FTA:

The Republican approach to Vice President Kamala Harris is terrible, no good, absolutely awful and all over the place. Compared to Harris' upbeat, future-oriented campaign backed by the banging chorus of America's greatest pop star, Donald Trump looks like a late-stage Elvis stuck in a doom loop.

While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has urged his caucus to focus on policy and not personality, Trump and his allies will obviously ignore this good political advice over the next 100 days. This will damage his campaign--and the country--but it's the only way Trump and his followers know how to run. Racism and sexism are very powerful forces in American politics and have often worked to great effect. Trump and his allies obviously know this, so they have trotted out their greatest hits of tropes that amplify the two, hoping to further hype up the MAGA base.

Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
I know we're treating him like a normal candidate, yada yada, but can someone ask him this which should've been asked in the debate:

Do you agree that you are ineligible to run again in 2028 if you win this time and must leave the presidency in Jan 2029?

Just see what he says.

FTA:

Harris has a profound opportunity to present herself as a change agent while embracing Joe Biden's legacy. To do that, she must do a better job than the president in explaining how their administration has been rebalancing power in favor of the little guy. It's a populist revolution that most people have never heard of.

One reason most voters and much of the media are oblivious to this story is that Biden has always viewed himself, and been viewed by others, as an institutionalist who values regular order and working across the aisle. Yet when Biden first sat behind the Resolute Desk in 2021, he made appointments and policy changes that challenged principles that elites in both parties have used for 40 years to entrench their power and privilege.

These principles have gone under different banners in different decades. In the 1990s, policy wonks often referred to them as "the Washington Consensus." Today, the mindset is called "neoliberalism," a core belief that market capitalism is a self-stabilizing system and that if left undisturbed by government regulation, it will spread broad prosperity and freedom across the globe.

Video at link:

Q. "Do you believe if Donald Trump were elected next year, that he would try to stay in office beyond a second term? That he would never leave office?"

Liz Cheney: "There's no question ... Absolutely. He's already done it once."
(April 2023)

It sure looks like Trump wore that big white bandage for days not to protect his poor injured ear but to cover up the fact that it wasn't very injured at all.

I remember at least one poster on the Retort telling us Trump was going to need plastic surgery to repair his badly injured ear. Guess not.

In the real world,Trump is not God's chosen one. His comments about Harris are projection. He's the one who is a bum and real garbage.

It's hard to believe that some people, way too many people, believe that this is the man God saved so that he could save the USA.

'Wow': CNN anchor taken aback after Trump calls Kamala Harris 'real garbage'

Sidner played a clip of Trump speaking with "Fox & Friends" on Thursday morning in which he said of Harris that "I'd love to be nice but I'm dealing against real garbage."

"Wow," Sidner said in response.

You can just see/hear how much he relishes saying this:

Trump: "Kamala Harris was a bum three weeks ago. She was a bum."

Clown, this one's for you:

Folks already getting ideas for Halloween:

I didn't even know Spirit Halloween sold these @uNoClimbGorilla, looks like a lot of fun, should be popular this year

Sumbitted without comment:

#119 Thanks, Redial. Yeah, there was nothing like a tree branch in Crooks' line of sight, so it's hard to understand why the FBI is considering a bullet fragment as a possibility.

Grazing an ear is not going to cause the bullet to fragment.
#117 | Posted by jpw

JPW, you seem to know a lot about this topic, so could you answer my uninformed but honest question:

If it was a bullet fragment rather than a bullet, how/why did it become fragmented? Did the bullet just explode in midair without contacting anything? Is that something that can happen? Or did it have to hit something in order to break/burst into fragments?

Funny, I was thinking that Trump is the one who should stay away from balconies and be careful what he eats because JD is both ruthlessly ambitious and the real choice of the Opus Dei gang.

I have never suggested that Kamala Harris was selected to attract Black voters. She was selected to diversify the ticket, thus attracting voters from many demographics an old white dude doesn't draw. Are YOU suggesting that Kamala Harris only attracts Black voters? I didn't think so.
Posted by Miranda7

My point was the opposite: Biden was trying to attract some voters for whom diversity is a bugaboo, a con, not a plus. For those voters picking Kamala was a greater risk than picking someone like Klobuchar would have been. What demographics do you think Kamala was added to the ticket to attract? Specifically, what demographics do you think Kamala was selected to attract that Klobuchar wouldn't have?

The FBI issued its own statement, "What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject's rifle."

I still have the same general question I asked earlier:

If it was a bullet fragment rather than a bullet, how/why did it become fragmented? Did the bullet just explode in midair without contacting anything? Is that something that can happen? Or did it have to hit something in order to break/burst into fragments?

Don won't ditch him because he needs the money from Peter Thiele and it would be admitting Don Jr made a mistake. The only way it could happen is if JD can be convinced to quit the ticket by for "personal reasons".

I remember he promised to appoint a black woman to the SC.

"From the beginning, It has been my view that Harris (despite her qualifications) was selected to diversity the ticket and pull in votes, but they had ZERO intention of grooming her to be the future president."

The other flaw in your logic that Kamala "was selected to diversity (diversify?) the ticket and pull in votes" is that Biden won the nomination because of black voters. He didn't need to pick a black woman to get their votes; he already had them. If he was trying to attract swing voters in midwestern states, it might have been a better purely political calculation to pick someone like Amy Klobushar, who also ran in the 2020 primary. He wasn't going to pick a male running mate, but I don't think it was a given that he needed to pick a woman of color and I wasn't at all convinced he would. Before he made his seleciton, I actually wrote to him/his campaign and recommended he pick Harris.

Until you can come up with something more substantial than a November, 2021 article, I stand by what I said: Evidence does not support your hypothesis that Harris was forced to hide her light under a bushel and that Democratic elites, including/especially Joe Biden, deliberately tried to sideline her.

And here's another recent article that concentrates on her foreign policy experience:

Kamala Harris would bring greater foreign policy experience than most new US presidents

A few things are certain: Harris represents significant generational change. She embraces the globalized outlook one might expect of a daughter of immigrants who spent part of her childhood in Canada. She will take office with a seasoned team around her. And other than Biden, Americans must go all the way back to George H.W. Bush in 1989 to find a president who would take office with more foreign affairs experience than her.

Vice presidential accomplishments

Other engagements were the diplomacy that consumes senior officials' calendars--trips to Mexico and Central America as part of her migration agenda, and a three-country trip to Africa fulfilling a White House pledge.

Attending a meeting is not, of course, the same as being the final decider on US foreign policy. But that experience--and the hours of meetings and study that go with it--sets Harris apart from the new presidents of the last three-plus decades.

Donald Trump had never represented his country to a foreign government before being elected. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush led international trade missions as governors. Barack Obama, like Harris, travelled occasionally during his four years in the Senate. But one would have to go all the way back to George H.W. Bush, who served as vice president, CIA director and a member of Congress, to find a president before Biden who began their first term with more experience than Harris.

Harris has a stable and well-respected foreign policy team in her role as vice president. Her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, and his deputy, Rebecca Lissner, are both experienced Washington hands who served in previous administrations. Both have published books that suggest a subtle shift away from an America that leads the world aggressively and alone.

Interesting. This is EXACTLY what I said a couple days ago on another thread and Gal dismissed it as a "falsehood" and a "GOP talking point". I'll double down on it now. From the beginning, It has been my view that Harris (despite her qualifications) was selected to diversity the ticket and pull in votes, but they had ZERO intention of grooming her to be the future president. The Democrat power brokers DELIBERATELY sought to sideline Harris, keep her profile low and prevent her from shining outwardly and becoming a threat to their future "chosen one" predetermined to be one term President Biden's successor. Paybacks are hell.
#139 | Posted by Miranda7

Double down all you want, but you are placing all your bets on an article from November, 2021. IOW, an article written 10 months into the Biden/Harris administraton. Here's what a recent article which outlines her accomplishments as VP:

What has Kamala Harris accomplished as vice president? Here's a quick look.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her meteoric rise as the successor to President Joe Biden, 81, as the Democratic presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election is the most significant seismic shift in presidential politics in recent history.

As she gears up to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in Chicago this August, we examine some of Harris' most significant accomplishments and policy initiatives.

Sorry, already posted:

FTA:

Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, called the Catholic organization "a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality". The group's founder, Saint Josemara Escriv, saw his followers as part of a "rising militia", Gore said, who were seeking to "enter battle against the enemies of Christ".

"Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society," Gore said. "For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington's political and legal elite " and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo."

Leo is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.