastic straws.
“She wants to ban plastic straws,” Hannity grumbled. “I love my plastic straw. I hate those paper straws. Anyway.”
Mostly Monday Reads: Tableaux and Free to be You and Me
Posted: July 29, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections | Tags: Dionysian Bacchanalia, DonOld Wierdo, Free to be You and me, JD Vance Weirdo, Tableaux, The 2024 Paris Olympics Opening 6 Comments
“Vance is a weirdo. Trump is weird. They make a lovely pair.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I was raised in a city where I never felt I belonged and was a Nerdy Tom Girl bored to tears. Fortunately, my mother loved to travel and always took me to the library. She also taught me piano starting at age 3. All I can remember from a lot of that period was what I was told I couldn’t do. I couldn’t wear pants to school–even in a near-blizzard–because whatever. I couldn’t play little league baseball even though I could bat a ball and put it wherever I wanted because whatever. The world of the 1950s and the early 1960s was a world of barriers with the excuses of “just because.” Books, music, taking my sketchbook on trips to places where no one judged what you did or gave you a speech about what’s not, I found refuges from piety scolds.
J.D. Vance and the deplorable throwbacks that worship Donald want to shove the majority back into a world of barriers. I looked at the boys with a glare that screamed Broadway Annie Oakley’s song “Anything You Can Do. I can do better; I can do anything better than you.” Then, I worked to prove it at horse camp, on the ski slope, sliding down huge hills in the Missouri River hillsides, or dissecting a pregnant nurse shark after getting my scuba diving license for one of the high school football players because he couldn’t do it.
I was drug into the school psychologist’s office in high school for testing off the walls on ambition, which was considered a male trait on the Bem Sex Role Inventory, BSRI. They were always testing us for something. I always found some supportive men. They generally tended to be creative like me, musicians like me, or dreamers of a life beyond boundaries. Most of these guy friends died in the 1980s. I was an activist feminist by that time. I was duly working to change the sexual abuse and domestic violence laws in that same boring place. I also volunteered to go to other states to get the ERA passed. But, also, at that time, I had to bring meals to these friends, take them to doctor’s appointments, and be prepared to watch them die even as their family turned their backs on them.
I know real misogyny. The faces of misogyny are right there at the top and all over all the Republican tickets. I know the faces of religious oppression. You can find them in the same place. I also know the people who can not just let people live and let live but be their authentic selves if that means either wearing a dress or sporting a crew cut when the piety scolds tell you that just isn’t done when you’re you. We all evidently failed the Bem Sex Role test. To hell with defining masculine and feminine traits.
My religion is kindness. I let the local homeless folks use my hose to get water. They may sit on my porch in the shade of my Magnolia and rest. I leave fruits from my trees and anything spare I can to feed them. I was taught that for those who have much, much is required by my mother and Nana. I was also taught to not judge others unless ye be judged yourself. I still believe in many things I was taught in Sunday School. It’s easier, however, to apply them as a Buddhist. I now have the meditation chops to negate piety scolds. Piety scolding is not a Buddhist thing.
J.D. Vance better not come to New Orleans. We’re already planning the protests. The man who searches for dolphin-on-woman porn, who can’t even defend his wife properly, and who starts the bad performance with “even though she’s not white” better stay out of New Orleans because we will protest and probably too much by his standards. Nothing comes from his mouth, only insults to my neighbors. This is from The Hill.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP vice presidential nominee, said this weekend his feelings are not hurt by Democrats labeling him “weird” as past comments he made before being tapped as former President Trump’s running mate are resurfaced.
“No, not at all,” Vance told a Fox News reporter in an interview that aired Sunday. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
“Look, the price of admission — meaning, the price of getting to serve the people of this country — is the Democrats are going to attack us with everything that they have. I think it’s an honor,” Vance continued.
“As Harry Truman once said, ‘if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,’” he said.
The brief interview, conducted during a campaign stop, comes nearly two weeks after Trump announced Vance would be his running mate on the GOP presidential ticket.
I personally wonder if Vance has ever seen functional parts of kitchens. Donald, however, builds it up. This is from Marcie of EmptyWheel. None of us have the power to persecute these people. First off, the U.S. Constitution lets everyone do their own thing when it comes to Religion. Second, professors like me, cat ladies like me, and women like me have little to no power. Just check who the rapists are, the perpetrators of climate change, and the lawmakers who limit our freedom, and you’ll see the demographic that proffers persecution.
The other day, during an address to a Turning Point conference, Trump implored,
Christians, get out to vote. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians. I love you. I’m [not/a] Christian.You have to get out and vote. In four years, you won’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.
Horse race journalists didn’t care. They found it more important to repeat and therefore magnify Trump’s latest slur on Vice President Harris.
When I first looked at how NYT covered it at 3:37AM ET, this was their headline.
At 8:311AM, this story from Michael Gold was published. It still focused on magnifying the slurs Trump used against Harris.
That story included Trump’s comment about voting, along with Gold’s spin of it as a claim that Trump would address the concerns of Christian voters sufficiently that they would no longer have to vote, buried in ¶14.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Trump urged the religious crowd to vote in November, suggesting that if elected he would address their concerns sufficiently enough that they would no longer need to be politically active. Earlier, he had lamented that conservative Christians do not vote proportionately to their size, a complaint he has made repeatedly in recent weeks.
“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more, years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Let it be noted that one of NYT’s allegedly professional horserace journalists believes that the white Evangelical Christians who have been among Trump’s most important supporters vote in disproportionately low numbers or that any Republican would forego that most important part of their coalition. (That said, for demographic reasons Trump can’t change with a speech, white Evangelicals make up an increasingly smaller proportion of the voting public, which poses an entirely different kind of threat than apathy.)
Only much later, around noon ET, did Gold figure out that the “not have to vote” stuff was far more newsworthy than Trump calling the Vice President a “bum.”
This mural is at a restaurant in Mayfair, London, called Bacchanalia. It’s artist Gary Myatt’s interpretation of French artist Thomas Couture’s 1847 painting Romans in their Decadence..
Obviously, the media have power. They can ignore the important stuff and misalign our priorities.
So, it’s no surprise that the Piety Scolds are out on the Tableaux performance art at the opening of the Paris Olympics. Since I spent most of the 40 years of my life reading and getting away from Dodge Street as much as possible, I am fully aware of the role the art form and parlor activity played in suppressed Victorian England and America. It’s not only historical but also in the fiction of the time. It’s also referred to as melodramatic realism. Children’s books were essential forms of artwork in that style. Cinema uses it, too. It’s a form of escape from our rigid piety scolds in many ways. Many paintings of the time were tableau. It’s a really old artform and newly modern Paris was full of tableau performances and caberets with all kinds of acts and audiences.
I still have shits and giggles that some folks don’t know about the 19th-century Bacchanalia art and celebrations during the original Olympics. They even don’t know about Marie Antoinette or the goddess of the Seine River, Sequana.
We had a mythology semester for English in 5th grade and world religions studies in social studies. It was the first time I determined Buddhism was the only sensible religion. Also, my neighbor and friend and I used to play goddesses. She was a year ahead of me, so I got advanced lessons from the book. We’d drag white sheets out of the dirty laundry, make them cloudlike, and play Athena and Aphrodite.
I later named my consulting firm The Minerva Group in the mid-80s! Imagine spending your life thinking people persecute you because your education is sorely lacking! But one can always make up for that.
Bourdon Sebastien mid 17th Century, Bacchanalia
It’s not surprising that a French choreographer would study these art forms and use them first to represent the Original Olympics with its Dionysian Bachannals combined with the artistry at the time. We’ve also since discovered that the much older DaVinci Last Supper was also used for one of the scenes. A Bacchus/ Dionysus performer crashed the scene. Now, Piety Scolds are taking everything to task and even Mislabelling the Goddess of the Seine Sequana as one of the riders of the apocalypse. Okay, it’s the Washington Post. I get it. “Paris Olympics organizers sorry for Last Supper at Opening Ceremonies. The tableau included a woman in the role of Jesus, drag queens, and gay icons as disciples. It was crashed by a man in blue as Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry.”
Organizers of the Paris Olympics apologized on Sunday for a performance during Friday’s Opening Ceremonies that featured an apparent reenactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” amid mixed messages about the piece’s intent.
The tableau included a woman with a halo-like crown in the role of Jesus as well as drag queens and gay icons as disciples; it was crashed by a scantily clad blue man wearing a headdress of fruit — Dionysus, the Greek god of fertility, wine and revelry.
Church leaders and some conservative politicians condemned the performance as a perversion of the scene, recounted in the Bible, on the eve of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Saturday called the performance a “mockery [that] was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.” A U.S. telecommunications firm, C Spire, said it was pulling its advertising from the Summer Games. The French Conference of Catholic Bishops also objected.
My life as the musical director of a drag show, DJ, chorus, and band (piano). We were prime time on Bourbon Street for a few years. The worst patrons were Brides and Bridesmaids who would make everything all about them. Respect a queen because it’s the one time she can display a vital part of herself.
I wonder what upset them more: the woman as Jesus or the dragqueens? I understand a movement within the Catholic religion is trying to reposition Marie Antoinette as a Christian hero. So look who is upset about all of these. The White Men in power deny the rest of us our humanity and identity. What’s worse is the Olympic Committee is sanitizing the videos of the various legs of the tableaux. So, let’s look at this. Some of my women friends like wearing men’s clothing and having crew cuts. They wear tuxedos, and I have never seen them in any dress.
I have friends who are now dead because of Ronald Reagan’s response to AIDS who loved to play dress up and dolls with me when we were kids. They do so because they were never allowed to express themselves as they truly felt they were. They were not allowed their feminine sides, and men like J.D. Vance were the ones who oppressed everything feminine.
This is Miss Jessica DeLorean, who has a killer voice. She’s got big hair because she comes from Texas. My favorite part of our performance was when she sang songs like “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” or “I Say a Little Prayer For You,” which I introduced to her and arranged especially for her. She frequently flirted with men. I would watch many of them with crawling skin and think yeah, now you know what it’s like. Many of them I bet are still confused about why women take the bear. Most of my gay friends have a drag queen outfit in their closet somewhere because it’s the time they are allowed to play dress up with the little girls in their neighborhood. Something that they were not allowed as kids. It’s why performance artists like Cher and Dolly Parton are flattered to be featured in shows where the purpose is to highlight their talent and their status as gay icons. Neither is a Piety Scold, and they don’t misunderstand the art form.
My WiFi carries the name Queens of Poland Avenue because Women and Gays were primary on my block. We prefer that because you know it’s been a rough life, and you need someone who just loves you for who you are. This time of year, my outfit is usually men’s jockey shorts and the kind of t-shirts made famous by Marlon Brando, who, like many men in the creative arts, had to pretend to be something he wasn’t. One day, I will go to the FQ and join the show to shout Stella! It won’t be because I like the character, but I want to do the drag performance to show my favorite Dead of Summer couture. Women do drag.
That’s what freedom should mean. Free to be you and Me. That is the name of the album my oldest daughter listened to constantly as a kid. It was a gift from one of my friends in NOW. They had a baby shower for me. Free to love any other consenting adult. Free to be ambitious and not particularly care about marriage. But free to marry if that’s what you want. This country is about Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Justice. That can’t happen without respect being granted to those just living their lives and doing no harm to others.
This blog is a safe space. Given Donald and J.D. Vance and the thralls, we have enough to deal with daily in the news cycle. We understand different views but do not think it creates a positive environment to attack others and their lifestyle choices. Please respect this.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: July 27, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, abortion rights, American Fascists, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024, misogyny | Tags: Christian nationalism, JD Vance, misogyny emergency, Trump as strongman, Trump's ear wound, Trump/Vance weirdness, Turning Point Action, voting rights 19 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
Yesterday Trump gave a speech in Florida to Turning Point Action, a right wing christian group. During the speech, Trump gave this rant:
Trump’s plea to voters last night: “Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore … In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
In that quote from MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, there is an ellipsis to skip over Trump saying what sounds like “I’m not a christian.” Some are claiming he said “I’m a christian.” That’s not what I heard. You can watch the clip from @Acyn here.
I took this to mean that if Trump is elected, there won’t be any more elections. Some people on Twitter tried to twist it to mean something else or claimed it was a “joke.” After all we have experienced with Trump, those claims just don’t pass muster. Here are some reactions from Twitter.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat @ruthbenghiat: Media: this should be *the* A1 story. I have studied dictatorship for decades and this is it-“you won’t have to vote anymore.” Trump will never leave office if he wins in November.
Pramila Jayapal @PramilaJayapal: This. Is. Terrifying. We cannot let this be the case.
Armando @ArmandoNDK: I don’t know what Trump was trying to say with his no more voting line. He is a moronic inarticulate narcissist. I do know what he’s done. And based on that, if he can get away with it- he would become a dictator. Anyone who doubts Trump is capable of trying is just stupid.
Simon Rosenberg @SimonWDC: There is a reason the Trump campaign has been keeping Trump from the trail – every time he speaks it gets harder for them to win. This promise, in very clear language, to end American democracy for all time is now a major part of the 2024 campaign.
Friday Reads: The Veep Shakes Trump, Rattles Republicans, and Rolls all over them!
Posted: July 26, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign | Tags: @repeat1968, Cat Ladies for Kamala, Donald's Weird Ear BooBoo, John Buss, Media Coverage of the Harris Campaign, Weird Donald, Weird J.D. Vance, Weird Republican Bigotry, Weird Republican Policy and Values 14 Comments
“I wanted to get this right, so I took my time. I have no respect for the bully pulpit; they didn’t do anything other than give themselves undeserved pats on the back. That being said, we have an election to win. Kamala 2024!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
And it is a good day! I became part of the Vice President’s Ground Game last Wednesday! I took a deep breath and shook off my phone anxiety. Then, I called Georgia Voters. I’m giving my Wednesday off to do this until my birthday, which is the day before the election. I’m one of the many people delighted to see a Harris Presidency. The Obamas were the last to join the chorus and finally endorsed Harris today. I can tell you that this ride to victory is a joyous one! Everyone I know and follow is ready to go!
Historian Steven Beschloss made these observations in his America, America blog. “A Joyful Campaign Ahead. With an exuberant laugh, Kamala Harris is energizing Democrats and renewing confidence about the coming election.”
Donald Trump and all the other arrogant, woman-hating Republican geniuses think attacking Kamala Harris’ laugh is a smart play. As if putting her down for her exuberance and joyfulness will reveal her to be unserious, unattractive, unfit for the job. As if a majority of Americans are not sick to death of the nasty, joyless, hateful and degrading mentality and agenda of Trump and his enablers. As if American voters—more than half of whom are women—really want to be told how to behave by a 78-year-old convicted felon who’s been found liable for sexual assault and has made exceedingly clear throughout his life what he thinks of women.
Last Sunday Joe Biden jolted the political world by announcing that he was stepping aside and endorsing his vice president—an inspiring act of patriotism that has led to a swift and electric surge of fundraising, endorsements and delegate support for now-presumptive nominee Harris. That same weekend, the ever-degrading Trump was mocking Harris’ laugh: “I call her laughing Kamala. Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts.” That was followed by calling Nancy Pelosi crazy, too.
Honestly, we should hope that he and his VP pick, J.D. Vance, keep reminding American voters how much they despise Kamala Harris for her gender and her laughter. Because it’s my view that the more they say so—including their woman-hating views on reproductive rights and marriage and family—the more that VP Harris will rise in the polls and in the eyes of voters who’ve had it with Trump’s lust for carnage and yearn to avert the grim future that he promises.
Take note of how the vice president, aware of the sexist mockery, described the origins of her laugh in a conversation with Drew Barrymore in April. “Let me just tell you something: I have my mother’s laugh,” Harris told Barrymore, who hosts a daytime television show and had just told her guest that she loves her laugh. Harris continued:
And I grew up around a bunch of women in particular who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen, drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs…And I think it’s really important to remind each other and our younger ones, don’t be confined by other people’s perception about how you should act…It’s really important.
Contrast that with the sour, humorless, grievance-filled Trump and his running mate who supports a national ban on abortion and who has said that he believes women should stay in abusive marriages for the good of their children. J.D. Vance is also the guy who attempted to smear Harris as one of a group of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” (Never mind that Harris is part of a blended family and has been a stepmother for over a decade.) Do they really think that denigrating women like this is a winning strategy? Have at it and find out.
The last days have been stunning, providing a kind of joyful whiplash for all of us who have gravely worried about the state of the race and the expanding prospect that Trump was careening toward victory. The speed with which the vice president has shifted from a question to a declarative answer about how to defeat Donald Trump has been overwhelming in the best sense.
The great news is that Harris and her choice of Veep candidate can get on state ballots. This is from CNN. “Exclusive: CNN survey finds 48 states say Harris can get on ballot instead of Biden, rejecting claim switch breaks state laws.”
The election authorities of at least 48 states, both Republicans and Democrats, say there are no obstacles that would prevent Vice President Kamala Harris from getting on election ballots if she becomes the official Democratic presidential nominee, as expected.
The findings of a CNN survey of all 50 states undercut the claims of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said both before and after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday that there are legal “impediments” in some states to a party switching presidential candidates as the Democrats did. There was not a single state election authority that told CNN Harris would face a ballot issue as the official nominee; election authorities in two states, Florida and Montana, did not respond to requests for comment, but a review of the states’ ballot access rules suggests Harris is not likely to face an issue there either.
Johnson, a lawyer, said on ABC News Sunday that “it would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re – they don’t like the candidate any longer.” He said on CNN Monday that “in some of the states, there are impediments to just switching someone out like that.”
But experts on election law say that is not true, since the Democrats never named Biden as the official 2024 nominee or submitted his name to the states as their 2024 nominee. And election authorities around the country have now confirmed – telling CNN or saying in public statements that Harris will not face any obstacles getting on their ballots if she is formally chosen as the Democratic nominee next month.
The 48 states (plus the District of Columbia) whose election authorities have said the official Democratic nominee will not have ballot issues include the seven states with the closest margins in the 2020 election, which are widely considered the key swing states again in 2024: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada. The 48 states also include the 15 states where former President Donald Trump, the Republicans’ 2024 nominee, had his highest share of the vote in 2020.
Johnson’s office did not respond to CNN’s requests to identify the “impediments” he claimed some states have.
One of my favorite things to listen to on the news the last few days is the profuse use of the word “weird” to describe the Republican ticket. Its association with J.D. Vance is hysterical because he and his policy suggestions are weird. This is from ABC News. The story is reported by Julia Reinstein. “Democrats’ new line of attack on Republicans? ‘You’re being weird’. “I think it’s really elegant in its simplicity,” one Democratic strategist said.”
Democrats have recently begun adopting a fresh new line of attack on Republicans: quite simply, calling them weird.
In a press release Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign responded to an appearance by former President Donald Trump on Fox News.
Under a bulleted list of “main takeaways” from Trump’s appearance was one that quickly captured the public’s attention: “Trump is old and quite weird?”
The dig appeared to be a callback to what Harris once said she would do, according to CNN, if Trump followed her around the debate stage like he did to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Harris reportedly said she would turn around and ask him, “Why are you being so weird?”
After the anecdote circulated widely online, more Democrats began leaning into the “just call them weird” strategy.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz adopted the new party line in an MSNBC interview on Tuesday.
“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said. “They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room, that’s what it comes down to. … These are weird ideas.”
Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz also picked up on it. In an X post on Thursday, he shared a clip of a 2021 speech by Sen. JD Vance, in which the now–Republican vice presidential nominee said Americans without children should not get “nearly the same voice” in elections as those who do have children.
“This is quite weird,” Schatz wrote. “Like, a very very bad idea, but also weird. And presumably, unpopular.
The Former Guy’s Campaign is stumbling and bumbling. His usual nasty labeling is not working. The choice of JD Vance puts attention on Vance. I think he’s not going to stand for that very much longer. This is from the Guardian. “Conservatives’ racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris show exactly who they are. Conservatives’ racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris show exactly who they are. Hatred will continue to ooze from the right. Pay attention – because that bigotry isn’t just talk, it’s Republican policies.” The analysis is provided by Judith Levine.
Like a warm compress drawing pus from a wound, the Democratic presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris immediately brought out the misogyny and racism of the Maga Republican party.
Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican representative, called Harris, the child of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire – picked, that is, because she is Black, not because she’s qualified. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, insinuated that Harris is a welfare queen. “What the hell have you done other than collect a check?” he asked at a Michigan rally of Harris, a former state attorney general, US senator and now the vice-president. At the same time, social media posts showing Harris with her parents falsely claim she’s not really Black, because her father is light-skinned.
Popping up again are rumors circulated in 2020 by Trump lawyer John Eastman that Harris is ineligible to run for office because she might not be a citizen. Like Barack Obama, about whom Trump stirred the same “birther” calumny, Harris was born in the US.
Far-right blogger Matt Walsh and former Fox host Megyn Kelly suggested Harris slept her way to the top. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went further, alleging that the veep was “once an escort” who started out by “giving blow jobs to successful, rich, Black men”. The founder of Pastors for Trump tweeted: “Both Joe + the Ho gotta go!”
While allegedly copulating with all comers, Harris is slammed for failing in her womanly duty to reproduce. In a video that recently turned up, Vance, the father of three, told Tucker Carlson in 2021 that the US was being run by “childless cat ladies” – Harris among them – who don’t “have a direct stake” in the country’s future. Will Chamberlain, a lawyer who worked on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, proclaimed that “people without kids … are highly susceptible to corruption and perversion. They have no care for the future and live in the present.”
Being a step-parent – as Harris is to her husband’s biological children – doesn’t count, Chamberlain added. This criticism has never been leveled against the childless George Washington – although, to be fair, he was the Father of Our Country.
And if misogyny and racism are not sufficient, the right keeps searching for plain weirdness to use against the Democratic candidate. All they’ve come up with, though, is one of her more charming characteristics, her laugh, from which Trump derives his lamest-yet political nickname: “Laughing Kamala”.
This stuff is vile to watch. But as with drained pus, it’s got to be exposed to the air. Because it’s not just talk. It reveals what a Trump presidency would mean. By exposing what’s festering barely under the skin of Trumpism, the Republican party is telling us to vote against him.
Margaret Sullivan writes this in the Guardian. “The media is already failing in its duty to fairly cover Kamala Harris. Sure, Harris deserves scrutiny. But she doesn’t deserve smears and stereotypes amplified by journalists and pundits addicted to clicks.” I have been more selective about whose coverage I watch these days and which newspapers I rely on. You may have noticed this in my cites recently.
It’s going to be ugly, that much is already clear.
In the few days since Kamala Harris began her 2024 campaign for president, the media has shown us where some of their coverage is headed: no place good.
Both the rightwing and traditional media are making some predictable blunders. Add in the swill that circulates endlessly on the social media platforms, and you’ve got a mess.
Take, for example, the recent coverage of a Republican congressman’s smear of Harris.
“One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” Tim Burchett of Tennessee said on CNN, using the acronym for “diversity, equity and inclusion” to claim that she was ascending because of her race, not on merit. “Her record is abysmal at best.”
An NBC headline was one of many to hand a giant megaphone to this racist trope: “GOP Rep Tim Burchett calls Kamala Harris a ‘DEI vice-president’.” Plenty of others did the same – parroting and thus amplifying the slur.
Some news organizations added a fig leaf to their coverage, like the Tampa TV station whose headline read: “GOP representative called Harris a ‘DEI hire’: what does this mean?”
There was a more responsible way to go. USA Today, for one, brought helpful context in a piece headlined: “DEI candidate: what’s behind the GOP attacks on Kamala Harris.” It did a good job of explaining that this phrase is all part of the right’s anti-“woke” culture wars. “DEI has become GOP shorthand to impugn the qualifications of people of color who ascend to positions of power and influence.” The reporter quoted the author Mita Mallick noting that the DEI label is an attempt to “discredit, demoralize and disrespect leaders of color by labeling them ‘diversity hires’ – or otherwise misappropriating the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion as thinly veiled racist insults.” You come away with greater understanding.
Some insults are even more transparently racist, as when the perpetual liar and propagandist Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News in order to trash Harris: “She does not speak well. She does not work hard. She should not be the standard bearer for the party.”
These stereotypes, painting a woman of color as unintelligent and lazy, echo well-established white-grievance themes, causing the author Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarian movements, to warn: “Propagandists know that you should build on existing prejudices when introducing a new hate object or theme.”
Some commentary wasn’t racist but just pointless – as when Katy Tur asked, on MSNBC, if Harris was the kind of person voters would want to have a beer with. The “likeability” question certainly seems to come up for women candidates more than men.
It’s a familiar election-cycle cliche, but the former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob didn’t find it harmless. He posted his disgust: “I want a president who won’t turn our country into a fascist hellscape. I’m not auditioning barstool partners.”
So, this is obviously going to get more heated and weirder as the next 100 days unfold. Here are some things that I’m looking out for. First, are we going to know more about Trump’s booboo that’s still wearing its Kotex? This is from Time Magazine. “What We Do and Don’t Know About Trump’s Ear Wound” This is another one of Trump’s braggadocious weirdness that’s like a lie. He did not take a bullet for us. He most likely caught a piece of shrapnel.
Trump’s ear wound from an assassination attempt at a rally on July 13 quickly became a symbol of solidarity for many of his supporters, and a grim reminder of political violence in the U.S.
But new comments by FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday indicated there’s much the American public still does not know about the injury. Wray suggested in congressional testimony that the wound may have been caused by shrapnel, while Trump and his former White House physician have said it was caused by a bullet.
The former guy is incapable of telling the truth. I don’t even think he recognizes it. He just makes things that make him feel good about himself and then repeats them incessantly. Will J.D. Vance be removed from the ticket for being too open about his weirdness and upstaging Donald in media coverage? This is from Matthew Chapman of Raw Story. “
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has a big problem, former Trump administration communications chief Anthony Scaramucci told CNN’s Boris Sanchez Thursday. He is constantly at risk of overshadowing former President Donald Trump himself.
And that is a dangerous thing for anyone in Trump’s orbit to do, he warned.
This comes amid reporting that Trump is already regretting his choice of Vance, which he made at a moment when he felt that he had already locked up the race and didn’t think he needed a running mate who balanced the ticket pragmatically.
“Given that vantage point that you’ve had into Donald Trump, how do you think he’s absorbing these comments by J.D. Vance about ‘childless cat people‘ and the sort of blowback that he’s gotten on social media and elsewhere from women notably, a subset of voters that Republicans haven’t had the most success with?”
“What made Vice President Mike Pence successful as a vice presidential candidate is he understood President Trump’s personality,” said Scaramucci, who became a sharp Trump critic after a catastrophic and brief 10-day stint in the administration.
Any questions to add?
So, have a great weekend. We can breathe easier but we must also work harder. I have two friends–one from here and one from Minneapolis–addressing and writing notes to votes with postcards. The number of us grannies on my Zoom phone bank retraining and calling was amazing. There were also a lot of grandpas too. You can also just ensure your family and neighbors get out to vote and encourage them to use mail-in and early voting if it’s available. GOTV work is just really empowering and it keeps you away from the stressful stuff. I’m doing as much as I can to save my daughters and my now 3-year-old granddaughters from a Donald, J.D., and Project 2025 nightmare! Just send out information on that all over Social Media! Everything helps!
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
Wednesday Reads: Kamala for President
Posted: July 24, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: age issue, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, polls 11 CommentsGood Morning!!
I feel like I’m pretty much over my cold, but I’m still very tired and keep dozing off in the daytime. Then I realized that my mother died a year ago yesterday, so maybe that partially explains why I’m feeling sad and tired. At least I’m no longer going through box after box of Kleenex. Despite everything, I’m very excited about Kamala Harris and I really believe we have a shot at beating Grandpa Trump.
Reuters: Exclusive: Harris leads Trump 44% to 42% in US presidential race, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
Vice President Kamala Harris opened up a marginal two-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to her, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
That compares with a marginal two-point deficit Biden faced against Trump in last week’s poll before his Sunday exit from the race.
The new poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, followed both the Republican National Convention where Trump on Thursday formally accepted the nomination and Biden’s announcement on Sunday he was leaving the race and endorsing Harris.
Harris, whose campaign says she has secured the Democratic nomination, led Trump 44% to 42% in the national poll, a difference within the 3-percentage-point margin of error.
Harris and Trump were tied at 44% in a July 15-16 poll, and Trump led by one percentage point in a July 1-2 poll, both within the same margin of error.
Ali Vitali at NBC News: Democrats are cautiously optimistic that they finally have the first female president.
In Vice President Kamala Harris’ quick, if unorthodox, rise to the top of the Democratic ticket, elected officials, activists and operatives see in her a new chance to beat Donald Trump and make history in one swoop.
Eight years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton, Harris could be the first female president and the first Black woman to hold the nation’s top job, as well.
Democrats are somewhat optimistic, now set in a landscape they didn’t have in 2016: a messenger in Harris who is uniquely positioned to energize voters following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn national abortion rights, more proof from the ballot box that women can win in battleground areas and the knowledge that Trump himself is beatable — if still politically dangerous.
“The lessons that still apply [from 2016] are that people need to take Trump and his supporters seriously,” Shaunna Thomas, who co-founded and runs the pro-women group Ultraviolet, told NBC News. “That’s even more of a top-line message than whether or not a woman can win the presidency.” [….]
Now, many of the party operatives and groups who pushed for Clinton to be the first female president are working, to borrow a phrase from President Joe Biden, to “finish the job.”
“‘Let’s finish the job’ is actually for us, too, from 2016,” said Mini Timmaraju, who leads the pro-abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All and was the women’s vote director on Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “We ran and lost against Donald Trump and we suffered an incredible, horrific loss nationwide overturning Roe and so much damage to our country that this is sort of the ultimate fight back for us.”
A Harris victory in November would mean finishing the job that many of those operatives started with Clinton, one that extends further back to Shirley Chisholm, of New York, the first Black woman in Congress, who ran her own historic long-shot presidential bid in 1972.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who once worked to elect Chisholm and now backs Harris, told NBC News.
Hillary Clinton speaks for herself at The New York Times this morning: How Kamala Harris Can Win and Make History.
History has its eye on us. President Biden’s decision to end his campaign was as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime. It should also be a call to action to the rest of us to continue his fight for the soul of our nation. The next 15 weeks will be like nothing this country has ever experienced politically, but have no doubt: This is a race Democrats can and must win.
Mr. Biden has done a hard and rare thing. Serving as president was a lifelong dream. And when he finally got there, he was exceptionally good at it. To give that up, to accept that finishing the job meant passing the baton, took real moral clarity. The country mattered more. As one who shared that dream and has had to make peace with letting it go, I know this wasn’t easy. But it was the right thing to do.
Elections are about the future. That’s why I am excited about Vice President Kamala Harris. She represents a fresh start for American politics. She can offer a hopeful, unifying vision. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president. And I know she can defeat Donald Trump.
There is now an even sharper, clearer choice in this election. On one side is a convicted criminal who cares only about himself and is trying to turn back the clock on our rights and our country. On the other is a savvy former prosecutor and successful vice president who embodies our faith that America’s best days are still ahead. It’s old grievances versus new solutions.
On the attacks Harris will face:
Ms. Harris’s record and character will be distorted and disparaged by a flood of disinformation and the kind of ugly prejudice we’re already hearing from MAGA mouthpieces. She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share.
I know a thing or two about how hard it can be for strong women candidates to fight through the sexism and double standards of American politics. I’ve been called a witch, a “nasty woman” and much worse. I was even burned in effigy. As a candidate, I sometimes shied away from talking about making history. I wasn’t sure voters were ready for that. And I wasn’t running to break a barrier; I was running because I thought I was the most qualified to do the job. While it still pains me that I couldn’t break that highest, hardest glass ceiling, I’m proud that my two presidential campaigns made it seem normal to have a woman at the top of the ticket.
Ms. Harris will face unique additional challenges as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party’s ticket. That’s real, but we shouldn’t be afraid. It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible. After all, I won the national popular vote by nearly three million in 2016, and it’s not so long ago that Americans overwhelmingly elected our first Black president. As we saw in the 2022 midterms, abortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before. With Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.
Time is short to organize the campaign on her behalf, but the Labour Party in Britain and a broad left-wing coalition in France recently won big victories with even less time. Ms. Harris will have to reach out to voters who have been skeptical of Democrats and mobilize young voters who need convincing. But she can run on a strong record and ambitious plans to further reduce costs for families, enact common-sense gun safety laws and restore and protect our rights and freedoms.
Read more at the link. I got past the paywall by using the link at memorandum.com.
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The Kamala Harris hype is real.
Just three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris has already secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. The speed with which the party came together around her is inspiring.
Harris has been endorsed by almost everyone who matters in Democratic politics — senators, governors, key organizations, unions. She’s also raised some $100 million and counting from more than 880,000 small donors, more than 60 percent of whom hadn’t contributed before this cycle. If anyone was on the fence about whether Biden stepping aside was the right move, they probably aren’t now.
The past three days have been a remarkable display of Democratic consensus and unity after a bitter intra-party argument over whether Biden should be the nominee. The rush to support Harris also indicates that the party believes she can beat the Republican candidate — giant orange fascist blight Donald Trump.
New Harris-Trump polling started trickling out yesterday, and it contained good news for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken entirely after Biden announced his decision to step aside showed Harris up two points nationally (and up four points when RFK Jr. is included). Another poll showed Harris and Trump tied.
Given that Harris just had her first rally as the presumptive candidate yesterday, we’ll need more time to figure out exactly how the race has changed. But there are already a number of reasons to be hopeful about her prospects of winning this November.
Of course there are risks.
Unifying looked easy. It’s not.
The first indication of Harris’s strength is … well, pretty much everything that’s happened since Sunday.
Harris has been pilloried over the last four years as a middling politician, largely on the grounds that she suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before Iowa. The reliably confused Pamela Paul at the New York Times, for example, argued this week that “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate” who “fizzled out” in the presidential race.
As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, though, Harris’s candidacy didn’t fizzle out. She had solid endorsements and decent polling — but she figured out that Biden was too far ahead to beat in a very crowded field and dropped out early. That allowed her to stay on good terms with party actors and put her in a position to get the vice presidency. That’s not losing. It’s winning.
We have even better recent evidence that Harris is a skillful politician, though. Namely, she just nailed down the presidential nomination in around 48 hours and raised $100 million.
The rush to endorse Harris and the flood of donations was so speedy and so uniform that it looked easy. But there was no guarantee it would go so well. AOC warned last week before Biden stepped down that many donors “do not want to see the VP be the nominee.” Some leading Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were calling for an open process or some kind of mini primary.
Harris certainly benefited from the fact that Democrats are sick of division and eager to move on to uniting against Trump. But her strength also indicates that she has used her vice presidency to solidify her standing with most party actors and interest groups — not least with Joe Biden himself. Harris engineered an unprecedented victory immediately following an unprecedented moment of uncertainty for the party. That’s the work of a talented politician.
Read more specifics at Public Notice.
Jill Filipovic from her Substack: It’s Fun When Politics Are Fun.
Going with Harris also more or less splits the difference in risk aversion within the party. The core of the debate over whether Biden should drop out hinged on one’s perception of where the biggest risks sat: Were they primarily vested in the candidate himself? Or were they in the potential for chaos?
The Democrats who thought the risks sat with the candidate got their way when Biden dropped out. Those who feared chaos are getting their way now, as the party rallies around Harris and avoids an open primary. It’s not how I would have chosen to do things, but there’s nevertheless a lot to recommend it.
Also: This is fun, isn’t it?
The Biden-Trump debate and the attempted Trump assassination and the days after were very much not fun; they were dreadful, scary, and divisive, and I was ultimately feeling pretty resigned to four more years of a Trump presidency. It frankly didn’t seem like Republicans were having much fun either. And not that politics need to be entertainment or a party — I frankly wish more people would elect boring highly competent technocrats — but also, people like parties because parties are fun.
For the first time this cycle, the election feels fun. The memes are not dark. The soundtrack is good. Harris is inspiring people not because she promises to stick it to Trump, but because she promises something better. Republicans are mocking her laugh, but god, how good does it feel to have a candidate who really laughs? Her dorky mom-isms feel sweet and endearing. The girls and the gays love her, and the youngs are talking about her in ways I frankly don’t understand, and isn’t that great. Sure, we danced in the streets when Biden won in 2020 because it was such a relief to see four years of Trump come to an end and also we had been so cooped up inside thanks to Covid. But no one was dancing at a Biden rally. Harris, on the other hand, is the chief executive of Brat Summer.
No, fun alone doesn’t win elections. But it sure doesn’t hurt. And Trump knows this as well as anyone.
Max Burns at The Hill: It’s time to talk about Donald Trump’s age.
At 78, former President Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in American history. If he wins re-election in November, Trump will end his term just a few months shy of his 83rd birthday, making him two years older than President Joe Biden is now.
In short, Donald Trump has a serious age problem.
The media and Republican political leaders should treat concerns about Trump’s advanced age every bit as seriously as they did in Biden’s case. Trump can put those concerns to rest by making good on his promise to take a public cognitive test. Is he still willing to “do it for the good of the country,” as he said back on July 12?
After all, comparing footage from Trump’s 2015 presidential announcement to footage from earlier this year shows that Trump isn’t quite the man he used to be. The former president now routinely confuses names when speaking off the cuff — including the name of his own doctor — and struggled to finish his sentences during a Nashville rally earlier this year. How can the American people be sure Trump’s stumbles aren’t part of a sustained pattern of cognitive decline?
Trump has repeatedly said he believes all presidential candidates should be “mandated to take a cognitive test” regardless of age. There’s no time like the present, because the concerning evidence of Trump’s mental decline has been mounting for years.
His memory problems are well-documented; the former president doesn’t seem able to recall what he was doing or who he spoke to for most of the day on Jan. 6, 2021. He also regularly forgets who the sitting president is, often confusing Joe Biden and Barack Obama during unscripted remarks. That seems pretty important.
Concerns about how Trump’s age could weigh on the Republican ticket aren’t exclusive to Democrats like me. Sixty percent of voters now believe Trump is too old to serve, according to a post-debate ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. That’s up from 44 percent a little over a year ago. Of voters who watched Trump’s rambling debate performance last month, fully 50 percent believe the former president should withdraw from the race and focus on his mental health.
Hahaha! Trump looks really old compared to Kamala, who is extremely energetic and enthusiastic.
You probably heard about the Fortune scoop yesterday about Elon Musk donating to Trump. The story is behind a paywall, but here’s the gist from The Guardian: Elon Musk denies report he will donate $45m a month to Trump Super Pac.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.
On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.
“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac.”
Super Pacs, short for Political Action Committees, are independent political organisations to which donors can give unlimited amounts of money, while donations to individuals or non-Super Pacs are capped.
After the Peterson interview, Musk replied on X to a clip from the interview saying, “Yeah”, and to another tweet referencing the reports saying, “Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level and the key values of the Pac are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of merit & freedom”.
The denial comes days after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, endorsing his vice-president Kamala Harris, who now has enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination in August.
Also on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Super Pac was being staffed by former aides to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. “The Super Pac has acquired an air of mystery in the Trump orbit, with other outside groups largely in the dark about its plans,” the Times reported….
“The intent is to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” Musk said on Peterson’s show. “I wouldn’t say that I’m for example Maga,” he added, referring to the Trump catchphrase. “I think America is great. I’m more M-A-G, make America greater.”
It sounds like Trump probably couldn’t use this money for legal expenses.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Kamala Harris makes Donald Trump do the one thing he fears most: Get up and get out.
The joyful reception that Vice President Kamala Harris received from Democrats when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her was rooted largely in the contrast between the relatively youthful 59-year-old woman and the increasingly frail 81-year-old president. She gives good speeches! She’s fun and energetic! And she can campaign aggressively, especially with Biden remaining president, allowing Harris to make campaigning her full-time job. People in focus groups frequently say they haven’t seen much of Harris these past four years. Well, that’s about to change, since she is well-positioned to give endless interviews, attend frequent events, and give oh-so-many speeches. The contrast with Biden, who struggled to find the energy to campaign on top of running a country, will be notable.
The contrast stands not only with her boss but with her new opponent. It isn’t just Biden who has to limit public appearances, lest he get tired and cranky. Donald Trump, at age 78, has also been mostly absent from the traditional campaign rigamarole. He goes to occasional rallies, where his fans swoon over him, but which get relatively little press. There’s no incentive to cover his usual incoherent stump speech because he doesn’t break any news. He gives interviews to right-wing outlets, which mostly ask him how he got to be so darn perfect while avoiding topics that might draw interest from the larger public. He unloads his far-right venom on Truth Social, but since most journalists ignore that, he might as well be blogging into the void. He golfs a lot and, of course, had to sit in the untelevised trial in May, which resulted in 34 felony convictions. But to average Americans, especially swing voters who will decide the race, Trump is mostly out of sight and out of mind.
This appears very much by design. While they are being graded on a steep curve, Trump’s campaign managers are, as reported, more professional and competent than his previous hires. They’re no doubt aware that the biggest obstacle to persuading skeptical voters to back Trump is the candidate himself. His overt racism, sociopathic impulsivity, and off-the-charts narcissism turn off everyone who isn’t deeply in the MAGA cult. Every time Trump talks, it confirms the Biden campaign’s narrative that the former president is a self-centered jerk who will sell out the country for his own interests.
Trump has so far been able to stay out of the spotlight because of Biden. The president had a lightweight campaign presence. He barely did any interviews or press conferences, which only fueled speculation that the Biden team was hiding their candidate’s condition from public view. This enabled Trump to hang back, as well. Trump’s campaign created the illusion that he was campaigning more vigorously than Biden, by putting him out there in situations noticed by the press but not by ordinary voters. The rallies looked campaign-like while keeping Trump out of the news. Trump gave a lengthy interview to Time, in which he hinted at election violence and supported abortion bans. These views hurt him with swing voters, but almost no one heard about it, because it was a print interview in a publication few people outside of the Beltway read.
I have to admit, I was wrong. I’m still sad that Biden was forced to step down in such a humiliating way. But he handled it very well by waiting until the Republican Convention was over. Now they have to complete retune their arguments and attacks. No more Hunter Biden to kick around, no more old age insults, no more “Let’s go, Brandon.” Back to Marcotte:
Astute readers will remember that the reason Biden wanted a June debate was to remind voters what a vile person Trump is since so many memories had faded. If Biden had been coherent, the plan would have worked. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote, Trump “couldn’t control himself and behaved once again like the undisciplined, lying, vulgarian who half the country already hates.” He told laughable lies, such as denying sex with Stormy Daniels. The post-debate fact-checker spoke as fast as he could to debunk Trump’s lies and finally had to quit from exhaustion after three minutes.
But once again, Biden’s age worked to cover up Trump’s myriad deficiencies. It was too troubling, watching the president stumble, to even pay that much attention to Trump’s same old lie-and-hate routine. Not just for journalists, either. Voters who watched the debate were too worried about Biden to pay much mind to Trump.
With Harris as the Democratic nominee, however, Trump is caught in a no-win situation. If he continues to hang back from the campaign trail while she’s out there hustling, he’ll start inviting the questions about whether he’s too old and weak, the exact questions that plagued Biden. But if he starts doing more media and events that are outside the MAGA bubble, he will draw negative attention and remind voters why they hate him. In the face of this paradox, Trump’s first impulse was to keep pretending Biden is his opponent. As reality sets in, Trump’s freaking out.
There more at the Salon link.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m very anxious to see what happens next in this reinvigorated campaign.
Mostly Monday Reads: We Stand with Her
Posted: July 22, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, American Fascists, Economy | Tags: 2024 Presidential Election, Kamala Harris 26 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s Deja Vú, All Over Again! President Biden withdrew his name as the Democratic candidate for President in 2024 after a series of bad days and calls by many in the media, donors, and pols to quit the race. Enthusiasm for the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris is on the rise. Once again, we can hope for leadership that reflects this country and its needs. I’ve been waiting for her first speech as the candidate since these events over the weekend. She is set to speak at the White House on NCAA Sports Day to 1000s of student-athletes shortly.
NCAA Sports Day brings championship teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the White House. Harris also spoke at the event in 2023, which saw more than 1,000 student athletes from nearly 50 teams, according to Harris’ remarks.
Shortly after Biden announced he will not seek reelection Sunday, he threw his support behind Harris as his successor for the Democratic Party’s nominee. Harris said in a statement on X, “I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination.”
President Joe Biden has been one of the most consequential American Presidents in History. I am not a Noble Laureate, nor did I attend anything but Public Universities in two States, and I have only taught in public higher institutions and secondary schools. His economic policy record is beyond anything we’ve seen since the policies to end the Great Depression. The good thing is that we’ve learned a lot since then, and we have the computers, statistical chops, and data to determine what works and what doesn’t. He’s heeded these lessons. This analysis is from Jonathan V. Last writing at The Bulwark. “Joe Biden Is Our Greatest Living President. On the most unlikely great president in modern history.”
A president gets, at most, two lines above the fold on his Wikipedia page. That’s it. That’s how history judges them.
Here is Joe Biden’s legacy: He beat back America’s first authoritarian attempt. And when he realized that he could not do it a second time, he stepped away so someone else could.
This is enough to make him—already, today, on July 21, 2024—our greatest living president.
Biden’s presidency was unexpected. Prior to 2020, there had been nothing in his 47-year career to suggest that he was more than a pleasant, ambitious, Irish pol from central casting. He had been a senator, and a man running for president, over the course of four decades. His selection as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 seemed like a nice capstone for a rather average career in national politics.
For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, no one expected Biden to challenge him.
But the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville became a hinge-point in which this ordinary politician found his moment.
…
Biden’s administration was not perfect, but was largely successful.
He passed several significant pieces of bipartisan legislation. He fixed the COVID vaccine rollout (which Trump botched) and drove a stake through the heart of the pandemic. He achieved the kind of soft landing on inflation that economists dream about. His handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the single most effective management of a foreign crisis since the end of the Cold War.
But Wikipedia doesn’t care about your CHIPS Act, or your Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, or your Inflation Reduction Act. It doesn’t care about NATO expansion.
Again, you can feel the mounting support for Vice President Kamala Harris. The money is pouring in, and Donald is likely throwing ketchup everywhere. This is from Newsweek. “Nikki Haley Voters PAC Announces Support for Kamala Harris.”
A coalition of former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley voters pledged their support for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential bid on Sunday, hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race.
Biden announced on Sunday afternoon in a letter that he will not be seeking a second term in this year’s presidential election and threw his support behind Harris. The president’s decision follows weeks of mounting pressure from people within his own party and from key Democratic donors urging him to step aside for the sake of the party’s future after a disastrous debate performance last month against former President Donald Trump.
The political action committee (PAC), previously known as Haley Voters for Biden, which now features Harris’ name, seeks to amplify the voices of former Haley voters in support of Harris’ White House bid.
Craig Snyder, the group’s director, told Newsweek in an email on Sunday afternoon that the organization believes Harris “is best suited to defeat Donald Trump in November.”
“A tough former prosecutor, the Vice President comes from the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, not it’s left most fringe…For Haley voters, all of this puts the Vice President in a sweet spot for them to register their ongoing opposition to [former] President Trump,” he said.
“Voto Latino pledges $44M to support Harris.” This is published by The Hill and reported by Rafael Bernal.
Voto Latino is endorsing Vice President Harris on Monday in her bid for the White House, pledging its entire 2024 campaign budget to her cause.
The civic engagement group, a key player in Latino campaign politics, supported President Biden’s reelection efforts and is a fierce opponent of former President Trump.
“As far right extremists seek to demonize immigrants, shatter our democracy, and curtail our rights at every turn, Vice President Kamala Harris has led the defense of our multicultural democracy. Her long-standing support for working Americans, voting rights, DACA, and for women’s rights have done so much good for our country and the Latino community — and it has never been more important,” said María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino.
Voto Latino’s campaign in 2024 is hitting the road, after a mostly-digital 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“In 2020, Voto Latino endorsed Joe Biden in the face of an unprecedented threat to our community and our country. His exceptional term has earned our admiration and respect,” Kumar said in a statement Sunday, following Biden’s announcement that he would no longer seek reelection.
“Now more than ever we must unite our efforts to make sure Trump is not elected in November. The stakes have never been higher. If Trump returns to the White House, he’ll execute his anti-democracy and extreme platform. He will continue dehumanizing immigrants and will deploy our military to round-up people who they deem look undocumented. Trump also will expand the cottage industry of detention centers across the nation where no one is safe — U.S. citizens or not,” Kumar said Sunday.
Kumar told The Hill last month that Voto Latino is on track to raise and spend $44 million, up from $36 million four years ago.
The group plans to focus on young Hispanic voters with anti-disinformation, registration and mobilization campaigns in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Politico has this headline this morning. “Kamala Harris clears the path to the nomination as potential challengers fall in line. The rapid demonstration of support was a show of force — and unity — after weeks of unrest and anxiety.” I admit that I feel better already.
It took less than 24 hours for Kamala Harris to all but clear the Democratic presidential field.
Endorsements from a series of governors Monday morning — JB Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — effectively ended talk of a serious contest for the party’s nomination after President Joe Biden’s sudden decision Sunday to drop out of the race. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who also briefly flirted with challenging Harris, also said Monday morning that he wouldn’t seek the nomination.
“I am proud to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president of the United States,” Pritzker said in a statement.
“Today, I am fired up to endorse Kamala Harris for President of the United States,” Whitmer wrote in her own statement.
“She is the fighter we need at this moment to realize the full promise of our nation,” Moore said.
The rapid demonstration of support was a show of force — and unity — after weeks of unrest and anxiety over whether the president would agree to step aside after his disastrous debate performance in late June.
Again, Donald and his campaign of hate are now in more chaos than usual. Sean Hannity was thrown off his game and had this shocking (not really) headline covered by HuffPo. “MAGA Rages That Kamala Harris Is A Threat To Plastic Straws. Sean Hannity grasped at the argument while alleging Harris will “be the single most radical major party candidate to run for election.” Mediocre white men are fall to pieces when threatened. Maybe he needs a sippy cup like my 3 year old granddaughters use.
Signe cartoon
TOON13
Kamala Harris
That has to be one of the most ridiculous displays of white male privilege I’ve ever seen. This is from The Atlantic. “This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared. A campaign that had been optimized to beat Joe Biden must now be reinvented.” It’s reported by Tim Alberta. How will they have enough time to teach the Reality Star and Crisis Actor his lines? Perhaps all we will hear about is his fear of sharks and obsession with Hannibal Lecter.
In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability. No Republican I spoke with could remember a longer stretch of uninterrupted forward propulsion. And with Biden appearing to dig in, they left Milwaukee believing that this run of luck might never end.
The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.
Given the historic volatility of this campaign—Trump survived an assassination attempt just last weekend—there’s no guarantee that Harris will ultimately succeed Biden atop the ticket. The Trump campaign certainly believes she will—understandably so, given the rapid consolidation of Democratic officials around her following Biden’s announcement—and blasted out a statement Sunday afternoon that tied Harris to her unpopular boss. “Kamala Harris is just as much of [a] joke as Biden is,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement. “Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”
This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people. “We’ve talked about strength versus weakness, success versus failure,” LaCivita told me before the convention, summarizing the campaign’s strategic vision for the race. “The great thing about that messaging is that it’s not just unique to Joe Biden.”
In other words, they’ll continue to lie about issues at the border, dismiss that Trump told Republicans not to vote for a Republican-written Immigration reformer bill. They’ll cover up his murderous Covid-19 performance and the rest of the stuff. Also, they support dictators so Biden’s success with NATO will never be mentioned. They know that many people question what happened on that day at Butler Farms where one man died and two others were critical wounded. Trump continues to wear his Ear Kotex while not delivering evidence there’s anything in it. Photographs, as we have shared here, suggest it was likely a bit of glass. The campaign is mostly using it as a amarketing tool to extract money from the Cult. And, it is a cult.
I especially like this article and lede in The Guardian. “The post-Biden era may be uncertain for the Democrats, but for Trump it will be utterly dismaying. Whoever is nominated, a fresh choice will be on offer – a far better one than a grudge match between two grumpy old men.” It’s penned by Simon Tisdall.
The unforgiving deadline is 19 August, when the Democratic party national convention opens in Chicago. Thursday 22 August is the day the successful nominee must make her or his acceptance speech. After that, there’s no going back, no time for second thoughts. From then until election day on 5 November, it will be all-out war, a fight to the political death with an extremist Republican ticket in arguably the most consequential election since John F Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in 1960.
Will Harris get her party’s nod, or face a damaging internal competition? She has big advantages. The vice-president since 2021, she can count on nationwide name recognition – unlike Trump’s far-right white nationalist running mate, the deservedly obscure JD Vance. She has black and Asian-American roots, a potential plus with minority voters. She is the first ever woman to hold the vice-presidency. And at 59, she is definitely not Joe Biden.
Before joining the White House, Harris was a well regarded prosecutor and senator from California. In office, she has earned a reputation, among those who care to look, for championing women’s rights, education and climate action – and for fighting Republican voter-suppression schemes. She is underestimated and mocked by opponents, as vice-presidents typically are. But she has taken hard knocks and kept going. And she could inherit the $100m Biden-Harris campaign war chest.
For the US’s independent and undecided voters, Harris, crucially, is also not Donald Trump. Instead of a grudge match between two grumpy old men, battering each other bloody like cranky Monty Python knights, a fresh choice may soon be on offer – in terms of personality, energy, policy, tone, trustworthiness and moral integrity. It’s a choice that could bring a generational leap. Come January next year, it’s possible a new, younger morning in the US may dawn.
Indeed, I hope we can finely rid ourselves of Donald and his cult.
I have to say that I am so happy to see so many of our Hillary friends are here again. JJ explained that we’ve been fighting the WordPress AI goblin, which is somehow mistreating comments. I even have trouble commenting on my posts, so don’t despair. If you download the Jetpack app, you can sometimes comment more easily there. Also, we know that some of your comments are going to SPAM, so we’re all on the watch for it! Nothing like getting the old gang back together again!! I am so glad you’re here.
We know what’s at stake. They’ve already taken so many rights away that it’s time we elect people at all levels to stop this.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments