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.”
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?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: July 20, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi | Tags: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Black voters, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Sheila Jackson Lee, women voters 34 CommentsHappy Caturday!!
I’m not sure how much I can post today. I’m down with a bad cold and I’m barely functioning. I did test for Covid and the result was negative. I’m not coughing, so I think it’s just a head cold.
I’m also really depressed about the way Democrats are publicly tearing down President Biden. It’s really shameful how they are treating him.
Before I get to that and other news, yesterday we lost a true Democratic shero. CNN: Sheila Jackson Lee, long-serving Democratic congresswoman and advocate for Black Americans, dies at 74.
Sheila Jackson Lee, a longtime Democratic congresswoman from Texas who was an outspoken advocate for Black Americans for decades, has died. She was 74.
“Today, with incredible grief for our loss yet deep gratitude for the life she shared with us, we announce the passing of United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of the 18th Congressional District of Texas,” her family said in a statement Friday.
Jackson Lee announced in June that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At the time, she acknowledged that “the road ahead will not be easy” and said she had “faith that God will strengthen me.”
Her family remembered her as “a fierce champion of the people,” saying that “she was affectionately and simply known as ‘Congresswoman’ by her constituents in recognition of her near-ubiquitous presence and service to their daily lives for more than 30 years.”
Born on January 12, 1950, in Queens, New York, Jackson Lee was among the first women to graduate from Yale University and served as a Houston municipal judge and a city councilwoman before she was first elected to represent Texas’ 18th Congressional District in 1994, unseating a Democratic incumbent in the primary for the Houston-area seat.
During her congressional tenure, Jackson Lee was an outspoken advocate for progressive interests and Black Americans. She was one of the sponsors of legislation to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday, frequently spoke out against police brutality and advocated federal legislation to prosecute police misconduct.
She was widely admired among progressives for her opposition to the Iraq War and was a fierce critic of former President Donald Trump. She opposed the tallying of electoral votes certifying Trump as the winner of the 2016 election, citing an unfounded claim about “massive voter suppression,” and occasionally used her position on the House Judiciary Committee to excoriate members of Trump’s circle.
Although she was unsuccessful in some of her most ambitious aims, Jackson Lee remained an advocate for racial justice, particularly in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in 2020.
“We will not stop until the nation knows Black lives matter, and reparations are passed as the most significant civil rights legislation of the 21st century,” Jackson Lee said at a march in Washington in 2020.
At the time of her death, she was a chief deputy whip for House Democrats and a vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She formerly served as whip of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Read the rest at CNN.
On the controversy over the Democratic nomination: The latest effort by anti-Biden Democrats is to force Biden out and then open up the convention to a “mini-primary,” because, as Rep. Zoe Lofgen claims, there shouldn’t be a “coronation” of Vice President Harris. This is insane, IMHO, but supposedly Nancy Pelosi supports this idea.
From The Hill: Senior Democrat suggests Obama, Clinton host ‘mini primary’ vetting.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) joined the growing list of Democrats calling on President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race Friday, suggesting in an interview that former President’s Obama and Clinton should help vet new candidates for a “mini primary.”
Lofgren joined MSNBC Friday to discuss what would happen if Biden were to decide to step aside — which he has thus far said he would not do — and what she hopes to see happen if someone new were added to the mix.
“Should he make that decision, there will have to be quick steps,” Lofgren said.
“Maybe a vetting hosted by former presidents including Obama and Clinton would be helpful and help focus the attention,” she added later. “And whoever emerges, including Kamala Harris, would be a stronger candidate than if we tried to exclude a transparent public process.”
As the pressure for Biden to drop grows, speculation over whether Vice President Harris would be the nominee if Biden chose to pass the torch and her ability to beat former President Trump in November has as well.
Lofgren, a close ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said she doesn’t think Harris should immediately be named as the nominee, should Biden leave the race. Though, she acknowledged that the vice president would likely have the best shot.
“I don’t think we can do a coronation,” she said. “But obviously, the vice president would be the leading candidate.”
If they pass over Harris, the Democrats had better prepare for large numbers of Black and women voters to be outraged.
Politico: Pelosi voiced support for an open nomination process if Biden drops out.
In a meeting with fellow California Democrats last week, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed the need for an open process to choose the party’s next nominee if President Joe Biden steps aside, in an effort to avoid the appearance of a Kamala Harris coronation.
The discussion in that meeting of the California delegation, which includes 40 members, took place in the Capitol on July 10, at least partly focused on the complicated next steps for the Democratic Party if Biden left the ticket. And they specifically talked about the potential political downsides of party elites quickly crowning the vice president as the next nominee, according to four people familiar with the discussion, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Pelosi was one of several California Democrats who stressed that an uncompetitive process would turn off voters, according to those four people.
The concern wasn’t about Harris’ strengths as a candidate — and in fact, several people made clear Harris needed to be the party’s next pick — but instead centered on worries that party bosses were choosing the president, rather than the party’s base.
“Nancy was leading that charge that it needed to be an open process,” according to a person briefed on the meeting, who was granted anonymity to avoid blowback from House leadership.
The debate about how to move forward should Biden step aside is unfolding across every level of the Democratic Party, but it’s particularly notable coming from a group effectively led by Pelosi, who has helped spearhead the public and private discussion about Biden’s condition since his disastrous June 27 debate.
Just hours before this California delegation meeting, for instance, Pelosi went on MSNBC for her now-famous remarks suggesting Biden hadn’t made up his mind on reelection and giving cover to fellow Democrats to speak out publicly. And several of Pelosi’s allies from California, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, who will likely soon be a senator for the state, are loudly urging Biden to exit.
The California Democrats are probably the most dependent on Hollywood money and we know that Hollywood donors have rejected Biden.
Interestingly, the Bernie Sanders crowd are supporting Biden.
The New Republic: AOC Issues Dire Warning on Threats to Come if Biden Drops Out.
On Instagram Live early Friday morning, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed the ongoing debate over whether President Biden is fit to run for reelection.
Speaking for close to an hour, the New York progressive explained her support of Biden and why she thought replacing him was a bad idea.
“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez attacked her fellow Democrats who have spoken anonymously to the press about Biden, particularly those resigned to defeat in November.
“My community does not have the option to lose,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations.”
“A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
As far as a plan for replacing Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said that whenever she has asked, she hasn’t gotten an answer.
“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court? And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
She noted that the convention is in less than a month, and that Michigan has to finalize their ballot two days after the convention, which could result in a legal crisis. Ocasio-Cortez said she was concerned that these factors aren’t being considered by Democrats in the replacement camp.
Recent reports say Biden dropping out of the race is increasingly likely, and could happen in a matter of days. The president appears to be strongly considering the idea after meeting with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and reportedly even former president Barack Obama thinks Biden needs to reconsider running. A major West Coast donor has already drafted a withdrawal speech.
Watch AOC’s complete statement at TNR.
From ABC News short takes: Donors furious on call with Harris and voter outreach organizers: Sources.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to calm the panic during a call Friday afternoon with major Democratic donors, and told them, “We are going to win this election,” one attendee on the call told ABC News.
Harris made the call with a person representing a Latino-focused organization and another representing a Black-focused organization, according to a source with knowledge of the call.
Their message was to “plead” to the donors who have been calling on Biden to drop out to stop and resume funding, according to the source.
“We know which candidate in this election puts the American people first: Our President, Joe Biden,” Harris said during the call, according to the attendee.
“With every decision he makes in the Oval Office, he thinks about how it will impact working Americans. And I witness it every day. Now contrast that with what we heard last night.”
The representative of the Latino-focused organization said they have spoken to thousands of people in swing states and out of those thousands of conversations, the debate came up only two times; these average voters were most worried about inflation and the economy.
Harris did not take questions, according to the attendee.
Some donors were furious, with some expecting the call to be about replacing Biden and they did not want to be lectured, the attendee said. As the call was wrapping up, one furious donor started going on a rant and the call ended in the middle of it.
The Guardian: Biden continues to resist Democratic calls to end re-election campaign.
Democrats were caught in an apparent stalemate on Saturday as a dug-in Joe Biden continued to endure high-profile calls to end his re-election campaign after a week of astonishing party moves to unseat the president in favor of a candidate many hope will be more likely to beat Donald Trump.
In the weeks since his disastrous debate performance against Trump, the 81-year-old Biden has attempted to fight off calls for him to step down from the top of the ticket amid concerns that his age and mental acuity are no longer up to the job. But a series of interviews, a press conference and speeches have done little to quell party nerves….
Frustration within the Democratic party establishment at what they see as Biden’s intransigence comes as the outlet also reported on Saturday that the president in private is complaining that former aides to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would be lecturing him on election strategy after Democratic 1994 and 2010 midterm election losses that he had avoided in 2022.
Those pressuring Biden – who also has Covid – to abandon his re-election bid, the Times reported, “risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all”.
Some advisers are said to believe that Biden is holding out at least until the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington on Wednesday. But some donors say that that this is the ideal moment for Biden to step aside now that Republicans have had their convention, and Democrats have a month until their own convention in Chicago to tell a new story about a new candidate.
The vivid picture of a Covid-sick, abandoned and resentful veteran politician, sitting out the pressure in a Delaware beach house, comes as most senior Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, former house speaker Nancy Pelosi and the current speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, are calling for Biden – at a minimum – to reconsider his position.
“We have to cauterize this wound right now and the sooner we can do it the better,” Virginia representative Gerald E Connolly, a Democrat, told the Times. Connolly, who has not publicly called for Biden to step aside, said the ongoing drama “shows the cold calculus of politics”.
The past week has seen waves of Democrat elected officials make public statements of their appreciation of Biden’s record in office but dire warnings that the US will see a second Trump presidency should he remain the party’s candidate for November’s presidential election.
The latest high-profile name to join the chorus was Sherrod Brown, when the embattled Ohio senator broke cover on Friday evening to call for an end to Biden’s re-election campaign.
“I’ve heard from Ohioans on important issues, such as how to continue to grow jobs in our state, give law enforcement the resources to crack down on fentanyl, protect social security and Medicare from cuts, and prevent the ongoing efforts to impose a national abortion ban,” Brown said in a statement.
The biggest problem I see with all this infighting and back-stabbing is that no one is explaining how all this work work. The other problem is that they are trying to disenfranchise the 14,000,000 Americans who voted for Biden in the primaries. I just want to beat Trump, and I don’t see how that can happen if Democrats dump Biden and Harris for a new candidate who will have to raise money, build a campaing infrastructure, introduce him/herself to the country, and fight the lawsuits Republicans are threatening if Biden is removed.
I’m really wiped out, so I’m going give you the rest of the stories I have as links only:
The Hill: Democrats’ stalemate over Biden candidacy escalates.
HuffPost: Near The End Of His Vice Presidency, Joe Biden Suggested How Long He’d Stay In Office.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: A Searing Reminder That Trump Is Unwell.
Raw Story:
Media Matters: Trump’s RNC speech was divisive, but front pages of mainstream media claimed it was “unifying” and “healing.”
Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Trump’s GOP is no country for MAGA women.
ABC News: JD Vance’s wife faces racist online backlash from far-right social media posts.
Scientific American: What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science.
MSNBC: Trump shooter flew drone over venue hours before attempted assassination, source says.
Take care and have a good weekend, everyone!
Finally Friday Reads: We Shall Overcome
Posted: July 19, 2024 Filed under: "presidential immunity", 2024 Elections, Biden Harris 2024, Feminists, fundamentalist Christians, House of Representatives, The Insurrectionists Club, The Media SUCKS, tRump crimes against humanity, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: @repeat1968, John Buss 9 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I never wanted a week to end so much in my life as this one. I’m not one for TV viewing because reality shows are not my thing. There are very few movies and series that grab my attention, too. This time of year, it’s good to have the weather channel. You already know I’m a news junkie, but the news is more like a staged reality show than about actual events that matter. It also is getting too far into the Beltway gossip zone to be of any real use. The media is on a few stories like flies on rice. I searched for something beyond the Beltway jive talk today.
Today, Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put to rest a story at the Washington Post yesterday. I would like to think this will stop all the headlines out there speculating when and if President Biden will give up his bid for his second term.
The other big story was the Republican National Convention, which looked more like a North Shore Klan rally than a convention. The self-proclaimed ‘David Duke without the Baggage,’ Congressman Steven Scalise, even got a speaking spot. I questioned my affiliation with the Republican Party after the 1992 speech by Pat Buchannan. After that, I registered as an Independent for quite a while.
[17] Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda.
[18] At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
[19] Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.
[20] Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
[21] Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
[22] Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
[23] This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
[24] The President of the United States is also America’s commander-in-chief. He’s the man we authorize to send fathers and sons and brothers and friends into battle.
[25] George Bush was 17-years-old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation, he walked down to the recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.
That time I got to see both President HW Bush and President Bill Clinton together presenting aid to the city’s Universities on the Campus at UNO. I was sitting nearly up front and even had a nice chat with a secret service woman. Where did those days go? (December 7,2005)
Needless to say, I voted for Bill Clinton even though I had previously supported Bush against Reagan when he pulled that stunt about Welfare Queens. If you haven’t read Josh Levin’s book ‘The Queen’, you should. Here’s an interview with him from PBS by Hari Sreenivasan from June 2019. Reagan used a criminal who was an outlier to slur an entire group of women, as detailed in “The True Story Behind the ‘Welfare Queen’ Stereotype.”
Hari Sreenivasan:
Josh there’s this “welfare queen” moniker that’s been used really to demonize entire groups of people. You go through this entire book and take a dive not just into that phrase but really that it’s based on a real person. She was an outlier while at the same time becoming an icon for a whole category.
Josh Levin:
Yeah that’s exactly right. Her name was Linda Taylor and she was identified by the Chicago Tribune in 1974 as a person who had committed welfare fraud while driving fancy cars, including a Cadillac. And very quickly after that she was given the nickname the welfare queen. And it was a nickname and a stereotype that really very quickly blew up.
Hari Sreenivasan:
You know it was a Chicago paper that gave her that nickname but it’s really Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail that makes that phrase such a household idea. How did it get from the Chicago paper into his speeches?
Josh Levin:
One of his advisers had found a wire story about it and Reagan was looking for kind of outrageous stories about welfare because welfare reform had been one of his big accomplishments as governor of California. And it was also something that voters were outraged about in the mid 1970s increased welfare spending at a time when the economy was really poor. And this idea that there were welfare cheats out there was something that created outrage.
Ronald Reagan Campaign Speech, 1976: In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veterans husbands. Her tax-free cash income, alone, has been running $150,000 a year.
Josh Levin:
He didn’t say the phrase “welfare queen” in his speeches he would talk about how there was this woman in Chicago who’d stolen as much as one hundred fifty thousand dollars in welfare money in a single year, which was an exaggerated sum. But there was such baggage attached to welfare at that point that I think the electorate really understood what he was saying and really knew what he was talking about. Welfare has been an effective talking point for a whole generation of politicians.
Me and the nuns at Congo Square protesting the caging of children and Donald’s family separation policy. (July 2,2017)
Now we have promises to deport and look up and one that is painted with the brush of ‘illegal immigrant with brown skin.’ They’re also developing a scheme of citizenship that would deprive citizenship for all kinds of folks that would actually include Melania if the law passed. This is from the page of America’s Voice.
Selected immigration components of Project 2025 are below:
Mass Detention and Family Separation: Project 2025 paves the way for mass family separation by eliminating important benefits for unaccompanied children and transfers the care of unaccompanied minors from Health and Human Services to DHS to allow for large scale detention of young children. The proposal recommends weakening standards for migrant detention, calling for mass detention in temporary structures such as tents.
Attacks on Dreamers and Parents of US Citizens: Project 2025 calls for the elimination of family-based immigration and DACA.
Raid Schools Hospitals and Religious Zones: Project 2025 removes prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’ thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.
Suspending Due Process: Project 2025 removes legal processes allowing immigrants a day in court by expanding the use of expedited deportations to the ‘fullest extent’ throughout the country. It also gives DHS the authority to declare a ‘mass migration event’ and enact anything to avert it (e.g. scrapping all Title 8 requirements and automatically expelling migrants). The proposal further undermines due legal processes by allowing immediate expulsion of migrants in the case of ‘loss of operational control’ or USCIS backlogs which is caused by consistent underfunding from Republican officials. Project 2025 would create a show-me-your-papers style mandate and require ICE to remove, arrest, and detain immigration violators anywhere in the country and without warrant, if possible. The plan authorizes local law enforcement to participate in border security actions and penalizes jurisdictions that do not comply. The project also plans to remove oversight authorities from ICE and classify all USCIS operations.
Use of the Military: Project 2025 encourages the use of the US military to crack down on peaceful migrants arriving at the border. The proposal also considers engaging in war with drug cartels in Mexico.
Attacks Legal Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to restrict legal immigration by barring certain groups or nationalities from accessing work and student visas, eliminates DACA, family-based immigration, TPS, and visas for victims of crime, reduces asylum and discounts gang and domestic violence as grounds.
Yup, I am photobombing my friends at the Women’s March (Jan.23, 2013). All the Donald Cult probably thinks I doth protest too much.
These kinds of things happen when White Christian Nationalists take over a party and embrace a criminal, narcissistic, lying, and authoritarian leader. We’ve gone from a B-movie Actor to a Reality Show Actor who sure does a good job at Crisis Acting, too. I’ll rely on JJ to outline the absolute misogyny demanded by Project 2025. My point is that the RNC this year was basically the showboat for Project 2025. It was a festival of the Donald Cult wreaking racism, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism. Plus, the Vice Presidential nominee is a self-loathing hillbilly. His book is all about blaming poor people in Appalachia for the systemic problems they face. This is from Aja Romano, who is writing for VOX. “Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made J.D. Vance. The bestseller proves Trump’s VP pick has abiding disdain for absolutely everyone.”
At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad.
Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian.
That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book.
Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets.
Another one about J.D. This is from the Independent. “I’m from the same place as JD Vance, and there’s nothing to celebrate now that he’s Trump’s VP. We are both Appalachians, with eerily similar working-class backgrounds which JD Vance wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, says Skylar Baker-Jordan, our views — and our reactions to this attempted assassination — couldn’t be more different.”
Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.
It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.
Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.
Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
So the man they’re hailing as being just a good old boy is really just another elite enthralled by bigger elites. That’s what reality television has done with political reality. It’s made an entire group of people believe that a staged, scripted, false narrative wrapped up in a box with reality printed on it must be true. Let me show you some data rather than speculation. This is from Newsweek. This was published two days ago. The data comes before that awful RNC ho-down. “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Election Are Declining.” This comes from who once was a candidate and has worked campaign since High School. Don’t trust polls too far away from Election Day!
According to the tracker, Biden is favored to win in 534 out of 1,000 of FiveThirtyEight’s simulations of how the election could go, while Trump wins in 462. The poll also shows that the simulations indicate that Biden is on track for a three-point win.
The polling website said its forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency.
It comes after a Presidential Voting Intention poll of 3,601 swing state voters by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, found that Trump’s margins over President Joe Biden have narrowed since June in two key states: Florida and North Carolina.
Trump previously defeated Biden in both states in 2020, while he held a six-point lead over Biden in Florida in a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll from that June.
This craziness at The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign. No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.”
However, he now only leads the current president by four points in Florida. The poll shows that 45 percent of participants plan to vote for Trump, compared to Biden’s 41 percent.
It is not the only recent poll to give Trump only a four-point lead in Florida. A June Fox News survey gave Trump 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Biden.
You would think a few folks would be reading them just to notice the trend. But, nope. Not with a big dose of Potomac Fever going on. So this one from The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign, No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.” Notice how we get two for one here.
Donald Trump‘s campaign will attack the Democrats for conducting a “coup” if Joe Biden quits the presidential race, the GOP campaign co-chair told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
The former president’s campaign for president will try to throw the charge leveled at him over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection back in Democrats’ faces, Chris LaCivita told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“Here’s what’s fascinating about it,” LaCivita said as he mingled on the convention floor in Milwaukee. “You are watching a coup. Literally. In front of your eyes.”
LaCivita, the architect with Susie Wiles of Trump’s 2024 campaign, offered the first insight into how Republicans will deal with a new Democratic candidate as Biden appeared increasingly likely to accede to calls to step aside.
The attack as a “coup plotter” will be matched with a playbook that continues to attack Biden’s record especially if Biden is succeeded by his vice president, Kamala Harris.
The campaign will run the same strategy if Harris takes over, he said. Biden has already given Republicans too much fodder, he acknowledged. They will also demand that Biden step down as president if he won’t run. That would give them extra ammunition to attack Harris as a sitting president who benefited from a “coup.”
“It’s Joe Biden,” he added, even if the nominee will not, in fact, be Joe Biden, should he step aside.
And AOC says the quiet part out loud. We knew this. “AOC goes live on Instagram saying many who want Joe Biden to drop out of race also want to remove Kamala. ‘A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,’ congresswoman says.” This is from the Independent.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram Live early on Friday morning to share her thoughts on Joe Biden’s floundering re-election campaign – and warning that many of those who want the President to drop out of the race, also want Vice President Kamala Harris off the ticket too.
“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support, Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she told viewers.
She slammed her colleagues for giving anonymous quotes to the press, calling it “bull****” and urged those resigned to a loss to Donald Trump to give up their seats.
“My community does not have the option to lose,” she said.
“If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations,” the congresswoman said.
One last story that really shows what the ramping up of Wipipo privilege has done to our society. This is from CNN. “‘Treated like a convict’: NFL legend Terrell Davis describes getting handcuffed on a plane near his kids after asking for ice.” This story is reported by Holly Yan.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
We should really be careful. It is getting ugly out there. But, if there is a protest of anything here in Orleans Parish, I will be there. I will also vote. I will also drag my neighbors to the voting booth if I have to.
We shall overcome.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Nothing reminds me of the worst stuff to come out of the 80s than Disco. Nothing says cultural appropriation like three white guys from the Isle of Man morphing funk and black slang into a song that’s all about themselves!!!!!! But it’s a good message to the pols and media that won’t settle down and do their damned jobs!
Wednesday Reads
Posted: July 17, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, just because | Tags: AR-15 bullets, JD Vance, Racist Republicans, Supreme Court reform, Thomas Matthew Crooks, Trump attempted assassination, Ukraine, Usha Vance 13 CommentsGood Day!!
I’m trying very hard not to panic this morning. Ever since the shooting at the Trump rally on Saturday, cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN have completely surrendered to Trump and the Republicans. Both channels are hosting wall-to-wall coverage of the Republican National Convention.
On Monday, MSNBC even took Morning Joe off the air and replaced it with anodyne Today Show-like programming, because they were afraid a host or guest might say something derogatory about Trump. Joe and Mika threatened to quit if it happens again.
From Oliver Darcy at CNN: ‘Morning Joe’ pulled from air Monday because of Trump shooting.
MSNBC will not air “Morning Joe,” its celebrated politics roundtable program, on Monday, opting to instead air continued breaking news coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The progressive news network confirmed the decision to preempt its influential and top-rated morning show after a CNN inquiry Sunday evening. The network said the show will resume airing Tuesday.
The decision by MSNBC to leave one of its most recognizable programs on the sidelines amid a seismic politics-driven news cycle, with the Republican National Convention getting underway in the wake of the Saturday shooting at Trump’s campaign rally, is certain to raise eyebrows.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole. Given the breaking news nature of the story, the person said, it made more sense to continue airing rolling breaking news coverage in the fraught political moment.
Morning Joe hosts Mika (formerly Brzezinski) and Joe Scarboro
“Given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking news coverage since Saturday evening,” a spokesperson for NBCUniversal News Group said in a statement to CNN. “As we continue to cover this story into the week, the networks will continue to cross simulcast, alternating between NBC News, NBC News NOW and ‘MSNBC Reports,’ so there is one news feed covering this developing situation.”
In the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, some of the former president’s supporters have vehemently criticized the press and liberal media commentators for their hard-knuckled reporting, which has sounded the alarm on what four more years under the former president would look like.
Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, made the decision in conjunction with Rashida Jones, the president of MSNBC, and hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the person familiar with the matter told CNN.
From Politico: Scarborough blasts NBC for pulling ‘Morning Joe’ after Trump shooting, threatens to quit if it happens again.
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough slammed his own network for pulling his show on Monday in favor of news coverage of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, saying he and co-host Mika Brzezinski were “surprised” and “disappointed” by the call and threatening to leave if it happens again.
“Next time we are told there will be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said live on air Tuesday morning. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”
Scarborough said the network told the “Morning Joe” team that there would be one NBC News feed “in breaking news mode” across all NBC channels all day Monday. But the “Today” show aired on Monday morning on NBC, and MSNBC hosts Andrea Mitchell and Chris Jansing appeared for their regularly scheduled shows in the afternoon.
“If we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed from NBC News across all NBC News channels … we obviously would have been in yesterday morning,” Scarborough said, later adding: “Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen.”
Trump with his massive bandage.
Despite the heavy coverage, no one seems to be asking questions about what actually happened on Saturday. What kind of injury did Trump have? If he was actually grazed by an AR-15 bullet, it seems as if it would have done more damage than is apparent in photographs. Originally, local police said he was hit by fragments of the teleprompter. Trump went to the golf course on Sunday; he wasn’t wearing a bandage and his ear looked normal. Now he’s wearing a large “maxi-pad” at the convention. Here are a few Twitter comments on the subject:
From former RNC chair Michael Steele:
@MichaelSteel
You would think someone would inquire about Trump’s medical report if for no other reason than Trump has not provided any medical updates or information, neither has the hospital that treated him. Outside of Trump telling us he’s “fine”, how severe was the wound? Did he loose part of his ear (bullets do terrible things to flesh)? How long for recovery? Will the wound require cosmetic surgery? What about reports that it may not have been a bullet which wounded him but glass from the shattered teleprompter? If I missed such reports from his campaign or the hospital please post. Thank you.
From The Hoarse Whisperer
Feel free to point me to the magic trajectory that would allow for a through-and-through of a person’s ear from a location lateral to them. Show me your expertise in… basic geometry.
Hi. A round from an AR wouldn’t poke a little hole in an ear. Trump didn’t get shot. He was injured by shrapnel or shattered glass or something.
We shouldn’t have to speculate abt any of this. It is the most basic thing for law enforcement and or the medical team that examined Trump to say what they found. It’s such a basic thing. It’s a huge story. How can it be that there’s zero official abt this part of it?
AR-15 bullets
This man is running for president. Shouldn’t we get more details about what happened? And why aren’t we getting more information about the shooter? Ever since it came out that he was a Republican, no one seems to want to talk about him. Maybe if the FBI can break into his phone, we will learn something.
Today we got at update on the injury from Eric Trump. CBS News: Donald Trump doesn’t have stitches after assassination attempt, but a “nice flesh wound,” Eric Trump says.
Former President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, said his father doesn’t have stitches after he was shot in an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, but that he has a “nice flesh wound” from the shooting.
The former president could be seen touching his ear as the attack unfolded, before he was shielded by Secret Service and whisked off the rally stage with blood on his face. When he appeared at the Republican National Convention on Monday and Tuesday, he wore a large bandage over his injury.
Speaking to “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil from the convention in Milwaukee Wednesday morning, Eric Trump said his father has referred to the injury as “the greatest earache he’s ever had.”
“You know, he was millimeters away from having his life expunged … I’m sure the ear doesn’t feel well,” Eric Trump said.
Eric Trump also told “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell on Tuesday that his father’s hearing is fine and that he is “in great spirits.
Okay. Take that for what you think it’s worth.
The Homeland Security IG is investigating the Secret Service security failures at the rally. AP: Homeland Security inspector general investigates Secret Service handling of security at Trump rally.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for former President Donald Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at a Pennsylvania rally.
In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”
There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.
President Joe Biden already had directed an independent review of the security at the rally.
The shooting has raised questions about how the gunman was able to climb onto a roof with a clear line of sight to the former president, who said he was shot in the ear.
The 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was able to get within 135 meters (157 yards) of the stage where the Republican former president was speaking when he opened fire. That’s despite a threat on Trump’s life from Iran leading to additional security for the former president in the days before the Saturday rally.
We may get more information about Crooks from local media. Here’s a story from Pittsburgh’s ABC news station WTAE: Video appears to show would-be Trump assassin at rally hour before shooting.
We’re learning more about the movements of Thomas Matthew Crooks before Saturday’s shooting at the rally for former President Donald Trump.
New video obtained exclusively by Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 appears to show 20-year-old Thomas Crooks lurking in the area an hour before he opened fire.
The man, who didn’t want to show his face on camera, captured the video at 5:06 p.m. on Saturday evening. He says it was a seemingly simply moment as he was trying to capture the size of the crowd, but ended up capturing much more.
“I wanted to pan the crowd because it was a massive crowd, so I was just taking in the moment. So this was before the shooting. Obviously had no idea how that day, how that day would end,” said the man who attended the rally with his teenaged son.
The video appears to show Crooks, 20, lurking in the area near a building just past the secured perimeter of the event itself. As it pans to the crowd, it shows multiple law enforcement vehicles in the area facing the building itself. As the video moves back toward the building, Crooks appears to be seen again. This means that Crooks was likely in the area for more than an hour before the shots were fired….
Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 has learned from multiple sources that Crooks was spotted at the rally, photographed as suspicious and officers were actively looking for him when he made his way onto the roof.
Law enforcement sources say Crooks was able to access the roof by climbing over an air conditioning unit adjacent to the building.
Dakinikat wrote in detail about the many questions that remain about what happened at the rally on Saturday, so check that out if you haven’t read it.
DC Democrats are still fighting each other over whether Biden should be their nominee. This has been going on for 3 weeks now. No one ever explains how replacing him would work. All of the suggested replacements are polling worse than Biden, and are unknown to the average voter who doesn’t follow politics closely. Many of these “insiders” who want to replace Biden also want to dump Kamala Harris. That would guarantee losing black and women voters who are the base of the party.
NBC News says that Biden is getting “combative.” I don’t blame him. , , , and write: Determined to push forward, Biden tightens his circle and grows combative.
President Joe Biden spent more than a week in meetings and on phone calls addressing Democrats’ concerns about his candidacy with a positive, conciliatory message about his path forward. At times, he even sounded contrite about his uneven debate performance, which prompted calls for him to suspend his re-election campaign.
He took blunt questions about his mental acuity in stride. He smiled through suggestions from allies that he take a cognitive test or consider allowing someone younger to take his place on the Democratic ticket. He agreed that his supporters have legitimate concerns and promised to show them he’s up for the rigor of a presidential campaign and another four years in the White House.
Then he’d had enough.
In the past few days, Biden has started to privately convey a new message to Democrats: The conversation about my future is over, and I’m getting irritated that you’re not realizing that. Biden has called several prominent allies individually to tell them to spread the word.
“We think we’ve got a good plan to fight through this,” a senior Biden aide said.
Nearly three weeks since his rocky debate performance that shook his party, Biden is intent on shutting down dissent among Democrats in order to move forward and focus on defeating Donald Trump. And after hearing out his critics, he’s tightening his circle to those he‘s relied on the longest — and who support his path ahead.
Biden’s thinning patience for questions about his candidacy were on display as he campaigned Friday in Detroit telling a large, effusive crowd: “You made me the nominee. No one else. Not the press, not the pundits, not the insiders, not donors.”
“And I’m not going anywhere,” Biden added.
Read more DC gossip at the NBC link.
Biden did make some news this morning. He is working on changes to the Supreme Court.
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo: Biden Relents And Elevates Supreme Court Reform To His Re-Election Agenda.
It’s hard to know the precise combination of developments that changed President Biden’s mind about Supreme Court reforms and prompted him to place them more centrally in the framework of the 2024 election.
Was it the ethics scandals of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court’s own ineptitude in dealing with them? Was it the series of controversial decisions across a whole host of issues and areas of civic life in which the court wrested power away from the executive and legislative branches and placed it firmly in the judicial branch? Was it the six-justice conservative majority aggressively uprooting the court’s own precedents in pursuit of its own preferred legal and policy outcomes? Was it the fact that he’s trailing in the polls with his own re-election more at risk that at any previous point in his presidency?
All of the above are in play, of course. A tipping point was reached, and it’s unlikely any one development was the difference-maker.
The shift, first reported by the Washington Post, was revealed over the weekend in a call Biden had with the Congressional Progressive Caucus:
“I’m going to need your help on the Supreme Court, because I’m about to come out — I don’t want to prematurely announce it — but I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court. … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months, and I need some help,” Biden said, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Washington Post.
The NYT separately confirmed that Biden’s “proposals to overhaul the court … could be unveiled in the coming weeks.”
Among the menu of choices Biden is reported to be considering:
- term limits for the justices;
- imposing an enforceable ethics code; and
- Relatedly, backing a constitutional amendment to reverse the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity.
Late addition: I meant to note that enlarging the court beyond its current nine-justice setup does not appear to be among Biden’s proposals.
None of these measures will pass the GOP-controlled House, though they could serve as messaging vehicles on the Hill between now and the election. More importantly, they elevate Supreme Court reforms to his second term agenda, creating the opportunity for the November election to be a referendum on the high court and create legislative momentum if Biden wins. Even then, it’ll be a very heavy lift.
This is a long-game move, that also offers a few short-term political advantages.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, applaud on Tuesday.
Yesterday’s big news was that Trump has chosen JD Vance as his running mate. It appears this is going to be a controversial choice. We will be writing more about him in the days to come, but here are a few relevant articles:
Andrew Roth at The Guardian: Trump’s choice of Vance ‘terrible news’ for Ukraine, Europe experts warn.
Donald Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick has reignited fears in Europe that he would pursue a transactional “America first” foreign policy that could culminate in the US pushing for Ukraine to acquiesce to Vladimir Putin and sue for peace with Russia.
“It’s bad for us but it’s terrible news for [Ukraine],” said one senior European diplomat in Washington. “[Vance] is not our ally.”
Foreign diplomats and observers have frequently called Trump’s actual policies a “black box,” saying that was impossible to know for certain what the unpredictable leader would do when in power.
Some have soothed themselves by suggesting that names tipped for top positions, such as former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, would maintain a foreign policy status quo while Trump focuses on domestic affairs.
Jonathan Martin at Politico: ‘Scared to Death’: GOP Security Hawks Slam Vance Selection.
Former President Donald Trump didn’t just select a running mate here – he doused political kerosene on the raging Republican fire over foreign policy.
By tapping the 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the party’s leading national security doves, Trump strengthened the hand of the isolationist forces eager to undo the hawkish GOP consensus that has endured since the Reagan era.
Should Trump prevail in November, the non-interventionists will have one of their most articulate advocates at Trump’s side. What worries the hawks is that Vance may also be the last adviser in the former president’s ear.
While toeing the party line and praising Vance in their public comments, in private the interventionists ranged from horrified to merely alarmed that one of the loudest critics of aiding Ukraine could soon be first in line for the presidency. The grimaces, sighs and whispered frustrations from the old guard as they made their way through the convention reception circuit were easy to find in the day after the selection.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who oversees military spending as the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chair, told one associate,according to a person familiar with the exchange: “The Ukrainians better hurry up and win.”
Another influential congressional Republican simply told me about the Vance selection: “I’m scared to death.”
While he had it on before Trump announced his running mate, the Ukrainian flag pin on the lapel of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, neatly illustrated without the necessity of words the gulf between so much of the GOP and Vance on the war in Europe.
Read the rest at Politico.
JD Vance with his wife Usha during his Senate campaign.
Some racist Republicans are unhappy with the Vance choice, because he is married to a woman of color.
Newsweek: MAGA Makes Racist Attacks Against JD Vance’s Wife.
Extremist figures and members of the Make America Great Again movement have criticized the wife of Ohio Senator JD Vance after former President Donald Trump named him as his running mate in the 2024 election.
Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was raised in San Diego before meeting her husband at Yale Law School. They were married in 2014 and later blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony, The New York Times reported.
In the wake of Trump’s vice presidential announcement on Monday, numerous conservative and far-right figures have taken to social media to launch racist attacks against Usha Vance because of her Indian heritage and the assumption that her influence on her husband’s political career means the Republican Party will be softer on immigration.
“I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration,” Jaden McNeil, a far-right activist and the founder of America First Students, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, while sharing a picture of the Vances with their newborn baby.
Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home along with rapper Kanye West in November 2022, suggested that Vance would not be a “defender of white identity” because of his wife’s Indian heritage.
“Who is this guy, really?” Fuentes said on his podcast. “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
Vincent James Foxx, who was present at the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, wrote on X: “JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there’s a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we’ll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!”
More racist comments from MAGA world at the link.
More Vance reads to check out:
The Guardian: Who is Usha Vance, the Indian American lawyer married to JD Vance?
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: The phony populism of JD Vance.
Talking Points Memo: JD Vance, Menstrual Surveillance Hawk.
The Guardian: A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates.
Financial Times: How Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley funded the sudden rise of JD Vance.
Those are my recommended reads for today. Have courage, Sky Dancers!
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