Stone Mountain in Georgia is a state park that has huge figures of confederate leaders carved into the mountain. Funded by the organization known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, it symbolized nostalgia for a racist past and became a rallying place for white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. The Intercept produced a short 10-minute documentary about the ugly history it represents..
As predicted, the Trump campaign has wheeled out the birther charge against Kamala Harris. The playbook for such things is very familiar. Someone publishes an article pushing a lie or a dubious theory and then Trump points to the article as ‘raising concerns’ while not explicitly endorsing the idea. This enables his spokespersons to deny that he is promoting birtherism while promoting birtherism. The strategy is utterly transparent.
The birtherism case against Barack Obama was based on the preposterous idea that he was not born in the US. In Harris’s case, her birth in California is not being challenged. This latest incarnation of birtherism as published in a Newsweek op-ed by John Eastman, a professor of law at Chapman University, suggests that Harris may not meet the constitutional requirement for eligibility since her parents may have been in the US on student visas at the time she was born. This argument has been dismissed out of hand by other law experts and staff at Newsweek were so outraged that this was published that they publicly protested and after three days the magazine kinda, sorta apologized but did not withdraw the article.
He gives a quick recap of he situation.
You can tell that the charges that Trump has been utterly incompetent in the way that he has handled the pandemic leading to far more people dying than necessary, is getting under his skin by the way that he gloated yesterday when New Zealand reported a cluster of new cases. That country and its leader Jacinda Ardern had been widely praised for their vigorous and decisive science-based response that resulted in a period of over 100 days with no new cases. To be compared unfavorably to the leader of another country, and a woman at that, must have really stung.
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That was the charge made by a group of people outside a store in Orange County, CA that is near Los Angeles.
Via Carla Sinclair:
A group of skydivers jump at the same time, when one is accidentally kicked in the head by his buddy. He goes unconscious, but is miraculously saved when one of his partners is able to catch him and activate his chute.
Country and folk singer Dolly Parton generally avoids politics but seems to have a generally welcoming attitude towards other people. She recently spoke out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. She also spoke about her earlier decision to drop the word ‘Dixie’ from the name of her theme park.
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I am not a fan of identity politics, the slots that a candidate checks off in terms of delineated demographic characteristics. For me its the policies that are of paramount importance. That does not mean that I am not pleased and supportive when someone whose group identity has never been represented in high office breaks through that perceived barrier and achieves it. But identity should only play a significant role if all other things are roughly equal.
But it seems that identity politics matters to many people, especially the political consultant class, and Kamal Harris’s selection by Joe Biden seems to be very beneficial to the Democratic ticket and a source of concern to Trump’s campaign. This is because she is someone whom many diverse subgroups can identify with.
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On NPR news yesterday that I listen to when I am in the kitchen doing various chores, I was startled when they announced the death of James Thompson, who had been the longest serving governor of Illinois. What startled me was not that he had died (at the age of 84, he had been out of politics for a long time) but that he was referred to as a ‘liberal Republican’, a political label that one never hears these days.
It made me realize how things have changed because there was a time, not that long ago, when that description was not obviously an oxymoron. There used to be John Lindsay, mayor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, and Jacob Javits, New York senator, the first two of whom were considered potential Republican presidential material despite having views that were classified as liberal.
Nowadays, everyone in the Republican party runs as far away as possible from the liberal label. Even the labels ‘moderate’ and ‘centrist’ are seen as poison. Conversely, there seems to be no extreme right wing label that they will shy away from, even if it has racist and sexist and xenophobic overtones or is even outright bonkers such as being called a QAnon sympathizer.