4 Likes
Just wanted to re-up this thread from the early days here in the WTF community forum. Honest vetting from real democratic voters. 
3 Likes
Now this Kamala VP announcement has been made, speculation now on who might replace her, and appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom should they hopefully get to the WH.
Rep Adam Schiff’s name is being circulated now. But he could be AG in the Biden-Harris adminstration.
Hey now…a double win.
3 Likes
Donald Trump Attacks Kamala Harris As “Nasty” And “Disrespectful,” But He Also Contributed To Her Past Campaign
Donald Trump said that Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee, called her “nasty” for the way that she questioned Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and said that he was surprised that Joe Biden picked her as his running mate.
“I was surprised that he picked her,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I have been watching her for a long time. I was a little surprised. She was extraordinarily nasty to Brett Kavanaugh — Judge Kavanaugh then, now Justice Kavanaugh. She was nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing the way she treated now-Justice Kavanaugh, and I won’t forget that soon.”
He also called her “the meanest” and “disrespectful.”
But that is a contrast to what Trump has said previously about Harris. Two weeks ago, he told a reporter that she would be a “fine choice.” Last year, shortly after she launched her campaign, he offered some light praise, sizing up her campaign launch as better than other Democrats.
Trump also has been a Harris campaign donor. He gave $1,000 to her campaign in 2013 and $5,000 in 2011, when she was still California attorney general and raising money for re-election. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, also gave $2,000 in 2013. Harris’s presidential campaign said that she donated Trump’s $6,000 to an immigration group in 2015.
During his press conference, he also attacked Harris as “the most liberal person in the U.S. Senate, and I thought that Biden would try to stay away from that a bit, because with what they are doing with open borders and sanctuary cities …with all the things that they are doing, I would have thought it would have gone a different way.”
At his press conference, Trump also reaffirmed his support for Vice President Mike Pence, calling him “fantastic.”
Shortly after Biden’s campaign announced Harris as the VP pick, the Trump campaign quickly got up a web ad calling her a “phony” (watch it below). “He is handing over the reins to Kamala while they jointly embrace the radical left,” a narrator says.
As Trump wrapped up his White House press conference, reporters asked him about his donations to Harris. He did not answer.
Trump whining that Kamala Harris was “nasty” to rapist frat boy Brett Kavanaugh, as well as “disrespectful” and “the meanest” just makes me love her more.
And Donnie scurrying away when asked about his contributions to her past runs is even funnier.
5 Likes
This R candidate, and QAnon believer, Majorie Tarlor Greene got through the primary and will be running in Georgia this fall. It will be interesting to see how this fringe, Trump republican does, particularly with a 14 point lead in the final runoff.
In Georgia, Ms. Greene defeated John Cowan, a neurosurgeon who is no less conservative or pro-Trump, according to The Associated Press, holding a lead of roughly 15 percentage points early Wednesday. The result is likely to unsettle mainstream Republicans, who have sought to publicly distance themselves from QAnon supporters running for congressional office this cycle even as they quietly support some of them.
3 Likes
Something to look forward to…bigly.
NYTimes: Kamala Harris Is the Future, So Mike Pence May Well Be History
Already, I am dreaming of the debate.
There’s Mike Pence, white of hair as well as cheek, his demeanor more starched than his dress shirt, his smile so tight it’s the twin of a grimace. He represents more than the Trump administration, God help him. He represents an America that’s half memory, half myth.
And there’s Kamala Harris — younger, blacker and more buoyant. She’s only the fourth woman on the presidential ticket of one of the country’s two major political parties and she’s the first woman of color. She represents an America that’s evolving, fitfully, toward equal opportunity and equal justice.
Under her gaze, Pence has to defend a racist, sexist president. As he watches helplessly, Harris gets to talk about how that racism and sexism feel to a Black woman like her. This isn’t any ordinary clash of perspectives and philosophies. It’s an extraordinary collision of life experiences.
And that’s exactly what Joe Biden wants.
Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Biden has defined himself as the opposite of President Trump in experience and earnestness and as the antidote to Trump in how he sees America and what he values about it. He has used his choice of a running mate to hammer home that last bit.
Harris is a distinguished public servant with a résumé — U.S. senator from California, state attorney general — unquestionably suited to this exhilarating and daunting opportunity, which she has earned. She is also an agent of contrast, emphasizing the difference between the Republican ticket and the Democratic one, between Trump’s politics of division and Biden’s politics of inclusion.
But even as she affirms Biden’s orientation toward the future, she reflects his appreciation of his own past. She enables him, for a second time, to be part of a presidential ticket that sets a precedent and blazes a trail. It’s almost as if he’s trying to recreate the established magic, to repurpose the victorious script.
…
She brings to that ticket some of the balance that presidential candidates typically want their running mates to bring. Biden is 77. She’s 55. Biden is East Coast. She’s West Coast. Biden is a white guy, like all but four of the major-party presidential or vice-presidential nominees before Harris. She’s not.
And oh, can she be nimble and fierce. That’s what Biden learned in that tense primary debate, cheap shot or no cheap shot. That’s what Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr learned when they appeared before Senate committees and endured her grilling.
That’s what I hope and trust Pence will learn on Oct. 7, at the University of Utah, where the sole vice-presidential debate is scheduled to take place. A man who reputedly doesn’t like to eat alone with any woman other than his wife — it looks weird and is a recipe for trouble — will face off against a woman who’s big trouble indeed. I suspect she’ll have him for breakfast.
3 Likes
VP Biden & Sen. Harris Presser now
Excellent first foray into the public sphere - VP Biden and Sen Harris - showing us strength, hope and ‘possibilities.’
WOW!!!
Adding
1 Like
I don’t have time to sit to much for quite a while today, I guess they’re acting as a good team so far?
2 Likes
Yes. They are simpatico…both are being heartfelt, articulate and taking the mantle…
They as a team are a strong (and hopefully formidable) team. 
2 Likes
Oh yes. I am watching them now, and they’re strong. It’s a really good thing to watch.
2 Likes
Watch: Joe Biden Introduces Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) As Running Mate
3 Likes
FiveThirtyEight has gotten a bad rap…BUT I like this statistic for Biden as winner.
1 Like
I’ll cheer when the Post Office works again.
2 Likes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Hb5jQy7Ro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N65K_IbUhzI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGj0nkRLWzs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F9D8KvhQuM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUwxqxlUXXY
2 Likes
Fuuuuuuck. And Newsweek just kicked off Birtherism 2.0:
Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility
The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position. The 12th Amendment provides that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” And Article II of the Constitution specifies that “[n]o person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President.” Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a “natural born citizen”—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.
“Nonsense,” runs the counter-commentary. Indeed, PolitiFact rated the claim of ineligibility as “Pants on Fire” false, Snopes rated it simply “False,” and from the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Daily News likewise rated it “False.” All three (and numerous others) simply assert that Harris is eligible because she was born in Oakland—and is therefore a natural-born citizen from location of birth. The 14th Amendment says so, they all claim, and the Supreme Court so held in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark .
But those claims are erroneous, at least as the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was originally understood—an error to which even my good friend, renowned UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh, has fallen prey.
The language of Article II is that one must be a natural-born citizen . The original Constitution did not define citizenship, but the 14th Amendment does—and it provides that “all persons born…in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof , are citizens.” Those who claim that birth alone is sufficient overlook the second phrase. The person must also be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and that meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully). Such was the view of those who authored the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause; of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1872 Slaughter-House Cases and the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins ; of Thomas Cooley, the leading constitutional treatise writer of the day; and of the State Department, which, in the 1880s, issued directives to U.S. embassies to that effect.
The Supreme Court’s subsequent decision in Wong Kim Ark is not to the contrary. At issue there was a child born to Chinese immigrants who had become lawful, permanent residents in the United States—“domiciled” was the legally significant word used by the Court. But that was the extent of the Court’s holding (as opposed to broader language that was dicta , and therefore not binding). Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances of the parents, is automatically a U.S. citizen.
Granted, our government’s view of the Constitution’s citizenship mandate has morphed over the decades to what is now an absolute “birth on the soil no matter the circumstances” view—but that morphing does not appear to have begun until the late 1960s, after Kamala Harris’ birth in 1964. The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico. Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.
So before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris’ eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth.
Were Harris’ parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark , she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.
Interestingly, this recitation of the original meaning of the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause might also call into question Harris’ eligibility for her current position as a United States senator. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution specifies that to be eligible for the office of senator, one must have been “nine Years a Citizen of the United States.” If Harris was not a citizen at birth, we would need to know when (if ever) she became a citizen. Her father’s biographical page at Stanford University identifies his citizenship status as follows: “Jamaica (by birth); U.S. (by naturalization).” But there is some dispute over whether he was in fact ever naturalized, and it is also unclear whether Harris’ mother ever became a naturalized citizen. If neither was ever naturalized, or at least not naturalized before Harris’ 16th birthday (which would have allowed her to obtain citizenship derived from their naturalization under the immigration law, at the time), then she would have had to become naturalized herself in order to be a citizen. That does not appear to have ever happened, yet without it, she could not have been “nine Years a Citizen of the United States” before her election to the U.S. Senate.
I have no doubt that this significant challenge to Harris’ constitutional eligibility to the second-highest office in the land will be dismissed out of hand as so much antiquated constitutional tripe. But the concerns about divided allegiance that led our nation’s Founders to include the “natural-born citizen” requirement for the office of president and commander-in-chief remain important; indeed, with persistent threats from Russia, China and others to our sovereignty and electoral process, those concerns are perhaps even more important today. It would be an inauspicious start for any campaign for the highest offices in the land to ignore the Constitution’s eligibility requirements; how else could we possibly expect the candidates, if elected, to honor their oaths to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and…to the best of [their] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?”
3 Likes
By this logic Ted Cruz couldn’t run for President, like he did in 2016. 
5 Likes
The Republican Senate nightmare is coming true
It’s a very long way from that assumption to this headline from the Cook Political Report, a non-partisan campaign handicapping site, late last month: "Almost 100 Days Out, Democrats Are Favored to Take Back the Senate."
Wrote Cook Senate editor Jessica Taylor (bolding is mine):
"Ultimately, every day that Trump stubbornly refuses to change course [on the coronavirus pandemic] is another day that it becomes increasingly likely he may not only tank his own re-election bid but could be on a kamikaze mission to take the Republican-held Senate down with him. At this point,* a net gain of five to seven seats for Democrats looks far more probable than the one to three seat gain that would leave them shy of a majority ."
3 Likes