Kamala Harris moves gingerly away from Biden on Israel

One of the things that we need to be clear about Kamala Harris is that she is not a progressive. Her record is one of a centrist Democrat and that means that while she is not as ardent in Joe Biden in his uncritical embrace, both literally and metaphorically, of Israel and its extremist leader Benjamin Netanyahu, she has been a solid supporter. They paid lip service to a two-state solution while turning a blind eye to Israeli policies of expansion of annexation of Palestinian land that was making that solution no longer tenable. As long as there was no major turmoil, they could pay scant attention to how horribly that country was treating its Palestinian population.

The massacre that is taking place in Gaza that has caused worldwide condemnation has made that kind of silence untenable. Joe Biden made some half-hearted attempts to try and curb Israel’s excesses but Netanyahu scornfully and even insultingly rebuffed him. I was curious as to whether Harris would continue to do what she had to do as vice-president, which was to publicly support Biden’s non-action, or whether, now that she is the party leader in her own right, she would try to move in a different direction.
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The myth of migrant crime

On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver debunks the false narrative heavily promoted by serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) and right wing media like Fox news that the US is awash in a crime wave being committed by migrants. He shows that crime rates have declined dramatically over recent years and that migrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, and that a few events that have been shown repeatedly as examples of this rampant lawlessness in fact show no such thing.

This show was aired last Sunday, before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, but Oliver’s plea at the end about the importance of voting against SSACFT, whatever our reservations and concerns about Biden, are still valid.

‘Weird, sick, creepy, freaks’

At the 2016 Democratic convention, when it was clear that Republican nominee and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) was going to wage a dirty campaign of lies and personal insults against Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama uttered the sentence that resonated with the crowd and that she is remembered for: “When they go low, we go high”. She was implying that Democrats would not get into a mud fight with SSACFT and the Republicans, but would take the high road and focus on the issues. It was a noble goal.

But that was then, this is now.

The early signs are that Kamala Harris is not going to hold back and is quite willing to take the fight to the Republican ticket. One of the things that the Harris campaign seems to be focusing on is that both SSACFT and Vance are both creepy and weird.
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Vivian Jenna Wilson has just about had it with her father

Elon Musk has a transgender daughter who is so angry with the way he has reacted to her transition that she has cut off all ties with him and even changed her last name so that she will not be associated with him. This has not prevented Musk from continuing to criticize her and even repeatedly dead-naming her, most recently when he ranted about her when he spoke with Jordan Petersen and on Twitter/X.

Wilson has issued a statement in a series of posts blasting Musk.

Jones Wilson says that Musk is lying about her, her childhood, and his role in her life.

Musk posted on Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and added that as a child, she would “pick out clothes for me to wear like a jacket and tell me it was ‘fabulous!’”

In her response on Threads, Wilson, 20, called the depiction an untrue gay stereotype.

“I never picked out jackets for him to wear and I was most certainly not calling them ‘fabulous’ because literally what the (f**k). I did not use the word fabulous when I was four because once again I would like to reiterate… I was four,” Wilson said.

She added that Musk “doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

Musk in recent years has become increasingly enthralled with right-wing politics, sharing anti-immigration, anti-DEI and anti-trans posts and ideologies on X.

Being the child of reputedly one of the world’s richest people, there would have been strong incentive for Wilson to just suck it up and be silent in the hope of getting some of that money. It takes a lot of guts to so publicly and completely cut ties with her father and it speaks to how awful a parent he must be.

Kamala or Harris?

A female friend and colleague of mine, a professor of chemistry at my university, recounted to me an incident in which she and a few other professors were being introduced by their department chair to a visiting speaker. The chair went around the group saying, “This is professor X”, “This is professor Y” and so on until it came to her and then he said “This is Z”, giving just her first name. Z is not someone who stands on ceremony. She is friendly in her demeanor, dresses casually, and is not offended when her students call her by her first name, like many other male and female professors. And yet, this incident rankled her because she was the only one being addressed this way. She felt belittled by comparison, less respected. She says that as a woman is science, she is often the only one in a group of her peers, and this kind of thing has happened more than once.
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JD Vance looks worse by the day

It looks like we can expect a steady drip of bad news about JD Vance as people start combing through his past.

For example, in a just-released clip from an interview he gave before the 2022 Dobbs decision that overthrew Roe v. Wade, he makes up some fantasy about in the event that happens and Ohio bans abortions altogether, the possibility of George Soros every day sending a 747 to Ohio to fill it up with mostly Black women seeking abortions and taking them to California to have them, and says that he is sympathetic to the idea of the federal government stepping in to stop this.


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What makes a good running mate

The position of vice-president in the US is a peculiar one. The position carries with it no power, nor substantive daily duties, other than a largely ceremonial one of presiding over the senate and that usually only occurs when a very close vote is expected and the vice-president takes the chair in case it becomes necessary to cast a tie-breaking vote. The real requirement of the role is to be able to take over in the event that the president should die, resign, be removed from office, or is otherwise incapable of carrying out their duties. So the main criterion for being selected to the position is confidence that the person is capable of taking over if necessary. While there are no real qualifications for being president in terms of experience, and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) has shown us that someone totally unfit for the office can attain it, one would hope that the person picked to be the vice-presidential nominee would display some reassuring qualities that they could rise to the occasion if need be.

However, the last election brought to the fore another task that the vice-president has that had been seen as purely ceremonial but became central to SSACFT’s plan to overturn the election and that was presiding over the certification of the counting of the electoral college votes. Vice-president Mike Pence refused to entertain the idea that he had the power to challenge the votes of states that SSACFT lost, and allow alternate slates of electors. On December 23, 2022, Congress passed a law to rectify any ambiguities and close any loopholes that might be exploited in the future.
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Haley Voters for Harris?

During her campaign challenging serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SACFT) for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley managed to outlast all her rivals. She said quite a few negative things about him but all somewhat obliquely to avoid alienating the MAGA cult. When it came to the age issue, she said that the first party to nominate someone under the age of 80 would win the election. This number was clearly carefully chosen to be ambiguous to avoid being an obvious disqualifier for SSACFT, who is 78 years old. As long as Joe Biden was in the race at the age of 81, she could try to have it both ways, highlighting her being young while not explicitly saying that SSACFT was too old. With Biden leaving and the 59-year old Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive nominee, that prediction that was meant to advance her own candidacy, has become a little too uncomfortable for her.

Like almost all the other Republican politicians who at some point ventured to criticize him, she eventually crawled and groveled back into his and the party’s good graces. But the primary numbers showed that there is a sizable number of people both Republican and non-Republicans who disliked the idea of SSACFT as the party’s nominee and hoped that her long-shot bid could stop him, and not all of them are following her back into the fold. An organization calling itself ‘Haley Voters for Harris’ have set up a PAC and claims to represent some of those Haley supporters.
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War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu met with protests

The Israeli leader who is carrying out a genocidal assault on the people of Gaza and who seems to care not one bit for the tens of thousands of people, most of whom are women and children, who have been killed and made homeless and live in the utmost squalor and starvation, and are constantly forced to move from place to place with whatever meager belongings they can carry in order to avoid the bombings and ground assaults. While attention is focused on the horrors of Gaza, the Israeli government and armed forces seem to be giving the settlers in the West Bank, who are illegally occupying Palestinian land, free rein to harass and even kill Palestinians there in order to drive them out.

And yet, despite all this carnage and his horrendous record, Republicans thought it fit to invite Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, and Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries agreed. But it has sparked loud protests from activists who are outraged that someone who should be a pariah is being honored in this way.
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